Internet infrastructure outpolls transportation infrastructure in UK

UK People Want Superfast Broadband More than New Airports and HS2 - ISPreview UK

Watch for this sentiment to spread to other nations including the U.S.

Possible alternative to capitalize U.S. FTTP build out emerges in Utah

Building infrastructure of any kind is a costly undertaking, including fiber optic to the premise (FTTP) telecommunications networks. Those high capital costs have crimped FTTP build out in the United States, challenging existing telephone and cable companies as well as newcomers like Google Fiber.

In Utah, a new strategy is emerging involving a global firm that with patient capital that specializes in big dollar infrastructure projects. The Salt Lake City Tribune reports Macquarie Capital Group, an Australian firm that advises and invests in public projects around the world, will launch an engineering and feasibility study to operate Utah's 11-city UTOPIA FTTP network in a public-private partnership: 

Macquarie’s investors — including pension funds, large insurance firms and private endowments — were seeking to develop stable, long-term investment opportunities and were drawn to technology-based projects, Hann said. 

If the feasibility study proves fruitful and Macquarie agrees to take over the network, it likely will entail a deal in which the firm would assume management of the network for 30 years and invest in building out and upgrading the rest of the lines to neighborhood homes, Hann said. 

The network would remain an open-access network and Macquarie would partner with third-party Internet service providers, he said.

First indication of AT&T withdrawal from residential wireline market

Sensing AT&T's lukewarm commitment to its residential wireline business segment, in 2008 I predicted that AT&T would abandon the segment in the first half of 2010. The telco is still in the residential wireline business as 2013 draws to a close. But a slow withdrawal could now be underway, one state at a time starting with Connecticut.

Bloomberg reports today that AT&T will spin off its Connecticut residential landline unit, including Internet and TV services to Frontier Communications for $2 billion.

AT&T relies on copper cable plant to deliver premises Internet service, scotching plans dating back to the late 1980s developed by regional bell operating companies AT&T absorbed in the 1990s to replace the last mile copper network with fiber optic cable. That reliance has technologically limited the reach of AT&T's Internet-based service offerings since copper was designed to carry analog voice service and not digital Internet signals that can be reliably delivered over only short distances using copper.

AT&T's relationship with Connecticut hasn't been a copacetic one. In 2007, then-Attorney General Richard Blumenthal pressured the telco to make its U-Verse product offering available to all residences in the state. Blumenthal, now a U.S. senator, said this week the deal should be reviewed to ensure it is in the interest of consumers.

Verizon CEO hints at fiber partnerships with local providers

Verizon, which halted build out of its FiOS fiber to the premise (FTTP) infrastructure last year, will stay that course Verizon CEO and Chairman Lowell McAdam said at last week's UBS Global Media and Communications Conference.  McAdam said some "fringe" deployment may occur, but that "deploying fiber in a lot of new markets isn't in the cards."

However, "I think there are more opportunities to partner out of market with companies that are there versus us going in and deploying FiOS," McAdam added.

McAdam's remarks were reported by Fierce Telecom. 

Verizon spokesman Bob Varettoni declined to elaborate on McAdam's comments when asked specifically with whom Verizon might partner to build FTTP infrastructure beyond its current footprint.

Who needs a Gig at home? Half of U.S. businesses | Technology Futures

Who needs a Gig at home? Half of U.S. businesses | Technology Futures

Andrew Cohill makes the excellent point that with the emergence of Fiber to the Home (FTTH) telecommunications infrastructure, the past focus on Internet throughput speeds that was relevant to legacy telephone and cable companies is becoming increasingly less so. Since incumbent telephone and cable companies have to compress data to transport it over metal wire cable plant not originally designed to carry Internet protocol-based signals, from their perspective bandwidth is a limited commodity. This also limits their ability to serve all premises in their service areas. Even more so in the case of mobile wireless technology which provides far less capacity and range. Hence, their business and pricing models treat bandwidth like a metered utility such as water or electricity.

