Broadband

Design Nine has been working on broadband planning with several communities recently, and during our meetings, some interesting stories have emerged.

This article warns that usable bandwidth in the UK will actually decline in the next several years without a major push to get homes and businesses connected with fiber. As more and more business and residential activities rely on broadband delivery (e.g. telepresence, gaming, movie and TV downloads), current copper-based and wireless systems will not be able to meet demand.

According to this news report, Google's YouTube subsidiary has reached a deal to make full length movies available online. The deal proves that competition works. When YouTube refused to work with the movie studios a couple of years back, that gave rise to Hulu, a competing video site designed specifically to support full length movie and TV show downloads.

Electric utilities and electric car manufacturers are beginning to sit down and talk to each other. At the Austin Alt Car Expo, representatives from the two groups shared opportunities and concerns. One very big concern is how the electric grid will handle the additional power load represented by electric cars.

An article from DSL Reports suggests that BPL (Broadband over Power Lines) has died. Many of us have been skeptics from the beginning, with concerns about cost, RF interference, and bandwidth. It would appear that all three were problems This particular technology should just be taken off the table as an option.

The Blandin Foundation is hosting their annual Broadband Conference - Connected Communities: Making the Net Work for Minnesota on December 3 - 4, 2008 in Eden Prairie.

This year the Blandin Foundation will also be hosting a Minnesota Intelligent Communities Award. The Blandin Foundation along with DEED will be partnering with the national Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) to recognize the top Intelligent Communities in Minnesota. Conference Highlights include:

A firm in Japan is rolling out gigabit broadband services to residential customers for $60/month. Back in April, FCC Commissioner Deborah Tate gave a talk and noted that the 100 megabit fiber connections in Japan were already showing signs of "congestion." The GigE service ought to improve throughput.

Meanwhile, we still have lots of people in the U.S. talking about DSL (at around 1 megabit) as "broadband."

We finally dumped our last analog phone line, which we had kept around in case we needed to send a fax. We decided to get rid of it because we've been using an efax service. We replaced it with an additional VoIP phone line, and our monthly charges for that phone went from an average of $100/month to $35/month.

The City of St. Paul is taking a serious look at fiber to the home as part of a community broadband effort for the city. A local group has started a Web site that has a lot of good information on it.

Nigeria is using a high performance network for the national post office (1,500 locations) to jumpstart community broadband connectivity. A new national backbone will be built, using the post office needs as an anchor tenant. But the high performance network will be designed to support other community broadband and service needs.

Slate has an article about a phenomenon that network administrators have known for many years: a handful of Internet users gobble up a huge portion of bandwidth. Five percent of users typically consume 50% of a service provider's total capacity.

New data for 2007 and 2008 shows that the Internet demand has continued to grow significantly year to year, with an aggregate growth rate of doubling every two years. Growth is "down" slightly from 2007 to 2008, meaning the rate has dropped from 61% to 53%, which is still a huge increase, and is consistent with the fifteen years of data we now have on Internet bandwidth demand.

In a series of broadband planning meetings earlier this week, I heard about several companies that were seriously considering moving their operations to another city if the local electric power infrastructure was not improved. The firms said they were experiencing multiple outages per month that often lasted an hour or more.

Widespread availability of affordable broadband should bring better access to health professionals, especially in rural areas, where some kinds of specialists are not available locally. Wired reports on the results of a new study that shows that just using relatively low cost Webcam technology for diagnosing stroke patients results in better outcomes.

The National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors (NATOA) has called for a range of policy changes and investments that includes a guaranteed right for local governments to invest in broadband and fiber as the preferred mode of access.

Design Nine has been named as one of the top 100 broadband firms in the United States by Broadband Properties magazine.

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The Pew folks have rolled out another hilarious study that suggests most dial up users don't want broadband.

I have observed this phenomenon for fifteen years now--much longer than the Pew folks. It is very simple, really. People that have never had a broadband connection are, in fact, likely to believe it is something that they don't want or need.

We are beginning to see the broadband coop as one very viable form of governance for community broadband efforts. Coops are a great ownership and governance model because they firmly vest the enterprise in the community--every subscriber is also a shareholder in the enterprise, and shareholder/members are able to vote and select board members. The Ripton Broadband Coop serves rural customers in rural Vermont via wireless, using an open access, open service model. Two service providers are selling services on the network.

The FCC has finally released new definitions of broadband.

Sprint's new WiMax initiative with partner Clearwire is stalling because the high capacity wireless access points don't work very well when backhaul (the connection from the wireless radios/antennas is over old-fashioned copper phone lines.

Do the math....