Governments Should Focus on Infrastructure Despite False Statistics Peddled by NY Times and Others | community broadband networks

Governments Should Focus on Infrastructure Despite False Statistics Peddled by NY Times and Others | community broadband networks

Excellent commentary by Christopher Mitchell. A must read.

Satellite broadband: can it light up the UK's broadband blackspots? | News | TechRadar

Satellite broadband: can it light up the UK's broadband blackspots? | News | TechRadar: Due to the distance the signal travels, latencies never dropped below 700ms and hovered around the 800ms mark. Even with predictive caching that makes web browsing speedy, there's always that near-second delay traversing pages. It's not annoying enough to stop you browsing, but it just doesn't feel as snappy as a landline internet connection.

Despite new sooper dooper "Surfbeam" technology, latency remains sub par as this story shows and bandwidth is costly and rationed. This item appeared the same day as this ridiculous story on Google's O3b satellite venture that will supposedly provide 1 gigabit speeds via medium orbit satellites. And at latencies of less than 150 milliseconds, according to this IDG News Service account.

I'm not buying it. Satellite Internet sucks, period. It cannot support reliable voice or real time video connections or provide a high quality Internet connectivity user experience. Google should scuttle this misadventure and instead partner with community fiber projects instead of perpetuating this substandard Internet connection scheme to as a poor substitute to badly needed fiber to the premise infrastructure. 

California unlikely to subsidize community fiber Internet infrastructure over near term

The California Public Utilities Commission’s (CPUC) construction subsidy fund for Internet infrastructure won’t likely help offset the cost of building community owned fiber to the premise networks.

The CPUC’s California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) limits grant and loan subsidies to infrastructure projects that would serve either an “unserved area,” defined in CPUC Decision 12-02-015 as not served by any form of wireline or wireless facilities-based broadband such that Internet connectivity is available only through dial-up service or an “underserved” area defined as an “where broadband is available, but no facilities-based provider offers service meeting the benchmark speeds of at least three megabits per second (mbps) download and at least one mbps upload.” The CPUC retroactively revised the definition in 2012 resolutions T-17362 and T-17369 as areas “where broadband is available, but no wireline or wireless facilities-based provider offers service at advertised speeds of at least 6 mbps download and 1.5 mbps upload.”

Under either definition, both fixed and mobile wireless providers could block CASF funding of a community fiber project. And under the definition adopted in the 2012 resolutions, they wouldn’t even have to actually provide service to an area. They could merely claim they advertised service there at the specified 6/1.5 Mbs speeds.

Senate Bill 740, legislation re-authorizing the CASF that’s making its way to the desk of Gov. Jerry Brown incorporates by reference the definitions of unserved and undeserved areas in Decision 12-02-015.

The bill would also give incumbent wireline providers that have not built out their networks to serve all premises effective veto power over any community-based project to reach underserved households -- typically those in areas out of reach of DSL or cable Internet service or having access to slow DSL in areas where aging, poor quality copper cable plant (illustrated in the photo below) cannot support higher speeds. The bill bars funding of these projects “until after any existing facilities-based provider has an opportunity to demonstrate to the commission that it will, within a reasonable timeframe, upgrade existing service.” 

"Reasonable timeframe" isn’t defined in the bill and thus would likely be defined by incumbent telcos that told regulators and consumers since the early 2000s that they were building out their DSL service to reach them. (They’re still waiting more than a decade later, providing an operative definition of what's reasonable). The bill would also give incumbent telcos and cablecos the ability to stymie community fiber projects built by local governments simply by applying for CASF funding.

The rural "digital divide" isn't the same in UK, US

Millions miss-out as Britain's broadband divide reaches record levels - Yahoo! Finance UK: Telecoms regulator Ofcom warned the difference between the 'haves' and 'have-nots' would also get worse before it gets better as telecom and pay-TV giants focus investment on next generation "superfast" fibre networks in Britain's biggest towns.

Figures revealed by Ofcom today showed the average internet connection speed in urban areas is now 26.4Mb per second. In rural areas it's just 9.9Mb. Rural speeds have more than doubled since 2011 but households in the countryside now trail city dwellers by an unprecedented 16.5Mb per second.

Americans living in rural, quasi-rural and exurban locales and stuck with dialup or satellite or forced to make do with costly, data capped mobile broadband for their premises Internet service would find this account puzzling. For them, having access to nearly 10Mbs throughput would hardly be considered deprivation at the present time.

