German government needs options for rapid FTTP deployment

Vodafone calls for German government help with ultrafast broadband rollout | News | DW | 05.05.2019: However, in an interview with Welt am Sonntag newspaper, Vodafone's German chief, Hannes Ametsreiter, said that connecting from the network to individual homes, the so-called last mile, was "extraordinarily challenging."

"It is enormously expensive to rip the road on your own," Ametsreiter said, suggesting that Germany looks at how broadband is rolled out in Spain and Portugal, where the state invests in the infrastructure, laying empty pipes, just as it builds highways.

This is called "dig once" in America. It's a perfectly sensible policy. But it can't meet the urgent need to rapidly replace obsolete copper cable built for the period of analog voice telephone service with fiber to the premise. It will have to go on utility poles where buried conduit does not exist.

Then when future road restoration or other trenching projects are undertaken and conduit installed, the aerial fiber can then be retired. Additionally, there are lower cost methods to deploy aerial fiber near energy lines such as lightweight All-dielectric self-supporting (ADSS) cable that can speed aerial deployment.

Another option is microtrenching provided the road surface is sufficiently thick with a stable base. But it must be ensured the microtrench slot is deep enough lest the conduit be forced out of the microtrench as Google Fiber recently learned to its dismay in Louisville, Kentucky.

3 ways Trump administration telecom infrastructure proposal falls short

White House to unveil latest 5G push and rural broadband initiative - The Verge: President Trump and Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai are expected to announce the administration’s latest plans to ensure US leadership in 5G and expand high-speed broadband access to rural areas across the country. On Friday morning, the FCC announced a new plan to roll out high-speed broadband to rural communities through the creation of the commission’s new Rural Digital Opportunity Fund. According to the FCC, the fund will “inject” $20.4 billion into broadband networks to connect up to 4 million rural homes and businesses with high-speed broadband over the next decade. “This is a critical tool towards closing the digital divide and will provide some of the critical infrastructure to connecting rural Americans with 5G technologies,” Pai said.

This isn't going to timely solve the America's problem of an urgently needed upgrade of its legacy metallic copper and coax telephone and cable TV plant of the 20th century to fiber to the premise for the 21st. The scope of which can't be narrowly described as a "rural broadband" issue. Rather than a simple plan to construct the necessary fiber, it follows previous subsidy program flaws:

1. Inadequate funding relative to construction costs dispersed over time frames far too long to catch the nation up to where it should be on telecom infrastructure modernization. A couple of billion dollars a year won't go far in a nation as large and diverse as the United States. A Deloitte study concludes the nation needs to invest $130–150 billion in "deep fiber" between 2017 and 2023-25 to provide sufficient bandwidth for premise and mobile wireless services.
2. Additional subsidies to legacy phone and cable companies with no universal service, quality or price strings attached.
3. Continued use of a speed versus technology definition of advanced telecom infrastructure that permits subsidization of metallic plant and and substitution of wireless infrastructure including still under development 5G wireless.

FCC chief touts hybrid fiber and next gen wireless delivery infrastructure as viable alternative to FTTP

U.S. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai said a hybrid infrastructure of next generation wireless backhauled by fiber offers an alternative delivery method for fixed premise advanced telecom service where the return on investment to connect premises directly to fiber isn't adequate.

Industry observers are skeptical of this scenario, noting next generation wireless service requires the construction of substantial new fiber infrastructure to support it, significantly weakening the investment case.

Pai disagrees, arguing that sufficient fiber infrastructure is already in place to move ahead with deployment. "Part of the reason is, in terms of the possibilities of fixed wireless, given the fiber penetration that some of your members have," he told the NTCA-The Rural Broadband Association in New Orleans earlier this week. Pai urged the group to "think broadly" about "how to extend this great fiber penetration you’ve got." 

