Broadband

The City of Boston has decided to develop an open access wireless network for the city. This project might actually succeed where many other communitywide wireless projects have struggled. Boston has decided to do some things differently.

Prepare to be depressed. French Telecom has just announced that it is rolling out fiber service in major cities with download speeds of 2.5 Gigabits/second and upload speeds of 1.2 Gigabits/second. The cost? Seventy Euros, or about $85 US.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., the heads of the major telecoms are patting us on the head and telling us we don't need superhighways to our homes, that DSL sidwalks are just fine. A typical DSL connection in the U.S. is about two thousand times slower than the Gigabit service being rolled out in France.

As Design Nine works with more and more communities on broadband development, I have become convinced that the only financial model that is going to work over the long term is the Open Service Provider Network (OSPN). What this means is that the network is designed, constructed, and managed specifically to allow and support a marketplace of service providers that compete for subscribers.

This article reports on a financial study that suggests community broadband projects could cut telecom and cable TV costs in a community by up to 48% because of increased competition. This is a pretty compelling reason for a community to invest in broadband--everyone saves money. The article also indicates that telcos and cable companies could benefit from community broadband because they could reach more customers more quickly.

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.

There was an article in the Roanoke Times this morning about a local businessman who sold his private water utility company to the city of Roanoke--in 1949. So as recently as fifty-five years ago, we had local leaders taking on privately owned utility services.

South Korea continues to be far more visionary than the United States when thinking about broadband and how it should be used. The city of Seoul, South Korea's largest city, has committed $830 million to the u-Seoul project. The 'u' stands for 'ubiquitious.'

Back in 2000, I began promoting the idea that one way communities should finance broadband was by selling shares in a stock ownership corporation. In this way, the entire community could participate in the ownership of a Knowledge Economy business. A stock ownership approach to community broadband has several advantages.

The Christian Science Monitor has an article about the emerging two tier Internet. It is a good overview of the political and technical issues that are driving this problem. The big broadband access companies (e.g. the phone and cable firms) are determined to wrestle control of their customers away from the open Internet.

The broadband access providers (aka the telephone and cable companies) are shocked, just shocked, that their customers are actually using broadband.

Their response?

According to this article in The Register, the big companies are already installing software that slows down much of what people want to do, to the point of making them give up and/or buying the service from the access provider.

The number of rural people using broadband more than doubled between 2003 and 2005, but that is still just a little more than half the number of urban broadband users. A new Pew Foundation study says availability seems to the primary factor--no surprise to anyone that lives in a rural area of the U.S.

Here is yet another marketing study that thinks broadband take rates (how many people sign up for broadband service) are affected primarily by price of the service. The study, done by The Yankee Group, shows just how wrongheaded both the analysts and their customers (mostly telcos and cable companies) are.

Add AT&T to the growing list of broadband access providers who are making noises about charging for access to their broadband networks (and customers).

With a hat tip to Chris Miller, this article underscores the seriousness of the broadband crisis in the United States. We're paying more than anybody else in the developed world for "broadband," while getting a lot less, performance-wise (50 to 100 times slower in most cases).

Northern Ireland is the first country in Europe to have 100% availability of broadband (typically DSL) to every home and business. Government investments helped get the job done.

But the real measure is impact. The CEO of the MJM Group, a highly specialized joinery firm in the country, had this to say:

"It would have been impossible to have achieved our export growth without broadband internet access which came to Rathfriland in 2004..."

One of the problems with community investments in broadband is the lack of data showing the value of such investments. Community leaders are somewhat wary of spending public money on unproven infrastructure. A new study from Carnegia Mellon and MIT shows that communities that have invested in broadband infrastructure are doing better from an economic development perspective than communities that have not.

The research team used extensive government data to analyze these investments and to develop the conclusions--this is not some casual vendor report.

SBC's Midwest Networking President, Kirk Brannock (currently serving on the Illinois Governor's Broadband Deployment Council) is getting his fifteen minutes of fame. He was captured on video at a public hearing stating that "fiber is an unproven technology."

It is an interesting assertion since SBC's networks would collapse without the tens of thousands of miles of fiber the company uses to run their entire phone and data system.

This article on Verizon's "super fast" DSL and fiber services is "super" misleading. It makes it sound like Verizon is rolling out some state of the art new service that is much better than anything else available.

I have Adelphia cable modem service at home, and had to call customer service the other day when the system was out for nearly a day. The service technician said something very revealing. The person could not determine why the service was out, and said they would have to roll a truck to make a service call. She informed me it would take a week and a half to do so. I asked if they thought it was acceptable to have a customer be without Internet access for ten days or more, and added that I sometimes work from home. Here is what she said:

What I and others have been predicting for years is starting to come to pass. As the number of broadband providers has narrowed to a duopoly of the cable and phone company in most regions, these firms are starting to muscle out third party service providers. VoIP startups are the first target because both the phone and cable company want VoIP customers of their own, and the simplest way to do that is to simply block all VoIP data packets except their own. Evidence of this is clearly visible as hardware manufacturers begin to sell VoIP blocking appliances.