Saturday, May 05, 2012

Copper culprits hasten obsolescence of twisted pair

The obsolescence of twisted pair copper cable is being hastened by thieves who want to quickly resign it to the scrap heap in order to recycle the valuable metal and put money in their pockets.  By comparison, the tiny glass strands of the modern standard for telecommunications -- fiber optic cable -- offer no such market incentive to copper culprits.

Check out this Fresno Bee story that reports that the crooks have gotten so brazen they are toppling utility poles in order to get at AT&T's cables.

Saturday, April 21, 2012

SB 1161 doesn't touch California's real telecom problem

There was a fair amount of mainstream media coverage this week of pending California legislation that would state public policy that the state's Public Utilities Commission does not have regulatory jurisdiction over Internet protocol (IP) services.  As this Sacramento Bee story reports, consumer groups fear SB 1161 would give monopoly incumbent telcos too much free reign as they migrate away from plain old telephone service (POTS) delivered over twisted pair copper.  The telcos and the bill's author, Sen. Alex Padilla, support the policy to remove regulatory uncertainty and allow unfettered expansion of the Internet and IP-delivered telecommunications services to homes, businesses and institutions.

SB 1161 would neither help nor hinder that goal.  California's real problem is incomplete Internet infrastructure that leaves millions of Californians disconnected from the Internet.  Since telecommunications services tend to be a natural monopoly market, the fears of consumer groups of any form of reduced regulatory oversight are understandable.  However, their concerns would make more sense if all Californians had fiber connections to the Internet via a monopolistic provider.  They don't.  California's telecommunications market suffers from market failure because the high cost business models of the incumbent telcos (and cable companies) don't allow them to achieve that level of service.  Accordingly, the CPUC should do a better job of assisting alternative, lower cost business models emerge -- such as consumer-owned telecom cooperatives -- take root and thrive.  So far, the CPUC has failed to do so.

Saturday, April 07, 2012

Drop DSL and go suck our sooper dooper satellite!

Satellite Internet providers that serve a captive market of those who are off the Internet grid because of a lack of terrestrial infrastructure now hope to attract DSL subscribers by offering higher speeds. But as this USA Today article points out, converting DSL customers won't be easy since they have to buy the dish and installation. Not to mention they'd be getting much higher latency, hardly worth the trade off for higher speeds.

Satellite providers are a national embarrassment that point up how just how much of the United States remains a backward Internet backwater. The service should only be available in the Alaskan wilderness and places like Buford, Wyoming (Pop. 1).

Sunday, April 01, 2012

Why America needs lower cost, coop business models to complete Internet infrastructure

The excerpt below from Timothy B. Lee's discussion in the current issue of National Affairs of what ails America's regulation of Internet infrastructure states a strong case for alternative, lower cost business models such as telecommunications cooperatives to bring fiber connections to nearly all premises and to keep cable companies from gaining near total market dominance:

FiOS is Verizon's attempt to solve this problem by replacing its slow telephone cables with fiber-optic connections capable of offering speed that can compete with Comcast's. But in 2010, Verizon announced that it was winding down its FiOS installation efforts. Verizon plans for the network to reach around 18 million households, but not in some major metropolitan areas, including a few (like Boston) at the heart of its service area. News reports cited the high costs of the project as a reason why it was not being extended to all homes in Verizon's territory. Meanwhile, AT&T's project to partially replace its copper network with fiber, "U-Verse," is also being hampered by high costs. U-Verse service is faster than a traditional DSL line, but it is significantly slower than Verizon's and Comcast's high-speed networks, and it will not reach all households in AT&T's service territory. This might explain why, in the third quarter of 2011, Comcast added more than twice as many subscribers as did the seven largest telephone incumbents combined.

Saturday, March 31, 2012

Bell wireline monopoly stymies wireless Internet

The physics of radio spectrum place a natural limit on wireless Internet capacity. That limit is exacerbated by the wireline telco monopolies who restrict wireline backhaul connections to cell sites, writes Level 3 Communications CEO James Q. Crowe in this Forbes article.

Crowe details uncompetitive market practices aimed at creating artificial market scarcity of wireless backhaul and calls for action from Washington to break up the big telcos' wireline cartel.

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

“Broadband adoption” is an irrelevant non sequitur

More than a decade after the term “broadband adoption” was relevant, studies such as this one issued today by TechNet continue to use the phrase as if the United States was on the eve of the new millennium and Y2K was a topic of concern. In 2000, discussing “broadband adoption” was pertinent since “broadband” Internet connections were relatively new and distinct from the then commonplace dialup “narrowband” service delivered over legacy copper cable telephone networks.

In 2012, broadband adoption is a non sequitur since both the term “broadband” and the notion that people are migrating in large numbers from “narrowband” are badly outdated. Nowadays, the Internet can deliver voice telephone and TV video in addition to websites and email that was relatively novel for many in 2000.

People adopted voice telephone and TV decades ago. What has changed is the means over which these services are provided. Internet protocol technology and fiber optic connections allow voice, video, websites, email and many yet to be popularized applications to be delivered to peoples’ homes.

TechNet is talking about the wrong subject. The real issue isn’t “broadband adoption.” The real issue is lack of adequate Internet infrastructure. President Obama so in his January State of the Union speech in which he spotlighted America’s "incomplete high-speed broadband network.” While the president’s choice of terminology — “broadband network” — is technologically obsolete from this writer’s perspective, he is clearly on the right track in identifying the problem as one of infrastructure.

It’s time to retire the term “broadband adoption” to the history books and get on with modernizing the nation’s telecommunications infrastructure to provide all American homes fiber optic connections and the many Internet-based services they can provide.

Tuesday, March 06, 2012

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.