Texas Hill Country: Where the "rural broadband" descriptor and comparisons to electric power in 1930s fail

Broadband Communities – News & Views / GVTC Launches New Fiber Internet Tier Structure in Texas: SMITHSON VALLEY, TX — GVTC, a fiber communications provider internet, digital cable TV, phone and interactive home security monitoring to residential and business customers in far north San Antonio, the Texas Hill Country and South Central Texas, is simplifying its fiber-to-the-home offerings with a new fiber internet tier structure. GVTC launched brand new fiber internet plans that feature standard download speeds of 250 Mbps in its fiber-to-the-home areas. In addition, upgrades to 500 Mbps and 1 Gbps are offered, all three plans featuring 250 Mbps upload speeds as well. New plans are available to both new and existing customers.

Despite the availability of fiber to the premise advanced telecom service in these areas, there is a continued misleading and overly broad description of America's telecom infrastructure deficiencies as a "rural broadband" issue. They've also been inaccurately compared to the lack of electric power infrastructure in the early 20th century when these same areas were completely unwired and left in the dark. Electric power infrastructure was truly a rural problem then because it didn't exist outside urbanized areas. Advanced telecom infrastructure by contrast is deployed in a far more granular manner by investor owned providers that cherry pick nominally rural neighborhoods where they believe they can earn the fastest return on investment and redline the rest.

Fiber to the prem renders issue of "broadband speed" largely irrelevant

Why are kids doing their homework in McDonald's parking lot?: An area of northwest Alabama is already seeing some benefit to that federal money, of course. Aderholt announced in May that Tombigbee Communications had received $3 million as it expands online connectivity services in Marion, Winston, Fayette and Lamar counties.

The meeting last week in Guntersville included business and elected leaders who gathered in a roundtable discussion to talk about the specifics of expanding broadband in northeast Alabama. Steve Foshee, the president and CEO of Tombigbee Communications, was among those in attendance.

That conversation, Aderholt said, got as focused as what internet speed would be best - not too slow to be useless but not too fast as to be cost-prohibitive.

The question posed in the last sentence reflects the misguided notion that regards advanced telecommunications infrastructure like water pipes. The bigger the pipe, the higher the cost. It's a false tradeoff, largely put forth by incumbent telephone and cable companies reluctant to modernize their legacy metallic infrastructures to fiber to the premise. Fiber has such abundant carrying capacity it renders the "broadband speed" issue largely irrelevant.

FCC chairman: Connectivity main obstacle of telemedicine | Western Colorado | gjsentinel.com

FCC chairman: Connectivity main obstacle of telemedicine | Western Colorado | gjsentinel.com: Speaking to reporters after the meeting, Pai said, from the FCC's viewpoint, connectivity remains the biggest hurdle to a serious move toward widespread use of telemedicine. "The telemedicine application is only as strong as the digital connections between communities," said Pai, a 2012 Obama appointee who was designated director of the commission by President Trump, and a noted free-market advocate. Pai pointed to his agency's recent infusion of funds into its Rural Health Care Program, which provides funds to some health care providers for broadband and telecommunications services. He also said he is aiming to eliminate outdated FCC rules and encourage competition among internet service providers. "We want to make sure these companies have a strong incentive to upgrade to fiber, especially in these rural communities that need high-capacity internet access," Pai said.

The FCC chairman is right when he says America needs more fiber advanced telecommunications infrastructure deployment as medical care increasingly utilizes it. But it won't happen with Pai's prescriptions. Limited purpose funding such as the Rural Health Care Program will hardly make a dent in the nation's enormous accumulated telecommunications infrastructure deficit where FTTP is the exception rather than the norm it should be.

Nor can regulatory reforms address the fundamental business problem facing investor owned ISPs. Building new fiber infrastructure under their current business models cannot yield positive net present value within the limited patience of their investors' capital looking for rapid returns. And encouraging competition in a natural monopoly market that is telecommunications infrastructure is like expecting ice cream plants to grow in the desert. No meaningful competition can ever occur.

