Competitive broadband market? Compete with this!

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Read more! Seems wholesale prices for fibre longhaul are plummeting, with a 63% drop in 2 years for a 10Gbps wavelength from Los Angeles to Tokyo now costing £22,000 ($36,000) as compared to £60,000 ($98,500) in 2009.

This blog post can be read at 5tth.blogspot.com



What has caused the drop? Three new undersea cables, mucho more capacity, and a host of new competition. Funny that. The competition comes when you chuck as much capacity as you can at the problem, not the least.

Unity - a total capability of 7.68 Tbit/s
Trans-Pacific Express -a total capability of 5.12Tbps
Asia - America Gateway - a total capability of 2.88Tbps

Individual customers can start with a 10Gbps wavelength. I can feel the need to move coming on again: after all we are now down to less than the price I was quoted for 2Mbps!

When will we see a similar drop in longhaul/backhaul prices within the UK? Or are we going to continue to pursue the scarcity model forever?

LA to Tokyo is 5400 miles, which would be 9 times up and down the UK from Land's End to John O'Groats - as crows fly. So, it seems that pricing by distance doesn't always have to apply.

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I'd like to know.....

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Read more! If everyone in this country was connected to a min 100Mbps symmetrical pipe, or more, by 2015, and let's assume that those who like using the Net level out the usage for those who don't, what exactly would it cost and to whom? Not the actual FTTH solution but the bits that will need to be transported around the country....how much will they cost and what precisely do we need to achieve that aim?

This blog post can be read at 5tth.blogspot.com



We all hear how scarce they are, these bits, and we know that the core network is struggling anyway, but JANET upgraded their core network recently so we must have actual hardcore (ouch!) figures to play with.

Don't stress over how it gets to each person, just assume it does. What do we need in Telecity, Telehouse, datacentres, bitmines etc etc to achieve what Erol Ziya wrote about all those years ago - the cheapest country within which to move [unlimited - my addition] data?

Which, it seems to me at the end of a long week, is what we surely STILL need to achieve.....

But how to do it practically? The investment needs to come not in the first mile alone (like *that* is happening, ho hum), nor in the middle mile alone, nor in the core alone. It needs to be across the board.

Ergo, my tired little brain would suggest, this requires a cunning plan. A collaboration. A big picture with a road map to the endgame.

So, who out of our dear, expensive analysts has considered this? Who has the requisite data?

Because, it seems to me, that every which way we turn it all seems to be "too expensive" to do. Telcos don't want to do FTTH in the first mile and are struggling to even see the point of less suitable technologies as economic solutions to properties; backhaul is bloody expensive for communities, ISPs, etc; and longhaul seems to be a struggle too if you talk to ...well, pretty much anyone.

So, what do we need to solve the problem of transporting bits around this country in the most economical and affordable fashion possible to help bring a long-awaited end to those arguments?

Your thoughts are welcomed.....

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Testbed by 'new entrants' deposes BT as FTTH leaders in UK

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Read more! This type of headline, methinks, is going to become ever more common now. BSkyB and TalkTalk are going for a test bed of 3600 homes for a FTTH trial in Harrow. They are not alone in pursuing FTTH -it is a natural extension to existing products - but others are steering clear of the press release/promo route, it seems, and are flying under the radar until solutions are in place, tested and saleable.

This blog post can be read at 5tth.blogspot.com


Ebbsfleet, the much vaunted BT FTTH 'experiment', has connected how many since it was first announced about 3 or more years ago??

Anyone responsible for allocating public funding to next gen access should be watching this type of 'new entrant' announcement very closely. There are new players making the most of incumbent lassitude, and claiming ignorance of their existence when you allocate funds will be no excuse.

There are, perhaps, a considerable number of players wandering around this conference ready to upset the cosy position of the incumbent in the UK by....

JFDI.

Public money must be put into innovative solutions, because otherwise it is likely to be thrown away on olde schoole solutions and providers who have become a little too comfy in their position to realise the world is evolving without them. Fund olde worlde solutions and your constituents will hold you accountable for lumbering them with last gen solutions, surely?



