Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Broadband delayed again� - News - The Charleston Gazette - West Virginia News and Sports -

Broadband delayed again� - News - The Charleston Gazette - West Virginia News and Sports -

This sickening story highlights the pathetic, on the cheap state of today's U.S. telecommunications infrastructure. Providers battle over subsidies that would be better invested in fiber to the premise infrastructure rather than stopgap, obsolescence-prone DSL and terrestrial wireless.

And the DSL provider (Frontier) has the temerity to suggest since it offers its West Virginia customers satellite Internet service -- a national disgrace that should only be serving locales north of the Arctic Circle -- it is therefore providing sufficient service.

Wednesday, November 07, 2012

AT&T forced to invest in wireline plant to stem residential cord cutting

This item from Bloomberg/Businessweek helps explain why AT&T is opting to invest $6 billion in its wireline infrastructure.  The telco has been bleeding residential connections for years as these customers have dropped landline service and migrated to mobile wireless.  This is particularly true for those residential customers not offered wireline Internet service and thus had no reason to keep their landline account active.

AT&T is apparently now hoping to win those customers back and retain those thinking of cutting the cord by providing them Internet service via its proprietary, VDSL-based U-verse IPDSLAM service.  According to an AT&T news release today announcing its 3-year, $14 billion CAPex plan, U-verse IPDSLAM will provide Internet access and Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) to 24 million customer premises in AT&T's wireline service area by year-end 2013.

Friday, November 02, 2012

California PUC rectifies its mischaracterization of Internet infrastructure subsidy fund


Several months ago, this blog called out the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) for incorrectly asserting the public policy goal of its program to subsidize the build out of Internet infrastructure in the Golden State was instead to encourage “the adoption of broadband.”

To its credit, the CPUC has rectified its gross misstatement of the law authorizing its $100 million plus California Advanced Service Fund (CASF). It did so this week, buried 18 pages deep into a proposed order that would loosen eligibility for CASF infrastructure loan and grant funding to include entities not holding a Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity (CPCN) or a Wireless Identification Registration (WIR):

“We wish to make clear that although we propose to modify the CASF eligibility requirements to include both for profit and nonprofit broadband infrastructure providers, it is not our intent to change the focus of the CASF program. The CASF was created to fund the deployment of broadband infrastructure in unserved and underserved areas of the state, rather than the adoption of broadband services.” (Emphasis added)

The CPUC should also make it easier for consumer owned, community-based providers such as telecom cooperatives to access CASF funding for last mile (to the premises) Internet infrastructure construction – a critical infrastructure link singled out for attention in the proposed order. A key need of these providers is technical assistance grant funding to retain engineers and expert consultants to develop preliminary network designs and business case analyses. These deliverables would help ensure that the contemplated projects pencil out and would generate sufficient revenues to justify the prudent investment of CASF funds.

The CPUC should also revisit its unworkable, hair splitting exercise in futility of attempting to map out what neighborhoods are considered “unserved” and “underserved” based on throughput speed and census block groups. The inherent variation of legacy telco infrastructure Internet service from one address to the next doesn’t lend itself to these broad brush delineations. Internet service available at a given premise can be entirely different from another one just a quarter mile or a half block away.  Some overlap or "overbuilding" as it is called by incumbent providers will the inevitable consequence of progress.  But it must occur if the United States is to remedy what President Barack Obama decried in his State of the Union speech at the beginning of this year as the nation's "incomplete" Internet telecommunications infrastructure.  A network filled with holes does not a network make.

Sunday, October 21, 2012

Increased adoption of telework offers low cost means of alleviating California's transportation congestion

Dan Walters: Study of exodus from California doesn't prove its point - Dan Walters - The Sacramento Bee: [t]here are legitimate doubts about California's ability to attract the job-creating investment capital we need to emerge from recession because of the aforementioned regulatory climate, high taxes and other factors, such as poor-performing schools and congested transportation. (Emphasis added)
California's transportation congestion problem has a low cost means of mitigation: increased adoption of working from a home office -- known as telework -- that eliminates commute trips and peak hour traffic.  A U.S. Census Bureau report issued earlier this month suggests that's the trend.  According to the Survey of Income and Program Participation, the number of people who worked at home at least one day per week increased from 9.5 million in 1999 to 13.4 million in 2010, increasing from 7.0 percent to 9.5 percent of all workers. The largest increase occurred between 2005 and 2010, when the share grew from 7.8 percent to 9.5 percent of all workers, an increase of more than 2 million.

As home to Silicon Valley and companies that have innovated telecommunications and information technologies that make remote work and virtual organizations possible, the Golden State should lead the way on telework adoption. Especially since raising billions to maintain its aging, decades-old system of roads and highways is proving fiscally challenging.

AT&T likely to upgrade only small portion of residential wireline plant, analyst predicts

AT&T is likely to upgrade only a fraction of its residential wireline plant to deliver premises Internet to residences that it doesn't currently provide Internet service, according to an analysis by George Notter of Jefferies & Company discussed in this Telecompetitor article.  The telco's strategy is stated to be unveiled next month.

Notter's analysis predicts AT&T will upgrade only about 15 percent of its wireline plant to support its hybrid fiber/copper U-Verse triple play offering.  Some of the remaining premises may be offered AT&T's version of Verizon's LTE-based HomeFusion product, according to Notter. 

Sunday, October 14, 2012

DSL turbocharging schemes remain just that

DSL Renaissance Underway?: Zero Touch Vectoring
Vectoring technology is a relatively new innovation for DSL which basically is a noise cancelling technology which reduces cross talk in copper pairs, allowing DSL to achieve much faster bandwidth throughput as a result. Some vendors are claiming they can squeeze 100 Mbps out of VDSL2 vectoring, albeit at rather short distances. It’s very much a FTTN technology, where VDSL2 connects to the home from a fiber fed cabinet.
These stories continue to appear year after year as vendors hope telcos will adopt their latest sooper dooper DSL turbocharging scheme.  Problem is while telcos aren't investing FTTH CAPex, they aren't investing CAPex or OPex in their aging legacy copper cable plants either and are instead concentrating on the mobile wireless space where more rapid ROIs are to be had.

And the above reference to "Zero Touch" for many telco customers has an entirely different meaning: DSL won't touch their premises because the DSL signal can't propagate far enough over old copper to reach them. Zero Touch=Zero Service.

Friday, October 12, 2012

Wipro Launches Prepaid Broadband Solution for US Cable Market - Yahoo! Finance

Wipro Launches Prepaid Broadband Solution for US Cable Market - Yahoo! Finance

I'm not so sure that adopting a pre-paid pricing scheme like that of the personal wireless market will provide sufficient incentive and ARPU for cable companies to build out their infrastructures to capture new customers.  But from a consumer perspective, it's far better than the current practice of asking would-be customers to come up with $65,000 per mile (with no equity in return) to build out to their neighborhoods under so-called "self help" provisions of cable franchise agreements.