With FTTH, that entire paradigm of bandwidth as a finite commodity goes out the window and with it the incumbents' outmoded business models. This also has implications for now outdated government subsidy programs based on rules written nearly a decade ago when DSL deployed by telephone companies was state of the art Internet technology. Those programs now need to be updated to scrap obsolete references to the speed of available Internet technology and treat any area lacking FTTH infrastructure as eligible for subsidies if incumbent or other providers aren't constructing it or opt not to.

Cheaper equipment to give fast copper broadband a boost | PCWorld

Cheaper equipment to give fast copper broadband a boost | PCWorld: G.fast promises up to 1G bps over existing copper telephone wires, but only over distances up to about 100 meters. The technology is now being designed to work at distances up to 250 meters, and it looks like ITU will have a full set of standards by early next year, according to Johnson.

Here we go again with the nutty idea that copper isn't obsolete for IP-based telecommunications. No matter how much throughput one can achieve with this decades-old POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) infrastructure, as this story shows it will always be limited by distance.  The faster the speed, the shorter the distance -- not a good trend as customers expect faster connections.  With such short distances of 1 gigabit connections over copper, it has to be fed by fiber connections so close to customer premises that it makes more sense simply to run fiber all the way to the premise. 

Getting to a gig: How CenturyLink is building out its network and why. — Tech News and Analysis

Getting to a gig: How CenturyLink is building out its network and why. — Tech News and Analysis: “But because of densities and scale economics, we as a country are potentially creating regional digital divides that our economy will struggle to tolerate. What’s always been a key enabler for us is that we have always had a fairly broad equal opportunity infrastructure as we did with the highway system, and we as a country must place a high value on the ability to communicate seamlessly. I don’t think we want to place ourselves in the position that we might miss out on the next Google simply because we as a country didn’t want to have a conversation about access and cost. We are going to have to figure that out and no private company can do that.”

So said Matt Beal, the CTO of CenturyLink, an an interview with GigaOM.  And he's right. Either private providers have to find business models that significantly reduce the cost of labor to deploy fiber to the premise and/or do so with some form of government subsidy or tax incentive. As I've blogged in recent months, even companies with pockets and fiber to the premise ambitions as deep as Google's aren't up to the challenge facing the United States.

Poor internet connections in the countryside are hitting rural property market, estate agents warn - Telegraph

One agent who helps customers buy homes worth more than £1 million told The Daily Telegraph yesterday he was advising all of his clients against looking at properties that have slow internet speeds.

It came as reports in Scotland claimed people dubbed "digital refugees" were now moving from the countryside in search of faster internet speeds in the country's towns and cities. Frank Speir, director at Prime Purchase said: "Slow broadband speeds are having a definite effect on the market. It's becoming a much bigger issue." 

 via Poor internet connections in the countryside are hitting rural property market, estate agents warn - Telegraph

This is bound to become a much bigger issue in America as well.  Notwithstanding some high profile limited 1 Gigabit closed fiber to the premise networks in metro areas, much of the countryside remains without modern Internet connectivity, still served with dial up technology that was state of the art when Bill Clinton was beginning his first term as US president.

Conversely, a property having a fast fiber Internet pipe is more desirable, according to a 2009 study of U.S. broadband consumers, finding 82 percent of homebuyers with fiber to the home ranked it as the leading real estate development amenity.

Telcos engage in nonsensical, circular argument over regulation designed for POTS

IIA Report: Time To Begin Full IP Transition - 2013-10-08 14:53:14 | Broadcasting & Cable: Only 5% of U.S. households rely solely on traditional home phones and that means the current regulatory framework is lagging the marketplace and siphoning off investment from new infrastructure.

That is according to a just-released report from the Internet Innovation Alliance, a broadband adoption and deployment advocacy group whose 175 members include AT&T and fiber-maker Corning.

The report, from analyst Anna-Maria Kovacks, finds a "plethora of choices" for voice, video and data including from wireless devices, cell phones, wired Internet VoIP and Internet applications (Skype), and that 99% of communications traffic is now IP-delivered. She said that despite the speed differentials between wired and wireless — wired is faster — wireless was a legitimate competitor and could deliver even a competitive video service.

From the end users perspective, she said, it would be possible to make them happy with LTE as well as fixed wired broadband.