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Why we must settle for nothing less than FTTH....

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Read more! I am struggling a tad with a story yesterday that implies that "superfast broadband" is 'up to 6Mbps' from now on. Have we lost it??? Other countries are doing 1000Mbps (yes, count the zeros) and we think 6Mbps will make us a leading broadband nation?
This blog post can be read at 5tth.blogspot.com



Meanwhile, thanks to Twitter, I finally have permission to reproduce a quite extraordinary post from across the Atlantic (I presume) from @lamapper on the Broadband Cumbria site

If you are not following Barry Forde (my first ever keynote speaker, in Leyburn, possibly before many people here had even heard the term "broadband" and long before I knew many of those who are now broadband centre stage!), then do so. Now!

Do not support a BT Infinity campaign or let your County Council spend your/our money until you know the options. Barry is outlining the choices and the world is responding..........

@lamapper says:
Great article, with great explanation that . . .

“they (BT)refuse to supply dark fibre to third parties”

. . . that is the problem in a nut shell in every country in the world today.

Japan solved this by deregulating NTT, thus in 2000 Japanese consumers received 100Mb/100Mb for $55 per month…Thanks to the de-regulated Fiber by 2006, they could swap out their Fiber Modems and could get 1 Gbps/1Gbps for $52 per month. The price going down as more and more subscribers come on board in spite of the exponential increase in a customer’s bandwidth is a very STRONG indication that the Japanese economic market for Internet access is working.

Many of us understand that you can multiplex a single fiber cable and increase the bandwidth from 1X to 1024X, this has been true since the early 2000s. And when a company runs Fiber, they do not just run a single strand…that would be a waste of time and money…they just leave the extra Fibre dark.

Here in the USA, the current non Fiber providers – read Cable, DSL, Telco… (and the non synchronous Fiber providers like Verizon who only offers 50Mb/5Mb) are quick to deny the reality that consumers need high levels of bandwidth and that ONLY Fiber To The Home (FTTH) will do the job over the long haul.

Any solution that does not put Fiber in the home of the consumer is at best a waste of time and money, and at worst a Ponzi scheme perpetuating the bandwidth scarcity myth that most providers rely on for their failed tiered pricing plans.

Consumers in the USA are no longer waiting for the telco – cable – wireline – wireless provider oligopoly to provide Fiber any longer. Consumers are beginning to wake up and have noted that their (providers) actions since 1990 have shown their true colors. That they have no intention of providing Fiber To The Home unless forced to do so. This is in spite of receiving in excess of $900 Billion SPECIFICALLY for Fiber from American Tax payers (money + taxes + fees) since the 1990s. They have had three decades, over 30 years to provide Americans with Fiber. They have failed. In fact it is reported they spend in excess of $1.5 Million per WEEK lobbing elected politicians to avoid fulfilling their 1990 era promise of Fiber…for which they were amply paid I might add.

Heck Chattanooga finished their FTTH build-(approx 2,500 businesses and over 20,000 residences) out 7 years ahead of schedule with an infusion of cash of barely over $100,000. EPB finished in 3 years instead of the planned 10 years. As of December 2010 they are finished with the initial Fiber build out and are already looking at expanding their offering thanks to the huge demand for the service by their citizens. It should be noticed that the incumbent provider had been fighting against EPB and Chattanooga since the 1990s to prevent this reality. Thankfully they failed.

In spite of these un American and anti-competitive providers a few American communities have provided FTTH to their citizens. In every case they have been fought tooth and nail by the incumbent provider whether telco or cable. In spite of the up hill battle, almost 30 communities have SYNCHRONOUS FTTH Internet in the USA. When Google announces their 5 Go Big With a Gig communities there will barely be over 30 communities in the USA that are providing true and honest Internet service to consumers, citizens and residents.

