Google testing white spaces cloud in South Africa

Memeburn has the story here involving the test involving the Tertiary Education and Research Network of South Africa (TENET).

The test is delivering connectivity comparable to basic Wi-Fi (2.5Mbps) to 10 schools, according to the story.

Google to Offer Internet Service in Olathe, Kansas - WSJ.com

Google to Offer Internet Service in Olathe, Kansas - WSJ.com: Google hopes its fiber initiative can put pressure on cable and phone companies to improve their networks as Americans use more bandwidth for online-video services such as Google's YouTube, among other sites.

Nonsense. Even assuming the truth of this purported rationale, Google can apply pressure all it wants, but for these publicly traded, investor owned Internet service providers -- Google included -- the real pressure is the pressure to produce quarterly earnings plus in the case of the incumbent telcos and cablecos, generous dividends.  And that imperative will always win out over CAPex to improve and build out network infrastructure.

Broadband 'black spots' across UK - Yahoo! News UK

Broadband 'black spots' across UK - Yahoo! News UK: Britons living in rural areas are stuck in "digital ghettos", an expert has warned as figures showed average broadband speeds have more than trebled in the UK.

These now reach 12 megabits per second (Mbps) - around three times the speeds recorded in 2008 and up by a third in the six months from May to November.

But "black spots" still exist across the country and users face a "postcode lottery" in terms of the service they receive, it was claimed.

More than three years ago, Prince Charles warned of the emergence of UK "broadband deserts."  Apparently he was right. 

IP may be in the "telephone" system, but many premises still only served by POTS

How the Humble Telephone Is About to Bring Internet to the Masses (Again) - NationalJournal.com: You aren’t going to wake up one morning and find every home connected to Verizon FiOS. In fact, even after the IP transition, many houses are still going to be connected to their local switch by copper.

Indeed they are.  The last mile (or more properly the first mile) often lacks the infrastructure to deliver IP-based services, leaving many American homes to Plain Old Telephone Services (POTS) that has been around for decades.  And two percent/6 million Americans involuntarily left off the Internet grid?  That seems an awfully low number given a 2012 U.S. Federal Communications Commission estimate putting the number at nearly 20 million Americans.

Online-Only TV Shows Join Fight for Attention - NYTimes.com

Online-Only TV Shows Join Fight for Attention - NYTimes.com: The companies are, in effect, creating new networks for television through broadband pipes and also giving rise to new rivalries — among one another, as between Amazon and Netflix, and with the big but vulnerable broadcast networks as well.

As Marshall McLuhan famously said, "the medium is the message."  And the medium is fiber to the premise.

Georgia House Defeats Bill to Ban Municipal Broadband Networks | News & Opinion | PCMag.com

Georgia House Defeats Bill to Ban Municipal Broadband Networks | News & Opinion | PCMag.com

Market failure and the pointless exercise of "broadband mapping" is finally starting to give way to progress.  It's about time.

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.

Robust fiber to the premise telecom infrastructure can help stem falling rural school enrollment

The Sacramento Bee reports today on rapidly falling enrollment in rural school districts in the Sacramento, California metro region.  I personally think we need help," Fred Adam, superintendent of Placer Hills Union and an executive committee member with the state’s Small School Districts' Association, told newspaper, adding, "I truly worry about the future.”

Behind the drop in enrollment, according to the Bee article, are an aging population and a declining birth rate. In rural areas, the article continues, these trends are magnified by a small employment base that has been further eroded by years of recession. With few jobs and fewer options, many families have moved to the suburbs or out of state to find work. "It's a pretty consistent story throughout California in rural communities," Adam is quoted as saying. "You can't compete with time and distance."

Yes we can.  It can be bridged by robust, Internet-based telecommunications services that can enable rural school districts to rely less on classrooms and the need to bus students to and from them, thereby reducing operating expenses.

How?  By facilitating what educators are calling blended learning.  Jeremy Meyers, deputy superintendent of the El Dorado County Office of Education (quoted in the Sacramento Bee story), recently wrote about the emerging educational method in which pupils do much of their learning and class projects outside of the classroom via the Internet – arguably the world’s biggest and best stocked library.  Back in the classroom, their teachers review their projects, answer questions and lead discussions. Authors William A. Draves and Julie Coates describe Web-based education as one of the nine defining trends of the 21^st century in the 2004 book Nine Shift: Work, Life, and Education in the 21^st Century.
 
