Australians Without Broadband Call For Changes To NBN | Internet

Australians Without Broadband Call For Changes To NBN | Internet: Experts have blamed Telstra for failing to upgrade creaking infrastructure because the NBN will limit the return it can get on its investment. Meanwhile many of those without broadband face over three years on dialup or expensive and patchy wireless plans as they are not part of the early NBN rollout.

At least the Aussies can claim they have active construction underway to build fiber to the premise infrastructure -- albeit not fast enough for areas that must still rely on early 1990s era dial up over twisted copper pair and data capped mobile wireless service.  The United States does not: only the travesty of a "national broadband plan" that exists on paper only.  There, the wait to get off dial up may take even longer than for the folks down under unless American communities take the initiative to build their own community fiber networks.

Connected company muscled state agency out of Internet contract - Florida - MiamiHerald.com

Connected company muscled state agency out of Internet contract - Florida - MiamiHerald.com: TALLAHASSEE -- In 2009, with more than a quarter of all Floridians without broadband access to the Internet at home, state officials lined up to get some of the $7 billion in federal stimulus money to finance state-based programs to increase access.

Enter Connected Nation, a little known but well connected Washington-based company. It won the Florida contract to use $2.5 million to map the broadband gaps for use by policy makers and telecommunications companies.

A year later, when the state won a second grant for $6.3 million to extend the broadband efforts, Connected Nation, a non-profit company, believed it had signed up to be part of a public-private partnership with the state that entitled the firm to a no-bid shot at that money too. But the Department of Management Services, the state agency that housed the project, disagreed.

DMS said the grant requires it to use some of the money to pay for three more years of broadband mapping and the rest to expand broadband access in libraries and schools.
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The real story here is the tragic policy failure of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to provide technical assistance funding to communities interested in building their own open access fiber to the premises networks instead of dubious "broadband mapping" projects.  It would have been a far more productive use of money to fill in the gaps with actual infrastructure instead of wasting it creating maps that won't connect homes in Florida and other states that remain disconnected from the Internet.

Verizon's residential LTE "HomeFusion" likely to serve only fringes of small number of metro areas

Verizon's announcement today of its HomeFusion wireless residential Internet service offering based on its nascent 4G cellular LTE service appears aimed at picking up marginal residential market share in suburban and exurban fringes of U.S metro areas where wireline connectivity from incumbent telcos and cable providers is sketchy. These are also areas where Verizon might otherwise deploy its FiOS fiber to the premise residential wireline product but will not because the company has called a halt to further FiOS expansion.

It's not likely HomeFusion will be broadly deployed in predominantly rural and quasi-rural areas. Like Verizon's mobile wireless offerings, it's bandwidth metered and can't offer the ample headroom for bandwidth demand growth -- much of it driven by video -- that fiber does. In order to improve Internet deployment and access in these areas, these communities will have to build their own fiber to the premises networks constructed by local governments or telecom cooperatives.

AT&T has effectively thrown in the towel in serving these areas. HomeFusion represents Verizon's last ditch effort to pick up some limited revenues in these underserved markets.

Cable emerges as dominant commercial ISP

As the Internet becomes the all purpose global telecommunications medium delivering voice, video, the web and email, cable companies have emerged as the dominant Internet Service Provider (ISP).

As Susan P. Crawford explains in this Harvard Law & Policy Review article The Communications Crisis in America, compared to incumbent telcos and wireless and satellite ISPs, only cable offers sufficiently robust bandwidth and headroom going forward. Telcos can't keep up since they would incur unabsorbable costs to replace their obsolete copper cable plants with fiber -- costs that would also make their generous stock dividends obsolete.

That's not likely to change despite the Federal Communications Commission's recent reforming of the Universal Service Fund (USF) from subsidizing plain old telephone service (POTS) in high cost areas to Internet. The Connect America Fund (CAF) requires telcos merely provide first generation DSL-level connectivity of 4Mbs for downloads and 1Mbs up and allocates only $4.5 billion a year -- hardly enough to meaningfully offset the cost of changing out decades-old copper plant for fiber.

In the wireless realm, the physics of radio spectrum hamstring wireless ISPs while satellite Internet -- on the verge of obsolescence from the day it was introduced -- has clearly reached its expiration date.