Comcast to build FTTP telecom infrastructure in 2 Michigan townships after tax measure fails

According to the Holland (Michigan) Sentinel, Comcast cites lower deployment costs due to improved carrying of fiber vs. COAX cable:

As Laketown finally gets internet, rural access still a prevalent issue elsewhere: Traditional coaxial cables use radio frequencies as the medium to transmit data, which means there is a larger amount of signal loss compared to fiber technology. This loss of signal that comes with traditional coax has made it difficult to serve Laketown and Saugatuck townships in the past because of large-size properties and widespread homes.
Now Comcast can build fiber to each home without building or extending main facilities to each one at about the same cost as using traditional coax cables to build the network out, Gilbert said.

FCC Chair Pai falsely characterizes satellite Internet as innovative telecom technology

REMARKS OF FCC CHAIRMAN AJIT PAI
AT THE SATELLITE INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION’S
21ST ANNUAL LEADERSHIP DINNER
WASHINGTON, DC
MARCH 12, 2018

Next-generation satellites are bringing new competition to the broadband marketplace and new opportunities for rural Americans who have had no access to high-speed Internet access for far too long. That’s why the FCC under my leadership has moved quickly to give a green light to satellite innovators.

Here, U.S. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai falsely characterizes satellite delivered Internet connectivity as innovative. It is not. It's been around since the 1990s as a forced option for Americans who needed better than glacial dialup Internet access over legacy copper telephone lines but weren't offered DSL or later by cable companies.

We’ve also made satellite broadband providers eligible for our upcoming Connect America Fund Phase II reverse auction, which will provide up to $2 billion over ten years to expand broadband deployment in rural America. To be sure, I understand that the satellite industry disagreed with some of the decisions that the FCC made in developing rules for the reverse auction. We are forging new ground with this first-of-its-kind auction, and in doing so we had to make some hard choices. But, I nonetheless hope that satellite companies will study this opportunity closely and choose to participate in the reverse auction. 

This is an incredible waste of subsidy funding. With satellite, the FCC is subsidizing a substandard and kludgy form of connectivity subject to high latency and bandwidth usage caps. Subsidies should instead go to deploying fiber to the premise connections that offer far superior connectivity and aren't as subject to obsolescence.

U.S."bandwidth problem" direct consequence of massive policy failure

The moving target: The amount of bandwidth required to make people happy increases each year as the benefits of broadband increase. What looked like a good technical solution a few years ago may not look like one today. That means any true solution must be future proof. Providers in the United States have made great strides toward modernizing their network infrastructure, and they continue to do so. But truly solving the bandwidth problem will require a national commitment to ensuring a world-class infrastructure. 

So writes Masha Zager, editor in chief of Broadband Communities magazine in her column appearing in the the January-February 2018 issue. Zager's column is titled The Bandwidth Problem. The origins of that problem stem from a massive policy failure dating back to the early 1990s. Public and regulatory policy regarded advanced digital telecommunications as a luxury add on to legacy telephone and cable TV services.

That perspective badly hobbled the necessary modernization of America's metallic cable infrastructure designed for 20th century analog telephone and cable TV service to fiber optic to the premise infrastructure for advanced digital telecommunications in the 21st -- the world class infrastructure referred to by Zager. It also established a mindset of bandwidth poverty instead of bandwidth abundance.

Consequently, a generation later the nation is limping along, trapped in a continuous, frustrating cycle of infrastructure failing to keep up with burgeoning bandwidth demand and the embarrassment of Americans still forced to use dialup and satellite services. Also absent is the national commitment that Zager calls for to address the problem. That commitment should be to solve it once and for all with a declaration of a war on bandwidth poverty and an aggressive national initiative to fast track construction of a fully fibered telecommunications network reaching every American doorstep.

Google Fiber enters building by building urban battle for MDU connectivity

Google Fiber picks MDU cherries in Orange County: Google Fiber is figuring out how to play small ball and still get thousands of fiber to the home subscribers. In its latest blog post, Google tells how it’s expanding its fiber footprint – actually, making lots of tiny paw prints – in the southern California multi-dwelling unit market…

The subscription-based business model employed by incumbent telcos like AT&T as well as newer entrants like Google Fiber clearly favors density because it generates decent ROI on fiber to the premise (FTTP) capital investment. The higher the density the better as these players engage in a form of business urban warfare, fighting for market share building by building.