Just as workshifting allows their parents to work part of the work week at the office, might someday soon students report to class on fewer days that the Industrial Age Monday through Friday schedule of the 20^th Century?  This is not to say the classroom is facing obsolescence, particularly for primary students where the classroom plays an important role in the development of social skills.  But for older kids who grew up in the connected world, blended learning makes lots of sense.

Key to making this possible is fiber to the premise telecommunications infrastructure that has the capacity to deliver information in all forms as well as enable video conferencing between students, parents and educators.  In order for that critical infrastructure to be put in place, communities must come together and find ways to finance its planning, construction and operation since the business models of existing telephone and cable companies cannot accommodate the telecommunications needs of less populous areas. 
 
A virtuous bonus of more robust telecommunications infrastructure is it would also better enable parents of school age children to work remotely and run home-based businesses.  That in turn would help keep them and their kids in the community and curb declining school enrollment.

California legislation would expand Internet infrastructure subsidy fund

Introduced February 22, California Senate Bill 740 boosts the size of the California Public Utility Commission's California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) infrastructure subsidy fund from $125 million to a maximum of $325 million and extends its life from 2015 to 2020.

Now if only the PUC would only make the CASF funding freely available to community fiber projects, it might actually achieve some real benefit for Californians, particularly those residing in areas lacking wireline Internet connections from incumbent telcos and cable companies.

N.M.’S Daunting Digital Divide | ABQ Journal

N.M.’S Daunting Digital Divide | ABQ Journal: If matching dollars from telephone companies that won stimulus grants are included, plus development loans from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service, broadband investments in the past five years surpass $400 million, according to the state Department of Information Technology.

But many of New Mexico’s rural zones still have no Internet coverage, and many that do are still using dial-up modems, or aging digital subscriber line (DSL) technology, said USDA Rural Development State Director Terry Brunner.

And don't expect Google to come in any time soon and build fiber to the premise infrastructure as it is doing in a single metro area, Kansas City.

“New Mexico still has a digital divide because in some areas it’s just so hard to go through mountains or rock formations, and then you get to the end of the route and find there just aren’t enough homes and businesses to pay for the construction,” said Valerie Dodd, CenturyLink Inc.’s vice president and general manager for New Mexico.

Not a valid explanation because it fails to take into account aerial fiber, using (and upgrading as necessary) the utility poles that deliver POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) via copper cable.

France undertakes public private partnership to build out fiber telecom infrastructure

France launches 20 bln euro fibre broadband rollout | Reuters: Feb 20

Three tranches of more than 6 billion euros each will fund the planned network rollout, Hollande said. One will come from network operators, one from a mix of operators and local government and the last from state and local-government money.

Local governments' outlay will be funded using tax-free, regulated deposits gathered by state bank Caisse des Depots.

By 2017, the end of President Hollande's first term, 50 percent of the country will be covered under the plan.

This clear implication here is telecom infrastructure build needs cannot be adequately funded purely by an investor-owned telecom market.

Study: Poor Online Video Quality Costly | Home Media Magazine

Study: Poor Online Video Quality Costly | Home Media Magazine: Global video content companies left as much as $2.16 billion on the table in 2012 due to poor online video streams, according to a new study.

San Mateo, Calif.-based video streaming company Conviva studied 22.6 billion video streams from 2012, and found approximately 60% experienced quality issues of one kind or another (20.6% impacted by buffering; 19.5% impacted by slow video startup time; 40% impacted by low-resolution picture due to low bitrates).

This item illustrates the significance of having Internet infrastructure capable of delivering quality video content.  Fiber to the premise remains the best current and future infrastructure for the job.

FCC looks into rural call completion problems - The Hill's Hillicon Valley

FCC looks into rural call completion problems - The Hill's Hillicon Valley: In a statement, Chairman Julius Genachowksi said the evidence of rural call completion problems is overwhelming.

"In too many towns across the country, the basic ability of all Americans to reliably receive phone calls — a bedrock of America’s communication policy — has come into doubt," he said. "This has serious economic, safety and other consequences."

The United States faces serious telecommunications service problems with 20 million Americans disconnected from premises Internet service and now voice phone service becoming spotty in rural areas.

In his State of Union address one year ago, President Obama pointed to the nation's "incomplete high-speed broadband network," calling on Congress to fund telecom and other critical infrastructure.  Let's see if the President revisits this continuing problem in this week's 2013 State of the Union address.

