Analysis & commentary on America's troubled transition from analog telephone service to digital advanced telecommunications and associated infrastructure deficits.
Monday, May 29, 2006
Residential broadband shows 40% annual growth rate
"A significant part of the increase is tied to internet newcomers who have bypassed dial-up connections and gone straight to high-speed connections," the report states. It added this trend "is a striking change from the previous pattern of broadband adoption" in which residential users started out with dial up service.
Underserved areas like much of El Dorado County however don't have that option. It's either dial up or nothing as the rest of the nation takes the high speed bypass to the information highway, leaving the county stuck on a rutted dirt road. "It is still the case that broadband penetration rates in rural areas lag those in suburban and urban areas," the Pew report notes.
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
Gut check time for Ma Bell
It's gut check time for Ma Bell. She needs to take a deep breath and think hard about whether she wants to be in the telecom business or just another retailer like Radio Shack or Best Buy, reselling someone else's service. And a service that's inferior to what she herself can provide. Market perceptions are incredibly important and this deal confuses and undermines the public perception of AT&T as one of the nation's preeminent telecommunications companies.
More alarmingly, the announcement could portend AT&T's abandonment of its existing wire line infrastructure outside of urban areas. Let the aged copper cables rot on the poles until the system finally gives up the ghost and customers won't even be able to make phone calls over it. Let's hope that's not the case. Otherwise much of AT&T's 13-state service area will end up like that of a third world country.
The news release offers no details as to whether this service will be offered in El Dorado County. But even if it were, your blogger -- and I suspect many other county residents and businesses -- aren't going to get excited over it since they've had the ability to go to satellite Internet providers at comparable prices and speeds long before today's rollout.
AT&T needs to stick with what it does best: providing its own telecommunications services. That means planning for the future needs of its wire line-based system and rapidly bringing the system up to where it needs to be in the Internet age and putting in place a system based on proven technology like fiber optic cable that offers a future growth path, rather than reselling someone else's satellite service.
Thursday, May 18, 2006
Telecom industry analyst sees wireless supplementing AT&T wire line infrastructure
As NSR sees it, AT&T is taking a multi-tiered and mixed technology approach to offering a high value bundle of services, a strategy which may well be followed in one form or another by all large telcos in the coming years. Fiber will be used to serve residences and businesses in the high and medium population density areas, which will generally account for the large majority of clients. Where fiber does not reach based on economics, terrestrial wireless technologies will bring services to lower population density areas, and satellite will serve those clients on the very farthest edges of the existing copper network.
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
Silicon Valley venture firms back start up planning universal wireless broadband service
Full Reuters story here.WASHINGTON, May 16 (Reuters) - Three Silicon Valley venture capital firms are backing a project to grab a slice of valuable U.S. wireless airwaves to offer nationwide high-speed Internet service, according to a recent regulatory filing.
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Charles River Ventures and Redpoint Ventures, each with more than $1.5 billion under management, are financing a firm called M2Z Networks Inc. to launch the project.
Most wireless spectrum is auctioned to the highest bidder but M2Z has offered to pay the U.S. Treasury 5 percent of its gross revenues from the premium broadband service it plans to offer alongside free, but slower, Internet access.
M2Z is trying to capitalize on President George W. Bush's call to have universal access to high-speed Internet, known as broadband, by 2007. The United States recently fell to 16th in world rankings for broadband penetration.
"M2Z's ultimate goal, through its own service, is to drive development of the broadband marketplace so that access is affordable and future penetration levels are near-ubiquitous throughout the country," the company said in a filing with the Federal Communications Commission.
The major questions here are how M2Z's backers define "near ubiquitous" service and what technology the service will utilize to overcome obstacles to wireless signals that make wireless broadband deployments challenging in hilly areas like El Dorado County.
Vandals cause telecom blackout in South Lake Tahoe
Story by Clint Swett in today's Sacramento Bee.