The problem is not everyone lives in or prefers to live in multi dwelling unit (MDU) properties. In MDUs, the vertically integrated model in which the providers own both the fiber infrastructure as well as proprietary telecommunications services delivered over it works well enough to make a strong business case. But when the density drops, it becomes iffy.

Ironically, that can leave even relatively affluent, low density neighborhoods of single family detached homes without fiber connections as the large investor-owned providers chase after dwelling density. Alternative business models are urgently needed. Without them, these higher value properties could end up becoming devalued due to their lack of fiber connectivity.

Fiber telecom infrastructure key, not "broadband speed"

Beyond Speed: FCC Should Focus on Broadband Experience: The market has evolved to where all-fiber connectivity is everyone’s goal, and it is time that the FCC got on board as well. In our comments to the FCC, the Fiber Broadband Association encourages the FCC to use an “all-fiber” metric — examining whether customers have access to all-fiber networks — to assess our country’s advanced telecommunications. “Robust fiber networks aren’t just capable of meeting community and enterprise needs throughout the United States; they’re essential to doing so,” says FBA President and CEO Heather Burnett Gold. “Fiber broadband has what it takes to take our country’s digital potential to the next level, and access to fiber is the critical first step.” If we want to accurately measure Americans’ access to sufficient broadband technology, looking just at speed won’t do. We must be looking at the technology that can actually provide high-performance, future-proof broadband service: fiber.

This organization is right on the money. As readers of this blog as well as my eBook Service Unavailable: America's Telecommunications Infrastructure Crisis know, I've emphasized the same point. The United States should focus like a laser (pun intended) on rapidly bringing fiber connections to every home, business and public institution. It's all about modernizing the nation's vital telecommunications infrastructure to fiber, not "broadband speed."

U.S. at crisis point on telecom infrastructure modernization – and the path forward

The United States is facing a crisis when it comes to modernizing its legacy metallic telecommunications infrastructure originally constructed in the previous century for analog telephone and cable TV services. In order to deliver digital advanced telecommunications service based on Internet protocol in the present and with capacity for future services as bandwidth demand grows exponentially, that legacy infrastructure needs replacement with fiber optic connections to customer premises.

However, that’s unlikely to happen for the foreseeable future under current federal policy. Customer premise fiber connections are likely to continue to at a glacial place, putting the nation ever further behind where it should be. Had the correct policy and planning choices been made in the late 1980s and early 1990s when it became apparent video, data and voice telecommunications would go from analog to digital and be transported using Internet technology, fiber connections should have been available to every American home, business and institution by 2010 at the latest. Consequently, the United States is facing telecommunications infrastructure crisis in the 21st century at a time when it’s urgently needed to support a transition from the Industrial Age economy to the information and knowledge economy of the 20th.

Given that telecommunications infrastructure functions as a natural monopoly, market forces cannot provide sufficient incentive to speed deployment of fiber. Legacy telephone and cable companies will only construct fiber where they can earn a relatively rapid return on that high dollar capital investment. New investor owned providers will be reluctant to enter a market already dominated by the incumbent providers given they too face the same high capital investment costs and uncertain investment returns.

The leaves the vast majority of the country with substandard and often obsolete infrastructure with little prospect of meaningful progress. Federal and state subsidy programs are grossly underfunded relative to the estimated $200 billion minimum needed to bring fiber connections to every American doorstep. Leaving telecommunications infrastructure in the hands of the private sector will prolong the dismal situation.

Only the federal government has the economic resources to do the job and the freedom to do so without the need to produce a quick return for investors. That’s not to say spending federal tax dollars on this vital infrastructure isn’t an investment. It most certainly is an investment in the nation’s future that will pay multiplier effect dividends by boosting jobs and economic activity, in turn generating tax revenues to repay the initial investment.