Outdated telephone regulation matches dominant obsolete telco infrastructure

Coalition says broadband means new jobs: SPRINGFIELD — Investments in broadband technology created more than 13,000 jobs in Illinois in 2010 and 2011, according to a study funded by AT&T.

The study also reported that in 2012, Illinois had almost 20,000 jobs related to mobile applications.

The study was released Thursday by a new coalition of 12 Illinois groups representing business and job creation proponents, taxpayer advocates and communications companies.

The new coalition — the Illinois Partnership for the New Economy & Jobs — formed to urge Illinois to modernize its telecommunications law.

“Illinois’ law mandates investment in the 100-year-old technology of wired telephones to your home,” said coalition chair David Vite, who is also president of the Illinois Retail Merchants Association. “Those dollars would be better used for private investment in broadband networks that are currently creating new jobs.”

The stated implication of this study is fallacious.  It assumes but for government regulations requiring telcos to maintain obsolete copper cable wireline infrastructure to provide required telephone services, incumbent telcos would be able to replace it with fiber optic plant delivering Internet Protocol (IP)-based services.  The outdated laws and regulations appropriately remain on the books because the outdated publicly switched copper POTS infrastructure remains the dominant infrastructure in most of the nation, much of it incapable of delivering any IP-based services.

FCC's gigabit goal will require significant public investment

FCC pushes for gigabit broadband in all 50 states by 2015 | Politics and Law - CNET News: The FCC hopes the Gigabit City Challenge will further these types of efforts. The FCC hasn't committed any funds to the "Gigabit Challenge," but the agency said it will help communities create an online clearinghouse of best practices to help educate local officials and local service providers on the most cost-effective ways to increase broadband deployments.

This will require the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Rural Utilities Service be sufficiently funded with grant and loan money to help communities meet the FCC's challenge with publicly and cooperatively owned fiber to the premises infrastructure.  Sharing best practices alone won't do the job considering the billions that will be needed to upgrade and replace America's obsolete copper cable infrastructure now being kept on life support with trash bags and baling wire.  In 2009, the FCC estimated it would take $350 billion to construct this needed infrastructure.

The distributed workplace: A new model for the Internet economy

In this white paper, Michael Shear, president of the Washington, DC-based Broadband Planning Initiative, posits a meta shift is at hand as the economy increasingly becomes knowledge and information-based. That shift heralds the obsolescence of the centralized office building and the massive transportation infrastructure that serves it, accompanied by the expansion of Information and Telecommunications infrastructure (ICT). The expansion of ICT infrastructure in turn enables what Shear describes as the distributed workplace in which people will work in the communities where they live rather than leading a bifurcated existence most days between their work location and community of residence.

Shear's distributed workplace entails community work centers containing multiple suites with each suite serving 15-50 workers from one company or agency. With a dozen or more tenant organizations, Shear writes, each work center could support 150 to 1000 employees. "Employees will have the capability to work for major business and government employers around the metropolitan or regional area from a networked work center located in their communities," Shear notes, enhancing the quality of their lives and their communities. He adds his distributed workplace model "takes advantage of the changing nature of work and balances deployment with security and management oversight while enhancing economic growth and competitiveness."

Shear's concept is decidedly progressive and tinted green in that it reduces wasteful commuting and its enormous personal, economic and environmental cost burdens. For big government towns such as Washington and Sacramento where government agencies have adopted but struggled over the years to implement telework policies, the distributed workplace could provide a way to break the logjam and move forward.

Another major potential beneficiary of Shear's new way of working is the commercial real estate industry. The economic downturn has created numerous vacant properties of various sizes ranging from small storefronts to large auto dealerships that could function as distributed workplace sites.

Internet co-creator says U.S. broadband competition has ‘evaporated’ - Yahoo! News

Internet co-creator says U.S. broadband competition has ‘evaporated’ - Yahoo! News: Cerf didn’t offer any concrete suggestions for ways to make the American broadband market more competitive, but generally dismissed the idea that deregulating broadband services would magically lead to more options and lower prices for consumers.

Mr. Cerf's dearth of suggestions to increase competition is because there are none as long as he's talking about investor-owned telecommunications infrastructure competition.  What's needed to end years of these continuing lamentations by Cerf and others is publicly- or consumer-owned open access fiber to the premise infrastructure where service providers pay for network access and compete for customers.  As Andrew Cohill aptly put it a few years ago, the current investor-owned model is broken because it's about as economically inefficient and nonsensical as having package delivery predicated on Federal Express or UPS to first have to invest in building private roads so their delivery trucks can reach customers.