This map shows the locations of SYNCHRONOUS FTTH US communities/cities: http://sn.im/1axal4

It is interesting to note that Utopia in Utah provides FTTH via User Owned Fiber. Home owners pay $1,500.00 and their community provides another $1,500.00 via bonds for this purpose. The home-owner’s real estate increases in value thanks to this User Owned Fiber.

Most of my friends are planning to move to one of the 30 or so communities on the map in order to secure FTTH Internet for themselves and their posterity. We have waited 30 years, we will NOT wait another 5 years. Thankfully we do not have too.

Over time as more and more home buyers insist on FTTH as their number 1 consideration when purchasing a new/used home, communities will have no choice but to either force their providers to provide Fiber or kick them out of their communities. Those communities with FTTH offerings are recovering faster economically than others as businesses too are relocating bringing jobs with them. Makes these communities a better long term investment in all areas, especially Real Estate.

What BT and their ilk should worry about more is the loss of TRUST that their inaction, bad business practices and customer no service methods have caused among their consumer base. After multiple decades of abusing their customers TRUST, why would you even want to do business with them, ever. My friends and I do NOT and we are instilling this legacy in our children as well. The great things about our kids, they are more Internet savvy than many of their parents, they get it.

Let em choke on their non FTTH, non synchronous, non net neutral inferior Internet offerings.

A couple of the FTTH communities thanks to synchronous bandwidth are allowing their customers to run their own personal cloud, file and email servers from their homes….long overdue and about time!

Even 10Mb/10Mb at between $25 to $50 per month is much, much better than a promise of “up to” anything, throttled back to less than 100Kbps/30Kbps, the Cable provider reality in the USA today.

In Japan, NTT, thanks to owning the Fiber once again found themselves in the dominant position in spite of De-regulation, I suppose consumers in both England and the USA are going to have to get a little bit more upset at the incumbent provider’s customer-no-service and insist on FTTH or they will never get it! Our combined telco/cable Internet history shows this truth to be self evident.

Here in America, we are relocating and moving for FTTH, problem solved.

Funny how synchronous Fibre bandwidth solves the net neutrality issues as well, once the bandwidth scarcity myth is put to death, there is no longer as large an incentive to censor, restrict and limit, why waste time and money on software and/or hardware if its simply not needed?

The Future can be BRIGHT, but only with FTTH, nothing less!
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Cochrane & Felten say it how it is

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Read more! Today's homework: Read this from Peter Cochrane about the telcos helping themselves instead of moaning, and this from Benoit about, um, telcos helping themselves. There will be a short test at the end of the week. Read more!

Stop claiming you are all about fibre

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Read more! Geoff at App-Rising (see blogroll on the right) has posted about his feelings over the potentially false advertising claims being made by ISPs over the Pond about fibre in their networks.

We have blogged about this issue before too, and it really is time it is stamped on throughout the EU. (Vivien, are you listening?)

As consumers, we ought to be protected from such advertising (mal)practices by the ASA and the likes of Trading Standards, let alone Ofcom. However, this does not appear to be happening - see the comment on the previous post about BT attempting to deal with VM's ads and how they were allowed to stand ... But worse, it is lulling those in government and so on into a false sense of belief about what is actually on offer, and therefore continuing this mistaken opinion that UK is competitive in the broadband arena.

Education of those both in government and consumers should be reinforced by ISPs and telcos' advertising, not entirely undone by it. And let's not forget, this level of protection of the consumer (and the government is also a consumer) is Ofcom's statutory duty.
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Come in, Hull.....

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Read more! When a town as historically important as Hull falls off the internet for a weekend, you realise how badly wrong we have it in the UK.

Let's do a little bit of history.

Once upon a time, communities across the UK set up their own utilities. In fact, galvanised individuals and innovators set up utilities. Not large corporates. They came much later.

My village, which is tiny, is the subject of a book by Ted Short I Knew My Place (wireless experimenter, Marconi, Postmaster General, then Secretary of State for Education and Science, Leader of the House of Commons and now Lord Glenamara) and he tells of the village digging a route for water to provide electricity to the village in 1918-20, before Manchester had such a service as I understand it, amongst many other fascinating tales.

