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Written by Dave Burstein
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Monday, 16 August 2010 19:16 |
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"Burying the hatchet" between Free.fr and FT became easier when "good cop" Stephane Richard became CEO, replacing "bad cop" Didier Lombard. Xavier Niel may be a bad boy, but with 5M customers and strong profits he's not going away. Fiber in France has been delayed nearly two years by FT causing disputes at the regulator, and after the peace agreement should be able to grow rapidly.
Niel is dropping his competition suit against FT while FT is dropping their libel suit against Iliad/Free. There's probably a payment or unannounced sidedeal. The evidence that France Telecom abused competition law was strong enough to justify hundreds of millions in fines, so Free.fr had a likely winning case. Niel certainly said many things about France Telecom that would be libelous if false, but I believe them all substantially true.
Figaro still calls Xavi "adepte de la provocation" but he's also a successful businessman who will need to cooperate with the other telcos on the mobile and fiber networks. France Telecom is spending most of their expansion capital and attention outside of the country, including a current offer to buy into Moroccan mobile. They also benefit from toning down the war on the home front.
"Burying the hatchet" in the U.S. is illustrated with a picture of a native American, so I was surprised to find a similar phrase in France. However, no one in North America  likely matched the fervor of the Celts and Gauls who invaded Italy and sacked Rome around 387 BCE, Roman accounts have the Celts as naked painted warriors whose ferocity caused trained Roman troops to break ranks and flee in terror.
Did Gauls and Celts carry hatchets?.
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Written by Dave Burstein
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Thursday, 12 August 2010 17:16 |
 Australian Minister Stephen Conroy announced the National Broadband Network would offer speeds of 1 gigabit without spending a penny more of capex. Sounds like the usual politician's promise. The NBN is a huge issue in the election in 8 days. The opposition wants to kill the $43B project as too expensive; the government warns that a vote against them will condemn Australians to a second rate Internet for a decade or more. Both are right.
Conroy wasn't lying. The shared 2.4 gig down, 1.2 gig up GPON Mike Quigley has chosen can in fact deliver a gigabit to the home - as along as your neighbors aren't doing much on the Internet. If three of the 32-64 users on a node want a gigabit, it can't deliver. Today, so few web services deliver even 100 megabits I'd guess you could get the 800+ megabits gigabit 95% or even 98% of the time. Even in five years, likely traffic patterns would allow actual speeds of 400 megabits or more most of the time. (Assuming GPON's shared bandwidth can be efficiently divided, which hasn't even been proven in the lab.)
 The capital cost to the Australian taxpayer will be almost the same because the OLT in the exchange is the same standard Alcatel GPON. It will require more robust switches and routers from the exchange to the Internet peering point at modest expense.The OLT in the home may be slightly more expensive, but the chipmakers are making progress integrating the silicon. Charging the customers who want the gigabit $5-10 more per month would easily cover the increased operations costs.
We've learned that in practice even dramatically faster speeds produce surprisingly modest increases in total demand. HD TV at 3-8 megabits is the only high volume use. It streams at the same rate whether the connection is 10 megabits or 800 megabits. It's a joy to get your 150 megabit Microsoft update in seconds with high speeds, but you don't do more updates because of it.
Hong Kong Broadband Network is the only carrier I know doing customer experiments with a gig over GPON and hasn't discussed the results yet.
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Written by Dave Burstein
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Thursday, 22 July 2010 16:08 |
 China added 5.5M new DSL & fiber connections Q2, Lee Ratliff calculates, probably just under half the worldwide total and continuing the torrid pace of Q1. There are about 119M broadband connected Chinese, just about the total of #2 U.S. (87M, Q1) and Japan (32M). With 600M-800M Chinese still unconnected, there's plenty of room for growth. Ratliff of iSuppli estimates 184M million broadband subs by 2014, which would be a slight slowing of growth. He points to the $20B of government stimulus for "fiber" as a key driver. I wouldn't be surprised if the Chinese growth rate actually increases. Everyone there is excited by the new strategy of "convergence" and "triple-play." They are allowing cable modems, and some very aggressive outfits including Shanghai intend to grow digital cable to volumes that dwarf other countries.
