Infrastructure

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).

Here is a guy who thinks we have too much fiber. With even the cable companies reluctantly beginning to deploy fiber in some markets, this has to be an article written to support the wireless industry. The write also suggests the useful life of fiber is only about twenty-five years.

Someone dredged up a video from my old employer AT&T about how to use the new-fangled dial telephone. Made in 1940, it is quite entertaining. You can skip to the 10 minute mark to get to the instructions on how to dial a phone. It's quite a statement to think that AT&T thought this was needed. On the other hand, in 1993, as we rolled out the ground-breaking Blacksburg Electronic Village, we spent a lot of time instructing people on how to use a mouse.

The incumbent telephone and cable companies must be really scared of competition from new fiber networks, because they are still peddling the old, tired "Who needs a Gig?" baloney to elected officials and regulators.

It is really a red herring argument, for two reasons:

Here is a short article on the technical characteristics of G.fast, the "solution" that is supposedly going to allow the telephone companies to compete with the cable companies.

Don't want to click through and read it? Here is the short summary:

After Hurricane Sandy, cell phone networks in the affected areas were, by and large, not working. Like the situation after Hurricane Katrina, many cell tower sites had no long term back up power source (i.e. a generator), fuel to keep generators running was not available, or generators were flooded out because they were installed on the ground. In the New Orleans area, it was not the storm that took out networks, it was the flooding.

CNet reports that the new iPhone 4S has broken sales records again, with more than a million pre-orders on the first day. The previous best was 600,000 iPhone 4 orders on day one. This is a bit amusing, because when Apple unveiled the new phone last week, a lot of pundits panned the device, complaining that Apple had fumbled, that it should have been an iPhone 5, that the 4S model did not have enough new features, and basically, that Apple had screwed up.

With the price for copper hitting $4/pound, the biggest copper mine in the world is hanging on poles in the U.S. Copper thieves are actually knocking over poles to steal the copper cable in Antioch, California, but copper theft is a problem all over the U.S. The high price of copper and the steadily decreasing price of fiber makes fiber less expensive in new construction, and of course, with fiber, you have the added benefit of being able to expand capacity as needed.

Fiberevolution has a short article with a damning slide, showing what Verizon charges for a fiber connection in downtown Boston and what a start up firm is charging for a fiber connection. The start up is offering ten times the bandwidth (100 meg vs Verizon's 10 meg) for a measly 97% reduction in cost on a per megabit basis. Put another way, you can buy ten times the bandwidth for almost 75% less cost ($2700 vs $700). What's wrong with this picture? Well, two things.

Dallas County, Texas lost its IT systems for three days when a broken water main flooded the basement of the building where all the county's servers are housed. The servers were fine--they are located on the fifth floor. But the UPS and other electrical equipment supplying power to those fifty floor servers were located in the basement, where water flooded in from the broken main.

The IPSO Alliance (IP for Smart Objects) is mapping the future of appliances and gadgets. Many common household and industrial items will have an IP address in the near future, enabling them to connect to the Internet and perform functions like system diagnostics, power management, transmission of environmental information (temperature, light, motion, health status), and software upgrades.

Even as some municipal wireless projects are falling apart, many other communities are still pursuing the risky "direct to vendor" approach. Instead of identifying broader community goals and needs first and then selecting systems and technology that support those goals, community leaders are going straight to a vendor and letting the vendor specify what the community should buy.

An Emtelle press release notes that the IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) has released a worldwide standard for microduct and blown fiber, including a standard for testing.

This is important because it will improve the ability to deploy products from different manufacturers in the same network and improve overall reliability of blown fiber and microduct products.

Getting fiber to the premise (FTTP) is always a challenge. In many communities, there is not space available on aging telephone poles, or the incumbents try to charge exorbitant make-ready fees to hang a thin fiber cable. Trenching is an alternative, but that can be more expensive and disruptive. CableRunner now offers an interesting alternative, which is to use existing sewer and stormwater drain infrastructure to run fiber through neighborhoods and into homes.

I'm on location this week, planning a major fiber build for a region of eight communities that have decided they can't wait any longer for world class connectivity and services. It's a rural area with lots of two lane roads. One of the things Design Nine is doing is surveying right of way and existing pole infrastructure.

Skip Skinner, the forward-thinking administrator of Wise County, Virginia, suggested do it yourself fiber to me three years ago. I've proposed it to many other groups since then, and everyone thought I was crazy.

While at the Digital Cities conference in Reston, Virginia earlier this week, I was able to get some detailed information about Vasteras, Sweden, where they have implemented the kind of open service provider communitywide broadband I advocate for communities in this country. Vasteras is a medium-sized city of about 80,000 people. In past eighteen months, they have run fiber to 7000 homes, 23,000 apartments, and 2000 businesses.

This article notes that the only working telecom infrastructure left in New Orleans after the storm was cheap wireless. And even today, WiFi is playing a big role in the city's recovery. In areas prone to flooding, WiFi has an advantage because it is usually installed on something that is above the flood levels. If you can get power to it, it works. And there are some WiFi hotspots powered by batteries and solar power, making them even more resistant to power outages.

I had the good fortune to hear Mark Ansboury, the COO of One Cleveland, talk about what he and other leaders in Cleveland have been doing to build what is probably the best planned community broadband infrastructure in the country.