Mobile isn't premise service

AT&T’s latest home broadband service isn’t DSL or fiber. It’s LTE — Tech News and Analysis: The idea of using a mobile network to connect homes that have either no or slow broadband access is definitely an admirable idea, but it has its limitations. Today’s mobile networks simply aren’t designed for the intense data demands of are increasingly hungry home broadband appliances — they have limited capacity and that capacity must be shared with all of the other users on the network. That’s why the per-gigabyte costs of mobile broadband are so much higher.

An excellent point in this GigaOM article that puts this service in the proper perspective.  It's designed for mobile and not premises services. Offering a mobile service to a premises does not make it a premises service.

A few paragraphs down, the article notes:

In fact, AT&T is trying to eliminate the distinction between residential and mobile service entirely.

Nice try, but it won't work.  Mobile is mobile. Premises is premises.

Petitions or "broadband mapping," the end result is the same: Bumpkes

Mark dance sundridge broadband campaign pointless | This is Kent: Jane Hunter from the Westerham Town Partnership has campaigned at every opportunity to add names to the petition but she says she is not surprised to hear the votes will not influence the rollout.

"They have been stringing us along for no reason," she said. "They don't want people hassling them so they haven't told us the reality of the situation.

"And while we have been given figures by the council they never answer any of our questions on exactly what the criteria were for which areas would be part of the superfast project.

Across the Atlantic in the United States, petition drives similar to this one in the U.K. -- some dating back years and encouraged by incumbent providers and misguided demand aggregators -- proved equally pointless. Signatures on petitions can't overcome market failure and are just as futile as "mapping" broadband not spots will make them disappear. The result at the end of the effort is the same: bumpkes.

How BDUK bungled Britain’s next-gen broadband rollout | PC Pro blog

Interesting dispatch from the UK that portrays the dominant incumbent telecoms provider, BT, as favoring American AT&T U-Verse-style FTTC (Fiber To the Cabinet) over Fiber to the Premise (FTTP), apparently to avoid the higher cost of the latter network architecture.

The UK Government entity charged with overseeing that nation's Internet infrastructure program also allegedly ruled out fixed terrestrial wireless as a viable premises service option. That's consistent with the first point since fiber would have to be deployed to bring it very close to premises in order to achieve high wireless throughput.

The 2 key inaction risks facing community fiber projects

Creative risk taking is essential to success in any goal where the stakes are high. Thoughtless risks are destructive, of course, but perhaps even more wasteful is thoughtless caution which prompts inaction and promotes failure to seize opportunity.

  -- Gary Ryan Blair 

Communities contemplating fiber Internet infrastructure projects should keep in mind that there are risks -- negative impacts -- associated both with taking action as well as not taking action.  The latter risk -- termed inaction risk -- is perhaps one of the most threatening and pervasive risks.  For some regions and communities, that risk is being left permanently off the modern Internet grid and unable to realize the benefits it offers for government, public safety, health and education, economic development and transportation demand mitigation. 

Milo Medin, Google's vice president of access services, laid out two major underlying rationales explaining why communities needlessly run the risk of inaction in his address to the 2013 Broadband Communities Summit. 

1.  The unswerving belief despite more than a decade of market failure that incumbent legacy telephone and cable companies will upgrade and build out their infrastructures to serve all premises.  Here's what Medin had to say on that point:

Part of the reason the U.S. is falling behind is that most cities haven’t been intentional about their broadband infrastructure. Cities know they have to make sure the water system works and scales to support growth, the roads are maintained and built, garbage is collected properly. But often, they think broadband is something that the phone company or the cable company will take care of for them and they can ignore it, or that the FCC will make sure the appropriate incentives are put into place to drive competition and upgrades. Depending on those processes is how we got into the situation we’re in today.

2. The misguided belief that wireless services have obsoleted fiber networks. Medin explains:

Some argue that fiber networks are not really needed because of wireless network growth. As an engineer, quite honestly, this kind of talk makes my brain hurt. Wireless network growth is driven by fiber. All those base stations that smartphones connect to are increasingly connected by fiber because, as speeds go up, fiber is required to carry that kind of traffic. Copper just won’t do for modern wireless networks.

Cisco and others expect wireless data to grow by a factor of 50 in the next few years, and you’re not going to be able to solve that kind of growth by throwing more spectrum at it. You’re going to have to reduce the size of the cells, shrinking them, reducing the number of users that are being served by a given base station. And that means a lot more cell sites and a lot more fiber to feed those cell sites. In the limit, the future of mobile is going to look a lot like Wi-Fi: tons of small cell sites connected by a wireline network, connected by fiber – and that’s just physics, folks.

The full Broadband Communities article excerpting Medin's speech can be viewed here and here (pdf).