Broadband

The National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors (NATOA) has called for a range of policy changes and investments that includes a guaranteed right for local governments to invest in broadband and fiber as the preferred mode of access.

Design Nine has been named as one of the top 100 broadband firms in the United States by Broadband Properties magazine.

The Pew folks have rolled out another hilarious study that suggests most dial up users don't want broadband.

I have observed this phenomenon for fifteen years now--much longer than the Pew folks. It is very simple, really. People that have never had a broadband connection are, in fact, likely to believe it is something that they don't want or need.

But here is the problem. The Pew folks have never asked broadband users if they would go back to dial up. And you need to ask that question in order to be able to understand the survey results of the dial up question in the appropriate context. We all know the answer we would get from broadband users: no one wants to go back to dial up. In fact, I've been asking that question to rooms full of people for many years, and I have never had a single broadband user stand up and say, "Oh yea, broadband is waaaay too fast for me. I'm switching back to dial up next week."

You need to query both groups with the complementary version of the same question if you want to be able to draw any useful conclusions.

We are beginning to see the broadband coop as one very viable form of governance for community broadband efforts. Coops are a great ownership and governance model because they firmly vest the enterprise in the community--every subscriber is also a shareholder in the enterprise, and shareholder/members are able to vote and select board members. The Ripton Broadband Coop serves rural customers in rural Vermont via wireless, using an open access, open service model. Two service providers are selling services on the network.

The FCC has finally released new definitions of broadband.

• First Generation: 200 Kbps up to 768 Kbps

• Basic Broadband: 768 Kbps to 1.5 megabits per second
• 1.5 Mbps to to less than 3 Mbps
• 3 Mbps to less than 6 Mbps
• 6 Mbps to less than 10 Mbps
• 10 Mbps to less than 25 Mbps
• 25 Mbps to less than 100.0 Mbps
• 100 Mbps and beyond

This is a major improvement over the old definition of "200 kilobits" as broadband. By this old definition, the country has very high levels of broadband penetration, but made the U.S. the laughingstock of the rest of the world. In much of Europe, residential broadband tends to be north of 40+ MEGABITS, or about 200 times more capacity than the FCC definition.

The graded scale is useful because it can provided benchmarks to measure progress in a community or region. If the FCC has provided targets, that would have been even better. For example, a ten year target could be to have 90% of businesses and homes in the "100 Mbps and beyond" category, and indeed, U.S. community broadband projects like the one in Danville, Virginia are deploying "100 Mbps and beyond" today.

Sprint's new WiMax initiative with partner Clearwire is stalling because the high capacity wireless access points don't work very well when backhaul (the connection from the wireless radios/antennas is over old-fashioned copper phone lines.

Do the math....

If Sprint/Clearwire is promising 3-6 megabits per user over a wireless connection and the copper phone line feeding it is a T1 line (1.5 megabits), customers are going to be very disappointed. Clearwire may become a valuable customer of communities that are building out fiber networks.

Clearwire has announced plans to operate its proposed national WiMax network as an open access system, and major players like Sprint, Comcast, and Time Warner have apparently already agreed to become resellers on the network. It will be interesting to see how this turns out, as an enormous investment will be required to build the national infrastructure required to meet the promised goals. One of the backers of Clearwire is Sprint, which is losing cellular marketshare rapidly, and may regard Clearwire as its last chance to keep from being broken up and sold.

A national wireless network makes sense only if the operator truly operates it as open. The dangerous part of the proposal is that Clearwire can make any rules it wants, and can change them anytime it likes. If most of the U.S. ends up relying on a single network owner for mobile access, is that a good thing? Again, it *could* work, if competitive service providers truly get treated equally.

Note also that the article talks about very realistic bandwidth projections of 6 megabits down and 3 megabits up for the WiMax system--excellent for mobile access but that kind of bandwidth won't support much video or other high bandwidth, multimedia services, like movie downloads, live HD events, and videoconferencing. We'll still want and need fiber to the premise (FTTP).

Once again, fairly small countries are far ahead of the U.S. in thinking about broadband. Malaysia has announced an ambitious but entirely doable plan to take fiber to major areas of the country, with the Federal government paying about 30% of the cost in a deal with the biggest telecom company in Malaysia. In the U.S., it would be the equivalent of the states making deals to write checks directly to the incumbent providers (which some states already do). The fiber system will have 100 megabit capacity, with a starter package of Internet access at 10 megabits.

The good news is that U.S. communities and regions still have the opportunity to surpass Malaysia. Malaysia's deal with the incumbent telecom will not increase competition and will not be likely to encourage the rollout of innovative new services. Open service networks like those in Europe are beginning to gather momentum here in the U.S., and open networks tend to lower prices and bring lots of new services to businesses and residents. Five or six years from now, Malaysian cities will be behind many broadband community efforts in the United States.

VPNs, or Virtual Private Networks, are fast becoming a major issue with respect to broadband. A VPN is a way for a remote user (e.g. from home, traveling) to be connected to the corporate or business network as if he or she was in the office. It gives the home-based worker or business traveler complete access to all the documents and services he or she would normally have sitting at their desk.

But here's the rub: VPNs work best over high performance, well-designed broadband networks. I'm on vacation right now, and have to connect through a wireless signal. The VPN barely works. I can connect, but transferring files is painfully slow, and I keep getting time outs.

As more and more people start working from home part time to avoid the high cost of driving, community broadband efforts will begin hearing more and more about VPNs. If we are going to save energy, community broadband networks have to support business class connectivity and bandwidth. Neighborhoods are going to be business districts in the Energy Economy.

Chicago ComEd electric power customers may end up paying an extra $3 per month to help fund a Smart Grid data network that will allow ComEd to better control power use and to speed diagnosis and identification of power outages.

That's a lot of money when you think about extending across millions of customers for many years. A better approach would be for the community to build a high performance, service-oriented broadband network and sign up the electric company to use that network to do its power management. Instead of building two networks, build just one and use it for many different kinds of services and applications, instead of just Internet access.

Spend less and get more--not a difficult concept, but few places are thinking about converging networks and electric service needs. Once stand out exception is Danville, Virginia, where the city electric utility has already started doing that with its nDanville network. Joe King, the Assistant City Manager for Utilities, recognized this was a better way to do things years ago (Design Nine provides services to the nDanville project).