Report: AT&T pulling plug on Pahrump, Nevada WiMAX by year end

A few years back, AT&T rolled out an early market test deployment of WiMAX in Pahrump, Nevada. Now an AT&T customer there tells me AT&T will stop offering the service effective Dec. 31 and has opted instead for DSL and is deploying remote DSLAMs around the town about 60 miles from Las Vegas.

Apparently there wasn't enough bandwidth to handle the demand. "We had it for about two years, and the longer we had it, the slower it got," the AT&T customer reports, noting he generally got 384 Kbs to 768 Kbs downloads on WiMAX. He's now on AT&T's 6 Mbs DSL plan, so while the switch to DSL cost $5 a month more, it was a no brainer.

What's notable about this development is AT&T's new technology chief John Donovan said only four months ago that the big telco viewed WiMAX as a less costly alternative to replacing aging copper plant and installing remote DSLAMs in order to provide DSL, particularly in less densely populated areas.

I sent an email to AT&T spokesman Michael Coe Dec. 10 asking why WiMAX was scrapped in favor of DSL in Pahrump but received no reply, so readers will have to draw their own conclusions. AT&T has also deployed WiMAX in Alaska offering sub 1 Mbs throughput speed and in parts of the former Bellsouth territory AT&T acquired at the end of 2006.

If AT&T's version of WiMAX can't provide more than 1 Mbs, it is already essentially obsolete and calls into question AT&T's expectations that it will serve as lower cost broadband option compared to DSL.

Fixed terrestrial wireless supplanting DSL as interim premises broadband technology

When it was widely introduced starting nearly a decade ago, Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) was viewed by telcos as an ideal interim broadband technology on the road to Fiber To The Premises (FTTP) and a means to utilize their existing investment in copper cable plant over the last mile. But since telcos are many years behind where they should be in deploying FTTP, DSL became more of a permanent thoroughfare rather than temporary byway.

The problem is DSL has not been able to adequately fulfill that role due to technological limitations that restrict its range and require the use of near pristine copper that's in increasingly short supply as telcos' decades-old cable plants grow old and frazzled.

Now fixed terrestrial wireless is poised to take the place of DSL as the preferred transitional technology on the way to FTTP, starting in areas where DSL cannot due to its notorious handicaps. Over the past few years, a large number of mom and pop Wireless Internet Service Providers (WISPs) offering fixed terrestrial wireless via over unlicensed spectrum have sprung up, exploiting DSL's far more limited geographical reach and providing a faster and less costly connectivity than satellite Internet. The big telcos have also incidentally picked up some fixed premises customers with their mobile wireless 3G broadband offerings, but don't represent a threat to the WISPs due to high latencies and bandwidth usage caps.

The proliferation of WISPs as a substitute for DSL is evident in this blogger's area of El Dorado County, California where one, Central Valley Broadband, is offering 3Mbs service to telco neglected SOHOs (Small Office/Home Office) located in telco broadband black holes.*
* (See 1/23/09 update)

Telcos and to some extent cable providers have effectively ceded these areas to the WISPs, leading to increased competition among them. More competition among WISPs is also driving consolidation. Central Valley Broadband announced in October it had acquired two WISPs serving Placer and El Dorado counties.

Going forward, I expect WISPs to continue to provide a more flexible and robust pre-FTTP premises broadband option than DSL. Since it will likely be many years before most all premises have fiber optic connections, the WISPs appear set for a good long run.

Russia shuns copper for broadband buildout

Light Reading Europe reports TTK, the state-owned Russian telco, is "embarking on a major push into high-speed broadband access, focusing on Russia's less well served cities and towns," noting that about 93 percent of Russia's 140 million inhabitants live outside Moscow.

Notably, those plans don't call for the use of metal wire-based cable plant used in most other nations, typically to provide underpowered DSL over copper. Instead, TTK's Sergey Shavkunov told Light Reading, the company will use a mix of point-to-point fiber, GPON and WiMax as apppropriate.

France adopts universal broadband requirement but sets bar too low

More international broadband developments this Thanksgiving weekend. While the Australian government struggles to implement near universal broadband access in the land down under and wrangles with its partially state owned telco, Telstra, over build out requirements, Reuters reports a French government official said his nation would require telcos (called telecoms in Europe) to provide universal broadband access providing connectivity of at least 512kbs throughout France starting in 2010. According to the Reuters dispatch, France had been pressuring the European Union to adopt a universal broadband mandate for telecoms that provide universal voice service but abandoned the effort due to lack of consensus among EU member nations.

France's 512kbs minimum speed requirement is really setting the bar low, perhaps in order to allow French telecoms such as France Telecom to attempt to deliver DSL over long and ancient copper loops commonly found in broadband black holes in the U.S. and elsewhere. That throughput level is already obsolete and is below even the minimal 768kbs "basic" broadband standard adopted by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission earlier this year.

Trouble down under with national broadband program

The Australian labor government and the nation's predominant telco Telstra are at loggerheads over the government's National Broadband Project, the goal of which is to bring broadband to 98 percent of homes and businesses, reports Business Day. Telstra isn't willing to go that far and wants its rollout to reach only 80 to 90 percent.

It's also balking at the government's demand that its infrastructure and retail arms be separated, apparently to discourage the latter from driving the former's broadband deployment strategy as has occured in other nations including the U.S. where telcos concentrate on selling services to more profitable areas while leaving others without broadband access.

Fiber cooperatives pick up the slack where telcos won't go

Here's an item from the nation's least populated state, Wyoming, that counters the myth that fiber optic telecommunications infrastructure is feasible only in densely populated areas. This is where things are headed: while the major telcos shun less densely populated areas and deploy fiber in limited portions of their service territories, cooperatives are stepping into the gap just as they did several decades ago when the other large private utility companies wouldn't serve these areas. Most importantly, those forming fiber cooperatives hold a long term view of their future telecommunications needs in contrast to the big publicly traded telcos that operate with limited quarterly and annual time horizons.

Tri County Telephone, the cooperative that serves the Ten Sleep area, upgraded from decades-old copper phone wiring to fiber in 2006 — a step that has still yet to happen in many urban areas.

Chris Davidson, Tri County's general manager, said the company wanted "to build a network for the future.