Best Broadband

The Coming Broadband Smackdown forbes.com
IPv4 depletion: T minus 2 years theregister.co.uk
Pirate Bay Verdict May Actually Lead To Pirate Party Official Joining European Parliament techdirt.com
CenturyTel expanding IPTV, broadband bonding telephonyonline.com
Verizon Seeks Extension For Alltel Spinoff informationweek.com
Consumers Want Internet-Ready TV Sets imdb.com
AT&T, Hertz Putting Wireless In Rental Cars informationweek.com
Public plot to fill UK Home Secretary’s inbox and stop ISP data-tracking scheme broadbandgenie.co.uk
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Earlier this week, we noted how satellite broadband provider WildBlue announced they’d soon be testing 18Mbps satellite service. The timing of the announcement comes as Wild Blue and HughesNet are trying to convince Uncle Sam that satellite broadband would be a great way to spend billions in broadband stimulus money. But in conversations with GigaOM’s Stacey Higginbotham, Wild Blue reveals top actual speeds offered would be closer to 10Mbps, such speeds are still three years out, and apparently dependent on Wild Blue getting some help from Uncle Sam. If you remember how long it took Wild Blue to get their first satellite into space, you might not want to hold your breath.
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Speaking to stock jocks about the company’s earnings on yesterday’s earnings conference call, Time Warner Cable COO Landel Hobbs stated that the company would be deploying faster DOCSIS 3.0 speeds this summer. Confirming reports we’ve heard from Cisco engineers familiar with the deployments, Time Warner Cable is already testing DOC 3.0 gear in NYC, which appears to be their only launch market in 2009:

NYC coverage will begin this summer and “completed by year-end,” says Hobbs. The carrier says that further DOCSIS 3.0 deployments will be “surgical” in nature. That’s code for targeting areas where the company faces competition from Verizon FiOS, and can’t get away with nursing last-generation infrastructure. According to Hobbs, the company faces telcoTV competition in 22% of its footprint; 15% AT&T U-Verse and 7% Verizon FiOS.

Verizon just signed a franchise agreement to wire all of New York City by 2014 with FiOS, making NYC an upgrade priority. With just 7% of their footprint impacted by FiOS, and AT&T exploring metered billing themselves, you can see why Time Warner Cable isn’t in a particular rush, and why they weren’t particularly worried about customer defections during their recent failed attempt to hoist metered billing upon a skeptical public.

So what about pricing for the tier, should you be in one of the fortunately competitive areas? During the metered billing kerfuffle, Time Warner Cable suggested they’d be unveiling a new 50Mbps DOCSIS 3.0 tier for $99, though that pricing may change as the carrier licks their wounds and designs a new battle plan after their recent PR disaster.
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We’ve discussed how regional incumbents are busy trying to crush community developed broadband in Wilson, North Carolina — where the city has started offering consumers symmetrical fiber service up to 100Mbps. According to the city of Wilson blog, local incumbents are busy “push polling,” or polling local residents with skewed questions designed to sway opinion. Wilson’s Brian Bowman says the pollsters are blanket calling the residents of several cities in North Carolina:

The questions asked aren’t just used to collect bad data, they’re used to “educate” customers on municipal broadband. If you’ve got a copy or recording of the questions being asked in Wilson, please drop us a line.

We saw similar actions by BellSouth and Cox when they tried to stop municipal fiber deployments in Lafayette, Louisiana. Pollsters there were hired to tell locals that a municipal fiber network meant the government would begin rationing their TV viewing and take away religious TV programming. That uh, didn’t happen. Instead, residents get very cheap, very fast FTTH. Similar misleading polling efforts were used in Illinois.

After a while, you start to wonder how many actual broadband connections these companies could have deployed with all of the money spent nationally on lobbying, PR, lawyers and push pollsters.
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The term “exaflood,” created by the same PR tank that crafted the term “intelligent design,” is part of a sophisticated campaign aimed at convincing the press, public and lawmakers that without giving carriers what they want (less regulation, no net neutrality laws, no price controls, huge subsidies and tax credits, less consumer protection), the world will simply run out of bandwidth and we’ll all be weeping over our clogged tubes.

Andrew Odlyzko, one of the nation’s top experts on global Internet traffic, repeatedly notes that while growth is strong, it doesn’t necessitate drastic new pricing model shifts (metered billing), and is entirely manageable with just modest capacity upgrades. According to Odlyzko, the current Internet growth rate of about 50% per year “can be accommodated with essentially the current level of capital investment.” If anything, Odlyzko predicts a slow down (something Cogent data confirms).

