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Thursday, 02 February 2012 22:39 |
Stock moves should be similar. Frontier, Century, and Windstream are U.S. mostly landline carriers in very similar businesses. They all have declining landlines, very modest broadband growth, and the problems of a wireline carrier in a world gone wireless. Until recently, their stocks mostly moved in similar directions. Over the last five months, Frontier's stock price has gone down 40% ($4.36) while the other two are flat. Goldman Sachs has now downgraded the stock. Something is wrong in this picture. The blue line in the chart is Frontier, and ordinarily it would be moving similarly to the red and green lines.
I haven't done enough research to determine whether Frontier is relatively underpriced now or was relatively overpriced previously. None of these companies have had leadership changes or obvious business changes that offer an easy explanation. The difference, I believe, is the market perception of the stocks, not the underlying businesses.
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Last Updated on Friday, 03 February 2012 00:52 |
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Sunday, 29 January 2012 22:43 |
 Gateways without HD already obsolete. Jeff Lewis of Comcast speaks on HD voice in Amsterdam February 14th. I don’t think he’s ready to announce HD voice for millions of homes but his CTO Tony Werner has told me HD is on the way at Comcast. http://bit.ly/xjT2D4 Ulrich Grote of Deutsche Telekom, also there, is shipping millions of HD gateways. Also speaking will be Philippe Calvet and Alain Orsot of France Telecom which has already launched HD on mobile in a dozen countries.
They aren’t going to the DECT Conference as an excuse to gaze at Rembrandts or enjoy the special pleasures of Amsterdam cafes. HD is a major product, sweeping Western Europe. Verizon Wireless and several cable companies in the U.S. are only 6-18 months away.
HD with today’s codecs sounds dramatically better than regular telco voice, although most people are so used to mediocre sound they have to hear both side by side. People aren’t running to pay more, but it’s a clear advantage most competitors will need to meet.
My friends at Lantiq sent me one of DT’s new Speedport W 921V gateways, the kind of device that’s rapidly becoming standard. Besides the HD voice, DT has included “300 megabit” WiFi, 802.11n with 3x3 MIMO. That’s fast enough that DT, following the lead of Swisscom, is sending HD TV around the home wirelessly for many customers. AT&T and Verizon are planning wireless HD homes in the near future.
It’s perhaps $3 more expensive to add HD to your gateway. The new phones - CAT-IQ, the upgraded DECT home wireless standard - remain few but that will change rapidly. On wireless and cable, better HD codecs add almost nothing to the cost while better microphones/speakers are inexpensive. The new version of the LTE standard, 3GPP Release 12, includes HD codecs with even greater range.
Most companies are still using obsolete last-generation gateways, without MIMO and HD voice. Smart carriers are already upgrading. |
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Last Updated on Sunday, 29 January 2012 23:08 |
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Tuesday, 15 November 2011 19:09 |
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“Growth Still A Challenge” Nikos Theodosopoulos writes about Tellabs, but he could be writing about almost any supplier to telcos or cablecos. The total market is limited by the carriers cutting investment. Nearly all suppliers will be flat to down for the foreseeable future. Even being just slightly down is doing well on the wireline side, where so many carriers are dis-investing.
High expectation hit particularly hard at Calix, down 20% in a day when sales disappointed and 60% in three months. Actually, Calix is doing fairly well, sweeping most of the contracts in the U.S. independents. They lost a large contract to Adtran when Adtran cut the price so low it noticeably reduced overall corporate margins, but is winning far more than they are losing. Now it’s been announced, I can report that Calix was the winner for CPE at Vermont Tel where I’ve done some consulting. Because it was part of a $100M stimulus project, the Vermont contract was intensely contested. A careful staff review decided Calix was their best choice. Calix had provided good support to VTEL in the past and has a good reputation for support among independent carriers. They have a substantial engineering department that can modify equipment for the customer’s needs.
Europe is currently far ahead of the U.S. in gateway capability. Among other thing, Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom now provide high definition voice and 3x3 high-speed MIMO 802.11n in standard gateways. Calix assured me that if VTEL wanted that capability they could design it. |
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Friday, 21 October 2011 23:00 |
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If delivered ~60-80% of unserved will get 4 megabit DSL. Two days before the Sunshine deadline, ten top telco lawyers met with the top ten FCC officials offering a deal: actually bringing DSL to many of the unserved. Their previous “ABC” plan discussed virtually nothing at AT&T or Verizon except for LTE that already was planned. The earlier proposal only projected 2M lines, less than half the figure now on the table. The difference appears to be many “unserved” homes that are less expensive to reach.
