Broadband

I have been talking to communities about the importance of redundant cable paths for years. If you don't have at least two entirely separate cable paths into your community for telecommunications, your community, and especially your businesses, are at risk.

The most mundane risk is having a cable cut by a contractor digging somewhere. But as a painful example of what can go wrong, one of the primary fiber cable routes into New Orleans was across the Pontchartrain bridge, which suffered enormous damage.

Telecom companies are trying to patch other routes together to get Internet and phone service back into the city, but it is a sober reminder that we have to plan for disasters--the routine ones, like a wayward backhoe, or something much worse.

Iowa may be the new battleground for broadband. Successful projects like the Cedar Falls fiber system and the statewide Opportunity Iowa project has shifted the battle from Louisiana, where the phone and cable companies lost a battle against the city of Lafayette.

The most interesting thing in the article is the arrogant attitude of the president of Quest:

Max Phillips, Iowa president of Qwest Communications International Inc., said the interests pushing the community fiber programs are misguided because people should focus on the speed and quality of service, not the medium that carries it.

This Newsweek article by technology writer Stephen Levy ought to be printed out and mailed to every rural legislator in the country.

The choice of the word "sticks" is unfortunate, but Levy hits the nail on the head. He compares the possibility of getting $500 million from the USF for rural telecom to the huge roads bill ($286 billion), and this gross disparity highlights the lack of understanding that legislators have of the issues facing rural communities.

It's not really a broadband crisis. And I've said so many times before, money has nothing to do with it. It's a leadership crisis. We're spending $286 billion of our tax dollars on roads--20th century transport systems. What is wrong with this picture? Why are our legislators so woefully misinformed about the issues?

With the recent FCC decisions that have classified cable modem services as an "information service," which frees it from telephone-style regulation, and the decision a week ago to drop the requirement that phone companies sell DSL access to third party providers, we now have, for all intents and purposes, a broadband duopoly in the United States.

Either you buy broadband from the cable company or from the telephone company. Not a thrilling choice.

Expect the phone companies to really push hard to sell DSL services. They will begin rolling out higher speed DSL (e.g. ADSL2, ADSL2+) that can offer download speeds of 8 megabits/second and as high as 24 megabits/second. They will try to get new phone subscribers to sign up for bundled DSL services that include voice telephone, and DSL will become the new "basic" phone service. But instead of basic phone service (e.g. local calling) costing about $25/month, "basic" service will include local, long distance, and broadband in a bundle costing $50-$60/month. Long distance will be thrown in for free, essentially, and the Bells plan to try to kill the long distance companies by doing so. And they will likely succeed.

The Rural Telecommunications Congress and Connect Kentucky, the host of Rural Telecon ‘05’, are pleased to announce that on-line registration for the conference is now open. The conference is scheduled from October 9 – 12. Some conference features include:

• Keynote Speaker – Dr. Dena Puskin, Office for the Advancement of Telehealth, U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services
• Keynote Speaker – Kentucky Governor Ernie Fletcher
• Keynote Speaker – Ann Pope, Appalachian Regional Commission
• Community of Interest Roundtable Discussions
• Over 35 experts presenting the latest information on broadband, community development, and new fiber and wireless technology.
• FCC Panel Discussion on broadband policy and how it affects communities.
• Vendor Exhibits, with vendors offering a wide range of broadband services and technology.

This year’s conference will be held at the Lexington Center with accommodations at the adjacent Radisson Hotel. I'll be a speaker at the conference (talking about the economic development value of community Web portals), but that's not the only reason to attend. The RTC conferences have been among the best community technology meetings I've been to over the years. They are consistently information-rich, and the RTC board works hard to get knowledgeable speakers and to keep out thinly veiled sales pitches.

The incumbent telecom providers have been flooding the public arena with relentlessly negative (and often very misleading) information about public broadband projects.

The American Public Power Association (APPA) interviewed the managers of two municipal utilities to get their perspective on communities getting into cable television and broadband services. It's an eyeopening article that provides a lot of information you don't usually get to hear.