A federal telecommunications infrastructure modernization initiative must not just be sufficiently funded. It must also include a clearly defined role for current and newcomer private sector players to construct and operate – but not own due to its monopolistic nature that disadvantages end users -- the new fiber networks. Like the roads and highways the connect metro areas to states and states to other states, the new federally owned fiber infrastructure should be operated on an open access basis, enabling various telecommunications services to be delivered over them by private sector firms. This avoids the tyranny of the monthly subscription take rate that deters infrastructure investment under legacy business models in which the owners of network assets also provide proprietary services over them.

Owners of existing fiber to the premise networks should be offered the opportunity to continue to operate them as privately held assets or to sell them to the federal government with favorable tax incentives.

Stop the Cap! The End of Google Fiber Expansion: Where Did It All Go Wrong?

Stop the Cap! The End of Google Fiber Expansion: Where Did It All Go Wrong? : The bean counters also arrived at Google Access — the division responsible for Google Fiber — and by October 2016, Google simultaneously announced it was putting a hold on further expansion of Google Fiber and its CEO, Craig Barratt, was leaving the company. About 10% of employees in the division involuntarily left with him. Insufficiently satisfied with those cutbacks, additional measures were announced in April 2017 including the departure of Milo Medin, a vice president at Google Access and Dennis Kish, a wireless infrastructure veteran who was president of Google Fiber. Nearly 600 Google Access employees were also reassigned to other divisions. Medin was a Google Fiber evangelist in Washington, and often spoke about the impact Google’s fiber project would have on broadband competition and the digital economy. Porat’s philosophy had a sweeping impact on Alphabet and its various divisions. The most visionary/experimental projects that were originally green-lit with no expectation of making money for a decade or more now required a plan to prove profitability in five years or less. (Emphasis added).

In adopting that five year ROI cutoff, Google Fiber effectively placed itself under the same financial constraints governing slow moving legacy telephone and cable companies it hoped to overbuild with fiber to the premise (FTTP). Having ventured into FTTP nearly a decade ago with no overwhelming technological or marketing advantage and using the same recurring monthly subscription business model -- including TV programming -- as the incumbents, it should surprise no one it's retreating.

As a former advisor to Google co-founder Larry Page was quoted as saying in Phil Dampier's post mortem excerpted above, "There’s no flying-saucer shit in laying fiber." Indeed. So unless Google Fiber figures out how to teleport fiber conduit into the ground or develops fiber cables that hang in mid air defying gravity -- thus avoiding the need for pole access -- it's pointless for Google Fiber to remain in FTTP.

Google Fiber's parent company, Alphabet, has a unit simply dubbed "X" to develop "moonshot" inventions profiled in the November 2017 issue of The Atlantic. Perhaps X will be able to obsolete FTTP and the Internet itself by coming up with a way to store quantum bits of information in the substrate of space time and encrypted by a form of blockchain technology to ensure data integrity.

U.S. policy should support technological progress in telecom, not protect interests of legacy telephone and cable companies

The Town That Had Free Gigabit Internet - Motherboard: But just as Wilson was preparing to expand the program in 2011, North Carolina passed House Bill 129: the "Level Playing Field" act, which was supported by Big Telecom lobbyists. This put tight restrictions on any town hoping to start its own municipal broadband, and reined in existing systems under the thinking that it was unfair for the government to compete in the open market with private businesses. After the law was passed, Wilson was not allowed to bring high-speed internet to Pinetops. "From our perspective, municipal broadband networks do not create competition in the long run," a spokesperson for CenturyLink, one of the ISPs that provided some service in the area, told me via email. "Rather, they replace it because public investment in government-owned networks drives out private sector investment and undermines an already-challenging business case for bringing broadband to certain areas." But locals argued the current providers weren't really competing at all, with many people unable to get access or stuck with expensive, slow connections.