Low equipment prices spurring China's growth. China Telecom gets great prices by putting out bids for 10M lines at a time. They make sure to split their orders three or four ways so they have contenders for the next contract. They are paying about $100/home for either GPON or GEPON per Wei Leiping. Wei indicated that most of their fiber network is GEPON in 2010, but Alcatel just announced large GPON orders from both China Telecom and China Mobile for Shanghai Bell. They are supplying the 7342 ISAM/MSAN, equipment also going to the U.S. and Australia.
Mike Quigley of Australia's NBN is under pressure to bring down costs. The former Alcatel executive needs to find out the actual price China is paying and demand Alcatel come close to that price in Australia. Can Quigley in Australia do what Joe Kennedy (JFK's dad) did when he became a public servant? As a wall street speculator, the father of the future President was one of the craftiest. When Roosevelt made him the first head of the Securities Commission, he turned around and used his knowledge to crack down on Wall Street abuses. Quigley was CEO heir-apparent at Alcatel until the Lucent buy changed the game. He's always been one of the sharpest in the industry.
To catch a thief... |
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Written by Dave Burstein
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Sunday, 20 June 2010 13:39 |
The first stage of Australia's NBN is about to go live in Tasmania. A price war has brought the price of 25  megabits (low cap) down to $26 (U.S.). Meanwhile, Telstra and Mike Quigley's NBN have cut a deal. For about $10B, NBN gets ducts, other facilities, and an agreement Telstra will move customers to NBN and ultimately shut down the copper network instead of competing. The price is a little high, but the government is paying to silence opposition.
NBN started because Telstra wanted so much government money for DSL/FTTN the government asked "Why not run fiber all the way home?" The logical next question was "If public money is paying for the network, why should we give it away to a private company?"
The NBN is a campaign issue across the front pages of the newspapers. The politicians will make some more noise, but without Telstra pulling the strings they are unlikely to stop the build. The last 10% will probably be wireless, a sensible compromise. Grahame Lynch at Commsday asked for some comments and I replied:
NBN deal a good thing but don’t overstate the benefits
Some perspective from the other side of the world in New York City. Ultimately, having a great Internet is a good thing for any country. The cost to Australia of this deal is high enough to create opposition today, but looking back after a decade I'm sure almost everyone will think it was the right move.
Experience from other countries points to issues ahead. Britain’s separation has worked marvelously on the retail level and brought British prices down 20-30% from where they likely would have been.
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Written by Dave Burstein
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Monday, 16 August 2010 12:11 |
Verizon connected a single test customer at close to a gig over GPON. Since GPON is 2.4 gig shared, it can't sell reliable gigabit speeds to more than a handful. The natural first customer will be Verizon Wireless for the backhaul from LTE towers. Most LTE deployments do fine today with 50-125 megabits fiber or microwave backhaul, but AT&T is generally deploying Gig-E for future expansion.
2.4 gig shared GPON can also provide a gig to residential customers 95-99% of the time with today's traffic patterns. That's what Australia's NBN is proposing.
Here's Verizon's carefully worded release.
Verizon Demonstrates Near Gigabit-per-Second Throughput on Its Existing FiOS GPON Platform
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Written by Dave Burstein
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Thursday, 12 August 2010 15:24 |
 Larissa Bartlett startled New Yorkers by telling us the Internet runs faster in Tasmania. If Labour wins the election next week, Mike Quigley's National Broadband Network will bring 100 megabit and even a gigabit to 93% of the country; the opposition promises to kill off the NBN as too expensive. Prime Minister Julie Gillard flew to Hobart for the official opening of the NBN -- and some politicking.
