Best Broadband

Verizon to double number of LTE markets 15 months after launch fiercewireless.com
The Myth of the Benign Monopoly gigaom.com
UK regulator Ofcom decides it can’t decide on spare spectrum theregister.co.uk
Clearwire: 2 Million Subs By End Of 2010 multichannel.com
Verizon Wireless Customers Most Loyal in the Industry prnewswire.com
Google s Verizon Nexus One clears FCC slashgear.com
Samsung Adds Skype To Broadband HDTVs eweekeurope.co.uk
Microsoft Makes Case For Antitrust Scrutiny Of Google wsj.com
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The weekend has arrived, along with lots of snow shoveling for many of us on the east coast. Take a break, put your feet up, and talk amongst yourselves in the comment section below.
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The first incarnation of the cable broadband DOCSIS 3.0 standard is theoretically capable of 160 Mbps downstream, and 100 Mbps (shared). But upstream channel bonding has been hard to perfect for hardware vendors and MSOs, which is why you see strangely top-heavy cable broadband tiers like 50/5 Mbps, or even in some cases 100/2Mbps. But we’re finally starting to see some movement on this front, and faster upstream speeds should finally be coming your way later in 2010. Comcast is busily testing bonded upstream service and says their tests are providing a consistent 75 Mbps upstream connection:

According to Comcast, the difference between the field and lab upstream speeds are due to the channel widths used to conduct the tests: the combination of two 6.4MHz-wide channels with two that are just 3.2MHz wide in the field, and the bonding of four 6.4MHz-wide channels in the lab. Comcast CTO Tony Werner had originally been telling reporters that faster DOCSIS 3.0 speeds would drop during the first quarter of 2010, but all indications are now that an upstream bump for Comcast customers won’t occur until the second half of this year.
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Canadian telecom circles have been busy this week discussing a new report (pdf) from Harvard (and commissioned by the FCC) highlighting how Canada’s starting to lag in terms of broadband speed, price, and penetration. This led to calls from Canadian media outlets like the Globe And Mail for the Canadian government to start instituting a broadband plan that increases competition in the Canadian market. Not surprisingly, carriers like Rogers Communications fired back, lobbyist Jan Innes proclaiming that data suggesting Canada had competitive problems was “flawed”:

As we’ve been illustrating for some time, part of Canada’s problem is that they’ve been copying the United States approach to broadband policy. Which would be fine, if U.S. policy for the last decade hadn’t consisted of letting the biggest and wealthiest carriers dictate policy, crush independent competition, and even write telecom laws. A popular tactic in selling this type of policy in the States has long been the use of paid consultants to act as “objective” analysts, who’ll loyally parrot ISP talking points to the press. Enter consultant Mark Goldberg, who writes this on his blog about the need for a national Canadian broadband plan:

Looks familiar. Of course by attacking any data that dares claim Canada has broadband issues, carriers in both the U.S. and Canada have tried to convince the press and public there really aren’t broadband problems that need fixing. That in turn ensures continued competitive issues and high prices, which is just the way incumbent carriers in any country like it. In the real world, you can ask users in our Canadian broadband forums if they think Canada has broadband competition problems. Make sure specifically to ask them how much they enjoy incredibly low monthly caps and high per gigabyte overages.

Update: At least one user writes in to note that Goldberg claims the Globe and Mail screwed up, and the original letter to the editor was written by Goldman himself, not Rogers lobbyist Jan Innes. Even if not direct plagiarism (and we’ve seen no retraction by the Globe and Mail), Goldberg has worked as an analyst for Canada’s biggest carriers in the past on reports claiming that Canda’s broadband market is secretly awesome, so draw your own conclusions.
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The network neutrality debate has seen no limit of dumb arguments from both sides of the aisle. Since the argument really heated up in 2005 with AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre first clumsily explaining his dream of double dipping, it has been so warped by fuzzy logic, bad science, and spin that the “debate” today is little more than an ugly mess, dominated by professional distortionists and people in strange outfits. The tone and pace of the conversation is now largely dictated by lobbyists and think tankers for hire, who use a wide variety of incredibly sleazy tactics to try and win what now passes for honest debate on the subject of open networks and consumer rights.