This is essentially the build recommended by the Broadband Plan analysis. In some of the most careful work ever done, Steve Rosenberg and Rob Curtis discovered that only a small fraction of the “unserved” - about half of one percent of total homes - were brutally expensive to reach because of distance/density/other problems. Most unserved homes could be reached with 4 megabits for under $3,000.
My guess is that the cost to reach half of the 4.8M will be closer to $500/home than $1,500/home. The total cost for 4.8M will almost certainly be closer to $6B than to $16B if the government watches costs effectively. The Broadband plan data confirm that. It will be a tough challenge to make sure the subsidies correspond to the real costs.
Everyone knows that current USF system far too often amounted to handing out blank checks. Some companies took advantage. There’s a seriously uninformed view in D.C. that auctions are a solution.Perhaps 80-90% of the time auctions are helpful but they will do little for most of the unserved territories. Unfortunately, the 5% or so unserved homes are in territories where no one but the incumbent has facilities. Most unserved homes are in clusters of a few dozen or few hundred at most, too few for anyone without local facilities to make an attractive bid. Result: for most of the unserved, there are only one or two logical bidders and auctions will totally fail at getting a good price. Direct cost controls - based on an accurate model of the actual costs for large carriers with fiber and facilities in place - are absolutely required.
Apportioning the 4.8M roughly by market share, AT&T would have to reach 2M unserved homes; Verizon, 1.3M; Century-Qwest .9M; and Frontier 200K. I wouldn’t sign off on any deal without a map of homes to be newly served and a firm schedule. There’s no reason this should take longer than 2-3 years. It’s all standard equipment in good supply and there are a surfeit of contractors looking for this work.
The data in the filing suggests the companies put engineering teams to work to find the least expensive way to get 4 megabit service widely available. AT&T’s “fiber to the node/DSL” is designed for nearly all homes to be within 5,000 feet and get 25 megabits (with bonding if necessary.) This proposal puts only 34% within 6,000 feet and the majority will get less than 6 megabits. It’s almost certainly the slightly cheaper ADSL rather the VDSL in AT&T U-verse. That’s a false economy.
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Last Updated on Saturday, 22 October 2011 17:22 |
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Wednesday, 12 October 2011 18:13 |
Millions sold to Deutsche Telekom. Invisible to me and most others in the West, Arcadyan has been selling 10's of millions of units under some of the most prominent brand names. They are now opening offices around the world and seeking direct sales.
I sought them out at BBWF because the Deutsche Telekom box is one of the most advanced gateways in the world in volume production. 3x3 MIMO WiFi, HD Voice, USB for home storage server and many other features that carriers around the world will soon make standard. The volume of products in their booth surprised me, including all flavors of WiFi, femtocells, and set top boxes. They have a strong engineering team and have developed their own software stack for gateways.
The Microsoft Mediaroom set top drew the attention of a North American carrier at the show. Mediaroom is doing amazingly well, actually beating cable even over FTTN/DSL. The costs are high, however, especially the license and the set top. Until recently, only Motorola and Scientific Atlanta/Cisco were certified by Microsoft. AT&T wanted a broader choice of suppliers, so Pace/2Wire and Tatung are well along on the path to certification.
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Last Updated on Monday, 31 October 2011 06:38 |
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Monday, 19 September 2011 18:47 |
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 Really Real? That's the question I'll be asking the exhibitors at Paris' Broadband World Forum.
Vectoring has the promise of doubling short loop DSL speeds. Take a look at Alcatel, ASSIA, Huawei, Ikanos and a few others to see how close it is to market and what problems to deal with. Keymile has a new vectored line card that's also 50% denser.
Your gateway and home network can't keep up with decent broadband or HD TV if you're like most of us. 3x3 and 4x4 MIMO promise to double 802.11n speeds. Visit Celeno, Lantiq and Quantenna to hear the promises and expect a pleasent surprise when they tell you the price. If it's only a few dollars more for the MIMO, it makes sense to use it almost everywhere. Then ask the carriers testing whether this really is enough for HD around the house. Swisscom says it works.