With cable now the dominant commercial Internet provider for most Americans, Crawford argues for increased government scrutiny of its monopoly market power. Crawford's position may draw support from community networks that have gone up against cable companies that pull out all the political stops to preserve their monopolies. The cable guys don't always win as Longmont, Colorado showed this week and as reported by Christopher Mitchell of Community Broadband Networks. Community networks also have a technological carrying capacity edge over the hybrid coax/fiber cable plant employed by cable companies since they typically deploy full fiber to the premises networks.

American Jobs Act misses on modernizing, building out nation's outdated telecom infrastructure

The Obama administration's American Jobs Act unveiled today misses the opportunity to build out the nation's outmoded wireline telecommunications infrastructure at a time when millions of Americans remain disconnected from the Internet. The White House instead continues to propose mobile broadband as the means of bridging the gap:

Expanding Nationwide Wireless Internet Services For the Public and the First Responders, in a Fiscally Responsible Way: The plan follows the model in the bipartisan legislation from Senators Rockefeller and Hutchison in including an investment to develop and deploy a nationwide, interoperable wireless network for public safety. The plan includes reallocating the D Block for public safety (costing $3 billion) and $7 billion to support the deployment of this network and technological development to tailor the network to meet public safety requirements. This is part of a broader deficit-reducing wireless initiative that would free up public and private spectrum to enable the private sector to deploy high-speed wireless services to at least 98 percent of Americans, even those living in remote rural and farming communities.

It's a major misapprehension on the part of the Obama administration to propose mobile wireless broadband as the means of connecting American homes and businesses to the Internet. Mobile broadband as its name implies is primary intended for mobile access and not to serve fixed premises locations. That's why it comes with preset caps on how much bandwidth is allotted to each customer as this post by Community Broadband Networks explains. Wireless Internet providers don't want customers using it for regularly accessing the Internet and particularly downloading high bandwidth demand video content.

Instead of taking this misguided approach, the administration should as part of its American Jobs Act fund fiber optic to the premises infrastructure and provide technical assistance grants to local governments and consumer telecom cooperatives to help them deploy it to homes and businesses where a business case cannot be made by investor owned providers to build out their incomplete networks.

Verizon misses on price points for higher tier FiOS service

There are four key elements to a successful business offering: product, price, promotion and distribution channel. When it comes to the high end of its FiOS fiber to the premises (FTTP) Internet service, Verizon has most but not all of those elements.

The missing element? Price. At $200 a month for service providing downstream connectivity of 150 Mbit/s and 35 Mbit/s on the upside, "nobody's buying," reports Kathy Brown, Verizon's senior vice president for public policy according to this Light Reading story. Even in university towns, where Aspen Institute fellow and former government broadband policy guru Blair Levin wants to explore bringing gigabit service through his Gig.U project. Consumers, Brown notes, instead opt for cheaper service tiers providing connectivity at lower speeds.

Of course few are interested in buying Verizon's higher end service at $200 a month. That's an unacceptable price for most consumers. It's also an expected consequence of telco marketing strategy that rations bandwidth, creating an economic disincentive for customers to use more. Products and services cannot be successful when price points are set unrealistically high. It is also pointless to blame consumers for not buying when they are.

Battling over accuracy of broadband maps plays into hands of legacy providers

Readers of this blog know that I've long regarded so-called "broadband mapping" as well as as focusing on "broadband adoption" as strategies cooked up by the PR shops of the big legacy telco and cable companies to divert attention away from the lack of advanced telecom infrastructure. As long as people are battling over the accuracy of "broadband maps," they aren't taking matters into their own hands and money isn't being invested to construct fiber to the premises telecom infrastructure to fill in the availability gaps the mappers are attempting to document.

The Associated Press reports Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin is steamed that existing "broadband maps" -- probably including the useless National Broadband Map paid for by our federal tax dollars -- show his home near Putney, Vermont has DSL service. Not true, the guv says. So he's countered with his own state-run mapping program, BroadbandVT.org

Instead of trying to see who can most accurately map broadband black holes -- an exercise about as useful as mapping the celestial variety -- Vermonters should call upon their independent New England spirit and create cooperatives to build fiber to their homes and businesses. That spirit is apparently alive and well in western Massachusetts, where the Wired West announced this week that several towns voted in favor of moving forward to formalize creation of a municipal telecommunications cooperative to build sorely needed fiber to the premises telecom infrastructure.