One of the biggest contributors to the ever-devolving quality of the discussion has been Bret Swanson, recently employed by a PR firm named the Discovery Institute. The Discovery Institute is responsible for such ideas as “intelligent design” (created by evangelical partisans to help sell creationism in the classroom) and the Exaflood (created by ISPs to try and convince the world the Internet will collapse if ISPs aren’t allowed to cap, throttle, and overcharge consumers).

Swanson is essentially a fake objective analyst for hire, who now does heavy lifting for major telecom carriers under the actually rather ironic name of Entropy Economics. Through bunk science and massaged statistics, Swanson gets quoted as an objective analyst in media outlets, informing the world that there really aren’t any broadband problems. Swanson’s latest masterpiece appeared this week over at the Huffington Post, where Swanson informs his readers that the FCC’s effort to craft more tangible network neutrality guidelines for carriers will result in huge job losses:

So, Swanson’s “science” here consisted of taking a count of those who submitted network neutrality comments to the FCC, then adding up how many people they employ to nebulously make a scary connection to job losses. Except one, there’s no indication that the kind of wimpy and vaguely worded network neutrality guidelines the FCC is proposing will do much of anything, much less hurt employment. As it stands, the most the new rules will do with require that ISPs are simply clear about what kind of network management they’re using. While there are layoffs in the telecom sector, they have nothing to do with network neutrality.

Two, and more importantly, a huge number of companies and other firms that submitted comments to the FCC (including Swanson himself) were doing so under the guidance of companies like AT&T. Carriers like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast of course bombarded the FCC’s inbox with anti-net-neutrality tirades themselves. So did all of these companies’ hardware and networking vendor partners, who mirrored carrier positions against network neutrality because they’d like to keep getting paid.

But carrier lobbyists also filed protests with the FCC under the guise of literally thousands of think tanks, fake consumer groups and even seemingly unrelated front organizations, including professional disc golf course designers (funded by AT&T) or even the “Arkansas Retired Seniors Coalition” (run by a former 30 year BellSouth PR rep). Adding up the total number of people employed by this orchestra of co-opted and AT&T-funded organizations shows nothing about employment or network neutrality, but it does say planety about how far companies like AT&T are willing to go to manipulate public opinion.

Swanson knows his argument is empty, but assumes his readership is well-stocked with idiots. He even goes on to note that “one can’t gauge Net Neutrality’s overall desirability merely by who files FCC comments,” yet proceeds to do just that. The rest of Swanson’s argument is the same canned telecom industry arguments we’ve been debunking for half a decade, including the idea that neutrality protections would harm investment in networks, or that the neutrality debate is simply between huge telecom companies and huge, mean content companies like Google (which helps foster apathy among consumers unfamiliar with the debate).

Swanson, like most hired telecom wonks, omits the fact that the idea of open networks — or being able to use the applications and devices of your choice without ISP interference — is something supported by a vast majority of consumers. Not everybody agrees that we need network neutrality regulations, of course. Many supporters of the concept argue that all you’d really need to protect open networks is persistent competition, but guess what: carriers object to any changes on that front as well.

You’ll notice that at no point does the Huffington Post highlight Swanson’s connections to the telecom industry’s biggest players (Swanson’s tied to AT&T through the telco’s funding of such “think tanks” as Digital Society, where Swanson is a “visiting fellow,” and Arts and Labs). In fact, Huffington Post (or Swanson himself) doesn’t even allow users to comment on the article, which conveniently prevents Swanson from actually having to defend his painfully-unscientific job loss “evidence.”
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Novatel’s MiFi portable 3G to Wi-Fi router has become very popular among carriers, many of which are now selling rebranded version of the devices to their 3G customers (both Sprint and Verizon sell the unit as the MiFi 2200). According to a Novatel press release yesterday, the next step for the carrier may be to make the already rather small devices even smaller with the help of Qualcomm. “Qualcomm’s Wearable Mobile Device module designs enable the development of very small form factor devices,” says Jack Steenstra, Vice President of Engineering at Qualcomm. According to the companies, a new arrangement between Qualcomm and Novatel will “allow Novatel Wireless to commercialize the Wearable Mobile Device WMD-1X and EV-DO modules… making them readily available to device developers.” Nice EVDO to Wi-Fi necklace you’ve got there, hoss.
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Last week we noted that AT&T’s femtocell service was getting closer to launch, but that the company was working out a few last minute kinks and still having some internal discussion about the pricing model the service will use. The service essentially creates a micro cell tower in the home, allowing users to route wireless calls over their in-home broadband network. Users improve reception, and carriers get to take additional load off of their local towers.