"The NBN is probably the definitive issue of the campaign, especially for Tasmania where it has all begun and we are rolling out the cable first," Ms Gillard said. "It is particularly important for Tasmania, especially where broadband has been lagging behind the rest of the country for so long. This will be a historic day for not only Tasmania but the rest of the nation because it officially marks the start of the fibre future and puts Tasmania at the forefront of the digital revolution." (The Mercury)
The impact of broadband is overstated in Australia as it is in other countries. I don't go as far as Grahame Lynch, who writes in the Australian "NBN is welfare for tech-heads," believing the a great Internet is worth the cost.
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Written by Dave Burstein
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Tuesday, 06 July 2010 21:29 |
 "You go girl!" headlines the web page for Engineer Funke Opeke at the Queen's School Old Girls Association. Ms. Opeke went on to Columbia University and Verizon before returning home to Nigeria. She's now brought massive connectivity to Lagos and Accra (where one's heart belongs) via the 7,000 kilometer Main One cable. Working with Tyco and Alcatel she's already planning the extension to meet SEACOM in South Africa. The cable is operational today, delivered on time and on budget.
A terabyte is enough for 10M broadband connections at today's rates for DSL, and probably for 50M if much of the information is sourced or cached locally. They've only lit 30 gigabits per section but are able to expand that rapidly if there's demand.
“Today is a historic day for West Africa. The arrival of the Main One cable proves that much good can be done by Africans for Africans. We are pleased to realise the fruit of our dedication and commitment in the past 30 months. More importantly, we are happy to be a channel for driving growth in Africa and changing the status quo for the average African as reliable internet connectivity becomes easily accessible and affordable for all” Fola Adeola
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Written by Dave Burstein
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Saturday, 12 June 2010 03:53 |
 Basil Alwan of Alcatel "will be production shipping 100G in the next few months," he emails. They've delivered 100G that Softbank is demonstrating in Japan. Alwan claims "full service routing including all edge services (VPNs, QoS etc)."and proving that "already in several customer labs. ... We build our own silicon and have been shipping 100G packet processing / TM chips for awhile. In fact we first ramped this silicon around two years ago (introduced as FP2) and we used it for our 50G full duplex cards. Now that 100G optics are becoming available we simply re-configured the same deep touch chipset in simplex mode."
Rick Dodd of Infinera explained to me why 40 gig was late and disappointing while 100 gig is drawing enthusiasm. "The step from 10 gig to 40 gig was particularly tough because the modulation format changed to phase shift keying and that wasn't easy. 100 gig is also PSK so there are fewer obstacles. We expect 100G will be very big in 2012."
10G required only three optical components: a laser, a modulator, and a photodetector.. 40G's change to PSK and coherent detection literally quadrupled the number of components, from 3 to 12. The same components are used for 100G, running faster as Moore's Law improves performance. Most components, such as line system amplifiers, are little changed from 40G to 100G.
Alwan is proud that Alcatel is ready to deliver both the 100G router and 100G long-haul optics."Both sides of the fiber need to support 100G for it to be useful – the device that is the on-ramp to 100G (the IP/MPLS router) and the long haul optical 100G system. ALU has both – we just announced the 100G coherent long range optical product and demonstrated it. And in the IP/MPLS router our FP2 based 100G routing card is the only card in the industry that does single flow 100G (a true 100G packet processor). The parallels are interesting:
In optical we are the only vendor with single wavelength 100G (Nortel uses 2 waves and others use 4 or more). Naturally doing single wave 100G is more advanced, more difficult and better. In packet IP/MPLS we are the only vendor with single flow 100G packet processing and queueing (both Cisco and JNPR use two or four packet processing systems to handle the traffic). Again doing single flow is more advanced and better – when you have multiple forwarding complexes you have duplicated tables, devices which lead to more board space, more power and less density."
Cisco had a great Q1 but "Q1 was up for us YoY" at Alcatel. "We are not done taking share" Alwan concludes.
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