Making fiber to premises a reality requires consumers to think like business owners

Much has been written on this blog and elsewhere about market failure and the urgent need for alternative business models to speed deployment of fiber to the premises telecom infrastructure. Most of it has been centered on market economics and technology.

However, a fundamental change in thinking must occur if these alternative business models are to come to fruition and bring the services people need now and in the future as bandwidth demand grows exponentially. People must think of themselves as not just consumers but also as owners.

Consumer cooperatives were formed in the U.S. a century ago to provide voice telephone service where investor owned telcos could not make a business case to provide service. Now that the telephone network is being replaced by the Internet, the time is at hand for the revival of this business model.

While coops offer significant structural cost savings that can make the business case pencil out for deploying an open access fiber to the premises network, those advantages cannot be realized until consumers think of themselves not just as a consumers but also as a business owners since a coop is a business, albeit owned by its customers. Being an owner requires doing diligence and assuming some degree of risk and not just asking what the coop may be able to provide them personally and at what price.

Without this shift in thinking, consumers will continue to be at the mercy of the incumbent telcos and cable companies and what services they choose to provide (or not provide as is often the case) and forced to pay whatever they want to charge for them in order to earn a return for their shareholders. Rather than benefit remote shareholders who could care less who gets fiber to the premises in their communities, it's time for consumers to say "enough" and take control of their telecommunications service.

Burgeoning telecom bandwidth demand emulates Moore's Law

In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore successfully predicted semiconductor processing power would double about every two years. A trend similar to Moore's Law is now occurring in fiber optic capacity. And just in time as this New York Times article notes, pointing to burgeoning demand for Internet bandwidth:

The need for core network improvement is pressing, said Stojan Radic, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, San Diego. “We are looking at a point soon where we cannot satisfy demand,” he said. “And if we don’t, it will be like going over a cliff.”

Demand is continually growing, somewhere below street level, as details of our e-mail, bank balances and national security zip along on light waves. And consumers can’t get enough video clips on YouTube, television shows on Hulu, and movies streamed to them by Netflix that they watch on their computers and TVs.

This has implications for telecommunications services, which in theory could deliver a better Internet experience and new applications with far more bandwidth. While technological advances will allow more bandwidth to move along the fiber of the Internet backbone and middle mile distribution networks, this increased capacity hits a major bottleneck at the so-called last mile that connects to customer premises.

This segment of the network is still largely made up of metal wire designed for the single purpose of delivering analog phone service or cable TV. The business models of the telcos and cablecos don't allow them to make the capital expenditures necessary to upgrade the last mile to fiber, creating an urgent need for alternative providers that can devise viable business models that can make the fiber connections for consumers.

Internet access is the new dial tone, but millions of Americans are disconnected

Three years ago, then-U.S. Federal Communications Commissioner Jonathan S. Adelstein called on the nation to make broadband "the dial-tone of the 21st Century."

Adelstein's characterization is correct. Today, the Internet is the telecommunications network. Those who don't have access to it are disconnected and isolated.

The Huffington Post has posted a summary of Akamai Technologies' State of the Internet" report for the first quarter of 2010 showing which states are the most offline. (Hat tip to Jason Wilson) It wouldn't surprise me if these states find it toughest to help boost the nation out of a deep economic contraction, being sidelined in an increasingly Internet-based economy.

The governors of these (and other) states should ask the Obama administration to create a Work Projects Administration-like entity to embark on a crash program to construct locally owned and operated fiber networks to serve all Americans where they live and work. Achieving this goal is a stated administration policy. Moreover, given the administration's projected multiplier effect of a project like this in terms of job creation and economic activity, it could well end up being revenue neutral when increased tax revenues are factored in.

Local governments, coops better positioned than legacy providers to meet burgeoning bandwidth demand

Check out Lance Whitney's July 21 cnet News article that illustrates the growing conflict between burgeoning bandwidth demands of Internet video content and the incremental billing business models of the legacy telco and cable providers that ration bandwidth.