HD Voice is now standard in Franch and Germany gateways. Why not everywhere? Lantiq will sell a CAT-IQ chip for $2 and that's about all you need.
Infinera's Multi-Terabit Packet- Optical Transport Network Platform (DTN-X) is promising data transfer rates up to 500 Gbps. Ericsson also has new switches/routers from their old Redback division. Hans Vestberg tells me they are very hot.
Hughes has new satellites with gigabits of spot beam capacity. Latency won't go away, but speeds of 5 megabits and more to homes are now coming to market.
Adtran and Calix, major US suppliers, hope to break through to European and Asian customers.
From the carriers: Hong Kong Broadband will explain how to make money selling 100 meg for less than $30. Armenia will claim it will be the most fibered country in Europe. Deutsche Telekom will get serious about sharing infrastructure in a series of four sessions.
G.Hn announcements from Lantiq, Sigma, and Marvell. Until the chips they are talking about make it through interoperability testing, it's talk but no action. The talk sounds great. John Egan of Marvell is confident prices will be very competitive, very quickly.
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Last Updated on Saturday, 24 September 2011 03:02 |
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Wednesday, 17 August 2011 15:30 |
 300M homes connect via DSL and that number will continue increasing. In the early days, DSLCON was the event, loaded with people exploring what's new. DSL is no longer "new," but the technology keeps advancing. So I welcome a new event, Informa's DSL Acceleration, which just put out a call for speakers. Informa now runs the Broadband World Forum in Paris, a good show. The contact is jane.schofield@informa.com. They promise a focus on "assessing and deploying cost effective solutions for super fast broadband." Expect lots of talk about vectoring, bonding, and VDSL. www.dslconference.com
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Thursday, 02 February 2012 21:43 |
 Think one line for downloading teenager, one for adults watching Netflix. Frontier has found a very lucrative niche product: a second DSL line to the same household, without bonding. Bonding of 2 three megabit lines yields six megabit service to the home. Unbonded second lines max out at 3 megabits each, but the TV watchers on one line aren’t affected by the TV downloads on the other line. It costs something like $8/month, all in, to add a new connection to an existing broadband network. So at a price of $20, this is a very profitable. Bonding the two lines is now a routine offering at many carriers but the bonded offering does add a moderate extra complexity to the network. An additional modem type needs to be stocked and the OSS needs to have an additional offering. Today’s DSLAMs are designed to bond easily, but a company like Frontier has many 10 year old obsolete units in the field.
I don't think the feds would accept two 2 megabit lines, unbonded, as 4 megabit service, the minimum for the federal CAF program. But my reading of the CAF rules would suggest that the upgrade of customers currently getting 2-3 megabits so that they now can get 4 megabits would be subsidized. Probably 100,000-200,000 of the 1.8M broadband lines are in this category. They include many outliers, so that many of them are not served by cable. Frontier would have to do a careful survey to be sure, but I'd guess there are 30,000-50,000 "unserved" lines that if bonded would meet the new 4 megabit threshold. This could be accomplished for under $300 each, well under the $775 maximum in the CAF regulations that Frontier is having trouble meeting.
Only a limited number of customers are paying for the bonded speeds where available, so even modest cost savings from simpler unbonded operation may be worthwhile. For those companies that aren’t offering bonding, this may be a way to offer higher speeds and keep the regulator happy.
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Sunday, 04 December 2011 18:48 |
  Correction 12/15 China Telecom promised a 35% increase in speed without raising prices, not a drop in price. Since speeds go up almost everywhere over time, this is a symbolic gesture, not a significant price drop. Facing $100’s of millions in antitrust fines. Monopoly fighter Li Qing of NDRC November 9 promised broadband prices would come down 38% if China Telecom and China Unicom/Netcom faced more competition. This was historic; Government agency NDRC had never before taken on major state owned companies
The telcos have decided not to fight and offered intense self-criticism. Xinhua reports “China Unicom said that it found improper price charges from Internet service providers … [and] has submitted a plan to correct its practices to the NDRC. … China Telecom also said in an online statement that it found improper charges.” They probably will accept a fine at a level insignificant for companies with annual sales of $60B. China Telecom controls most of the southern two thirds of the nation and China Unicom/Netcom most of the northern third.