This needs some unpacking. First some basic microeconomics. Infrastructure tends to function as a natural monopoly due to high cost barriers that protect incumbents and deter potential sellers from entering the market. Case in point: Google Fiber. It tried to take on the incumbents in a small number of U.S. metro areas and retreated in 2016 -- due to those high costs of entry. They proved to be too much, even for a very deep pocketed, tech savvy enterprise like Google.

In functional markets, sellers and buyers are able to get together on mutually agreeable terms. That's often not the case when it comes to advanced telecommunications infrastructure since those high cost barriers creating a natural monopoly typically mean only one seller -- or two at best. And if they offer poor value service -- or none at all -- consumers are stuck.

Naturally, CenturyLink as other rent seeking legacy incumbent telephone and cable companies wish to be that one seller and want their natural monopoly franchise protected by government policy, even as they struggle with a "challenging business case" as CenturyLink concedes. But U.S. government policy should not be to protect the interests of these players who must operate on very extended, uncertain timetables for modernizing their infrastructures for the digital age due to the aforesaid business case difficulties. Instead, it should be to ensure the rapid deployment of public sector-owned fiber connections to every American doorstep like roads and highways.

Until America musters will to fund crash program to build modern, government owned fiber telecommunications infrastructure to every doorstep

Until America musters the national will to fund a crash program to build modern, government owned fiber optic telecommunications infrastructure to every doorstep, it will continue to experience:

• Neighborhood infrastructure redlining and unregulated pricing by legacy incumbent telephone and cable companies exploiting the natural monopoly that is telecom infrastructure; 

• Poor connectivity and customer service;  

• Underfunded, incremental efforts by states and localities to build fiber to the premise telecom infrastructure.

Incumbent legacy telcos, cablecos don't fear "net neutrality." Title II monopoly regulation is the real concern.

Net Neutrality and Broadband Investment for All - Morning Consult: A wise Federal Communications Commission chairman noted that “the best decision government ever made with respect to the internet was … NOT to impose regulation on it.” Who said that? Republican Chairman Ajit Pai? Republican Chairman Kevin Martin? No, it was Bill Kennard, the Democratic chairman appointed by President Bill Clinton. Kennard’s smart, future-focused, pro-innovation and pro-consumer philosophy — followed by chairmen of both parties for two decades — established an investment-friendly regulatory climate that resulted in more than $1.5 trillion in broadband network investment, and with it, America’s world-changing internet technologies, applications and services. Kennard’s words remain as true today as they did in 1999. Pai’s plan to unwind the 2015 Open Internet Order, which regulated broadband service like an early 20th century telephone monopoly, is the right start.

The thing is telecommunications infrastructure is a natural monopoly regardless of whether it's plain old telephone service (POTS) over copper or based on Internet communications protocol delivered over fiber to the premise (FTTP). It's simple microeconomics. Infrastructure a labor intensive, high cost proposition and as such will never attract many sellers due to the high cost barriers to entry. While some degree of redundancy is beneficial to ensure network reliability, it would make no sense and be uneconomic to have many providers installing multiple infrastructures to serve communities and customer premises.

The above item by the president and CEO of the telecom industry trade group USTelecom shows the industry isn't as concerned about so-called "net neutrality" rules requiring all Internet protocol traffic be afforded equal carriage. Rather, the real fear is monopoly regulation.

Microsoft dusts off TV white spaces wireless tech with "Rural Airband Initiative"

Microsoft proposing $10B program to bring broadband internet to rural America | The Seattle Times: Microsoft is set to propose a $10 billion program to bring broadband internet to the rural U.S., an economic-development program aimed at a core constituency of the Trump administration. The plan, which calls for corporate and government cash, relies on nascent television “white-space” technology, which sends internet data over unused broadcast frequencies set aside for television channels.In an event scheduled for Tuesday in Washington, D.C., Microsoft is to propose using the technology it helped develop as a cornerstone of an effort to connect the 23.4 million Americans in rural areas who lack high-speed internet access.