The legacy telcos are engaged in a disingenuous circular argument.  Their business models don't allow them to revamp their legacy copper cable plants -- over which they offer only outdated dialup Internet access for many premises -- to fiber to the premise (FTTP).  Oddly, however, they wonder why they remain subject to a regulatory scheme designed for POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) delivered over Public Switched Telephone Networks (PSTN).  The answer is pretty self evident. They only have to look at their own networks and service territories for the answer. If they deployed FTTP networks to all of their customers, then their question would be relevant.

As for mobile wireless, it is not a substitute for premise service (can you spell M-O-B-I-L-E?) since it can't offer sufficient bandwidth capacity to serve various IP devices in the home ranging from video, voice service and personal devices like tablets.  It comes with bandwidth caps for good reason since compared to FTTP, mobile wireless can't even come close in carrying capacity.

UK Internet infrastructure subsidization policy reveals split between citizens and incumbent telco BT

BBC News - Rural broadband: How to reach the broadband notspots

This BBC article goes into good detail on the Internet infrastructure deployment difficulties in the UK. As in America with AT&T, the incumbent telco, BT, prefers to deploy slowly over a period of many years, employing FTTN (Fiber to the Node) network architecture (or FTTC as it's called in Britain -- Fiber To The Cabinet). AT&T's analogue is its U-Verse product, which feeds neighborhood nodes with fiber and uses existing copper twisted pair cable designed decades ago for voice service to bridge the final link to customer premises. However, unlike BT, AT&T limits U-Verse to urban and suburban areas.

British households and small businesses left of the Internet are running short of patience with the slow BT rollout after having waiting about a decade to get some form of wireline Internet connections. Some communities see the passage of time and burgeoning bandwidth demand as having technologically obsoleted FTTC and want Fiber to the Home (FTTH) infrastructure.

Government subsidies are available.  As the article notes, a big question is whether they continue to go toward older but less costly FTTC infrastructure favored by BT or FTTH preferred by the locals who don't want to spend more years waiting for modern Internet connectivity and want a greater degree of control over infrastructure deployment in their communities.

Pew Internet survey flawed by badly outdated, retro perspective

With the relentless pace of Internet bandwidth demand growth to support multiple services including video, voice and Web-based services as well as a portable devices used in the home, there is near consensus that only fiber to the premises infrastructure will be able to accommodate the demand going forward.

That’s why I’m taken aback to continue to see surveys such as this one issued today by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project that take a decidedly retrospective view of telecommunications services with their late 1990s distinction between narrowband (dialup) Internet connectivity and “high speed” broadband connections. 

Dialup service is obsolete and can no longer be considered a useful form of premises Internet connectivity. Had this survey been done in 2000 when the distinction between narrowband and broadband was still relevant, the distinction might have meant something. In 2013, it is a distinction without a difference. 

The other major contextual problem with a survey like this is it concentrates only on computer-based services such as Web browsing and email. That’s also a major flaw in the survey. The Internet now delivers video and voice services including applications such as online learning, videoconferencing and telemedicine – none of which are truly usable via a dialup service.

Why We Should Build a National Internet System Under the National Highway System - Eric Jaffe - The Atlantic Cities

Why We Should Build a National Internet System Under the National Highway System - Eric Jaffe - The Atlantic Cities: The National Broadband Plan of 2009, for instance, was mostly limited to policy recommendations and failed to encourage competition (which explains why incumbent providers like it so much). Proposed legislation requiring highway projects to install broadband conduit hasn't made it too far. The Obama Administration did issue an executive order last year calling for a "dig once" [PDF] policy to help promote broadband-highway coupling, but that still relies on private enterprise to do what it hasn't done to date: lay fiber everywhere.

So why not make the whole national internet system a public one, like the national highway system before it? At a time when elected officials are struggling to find a truly federal transportation goal, the concept might serve as a welcome rallying point. The government could sell some of its broadcast spectrum to foot the bill, but the user-pay model could probably work well, too — especially since people don't suffer the illusion that Internet access is free, unlike they do with roads.

"There is a really interesting parallel between transportation and broadband," says Lennett. "In the 20th century we needed to move cars, and in the 21st century we need to move bits.

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.