Broadband

The incumbents never sleep, and they rarely stop opposing competition, especially if the competition is a local or regional government broadband initiative. The Community Networks Web site has an excellent article on all the problems with a recently released report by the ITIF (Information Technology and Innovation Foundation).

Starlink has indicated that it has run out of satellite capacity in certain parts of the U.S. While they continue to launch additional satellites, the physics of radio frequencies will always be a binding constraint on terrestial, LEO, and geosynchronous wireless broadband networks. The upper limit on fiber cable bandwidth has still not been found.

CoreConnect is a consortium of counties in northwest Pennsylvania that intends to build a high performance open access fiber network in eight to ten adjacent counties, using a combination of BEAD funding and other funding sources. CoreConnect is seeking a network operator who has experience with the management of open access networks. Experience and capacity to provide engineering and construction management is a plus. Responses to the RFI are due 10/22.

I spent an hour and forty-five minutes on the phone with two different Comcast/Xfinity customer representatives yesterday evening. By the end, I was ready to throw myself out the window. The company seems determined to make it as difficult as possible for customers to talk to a service rep by phone, and if you do call them, they keep trying to get you to hang up and use the online chat. If you don't do this after a few minutes of wandering around the phone tree menu choices, they actually hang up on you, which they did to me.

Another open access network is going live in Eagle, Idaho, following on the open access network underway in Rexburg, Idaho.

Eagle has used ARPA funding to build an open access fiber to the home and fiber to the business network, and local and regional ISPs will be able to offer competitive services. The town expects that symmetric (equal upload and download speeds) Internet service will sell for between $50 and $60 per month.

So Comcast has hilariously complained to the FCC that it is just too darn hard to list all their prices. The "problem" is the mandated broadband label requirement. The label was part of a 2021 Federal law that requires ISPs to use a standard format, similar to what is used to disclose the contents of packaged food, to make it easier for consumers to see what they are paying for (e.g. speed of service) and how much it costs.

The quote from the great movie "Casablanca" is evergreen, and can be re-purposed as "I'm shocked, shocked, that the cable companies are fudging their coverage data."

This article details intercepted emails from two different cable companies that admit they were intentionally fudging their service areas to stop public broadband funds from creating competition. In other words, the incumbents want to keep their monopolies, don't want competition, and want to continue owning the customer.

In Design Nine's planning study work, we began to notice that about three years ago, many ISPs, especially the cable Internet companies, no longer provided any information about upload speeds. They started doing this to help hide the fact that their upload and download speeds were highly asymmetric. This was a marketing ploy that worked fairly well when few people were trying to work from home and there were few distance learning students.

As many of us expected, Starlink speeds have slowed over the past several months. As the service has added more users, the Starlink network is starting to show traffic congestion.

Our cable provider for our home Internet just sent us a notice telling us we were getting a free upgrade upload speed. It will be going from "...up to 5 Meg" to a whopping "...up to 10 Meg!"

Wow! Color me excited!

Meanwhile, I have to drive back and forth to the office for evening videoconferences because I can't trust the cable Internet service at home if there are more than a couple of people on the conference call. I really don't think doubling it to "up to 10 Meg" is going to make much difference.

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.

It is interesting how many press releases I have seen recently from incumbent providers explaining that nobody needs symmetric Internet, and that highly asymmetric service (e.g. 100 Meg down, 10 Meg up) is just fine. Both the cable and the phone companies are trying to get us to drink this Kool-Aid, but economic developers are finding out something different.

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.

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.

Alex, I'll take "Things I never thought I would write about" for $500. A network security researcher has successfully hacked a coffee machine and was able to take control of it, make it beep constantly, have it refuse to make coffee, and spill water all over.

The City of Huntington, West Virginia wants better broadband and had been begging the incumbents for years to improve service, with no success. The Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) granted the City $2.5M in funds to start building a Gig fiber network, and that woke the incumbents from a deep sleep.

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.

I have been writing for years (decades, at this point) about how important symmetric bandwidth is to the business from home, work from home segment of the economy. It would appear that the lockdown we are currently experiencing and the huge surge in work from home needs has been illustrating just how important symmetric bandwidth is. Related to symmetric bandwidth is Virtual Private Network (VPN) technology, which provides end to end encryption of an Internet connection between two points (e.g. a home based worker and their corporate network).

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.

I'll give credit where credit is due: Comcast has announced that it will not disconnect any customers for late payment or non-payment for the next sixty days. They will also not charge late fees for small business customers who fall behind on payment.