Ten years ago, Microsoft along with Dell, EarthLink, Google, HP, Intel, and Philips Electronics formed the White Spaces Coalition and submitted a prototype wireless Internet protocol-based telecom device to be tested by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. The White Spaces Coalition hoped have the device approved for use when analog TV broadcasts ceased in February 2009 in favor of digital transmission, using unused portions of the television broadcast spectrum, 2MHz to 698MHz. The technology never came into widespread use in the decade that followed. According to this story in the Seattle Times, Microsoft’s Rural Airband Initiative seeks to deploy the technology with telecommunications industry partners in a dozen states by 2018.
 
TV white spaces technology isn't being held out as a panacea for the many neighborhoods redlined by incumbent landline telephone and cable companies that are found immediately adjacent to neighborhoods that are served by them. It's specifically targeted to areas with between two and 200 people per square mile, according to a Microsoft blog post. Fixed terrestrial wireless and "limited" fiber to the premise should be deployed in communities with a density greater than 200 people per square mile, according to the post, and satellite should be used to provide service in very sparsely populated areas with a population density of less than two people per square mile. Currently, however, satellite is found in much more populated areas that lack landline infrastructure and provides a far inferior level of service than can be provided by landline infrastructure.

Microsoft's TV white spaces plan faces a number of obstacles mentioned in this New York Times story. They include the high cost of the devices to deliver it, longstanding opposition from the TV broadcast industry concerned about possible interference and limited bandwidth inherent in any advanced telecom technology based on spectrum. There's a larger downside as well: looking to technologies that have limited and unproven track records for delivering advanced, Internet protocol-based telecommunications. It's happened before with Broadband Over Power Lines (BPL), which was first touted in the mid-2000s (around the same time as TV white spaces), G-Fast (souped up DSL) and more recently, AT&T's experimental AirGig technology. None have proven to be lower cost replacements offering the same bandwidth capacity and reliability that fiber to the premise (FTTP) technology provides.

Coming on the heels of a Deloitte white paper declaring building out fiber a U.S. national infrastructure imperative, Microsoft's proposal underscores the poor public policy and planning that brought the nation to where it is today with widespread telecommunications infrastructure deficiencies and disparities. TV white spaces might have made sense as a planned transitional technology on the road to universal FTTP. That it's being hauled back out 10 years after it debuted reflects a desperate, on the cheap strategy borne out of the landline infrastructure deficiencies and disparities rather than a transitional strategy.

50 million US homes have only one 25Mbps Internet provider or none at all | Ars Technica

50 million US homes have only one 25Mbps Internet provider or none at all | Ars Technica: More than 10.6 million US households have no access to wired Internet service with download speeds of at least 25Mbps, and an additional 46.1 million households live in areas with just one provider offering those speeds, a new analysis has found. That adds up to more than 56 million households lacking any high-speed broadband choice over wired connections. Even when counting access to fixed wireless connections, there are still nearly 50 million households with one 25Mbps provider or none at all.

The data comes from a report by researchers who evaluated Federal Communications Commission data in order to shed more light on broadband deployment, or lack thereof. The FCC's own reports on this data show the percentage of developed census blocks that have ISPs offering broadband at various speeds. The researchers attempted to improve upon that analysis by comparing the census block information to household data from the US Census Bureau's 2015 American Community Survey in order to determine how many homes have or don't have high-speed broadband access.

This analysis continues the misguided view that telecommunications infrastructure is a competitive market and therefore something is wrong if premises don't have multiple landline services from which they can obtain Internet protocol-based services. It is not a competitive market. Due to high cost barriers to entry that discourage competition, it functions as a natural monopoly like other utilities such as electric power, water and natural gas. It's not economic to have multiple power, water and gas lines serving a given customer premise. Driving this view is the notion that IP-based telecommunications is a "broadband" service and not infrastructure.