One interesting bit of information: one of the cities has two Fortune 500 company headquarters, and only one cable route out of the community. If that cable was cut with a backhoe, the company would come to a dead stop for as long as the cable was damaged. When the telecom company which owned the cable was asked if they planned to provide an alternate cable route into the community, they said, "No."

The Finnish firm Teleste has announced new networking equipment that will allow cable modem service providers to offer much higher speeds--up to as high as 100 megabits per second. If this equipment works (it is in early testing right now), it could give U.S. cable companies a crushing lead over rival phone companies, who are stuck with the distance-sensitive DSL.

In what may become a milestone in the quest for broadband, a public referendum in Lafayette, Louisiana to use municipal bonds to fund a fiber network passed by a wide margin (62% of voters said "yes"). Lafayette's public electric utility wanted to offer fiber broadband to its customers a couple of years ago, and the city became ground central for a bitterly fought battle led by the telephone and cable companies, which spent millions to stop the initiative.

A private report by Informa Telecoms & Media shows that Asian countries are deploying fiber to the home faster than ever. In Japan, there are now about 2.5 million homes and businesses with fiber connections, and 10 million are expected by 2010. FTTH connections in the U.S total probably well under half a million, and that may be wildly optimistic.

An article called "The United States of Broadband" is available over at TomPaine.com [link no longer available]. It's well worth a read, as it takes the Federal government and the FCC in particular to task about the sorry state of broadband in the United States.

The province of Catalonia, in Spain, along with a consortium of 782 towns and cities located in the province, have agreed to invest $542 million in a province-wide, redundant fiber network that will connect all the partner towns and cities.

Meanwhile, in the United States, many of our elected leaders are trying to pass laws making this kind of investment illegal.

Motto for the week: Our state--not really as good as Catalonia, but we have great dial-up.

I just had to upload a small ad to a magazine ftp site. The file was about 5 megabytes, which is very small for this sort of thing; a photo heavy full page ad could easily run 100 megabytes or more.

The New York City Committee on Technology in Government has issued an excellent and extensive report [link no longer available] on the need for broadband throughout the city. It reaches many of the same conclusions that the City of Seattle reached in its study of broadband. Among the highlights:

James Carlini, who writes in ePrairie, an Midwestern online business and technology magazine, has a terrific article taking Illinois leaders to task for shirking their responsibilities to the the public at large and to businesses and communities in the state.

It's hard to improve on Carlini's thoughts, so I'll include just one item from the article. You can read the entire piece here.

I wrote recently about Seattle's plan to invest heavily in fiber. The work that the city has done now seems even more timely because a list of "Most Unwired Cities" came out recently, and Seattle holds the number one slot, just as the city has identified "wired" technologies like fiber as critical. One of the things everyone forgets is that "unwired" hot spots still have to get access back to the wired network, and fiber is usually the most desirable way to do this.

Here is an excellent and relatively optimistic summary of what's happening at the state and Federal level with respect to anti-muni broadband, or as my old friend Gene Crick would say, "...the best laws money can buy."

In what has to be a sign of desperation, SBC has dropped the price of its entry level DSL service to $14.95 a month. Claiming that the online registration "lowers costs," the telco is also giving customers a $99 credit towards home networking gear like wireless access points.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has an article on a report issued by a City of Seattle task force that concluded that the city has to take broadband seriously, and must begin immediately.

This is a must read article that makes many good points. Rather than rehash them, here are some of them verbatim:

If your community is looking at Broadband Over Powerlines (BPL) as a cheap way to get broadband out to neighborhoods or rural areas, you should read this article over at NewsForge, which says BPL still has some issues that have to be worked out.

Among the problems this article raises are relatively high costs, the need to deploy a fiber backbone to support neighborhood level BPL, and radio interference in frequencies used by public safety (fire, police, rescue).

New Zealand, which is a country smaller than most U.S. states, is investing heavily in broadband, with a budget in the tens of millions of dollars. While too many state legislators (14 states at last count) are trying to limit broadband, we've got countries that are going in the opposite direction.