Each house had one light bulb (hell, that was a major luxury), and this is a tale from a man who did wireless comms experiments in the house 2 doors down from me in 1920ish. We had a full mill race dug and mill wheel built and set up by the village craftsmen. Then these amazing folk sourced and dug in the piping for a sweet water supply after a smallpox epidemic killed too many local people, especially children. This amazing local service was sadly absorbed into the national water board in the 60s (I think), and the water in our village has been nowhere near as good since because it isn't local.

Every village I have lived in has similar tales. Once upon a time, rural (and urban) Britain was fairly self-sufficient in basic utilities. And one feels that given half a chance, these villages would be now too, in 21st century utilities.

Hull was a ground breaking city. If you only know a couple of facts about Hull, it is probably that they had unlimited local calls for a long time (which put them way ahead of FRIACO on cheapy internet access) and on a par with the US who had free local calls. Or that they have grey/white phone boxes. Either way, Hull was the envy of many for a very long time for its telecoms services.

No longer. I was there a fortnight ago. Ask for a costing on a 10Mbps leased line type service (£8-10k a year in London) and you are looking at something like £84k. No wonder businesses don't locate there. In fact, businesses are leaving, in droves, as the comms costs drive them away.

Worse though are the consumer problems of getting on the Net. If Karoo goes down, as it did this weekend, there is no alternative ISP. Anyone who runs a small business elsewhere in the country will (should!) have 2 broadband ISPs. None of us understand why one ISP can keep going through a BT exchange when another can't, but occasionally one network can fall over when another doesn't. Or you can use 3G, or mobile data access (ouch!!), but even having an ancient dial up modem can keep you online these days.

But, let's face it, that is pretty extreme and crap. In Hull though, you can't even take those precautions. Kcom. Or nowt.

This weekend even the hospitals comms in Hull fell over. And to me, this signals the problems loud and clear that we have in Britain. If BT's network fell over (and it really shouldn't, but has in the past - burning wheelie bins down manholes in Manchester etc), then we have all our eggs in one (copper) basket, we have no resilience.

We have allowed monopolies to dictate how we communicate. Where is freedom of speech when you have no phone line or internet, as happened this weekend in Hull? This time, so they say, it was down to some major issues whilst they upgrade the network to adsl 2 (sweating the copper asset rather than upgrading). This will probably not be a one off, but I can't see the Hull Daily Mail reporting it every time a borough gets knocked off over the coming months, so assume this is going to be an(other) hidden issue of disconnected folk.

We need to see more alt nets springing up. SYMsip, 3G and other services need to be widely promoted so that consumers understand they have CHOICE.


Ofcom need to take their statutory duties more clearly. Stop the telcos from lying for starters.

Co-ax is not fibre.

ADSL is not broadband.

FTTC is not NGA or FTTH.


And let's see some real competition out there. I know we have fibre less than 1km on one side of our village, and about 4km on the other down the Settle-Carlisle railway. Get me off the monopoly network, allow this village (and many others) to return to the edge of the network independence that saw the start of ALL these utilities, and then let's see some real competition. Not in the ownership of the network infrastructure, but in providing services. Let the community run the network.

Because in this village, we ran exceptional water and electrics services without central involvement, way before Manchester or other cities had electricity and sweet running water. We can do the same now. But you, who want to play on our networks, and take money from our residents, you can offer services: IPTV, HDTV, e-gov, access to telemedicine etc etc. But let us supply our connectivity, because I hate to say it, but we really do know best and have proven it, nationwide for years.

There are two fine examples of community -provisioned networks, beyond those already given from my village, that no longer deliver even close to their original intentions, to the detriment of their consumers I BELIEVE. And this is a very personal opinion. One is local to Hull, and the other is national. It is time to give the power back to the communities, and -provide what is required by those communities, and let it be owned by those communities.

/rant


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