The analysis also incorporates a speed-based definition of service. The definition derives from a dearth of fiber to the premise (FTTP) infrastructure in the United States. Internet service providers rely on metallic cable landline plant and radio spectrum that offer considerably less bandwidth capacity than FTTP. Hence, bandwidth is constrained and throughput speed rather than infrastructure tends to define what constitutes good service. FTTP infrastructure rather than throughput speed is a far better metric and avoids the constant need to redefine a speed-based standard as bandwidth demand continues its inexorable growth.

As usual, AT&T decades late & dollar short, betting heavily on the come

Meanwhile, in terms of its fixed line activities AT&T confirms it is now marketing a 1Gbps connection to nearly four million locations across 46 metropolitan areas nationwide, including more than 650,000 apartments and condominium units. By mid-2019 the telco plans to reach at least 12.5 million locations across 67 metro areas with its fibre service. In addition, AT&T is conducting technology trials over fixed wireless point-to-point mmWave and G.fast technologies with a view to delivering greater speeds and efficiencies within its copper and fibre networks. Finally, the telco expects to launch a new fixed wireless internet (FWI) service in mid-2017 in areas where it has accepted Federal Communication Commission (FCC) Connect America Fund Phase II (CAF II) support. The operator expects to reach more than 400,000 locations by the end of 2017 across 18 states, most of which will get internet access for the first time. By the end of 2020 AT&T plans to reach 1.1 million locations in those 18 states.

It's mind boggling to consider the boldfaced sentence above that notes premises in AT&T service territory will get their first Internet access between 2017 and 2020. Those premises will be served by a bolt on adjunct to its mobile wireless infrastructure that will be obsolete even before its deployed and highly likely bog down during peak periods as its shared bandwidth becomes saturated with heavy, multi-premise demand. Had AT&T's predecessor SBC Communications and other regional bell operating companies stuck to their early 1990s plans to replace their copper networks with fiber to customer premises, they would have likely completed that task by 2008 to 2010. They didn't. Consequently, the quality of America's telecommunications infrastructure has suffered greatly, deficient for the needs of today and tomorrow.

This item from TeleGeography (excerpted above) also outlines AT&T's residential strategy that heavily relies on its mobile wireless plant as a successor to its VDSL-based U-Verse hybrid fiber/copper service that suffers from severe bandwidth constraints due to the aging copper cable plant service customer premises. The wireless link to customer premises is apparently going to replace the twisted pair copper. It remains to be seen whether AT&T can overcome the technological challenge of being able to deliver adequate bandwidth over the wireless link to customer premises. And equally critical, the economic challenge of having to invest considerable capital in fiber to backhaul all of the necessary radios that would essentially require nearly every premise to have one, similar to step down transformers for residential electric service. 

Outmoded 1990s thinking retards U.S. telecom infrastructure modernization

Digitally Unconnected in the U.S.: Who’s Not Online and Why? | NTIA: But what about those Americans who do not use the Internet? Whether by circumstance or by choice, millions of U.S. households are not online, and thus unable to meaningfully participate in the digital economy. Data from NTIA's July 2015 Computer and Internet Use Supplement to the Current Population Survey confirm that the digital divide persists. In 2015, 33 million households (27 percent of all U.S. households) did not use the Internet at home, where families can more easily share Internet access and conduct sensitive online transactions privately. Significantly, 26 million households--one-fifth of all households--were offline entirely, lacking a single member who used the Internet from any location in 2015.

This report reflects the limited thinking that retards the direly needed modernization of telecommunications infrastructure in the United States. It adopts a one-dimensional view of modern telecommunications rooted in the later 1990s and early 2000s when internet protocol-based telecommunications solely meant going on line with a computer, using dialup or DSL where it was being rolled out.

Nearly two decades later, the internet isn't just about going online, particularly as legacy telephone companies look to retire their aged and obsolete copper cable plants and fiber to the premise (FTTP) obsoletes metallic cable and can support multiple telecom services. Internet protocol also supports voice service (Voice Over Internet Protocol) as well as video, both one way and interactive. It's a multi-modal telecommunications platform.