China has 150M broadband subscribers and adds 30M or more per year. That’s 50M more than the U.S. and as many as the combined total of Japan, Germany, France, Britain, South Korea, Brazil and Italy, the next seven broadband leaders. Fiber home is now the standard for new buildings and the two companies are upgrading 10’s of millions more to fiber every year now. That’s a remarkable achievement for a country where even the most developed areas have family incomes less than half the U.S. or Western Europe.
The press speculates that SARFT and China Mobile, working with selected academics, inspired the NDRC plan. Government at the Politburo level remains unsatisfied with broadband pricing, speeds, and growth. National policy is “convergence” on “tripleplay.” Cable competition led by SARFT would be the broadband driver while telcos would create television competition in turn. Cable could go from very few modems to 50M in a few years if unleashed. China Mobile has a broadband subsidiary, China Railcom/Tietong, which is a potential third player. SARFT just banned advertisements during prime time TV dramas, a very popular move that should give them some political leverage. If the 35% price cut comes through, Li Qing joins the short list of regulators who have made a difference.
(Thanks to Xinhua, Caixin, and People’s Daily/Global Time for reporting.)
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Last Updated on Friday, 16 December 2011 15:17 |
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Wednesday, 26 October 2011 00:59 |
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Avoid war. Reasonable and non-discriminatory, please. Aware did pioneering work in DSL, including design work crucial to several chipmakers. As DSL chipmakers dwindled to the current four, demand for independent design dried up and Aware sold the business to Lantiq. They’ve retained the Dr. DSL diagnostic business and some royalties from earlier work, but revenues are declining. Their board now is “reviewing its strategic options, including a potential spin-off, sale, or licensing of patents.”
Aware’s patents have long been difficult to monetize. There are dozens, perhaps hundreds of patents related to DSL, making the value of any individual patent hard to prove. In addition, the total value of DSL chip sales is dramatically down and likely to continue dropping over time as such a large proportion of phone lines are already equipped.
Texas Instruments won a large judgment against Globespan that was so questionable they settled at a major discount. Otherwise, patent lawsuits have primarily been tactics to tie up competitors, an abuse of the system.
The standards bodies have been incredibly negligent about enforcing the “reasonable and non-discriminatory” clauses in the standards.
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Friday, 21 October 2011 11:17 |
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The FCC is making $50B in decisions on universal service, mostly in the next few days. I sent over some data I thought might be relevant for someone at the FCC to judge how reasonable some beltway claims may be. This is quick, off the cuff stuff. Anyone who notices anything wrong please get back to me. db
- Max practical LTE cap for under $50 service - probably 15-20 gigabytes (Germany and other sources). LTE Advanced in 2014-2017 can raise that 5X.
- Likely cost of 4.8M from remote DSLAMs - At least half closer to $500 than $1500. Total more likely closer to $6B than $16B.
- Time frame for DSL buildout: 24-36 months for 90% is easy. Relevant gear is off the shelf and in good supply, as are contractors. This is all standard stuff.
- Relevance of DSL vectoring - None. No practical impact over 1,000 meters.
- Relevance of DSL bonding - High. $150 or so all in to double speed of any connection.
- Relevance of DSL repeaters/amplifiers - Interesting. They can bring 1-2 megabits 20-30K feet for $250/line. Hard for them to get to 4 megabits.
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Thursday, 22 September 2011 09:59 |
 70-100 megabits 400-500 meters. Stefaan Vanhastel promises to deliver production quality vectored DSL to the first European customers in December, with North America soon to follow. He tells me that generally field results are 100 megabits about 400 meters and 70-90 megabits at 500 meters. That’s not quite double what most lines are getting without vectoring. Vectored noise cancellation is particularly effective at short distances and falls off rapidly after that, yielding more like a 30% improvement at 1,000 meters and even less at 1,500 meters. Deutsche Telekom and British Telecom are deploying something like 10M lines of FTTN/DSL from neighborhood terminals that will bring many - perhaps half - of the homes involved to distances that can benefit from the vectoring. It’s natural for builds like that to use vectored gear for all new installations. Alcatel’s not revealing costs, but for new gear the difference should be well under $50/line, a dollar per subscriber month for much higher speeds.