Faced with the explosive demand for bandwidth, the legacy providers are responding the only way they know how given their business models: charging more money for more bandwidth via tiered service offerings and rationing bandwidth with the use of caps.

This puts the legacy providers in a bad spot since incremental bandwidth pricing and punitive caps will only tick off their customers. What's worse is the legacy providers can't upgrade their infrastructures to accommodate the jump in bandwidth demand and leave room for future growth over the foreseeable. That's because they are owned by shareholders who have been with them for decades and expect a nice safe, utility company style dividend -- money that can't be allocated to capital expenditures.

The take away here is alternative providers such as local governments and consumer telecom cooperatives who don't have to pay those fat shareholder dividends are better positioned to deploy fiber to the premises infrastructure that can easily deliver the bandwidth needed today and leave headroom for tomorrow.

DSL reaches end of line as interim pre-fiber to the premises technology

Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) was deployed by telcos starting in the late 1990s as an interim technology to bring Internet Protocol-based telecommunications services to customer premises before fiber optic connections could be brought to them.

Now DSL faces a crisis that dramatically shortens the days it can play this role. While DSL allows telcos to use existing copper plant designed for Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS), that copper plant is aged and deteriorating quickly. DSL tends to work best over newer, more pristine copper. But there's not much of that (if any) being deployed these days. Meanwhile, DSL customers complain about connections that run slower than advertised or are prone to outages as DSL signals struggle across ancient pairs of twisted copper.

And since about 2008 and amid the current economic downturn, telcos have pared back their DSL rollouts. Verizon concentrated on fiber to the premises via its FiOS product offering, prompting customer complaints it was neglecting its copper plant and repairing it with bubble gum and duct tape.

Here's the crisis: Now that DSL has served its role as an interim IP solution on the road to fiber to the premises, the United States is not prepared to make the transition to fiber. Stunningly, this gap in the technology transition isn't addressed in the Federal Communications Commission's National Broadband Plan issued this past spring. Nor is there any indication the nation's two largest telcos are seriously addressing it. Verizon recently halted build out of its FiOS fiber plant. AT&T opted for a hybrid model of fiber to the node and copper to the premise for its U-Verse product. But the VDSL transmission technology that powers U-Verse suffers from far greater distance limitations than previous generations of DSL and greatly limits U-Verse's service footprint.

It will fall to smaller, locally owned and operated telcos, local governments and telecom cooperatives to pick up where DSL left off (or in many cases, left out for those not serviceable by DSL). The National Broadband Plan should recognize that DSL over copper is dead or dying and support efforts by these entities to deploy fiber to the premises with technical assistance grants and infrastructure construction grants and low cost loans.

Dark fiber owners seek buyers -- but last mile will determine value

Today's Wall Street Journal reports dark fiber left dormant since the dot com bust of a decade ago is on the block, its owners hopeful that the transition to Internet protocol-based telecommunications that stalled around the same time will finally take off.

But now as then, the so-called last mile (or first mile as some refer to it) remains key since the dark fiber was put in place for long haul and in some cases middle mile infrastructure. Long haul and middle mile fiber standing alone do not a network make. It takes last mile fiber infrastructure to reach customer premises.

Potential purchasers of that dark fiber must assess the odds whether there will be sufficient last mile fiber to connect to. Reliance on legacy incumbent telcos and cable companies lowers the odds. They have largely upgraded and built out their networks to the extent their business models allow. Verizon, the sole legacy telco that was building fiber to the premises, recently pulled back to concentrate on wireless service in metro areas. But if local governments and telecom cooperatives crank up construction of fiber to the premises infrastructure to fill the gap left by legacy providers, the value of these dormant dark fiber assets will likely increase.

WISP runs into opposition in Georgia

For many areas of the U.S., terrestrial wireless Internet Protocol telecom infrastructure offers an interim solution until fiber to the premises wireline plant can be built. Particularly for those areas that lie outside the footprints of telco DSL and cable service.

But terrestrial wireless service for homes and businesses has its downsides. Achieving decent throughput, adequate backhaul and attractive price points have posed challenges for many Wireless Internet Service Providers (WISPs).