Several of our readers have written in to note that AT&T is sending out this notice to customers that states the trial is expanding. According to the notice, select users in Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Las Vegas and San Diego can now participate (plug your zip code into AT&T’s Microcell website to see if you qualify).

As we recently noted, AT&T says pricing differs by trial region, but indications are users pay $49.99 for the hardware (after $100 mail in rebate), and $19.99 a month for unlimited calling.

There’s still indications that AT&T will also offer a less-expensive plan that eats your wireless minutes, which as we’ve complained with Verizon’s femtocell launch, is a good way to destroy the value proposition for the customer. If you’re easing the strain on your local towers, and the consumer is using their own bandwidth to make the calls, the service should not be expensive if carriers really want it to take off with consumers.
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We often talk about how the evolution of wireless broadband networks, the smartphone, and concepts such as Google Voice are going to change everything. Specifically, the rise of mobile VoIP and a multitude of push IM smartphone clients mean the death of not only expensive carrier SMS services — but of the entire concept of voice “minutes.” While the industry may stubbornly refuse this concept, they’re slowly realizing that their counter move to this evolution is to simply charge consumers more money elsewhere, be that in the form of hidden below the line fees, higher prices for wireless data, or higher early termination fees.

But the death of wireless voice minute pricing is going to be a sluggish affair, as carriers try to slow the organic evolution of the market out of their fear of becoming “dumb pipe” carriers. That of course includes forcing data-only users to buy voice minute bundles, or other restrictions. They’ll probably be able to stall these changes well into the introduction of next-generation 4G wireless broadband networks, notes Network World. Phil Redman, an analyst for Gartner research, notes that the evolution away from the idea of voice minutes is going to be particularly slow to arrive for more rural users:

And should carriers want to be stubborn and cling to the idea of minutes, users will flock to third party phone applications that offer dirt cheap voice calling. As SMS and voice revenues plummet over the next five years the real question is going to be just how much you’re going to have to pay for that wireless data connection.
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Independent ILECs go beyond the voice call fiercetelecom.com
Dublin, Ireland: “Forget the Government, let s go to Google”; city to ask to be included in Google fiber test? siliconrepublic.com
Growing Concern From European Officials Over ACTA techdirt.com
Australian Censor Master Censors His Own Tagcloud To Hide Anger Over Censorship techdirt.com
Verisign tries to secure DNS theinquirer.net
Virgin Media admits broadband upgrade ‘confusion’ reghardware.co.uk
Nintendo joins the e-book parade theinquirer.net
Will Bloom Energy Live Up To The Hype? techdirt.com
Why Can t PCs Work More Like iPhones? nytimes.com
Microsoft slams nails in Windows Vista, XP SP2, 2000 theregister.co.uk
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BT could face criminal case over Phorm trials theregister.co.uk
U.S., Korea, Singapore, Denmark, Germany, Belgium And Portugal: Against ACTA Transparency techdirt.com
Despite promising new technologies and federal stimulus money, rural U.S. remains land telecom forgot computerworld.com
NBCU President: FCC Should Look Beyond Broadcasters For Spectrum multichannel.com
FCC to ask Congress for $18B for public safety network computerworld.com
Q&A: Verizon’s LTE road map for 2010 and beyond networkworld.com
Study: Lithuania has highest fiber penetration in Europe networkworld.com
Broadband probe aimed at BT’s next gen upgrades theregister.co.uk
Microsoft can kill botnets theinquirer.net
Itunes reaches 10 billion mark theinquirer.net
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