Alcatel addresses the crucial problem of working well with existing deployments in several ways. For example, AT&T U-Verse has already deployed around 29M of the 31M lines Ralph de la Vega says are in the plan. While those lines could be connected to new vectored line cards, there's no indication AT&T or any other deployed networks will undergo a major system overhaul. Even worse, “unvectored” lines in the same binder with “vectored” lines can cause serious interference and reduces the effectiveness of vectoring. How well the existing lines integrate with the newly vectored lines will be a key differentiator of the new systems. As results come from the field I'll be watching closely.
Vectoring minimizes cross talk, the most important source of noise on loops under 1,000 meters. A side effect is that other disturbers, such as impulse noise, now become more important than they had been. Today, these generally minor noise sources are often drowned out by primary crosstalk. With that crosstalk defeated, they become more noticeable. Problems like this will continue to make some lines do considerably worse than expected.
It's great to see real deployments are close after six years.
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Last Updated on Thursday, 22 September 2011 10:27 |
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Saturday, 17 September 2011 21:10 |
It's going to be a great show. Here's some notes on the more interesting exhibitors as well as the complete list. See also the What's Hot. 
- Actelis Networks has an interesting small box that can dramatically increase the rate/reach of a DSL line. Just don’t call it a repeater.
- Adtran, like Calix, is mostly considered a U.S. supplier but is ambitious about expanding worldwide.
- Alcatel-Lucent for two years has been on the cusp of delivering vectored DSL and will probably feature it. (Written before I took a briefing under non-disclosure.)
- AudioCodes. Ask them about HD Voice, ready to explode in Europe.
- Aware hasn’t been as visible since they stopped designing DSL chips but maintains a line of respected test equipment
- Broadband Forum is a non-profit group including almost all companies in the industry.
- Calix, like Adtran, is mostly considered a U.S. supplier but is ambitious about expanding worldwide.
- Celeno makes MIMO WiFi chips. Ask them for evidence from the that MIMO WiFi is fast enough to distribute HD video around the house. No one believes it, but it’s very close.
- DECT Forum sets the standard for cordless phones. The new version, CAT-IQ, includes HD Voice. Lantiq tells me it’s ready for production.
- Ericsson has a new line of “edge routers” that Hans Vestberg tells me are really fast and will (finally) redeem the Redback purchase. Ask Ericsson, Alcatel, and NokiaSiemens when 8x8 LTE Advanced will be ready.
- France Telecom Orange is the world pioneer in HD Voice, starting in Moldavia and soon in Paris. They continue to support their labs when so many other telcos have said to ‘ell with the future.
- Hong Kong Broadband Network Limited is little known in the West but offers the best deal on 100 megabit and gigabit connections in the world. CEO William Yeung is doing a keynote on how to be profitable while charging 50% less for 100 megabits. He has a “great big hairy goal” of displacing the incumbent.
- Huawei passed Ericsson to be the biggest telecom vendor in the world. The problem now: there’s very little more room to grow. So they are making billion dollar investments in cloud computing and corporate networking.
- Ikanos Communications is a must see for the first details of node scale vectored DSL, which Huawei has endorsed.
- Lantiq has their version of DSL vectoring, 3x3 MIMO WiFi, HD Voice for Dect phones, and a customer announcement on GPON chips.
- Pace, without fanfare, has probably become the largest set top box maker in the world. Motorola & Cisco/Scientific Atlantic
- Qualcomm Atheros and Ruckus Wireless are both at the forefront of high speed WiFi. Is it ready for HD TV? Can they prove it.
- Sandvine’s Dave Caputo was surprised when I recently recommended their gear to a consulting client for network management. I’ve often criticized the abusive ways service providers use the boxes to close the web, but they can also be used for honorable purposes.
- Technicolor is the new name for the company we used to call Thomson. They remain a major player in CPE, gateways and set tops. (And also deliver Technicolor services to Hollywood.)
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Last Updated on Thursday, 22 September 2011 11:17 |
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Wednesday, 17 August 2011 01:58 |
 ADSL gear is rarely a safety problem, but Deutsche Telekom is now recalling the power supplies for it's Speedport W 700V routers because of danger due to an electrical shock. The case could crack or the cover detach, exposing live elements. The unit is made by respected Taiwanese manufacturer Leader Electronics. Google doesn't show me any problems with other Leader products. The Speedport also had a major security problem in early days. Here are the DT announcement as well as the earlier security advisory.