In addition, wireless IP signals often can't reliably penetrate terrain, foliage and even municipal building codes as one wireless provider recently discovered to its chagrin. The Marietta Georgia planning commission turned down a request by American Broadband Communications LLC, for a variance that would allow the WISP to erect a 150-foot-high tower, the Parkersburg News and Sentinel reports.

Marietta should like other U.S. local governments concerned about tall towers springing up in residential areas like Lafayette (Louisiana), Ashland (Oregon) and a muni consortium in Utah find a way to get fiber to homes and businesses, either directly or in partnership with private providers or nonprofit telecom cooperatives.

App-Rising: FCC fudges on fiber

From the perspective of App-Rising, a recent Federal Communications Commission report addressing how to complete America's incomplete IP-based telecom infrastructure suffers from a major flaw. There's too much emphasis on DSL wireline technology intended to serve as a temporary stopgap on the road to fiber to the premises -- technology that will soon be obsolete and already suffers from poor reliability and high maintenance costs given the nation's aging copper cable plant.

The FCC also fudges on fiber by looking to mobile 4G wireless technology as a substitute for fiber to the premises. I agree with App-Rising that's also bad idea. This technology is intended primarily for mobile and not premises service. And unlike fiber, it's not a proven technology. Plus there's no indication 4G won't also become quickly obsolete, unable to scale up as premise bandwidth demand inevitably grows.

Google's fiber foray: Likely goal is to test alternative business model

Google's demonstration of concept fiber to the premises "experiment" announced last week could represent the start of a major transformation of how consumers receive information in an age where information is increasingly delivered via Internet protocol.

The potential transformation: from the telco/cable business model that brings the bulk of Americans Internet access that due to CAPEX constraints cannot reach about 12 percent of U.S households to the advertising-based business model used for decades by mass broadcasters. Investors provide much of the funding needed for costly transmitters and other broadcast equipment. But advertisers provide another deep and ongoing source of cash to invest in the necessary broadcast equipment to reach consumers.

Google's experiment isn't likely about testing fiber to the premises technology. Fiber is a well demonstrated means of getting lots of bits and bytes to the doorstep with plenty of capacity to spare. Rather, I suspect it's to explore an alternative business model to bring Internet protocol-based services to homes that is to a large degree based on the network broadcasting business model.

Notably, Google's announcement comes as the U.S. government struggles with the inherent conflict of implementing policies to expand advanced telecommunications infrastructure to all Americans while paying homage to the privately owned telco/cable dominated Internet "ecosystem" that makes doing so impossible without substantial subsidies in a time of economic penury.

In the 1960's, mass communications theorist Marshall McLuhan predicted an electronic global village linked together by a broadcast television -- a medium so powerful that the medium itself would be as important as its content. "The medium is the message,” he famously declared. While McLuhan's observation was about TV, in retrospect it applies even more so to the Internet. Google's foray into fiber may well have been undertaken with McLuhan firmly in mind.

Google's fiber to the premise "experiment" a would be broadband game changer

Nearly three years ago, I predicted Internet-protocol content providers and aggregators fed up with trying to pump their product over legacy telecommunications infrastructure dominated by telcos and cable companies would acquire or build their own infrastructure to reach consumers. It's an expected outcome of a conflict between the content providers' needs for ever increasing bandwidth and the telco/cable companies' need to conserve capital expenditures and place incremental limits on bandwidth consistent with their service offerings in which consumers pay increasingly higher rates for more bandwidth. The content providers want unlimited bandwidth delivered over big pipes. But the business model of the telco/cable duopoly is based on making bandwidth a restricted scarce commodity delivered over little pipes.

So it was no surprise when Google -- which has reportedly been quietly buying up fiber left dark after the dot com bust of a decade ago -- announced this week it would build an experimental alternative business model that would bring advanced telecommunications to consumers over a really big pipe: fiber optic infrastructure to the premises capable of throughput of 1 gigabyte per second.

Google is also clearly holding itself as an alternative to the Obama administration's program to build out open access broadband infrastructure subsidized by more than $4 billion set aside in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) President Obama signed into law nearly one year ago.

