Broadband

X is the new Twitter

Elon Musk has renamed Twitter to 'X.' This is part of his strategy to add more features and functionality to the platform, and ultimately, make his purchase profitable. It will be interesting to see how that goes. Mark Zuckerberg and his Threads platform was developed to compete with Twitter, but Threads is actively discouraging political commentary and is censoring lots of other kinds of discussion, according to user reports. Since Twitter (X) has lots of political commentary, it is hard to understand how Zuckerberg plans to compete.

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Starlink is not a replacement for fiber and terrestial wireless broadband

We get calls every week asking if Starlink is going to eliminate the need for terrestrial broadband solutions like rural fiber and fixed point wireless broadband.

The short answer is, "No."

Starlink is a substantial improvement over traditional geosynchronous orbit satellite Internet (e.g. Hughesnet, Viasat), but it is still going to have much higher latency than terrestial wireless, and its bandwidth will never get close to Gig fiber.

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Fiber can be an economic development powerhouse

Chattanooga's city-owned fiber network (via the City electric utility) is now ten years old, and they have published some results. The Gigabit fiber network delivered, on average, $261 Million PER YEAR in new jobs, retained jobs, lower unemployment, and reduced electric outages. Read the whole article for all the benefits.

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A great discussion of LEO broadband and Starlink

The always thorough and analytical Steve Ross has a great discussion of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) broadband and why Elon Musk's Starlink is not going to be a one size fits all replacement for fiber in rural areas.

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Mediacom "network stress"

Mediacom essentially has confirmed what I and many others have been saying for more than a decade, which is the cable HFC (Hybrid Fiber Coax) network is twentieth century technology that is not able to support the growing demand for bandwidth.

Stop the Cap! recently cited a Mediacom customer who got a letter and a phone call from Mediacom to complain that the customer was using too much bandwidth.

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Is Starlink a game changer for rural areas?

Early reports from beta tests of Starlink, the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Internet service are very promising, with excellent bandwidth and lower latency than the traditional Viasat and Hughesnet systems. Lower latency is important because it means that some voice and video services like Skype and Zoom may be more usable. It could be a game changer for rural and remote rural areas of the U.S. There are many rural areas that it is going to take time to deploy fiber. In the meantime, Starlink could be a good bridge solution.

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Comcast is rolling out data caps

Stop the Cap points out that Comcast is rolling out data caps in many parts of the East Coast. If you want to keep your "unlimited" plan, you can pay an extra $30/month. Bandwidth is so cheap for a company the size of Comcast that the only reason for doing this is to hike profits.

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Alex, I'll take "Things I never knew I wanted" for $500

I would like to meet the person that convinced Google that there would be big demand for a phone app that lets you hum a song and have the Google InnerTubes tell you what the name and artist of the song is.

This strikes me as yet another example of bored Google software engineers without enough to do rolling out stuff that no one really wants. Does this really make anyone's life better?

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Tulsa is paying home based workers to move to the city

Smaller communities in rural areas are always trying to attract workers and families. Tulsa, Oklahoma decided to try paying them to move, and it is apparently working. The City offers $10,000 in cash for "entrepreneurs, remote workers, and digital nomads." It's an idea so crazy it works! The funds can be used to offset moving expenses and monthly expenses during the first year of residency.

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Broadband planning is more important than ever

The corona virus and the need for so many to work from home has highlighted what I have been telling communities for nearly two decades: neighborhoods and rural roads are business districts.

It is too soon to tell what will happen once most businesses are open again and people return to work, but "return to work" may have an entirely different meaning as businesses realize employees can work productively from home at least part of the time.

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Coronavirus and bandwidth shortages

With the huge increase in people working from home, bandwidth has become an issue. There are numerous stories about Netflix and other streaming services degrading picture quality to ease the burden on networks. But it is not really a problem that Netflix is having. Netflix is reducing bandwidth to help local cable, DSL, and wireless networks cope. Netflix long ago pushed most of their content to locations directly connected to local networks--the problem is getting from the Netflix server already attached to a Comcast or Spectrum or Verizon network to the local customers.

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Can the network handle work from home?

The news is filling up with stories about office workers trying to work from home. The most interesting thing I have seen is a report from the Utopia network out in the Salt Lake City area, which said that they have had a 20% increase in requests for fiber service in the last week.

No one is going to call for a new network connection in the middle of a crisis like this one unless their current network connection is not meeting their needs.

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Who needs fiber?

Apple TV+, according to MacRumors, has the highest quality streaming service available, with the average streaming speed (bandwidth required) reaching 29 Megabits/second. So if you have two people in a household watching two Apple TV+ programs on two different devices, you need somewhere north of 60 Meg of bandwidth.

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AT&T: We are losing customers, so let's raise prices!

Are Technica reports that AT&T is hiking prices for its TV service--formerly DirecTV--as much as 50%, depending on what package a customer has. The company has lost about 10% of its customer base for TV services in the past year, which reflects the continued growth in "cord cutting" of cable and satellite TV service.

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A muni network success story

As hard as some of the incumbents work to convince local elected officials that muni networks are a bad idea, more and more success stories are emerging over time.

Broadband Communities magazine has a great story about Fairlawn, Ohio's Gig fiber network.

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A muni network success story

As hard as some of the incumbents work to convince local elected officials that muni networks are a bad idea, more and more success stories are emerging over time.

Broadband Communities magazine has a great story about Fairlawn, Ohio's Gig fiber network.

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Danville: A True Success Story

The Roanoke Times has an excellent article about Danville, Virginia and its success in transforming the community from a traditional Southern mill town to an Information Economy powerhouse.

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Open Access Explained, Part III: What the Local Transport Provider Does

The local transport provider has several important roles and responsibilities in providing a high-quality experience for both providers and their customers. The LTP provides professional day-to-day management of the network, offloading that work from the service providers. Typical work activities include

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Open Access Explained, Part II: The Local Transport Provider and Backhaul

As we design and build Local Transport Networks for our community clients, we are frequently asked, "Where will the LTP get backhaul?"

LTPs do not need backhaul, because the LTP is not an Internet Service Provider. Put another way, the LTP is a broadband provider, not an Internet provider. Unfortunately, "Internet" and "broadband" are used interchangeably even though they are two different things. In the roads analogy, broadband is the single, high performance road network, and Internet is one of the trucks that use that road.

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Open Access Explained, Part I: The Local Transport Provider, or LTP

Open access networks unbundle the physical network from the services being carried over that network. We have become so used to having the network and service provided by the same company that it is sometimes a struggle to remember that that approach is only an artifact of very old technology. The copper twisted pair deployed for phone service was only capable of delivering that one thing: voice phone calls. And copper coaxial cable was only capable of delivering one thing: TV content.

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