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Last Updated on Wednesday, 31 August 2011 16:15 |
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Monday, 30 January 2012 21:58 |
 Phone or net, wired or wireless. Kicking off Friday Feb 3 in DC, the 550 Challenge has a goal of connecting all 7.5B people by 2018, the 550th anniversary of the death of Gutenberg. While that seems ambitious, both China and India are approaching 1B connections. A revolution is sweeping Africa, with countries like Nigeria almost 70% connected. "The challenge of connecting everyone on earth to the Internet requires overcoming a long list of issues already engaging public and private sector initiatives. While there is no shortage of obstacles, it is not impossible." The Friday event oti.newamerica.net/events/2012/550_challenge. I'm honored to be one of the initial signers, alongside Vint Cerf and many others. http://vcxc.org/550/
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Wednesday, 30 November 2011 04:33 |
 Caps don’t correspond sufficiently to peak usage. “Congestion pricing” would be a far more effective tool than data caps, according to an analysis of actual carrier traffic by Benoit Felten’s new consulting outfit, Diffraction Analysis. It breaks the actual data from a U.S. ISP into five minute intervals and isolates three hours of highest traffic, the only time the issue arises. The heaviest users accounted for a much smaller percentage of the traffic in those peaks. Many of the heavy users had very little impact during peaks, presumably being polite and downloading primarily overnight. During peaks, the top 10% of users varied dramatically at different times; 40% of all users were in the top 10% during at least one of the intervals.
Economist Scott Wallsten has suggested that use of data caps, rather than some form of congestion pricing, implies that congestion is not driving the rules. Most people, but not necessarily Scott, believe that caps at current levels are about blocking competitive video, not dealing with actual congestion problems. 150-250 gigabyte caps have little effect on either revenue or congestion because remarkably few go over them.
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Last Updated on Friday, 02 December 2011 02:01 |
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Tuesday, 25 October 2011 23:14 |
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The net isn't perfect, but ... Anyone who has been spammed, hacked, or DDOS'd knows the Internet isn't perfect, inspiring some to think an entirely new architecture is needed. With video being the strong majority of traffic, TCP-IP has some disadvantages. I'm skeptical any proposed alternative doesn't have as many problems in turn, but it's certainly worth investigating.
A comment of mine at an Internet Society event was misinterpreted as endorsing RINA (Recursive Inter-Network Architecture,) a proposal by John Day and colleagues. Actually, I didn't know anything about it. I read Day's recent paper and sent for a copy of his book. A professor friend said I should also look at the somewhat similar Named Data Networking project funded by the National Science Foundation. (Below: the summaries of the four NSF Future Internet Architecture projects.)
I quickly discovered a vast literature, much of it over my head. Saif Abdullah, an engineering graduate student doing some work with me, jumped in and is well along on an article on RINA. Readers with the expertise to help us, please let me know.
It's fun to think how to design new networks, whether of not practical.
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Last Updated on Wednesday, 26 October 2011 00:28 |
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Saturday, 15 October 2011 20:24 |
Gear ready to ship. Stefaan Vanhastel tells me Alcatel intends to price their vectored equipment low enough to ensure substantial sales in 2012. At reference customers including Belgacom they are seeing 30-70% performance improvement, occasionally more, albeit only on short loops. The enormous enthusiasm about vectoring has obscured the reality that the majority of lines are too long to see much improvement.
The consensus is that volume sales of vectored DSL will be delayed until 2013-2014, when several vendors are in the market. Big telcos are notoriously slow to make decisions. Vanhastel intends to do better than that.
Alcatel has vectored line cards and node processors almost ready to ship, with prototypes in production at Belgacom. They have to decide whether to price high and take advantage of being first to market or price aggressively to win customers from other manufacturers.
“We expect a great 2012,” Vanhastel enthuses.