That doesn’t stop carriers from repeatedly suggesting that a bandwidth apocalypse looms. One of the industry’s favorite source of capacity scare mongering is Nemertes Research, who, since 2007, has published a series of reports insisting that video demand is going to result in Internet brownouts. Their studies result in wholly unskeptical reports like this one in the UK Times Online. Be afraid:

The Times doesn’t bother to look for opposing statistics that counter Nemertes Data (of which there’s plenty), nor do they look to previous stellar reports deconstructing the exaflood myth, like this Economist report from last year. Odlyzko himself has stated that much of Nemertes data is sound, but that their conclusions of a looming Internet catastrophe are not supported by facts:

At this point we suppose the best we can do is just wait until next year, when Nemertes claims the Internet brownouts begin. When carriers (and the very intelligent engineers they employ) manage to scale capacity to meet demand without much fuss, perhaps Nemertes can issue everyone a robust apology for ruining their afternoon tea.
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We’ve been writing about the dysfunction of the FCC’s E-Rate program for what feels like an eternity. The system, which you pay into via Universal Service Fund (USF) fees, is designed to deliver broadband and technology services to the nation’s schools and libraries. Instead, like the larger USF, it’s more like a slush fund, where money paid in frequently isn’t tracked by the government, and spending accountability is minimal to non-existent. As you might expect, this has traditionally resulted in oodles of fraud by both carriers and schools.

40% of USF funds are poured into E-Rate, and the program has doled out $22 billion since its inception in 1998. The program has great potential, yet the FCC does not track how the money is spent or if the program is effective. For years now, the General Accounting Office (GAO) has issued an endless flood of reports on how the FCC should actually pay attention, and for just as many years the FCC has insisted they’d get right on that. So it’s not too surprising that it’s now 2009, and the GAO is saying the exact same thing:

The FCC could take a new look at the program when new FCC Commissioner Julius Genachowski finally gets Congressional approval. But any serious telecom reform may not happen until August, and USF reform may again be buried under the clamor surrounding the creation of a new national broadband policy. Even then, should lobbyists get their way, most of the USF “reform” could focus on ensuring that Verizon and AT&T get a broader slice of the USF pie, not on holding carriers and E-Rate money recipients more accountable.

In other words, we’ll see you next year, when the GAO issues the exact same report.
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Broadband Marketing Deception Must Stop pcmag.com
Meet Phorm’s PR genius theregister.co.uk
AT&T’s “new” video streaming terms are a non-issue engadget.com
Texas launches effort to extend broadband statewide bizjournals.com
AT&T’s iPhone Dilemma businessweek.com
Motorola continues to bleed amid rotten economy cnet.com

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Comcast issued their first quarter earnings this morning, which indicate the company added 288,000 digital video customers on the quarter, but lost 78,000 basic video customers. Broadband growth remains strong for Comcast despite the recession, the company adding 329,000 customers, bringing their total to 15.3 million. Comcast also continued strong growth on the VoIP front, the nation’s third largest residential phone company adding 298,000 new customers to bring their VoIP — sorry, Comcast Digital Voice — total to a very respectable 6.8 million customers. Total revenue rose 5.3% to $8.84 billion, and the company posted a healthy net income of $778 million for Q1.

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In what’s going to be a highly contested news, our users note that the State of Minnesota has decided to ban state resident access to all gambling websites. According the Associated Press, alcohol and gambling regulators have sent notices to 11 Internet service providers demanding they ban their customer access to some 200 gambling websites. That of course won’t include the Minnesota State Lottery. Legal experts highly doubt the move has any legal justification, and argue the State is, well, confused:

Morris goes on to note that the law cited only applies to phone companies directly doing business with bet takers, and of course most gambling operations are of course now offshore. Not only does Minnesota seem confused about the law, they’re confused about the realities of the Internet. Filters simply don’t work: they either block too much or too little content, and users find means to get to the content they want anyway.

Three of the four ISPs we’ve contacted for comment say they’re still reviewing the State’s decision.

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Government Accountability Office smacks FCC over E-Rate program networkworld.com
Swine Flu Prompts Calls For More Telecommuting informationweek.com
In-Stat: Wi-Fi to Dominate Wireless HD Video cable360.net
Internet Video Views Climb 26% In March; Hulu Now Ranks Third Behind YouTube, Fox multichannel.com
RIAA settles for $7,000 after 4 years pursuing NY mom theregister.co.uk
Online gambling bill coming yahoo.com
Panda Security offers free ‘Cloud Antivirus’; says its approach 100X faster than signature-based solutions informationweek.com
Verizon calls for public access to D Block theregister.co.uk
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