The timing of Google's announcement of its fiber infrastructure test program is also worth noting and shows the company is looking to make a statement. The window for applications for the second round of ARRA broadband infrastructure subsidies opens less than a week after Google's announcement. The deadline set by Google for local governments and communities to nominate themselves for Google's experimental fiber build closes the week after the ARRA funding round application window closes as well the deadline for the Federal Communications Commission to submit a plan to Congress to achieve universal U.S. broadband access as required by the ARRA.

While the federal agencies that will hand out the ARRA infrastructure subsidies have made assurances the money will soon begin flowing in earnest, doubts have emerged due to numerous challenges filed against proposed projects by the same incumbent providers Google wants to go around. Google likely figured amid that uncertainty, the timing was right to make its announcement.

With its self described "experimental" fiber to the premises model, Google may also be trying to debunk skeptics who believe fiber to the premises simply costs too much to deploy. That high cost has been cited as the main impediment standing in the way of investment in the fiber to the premises infrastructure that was to have been at the doorstep of every American home by 2006. If Google can show the cost assumptions upon which the business models of the incumbent legacy providers are based are wrong, then the entire game is changed overnight. That potentially puts America on course to catch up to where it should have been four years ago and where it needs to be for the future.

Brigham City, Utah: Pioneering America's telecom future

America's brightest and most promising version of its advanced telecommunications future is playing out in Brigham City, Utah. Residents there aren't waiting for the incumbent telco and cable companies to build fiber infrastructure to reach their premises. In the pioneering spirit of the great American West where consumer cooperatives formed a century ago to provide telephone service, they're doing it themselves, reports App-Rising.

According to App-Rising, 1,600 residents have paid $3,000 to install fiber to their homes, which will give them access to various providers via one of the nation's first open access networks, UTOPIA.

The concept is right out of a working paper issued one year ago by the New America Foundation authored by Derek Slater and Tim Wu titled Homes with Tails What If You Could Own Your Internet Connection. Like those for solar power, the paper recommends state and federal tax credits to create incentives for homeowners to buy their own fiber.

This concept has great potential to fill in the great many broadband black holes found throughout the West. As the Federal Communications Commission prepares recommendations to Congress due in two months on government policy to expand broadband access, it should put this open access, consumer owned fiber to the premises model -- and tax credits to encourage its use -- on the top of its list.

White paper highlights role of muni fiber as U.S. develops national broadband plan

Here's an excellent white paper on the status of U.S. municipal fiber to the premises systems issued this month by the Fiber to the Home Council.

The report lists 57 muni fiber networks that serve both homes and businesses operating as of October 2009 (it adds at least 15 more serve businesses only), noting that "a growing number of municipal governments are taking it upon themselves to build FTTH networks – much in the way that they have previously built roads, sewers and/or electrical systems – as a means of ensuring that local residents have access to necessary services, in this case, Internet connectivity for the 21st Century."

These muni fiber systems typically spring up after private service providers have declined to upgrade their networks or build such systems, the report notes. As such, the white paper concludes, these networks are an important component of the U.S. telecommunications infrastructure and should be encouraged.

That conclusion should be given due consideration by the Federal Communications Communications Commission as it develops a recommendation due to Congress in February 2010 on a national broadband deployment plan.

FCC wants comment on defining broadband

The Federal Communications Commission has issued a public notice requesting comment on how it should define broadband, a question that arose not long before the Obama administration assumed office at the start of the year. The notice contains a caveat on focusing on throughput speed:

Much of the discussion of any proposal to define “broadband” tends to center on download and upload throughput. Download and upload throughput are important, but neither is precise or diverse enough to describe broadband satisfactorily.

Indeed. The issue isn't broadband itself, but the poor state of the U.S. telecommunications infrastructure that has tended to keep the focus on speed and latency, largely because it's so lousy in much of the nation that its ability to deliver what could even be charitably described as broadband is sketchy and often nonexistent.

Broadband should be instead be defined as fiber infrastructure to the premises. As the FCC notice suggests, any definition based what the pipes can carry rather than the pipes themselves will devolve the discussion into a "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" debate and result in the the lowest possible standard chosen in order to dispose of the question in the most politically expedient manner.

Fiber is proven technology and remains the most obsolescence proof advanced telecommunications infrastructure going to best accommodate the growing volume of bandwidth hungry applications and multiple services.