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Last Updated on Monday, 31 October 2011 06:42 |
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Thursday, 22 September 2011 09:00 |
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 A remarkable dozen CEOs of Europe's largest companies are coming to Brussels October 3 to ask Neelie Kroes to allow "new models involving traffic - or quality dependent payments at wholesale level." In other words, the telcos want to collect from Disney, Netflix, Google, Hulu and anyone else who wants to deliver bits to people in Europe. "To 'ell with net neutrality" is the message, which the companies believe will "enable a sustainable digital society." ETNO and the Financial Times are sponsors. It's branded as an "invitation-only" event but it looks like registration is pretty open.
Bill Kennard, U.S. Ambassador to Brussels, follows nine CEOs and has to decide whether to shoot down their goals. The subtext of the European carriers bit tax is that the content folks are largely American and the carriers European. All good Europeans therefore should support charges aimed at the Americans. This hasn't been declared a trade war, but that's really what's going on. Obama and his FCC are strong supporters of net neutrality, so Kennard would normally face down the Euro CEOs and make clear the U.S. will fight back. He may be conflicted; Bill in his years outside government at Carlyle owned a telco and made some ill-considered statements that arenow contadicted by a strong U.S. policy initiative. Perhaps some of the D.C. reporters can track down the U.S. position here.
Steelie Neelie's greatest achievement was to save consumers $billions by regulating down mobile call termination and roaming rates. Collecting on termination nearly always costs consumers, because the carriers have "terminating monopolies" on millions of customers that only slowly erode. Economist Jonathan Liebneau is opening the event and perhaps can give a clear explanation of why "two-sided pricing" requires strong competition. Strong competition, of course, is exactly what these carriers lobby against.
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Last Updated on Thursday, 22 September 2011 09:51 |
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Saturday, 10 September 2011 13:56 |
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 Several years ago, AT&T targeted 2013 for vectoring to enable doubled DSL speeds over short loops like their U-Verse field terminals. Huawei now is announcing a prototype unit of “node level vectoring” designed for just such a deployment, sure to be matched quickly by Alcatel, AT&T’s primary supplier.
“Node scale” vectoring was introduced by Ikanos in 2009 to solve the problem of mixed networks that share the same binders connecting to a neighborhood. Previous vectoring demonstrations proved the concept worked for new deployments where all the lines were connected to a single DSLAM/line card with vectored noise cancellation built in. That’s fine for new deployments, but inadequate when some of the lines are connected to any of the 300M DSL ports already deployed.
The top line in the chart here from Ikanos shows the potential of vectoring, nearly doubling speeds at short distances. At around 500 meters, the speed gains are much less and they tail off substantially by about 1,000 meters. The middle line is Ikanos' projection of the results of just vectoring the line card, not the complete node. Other companies believe they will do much better; I suspect Ikanos has made some arbitrary assumptions that reduce competitors likely performance.
Ikanos’ solution, now reinforced by Huawei’s announcement, is to do the noise cancellation earlier in the network, presumably with a small but powerful processor for each node. Huawei, the #2 DSLAM manufacturer, delivered units worth over $400M in 2010. The Huawei prototype yields “average bandwidth of 100 Mbit/s over a 300m access distance and an average of 80 Mbit/s over a 500m access distance. The bandwidth increases by 70%.” Huawei’s timetable for deployment is 2013.
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Last Updated on Monday, 12 September 2011 22:56 |
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Tuesday, 16 August 2011 16:57 |
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 Cameron wants to cut off those "plotting violence, disorder and criminality." I doubt cutting off Facebook would have handicapped Bernie Madoff of the many criminals in London's City, but who knows. Sarkozy is cutting off folks for copying; perhaps he thinks Samsung should not just be sanctioned for copying the iPad but also removed from the net?
The Chinese saw the irony. As The Guardian reported, “The Chinese government official news agency, Xinhua, welcomed the suggestion, saying it marked an improvement from Cameron's comments in February. Then, he had urged Egypt and other north African nations to allow freedom of expression after they tried to restrict the operation of social media.
“Xinhua said: 'For the benefit of the general public, proper web monitoring is legitimate and necessary. We may wonder why western leaders, on the one hand, tend to indiscriminately accuse other nations of monitoring, but on the other take for granted their steps to monitor and control the internet.'” http://bit.ly/qc3IzK
Did anyone else see the irony of the U.S. working actively to delay Egyptian elections after the disorders because we thought the Muslim Brotherhood might outpoll the folks we prefer? |
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