New life for copper?

Mark Twain once famously said "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated".  Maybe the Telcos are thinking the same thing.  A new report out by equipment maker Ericsson indicates that, under the right circumstances, they can get up to 500 Mb/sec with multiple twisted pairs "bonded" together over a relatively short distance of 500 meters.  Still, if this last "quarter mile" can be made more economical with existing infrastructure, then we'll be seeing competition heat up even more for Broadband.  

See the whole article here...

Verizon to Charter: Not so fast!

In the escalating speed war of download speeds, Charter seemed to up the ante this week with a (limited) 60Meg/sec DOCSIS 3.0 alternative.  

Verizon responded immediately by pointing out that the speeds were only achievable if certain (upstream) pipes were widened -- something they might already have done.

Interesting concept embedded in the back-and-forth is the concept of guaranteed quality-of-service.  You can't offer a triple-play without partitioning bandwidth.  For example, if you put all your eggs in winning the download competition, your users may not have enough bandwidth allocated to make a simple phone call.  Similarly, triple play users can reasonably expect to watch TV and make a phone call at the same time.  

This is going to get interesting... More here:

http://www.cedmagazine.com/Verizon-DOCSIS-3-0-not-answer-013009.aspx

Broadband usage caps con't

We've looked before at how long "all you can eat" broadband subscriptions would survive.  And, we've seen that Comcast (and others) began experimenting in 2008 with charging by the Gigabyte.  Now, a new white paper has emerged that challenges the tenet that phone & cable companies should sequester their top 5% of users by charging them more.  The reason?  These "data hogs" might actually be performing a useful function by effectively serving as a "node" on the network.  

For more info, check out this link.

Will 2009 see the continued shift of Broadband to usage-based-pricing at the same time as Voice continues to slide to flat-rate?  

Time Warner Cable to meter Internet usage

Is the "All you can eat" Internet buffet winding down?

 

Time Warner Cable announced last week that, it an effort to curtail the heavy costs imposed by 5% of its users, it would try to meter their usage and charge accordingly.    It's probably no surprise that this announcement came in the same week as Steve Jobs pitching Apple TV version 2.0.  (That app makes turns ITunes into a superstore of Video as well as Music --- Video downloads that must ride the backbone of ISPs down to the user's hard drive.)

 

In the 25-year old "Bell Head" vs "Packet Head" battle-royale, you can chalk one up for the Bell Heads this week.  Call Detail Records (CDRs) will probably live to see another day, this time reincarnated as something like "Byte-Detail-Records" --- and, if successfully, they'll get people to stop drawing Internet clouds (whose usage is always perceived to be free).

 

http://www.reuters.com/article/industryNews/idUSN1639580720080118

 

 

 

 

Non-neutral-net and the China Syndrome

Readers of this column have heard me pontificate before that the 'all you can eat buffet model' (aka The Internet "Cloud") is unsustainable.  Flat-pricing models (the ones we're all used to when it comes to bandwidth) are unsustainable over the long run, because 'cost' can't be distributed efficiently enough.

 

Unlike other flat, per monthly fees (say a bus pass or a gym membership), bandwidth outliers can use thousands of times more capacity than the model, casual user.   So, what's a carrier to do? 

 

1- Do they charge each other - effectively bringing intercarrier compensation to IP packets?

2- Do they implement 'tiered' services for the end-user?

 

… or, hot off the press this morning …

 

3- Do they selectively block high-bandwidth services such as BitTorrent and other file 'sharing' applications?

 

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071019/ap_on_hi_te/comcast_data_discrimination_2

 

Some new evidence that ISPs, in this case, Comcast are opting for number 3.  By blocking access to the bandwidth 'hogs', they ensure better service (and less CAPEX) to maintain the all-you-can-eat-flat-pricing. 

 

But that hardly seems a lasting solution, especially given the bad press that will come of this. 

Fiber as a different kind of weapon?

Interesting analysis by Brian Santo at CED today (http://www.cedmagazine.com/article.aspx?id=147702) about how ILECs decommission their copper lines and what the impact might be on competition. You see, when an ILEC gets approval from the FCC to replace Copper (which must be resold -unbundled- to the CLEC) with Fiber (which has no such imperative) ... guess what: They do just that.
Now the CLECs are worried that, were this tactic used aggressively, it might diminish their capacity (via leased copper) in specific markets.

I've long been a sceptic about Fiber-to-the-home... not because it isn't great service (I hear it is!), but because the price seems so high. (Wall Street shares my view... Every conference call is littered with questions akin to "how are you going to make back the thousands of dollars of Capex for each home passed by fiber? Is there really that much demand for pay-per-view? Aren't you inviting a commodity-price-war with the Cablecos?)

But, alas, this might explain it: What if the real goal is to decommission copper? Then "Capex per home passed" is really an investment in "home-not-passed-by-CLEC".

Pretty, pretty smart.

The coming IPTV Interconnection Debacle

We've talked here before about how the 'old/POTS/Voice/Interconnection' model might offer a fit to the upcoming IP mess.  Now, there's extra reason to believe it.

In this week's Cringely column  (http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070202_001566.html), we learn that - like voice trunks - bandwidth is 'engineered' on the assumption that not everyone is on-line at the same time.  (And even if they are, they're staring at a screen a good portion of the time --- not actively downloading something.) That's the same premise as voice, of course --- no telephone switch in the world is equipped to let every user make a call at the same time.

His quote:

"While you may think your 1.5-megabit-per-second DSL service or your 3-megabit-per-second cable modem service is actually backed by 1.5 megabits or 3 megabits of Internet bandwidth, they really aren't. ISPs provision backbone access based on the expectation that people usually aren't on the Internet, and even when they are on the Internet most of their time is spent reading the screen, not actively sending or receiving packets. As such, ISPs have been able to get away with buying 20-30 KILOBITS per second of Internet backbone capacity for every MEGABIT per second of Internet service they are selling at retail. This 20-to-1 provisioning ratio of what's sold to what is promised (and believe me, 20-to-1 is me being generous to the ISPs since it is probably much higher than that) is what creates the burgeoning Internet video problem."

All of this means that newer services, such as IPTV, can only be implemented by improving on the 20-to-1 ratio.   And that costs money --- big money coming out of the ISP's pockets.  When you think about it, this is a pretty good reason for the ISP's wanting to bust up the net neutrality argument.  

So, we stick by our long-standing prediction that a new metric will emerge (similar to originating and terminating minutes in the POTS world) that will adequately spread the cost of provisioning these facilities on an intercarrier basis.  It won't be long before we see a "Missoula Plan" for Video over IP.  (http://policycouncil.nationaljournal.com/NR/rdonlyres/91E0BD63-F543-4F0D-AB00-7BBDD3E1BB7D/36101/060719251MissoulaPlan1.pdf)