Broadband

This article discusses what I have been saying for a long time: Video is finally turning broadband into a business. For reasons that are really no one's fault, the broadband business is upside down. If you are in the business of selling Internet access--dial up, wireless, DSL, cable, fiber, satellite--you make the most money if your customers never use your product. You make the least money if your customers sit in front of their computers all day long fooling around on YouTube and Joost.

Compared to other major industrialized countries, the U.S. "enjoys" some of the world's slowest broadband. Even worse, when you factor in price, we pay more and get less than countries like Japan, South Korea, France, Canada, and Sweden. Over the past decade, the U.S. has gone from being the world leader in broadband to 16th in the world.

There is an AP article circulating this morning about failing muni WiFi projects (not yet on the Web). This is something I have been predicting for a long time, based on the past performance of early WiFi efforts.

Here is a short list of problems with municipal WiFi-only efforts:

I wrote recently about Hughes Satellite's new pricing options that make it very attractive in rural areas where landline broadband may not be available. Hughes is also working on new technology that will provide much better quality of service for satellite broadband and will improve some of the latency (delay) issues that have been an issue in the past.

The cable industry is showing off their next generation broadband cable modems, which promise much faster speeds. The cable companies are under some pressure from the fiber rollouts of the phone companies.

There are some problems, however. The new technology continues to rely on copper to the home, and in fact, the "new" technology simply involves using four TV channels instead of two to carry broadband data. It is still a hybrid system that uses a fifty year old cable TV design to carry data. It's main advantage is that it is cheap to upgrade.

HughesNet has rolled out new lower pricing for their satellite broadband service. The dilemma in rural areas is how to help residents and businesses get something better than dial up access when DSL or cable service is not an option, and the one to four year timeframe needed to bring fiber to rural homes may be too long.

India has announced an ambitious plan to provide free wireless broadband throughout the country.

It is not at all clear that "free broadband" is sustainable. The longstanding problems with free services (in any market, not just broadband) include market distortion and low quality service.

It is spring, and around the country, many communities are starting water, sewer, and road projects of one kind or another. On the way back and forth to a project Design Nine is working on, I pass a water line project--a couple of miles of new water line along a major artery and business corridor, and the main route between two communities.

Unfortunately, the horrific murders here in Blacksburg yesterday highlighted yet again the technical superiority of the Internet during emergencies. For most of the day, it was difficult to make a phone call on a landline or cellphone, with most calls being greeted with "All circuites are busy." But the local public and private Internet networks kept chugging away, providing students and parents a way to connect. Instant messaging also proved important, and the Internet is used as a gateway between different cellphone messaging services.

There is a lot of confusion about the "right" approach to community broadband, and part of the problem is a lack of clarity about the meaning of "open access" systems. At a high level, open access refers to a network that allows multiple services providers to compete for customers--the right way to do things, as opposed to closed networks typically offered by incumbent telephone and cable companies, who do not want competition (rightly so, from their perspective) on their own infrastructure.

We are in the January technology doldrums. New product announcements won't start to appear for another couple of weeks, and communities with projects underway need a couple of weeks back at work before moving forward. 2007 predictions articles are popular, with most of them listing the "top ten" trends for the year, or something like that. Most of the speculation is pure guessing, and hardly worth commenting on.

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." --Henry Ford

Communities interested in broadband almost automatically decide that the first step is to ask residents what they want. But Henry Ford's comment from decades ago still rings true. If you are trying to prepare your community for the future, you need to remember that not everyone thinks much about it (the future).

Communities that worry about investing in fiber because it might not last long enough in terms of capacity need not worry. No one has yet found the upper limit of capacity. Siemens just set a new record for the amount of data pushed through a single channel of a fiber cable: 107 Gigabits, or about a thousand times faster than the "standard" 100 megabit off the shelf network gear used today.

Community leaders are often concerned about whether or not their citizens and businesses would actually use a community broadband system, with some justification--we do not have a lot of good data on community broadband projects. In the last couple of weeks, I have had conversations with leaders in two different communities who were concerned that too few citizens used the Internet to make the investment worthwhile.

According to this article, the state of California will make $460 million available for broadband in the state. $400 million is to speed up telemedicine uses, and will probably benefit hospitals the most, but the other $60 million is intended for accelerating broadband deployment. A broadband task force has been formed, but appears to be mostly industry insiders, who usually don't lobby for open service provider networks.

This article from mid-summer just came to my attention. It discusses some of the current municipal WiFi projects and the problems they are having. WiFi vendors tout the low cost of wireless and the "easy" installation--stick up a few towers and you are done. What they tend to leave out of the sales pitch is that current WiFi systems often have trouble penetrating trees with leaves on them, don't penetrate walls well, and the signal does not go around corners. Here is a portion of the article:

In a recent set of broadband workshops, I talked at length about the increasing demand for bandwidth, and that it is necessary to set not the upper limit on our bandwidth needs, but only a lower limit--which I think is 100 megabits/second to homes and businesses.

What was interesting is that the skeptics were not business people, who were actually nodding their heads in agreement; they understand that they do not want their ability to grow their businesses and to create jobs limited by bandwidth.

Michael Copps, an FCC commissioner and consumer advocate, had an op-ed piece in the Washington Post last week. Copps says American broadband is too slow and too costly, and that it is going to cripple our economy and our ability to compete in the global economy. I could not agree more.

If there was one thing everyone was talking about at the annual Rural Telecommunications Congress conference, it was open service provider networks. My talk discussed why they work financially (demand aggregation, across a whole community or an entire region, really pays dividends--literally). But vendors were also talking OSPN systems, and it is great to see systems coming into the marketplace that have been designed specifically for communitywide broadband use.

There are some basic priniciples that define a true open access system:

As Design Nine does more and more financial analysis of the benefits of Open Service Provider Networks (OSPN) for our clients, the news continues to be very good. In an OSPN network, the local government does not sell any services. Instead, local government builds a digital road system that any service provider can use. In return for access to the road system, service providers pay a portion of their revenue back to the network owner. This revenue pays for both the initial build out and ongoing maintenance, support, and operations.

Here are some of the things we are finding: