Author Archives: Jesse

Comcast Pulling Bait-and-Switch on HDTV, Phone Users

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Comcast is pulling fast ones with customer again, this time by making them subscribe to more service than they need. Users in the Bay Area are being told that they will be forced to migrate from $16.50/mo plans to a new $44.95/mo plan starting in just a few months. This is contrary to what they had been told up until this point.

Another Bay Area Comcast subscriber is enraged because her HD channels were taken away from her unless she subscribed to a significantly more costly tier of programming. This came without any warning whatsoever and took several phone calls to get sorted out. The end result? They wanted to grab an extra $50/mo for her to retain the level of service she'd had for two years. Of course you can't do anything when they've got you over a barrel like that. What're you gonna do? Switch to Dish?

(See full articles here and here.) 

AT&T Offers $10 DSL

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That's no misprint: as part of the conditions for buying out BellSouth, AT&T is offering up DSL for the price of dial-up. The service weighs in at a featherweight 768K down, 128K up and will be $5/mo more expensive in states not formerly served by BellSouth. AT&T will be chipping in a modem and will require a one-year commitment for service.

Naturally, AT&T hasn't exactly been shouting from the rooftops about this fire sale on broadband. Consumers have complained that they've had a hard time finding a link on their website to the plan which is limiting subscriptions. Not exactly complying in good faith, is it?

(See full articles here, here, here, here and here.) 

Palo Alto Mulls Fiber

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Palo Alto is reconsidering plans to build a FTTH network in its city after stalling for several years. Several years after the initial pilot project to a handful of homes, the council voted to continue negotiations with the winning bidder for the project. It's unclear if the network would be retail or wholesale, but my discussion with some residents seems to indicate they're in favor of a wholesale network. That said, some basic city services seem to be lacking adequate funding and there are numerous cost concerns, leading me to think this is not likely to happen for a few more years.

(See full article here.) 

Aussies to Get Universal Broadband Coverage

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Australia announced that they're sick and tired of lacking decent broadband and they aren't going to take it anymore. Prime Minister John Howard unveiled a $1.68B US plan to deploy fiber and wireless connections to 99% of Australians with a minimum speed of 12Mbps. The wireless portion, which would serve rural areas, is expected to be able to ramp up to 70Mbps while urban areas will be connected via fiber optics with an initial speed of 50Mbps. Some members of the opposing Labour Party want to do a full-on fiber network to everyone… at a cost nearly triple the current proposition on the table. Sounds like Australia gets it when it comes to broadband policy.

(See full articles here and here.) 

Debate on 700MHz Spectrum Heats Up

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A new startup has managed to stir the pot on the 700MHz auction by proposing to build and maintain a national network for both public and commercial interests. Frontline Wireless wants to take the 24MHz of spectrum reserved for police, fire and other emergency use and make it available to everyone while giving emergency workers priority use. Frontline's proposal sounds very similar to Google's push to make the band into a vendor neutral wholesale network that any device could connect to with Frontline simply maintaining it.

Naturally, Frontline's proposal came under immediate fire in the Senate hearing and big telco is already aligning itself to oppose anything but a "winner take all" auction of this valuable wireless spectrum, public interest be damned. Personally, I believe the idea to have a company be no more than a network maintainer is probably a good idea, similar to how there is a gatekeeper for domain name registrations. A vendor-neutral wireless network would encourage us to standardize our various wireless devices and free up a lot of other bandwidth, notably the 800MHz, 900MHz, 1800MHz and 1900MHz ranges used by cell phones. It could also enable the use of a "cellular Carterphone" regulation that requires interoperable handsets between cellular carriers. The question is if the telcos will let this UTOPIA-style model come to pass or not.

(See full articles here, here, here, here, and here.)

Sprint Re-Thinking WiMax While DirecTV and EchoSTAR Jump Right In

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It's a bad time to be Sprint. The wireless carrier has been taking a beating on the stock market over the indigestion caused from swallowing Nextel, possibly threatening its deployment of WiMax networks. Despite predictions calling for WiMax to be more popular than WiFi by 2010 (are you listening, Philadelphia?), Sprint max consider partnering more closely with Clearwire, a major WiMax deployment.

Satellite providers have already beat Sprint to the punch. Both DirecTV and EchoSTAR (purveyors of DISH Network) are tapping Clearwire to beef up their broadband offerings. I'd imagine it's because they want to free up spectrum for more HD channels (not to mention the latency on their satellite-based Internet service is near unbearable). With how rapidly wireless networks are evolving, it seems that municipalities on board the SS WiFi are wishing they had life jackets about now.

(See full articles here, here and here.)

Inexpensive Options Could Bring More Wireless Players

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Look for your cable operator to think about getting into the WiFi market. A company called Tollgrade Communications is hawking a wireless access point that taps directly into the cable operator's fiber backbone, allowing them to turn each of their neighborhood nodes into a wireless transmitter. This could allow cable operators to offer wireless roaming for current subscribers in addition to expanding their reach into the traditional wireless market using existing infrastructure. What remains to be seen is if any cable operators will take the bait and give it a shot.

In a related story, a company called Meraki is offering a cheap wireless repeater powered by solar. The outdoor device runs about $100 and has an option for a solar panel with a battery to maintain power at all times without being on the grid. The range of several hundred feet is respectable and can be boosted up to 10-12km with after-market antennae. This would bring the cost of a grid-connected WiFi mesh to under $10K per square mile, something I imagine most cities looking into WiFi would be grateful for. Could this be what makes WiFi a contender? We'll see.

(See full articles here and here.)

Comcast Promises 800 Channels of HDTV They Can't Deliver

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In a marketing ploy best suited to a used car salesman, Comcast announced they would be offering over 800 channels of HD content by 2009. Of course, it's very easy to get that many channels when you count pay-per-view channels in an endless loop as a single channel. It also ignored Comcast's immense bandwidth constraints. Carrying 800 HD streams will consume 64Gbps of bandwidth even though a piece of coax can only carry a paltry 4Gbps. Their solution is to do what AT&T does and push the content to the node, streaming content on an as-needed basis to the consumer.

The big problem, however, is when too many people are watching at the same time. With hundred of subscribers per node and about 1Gbps reserved for data, voice and overhead, Comcast can realistically offer under 40 separate streams of uncompressed HD at a time. This means that Comcast will continue doing their infamous over-compression of television signals and offer HD that really isn't HD. Their HFC network is doomed to collapse under the strain of their over-zealous demands.

(See full article here.)

US Plummets to 24th in Worldwide Broadband Penetration

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In another sure sign of our national infrastructure being poorly handled and neglected by the incumbents and their failed promises of '96, the US is now ranked 24th in terms of broadband availability, surpassed by pretty much every nation in Western Europe as well as South Korea, Japan, Macau and Hong Kong. If current trends follow, we're likely to get further and further behind old Soviet bloc countries like Lithuania and Romania.

Unsurprisingly, most of this can be traced back to how the telcos squandered the loot from the '96 Telcom Act. Instead of investing in fiber options, they chose to pump the money into long-distance, wireless and DSL ventures to get higher profit margins. Rural areas have been hit hardest since they were supposed to see this universal fiber built-out as well.

(See full articles here and here.)

No Love for Small Towns Seeking Broadband

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There's about 2,000 towns with fewer than 60,000 residents that can't find companies to build city-wide WiFi networks. Despite many of them having issued RPFs, top-tier providers are set on chasing the big contracts in Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia rather than Smallville, Kansas. Most of the cities are seeking these networks because existing cable and telephone operators simply will not roll out high-speed services; Brigham City joined UTOPIA for that reason. (Ironically, both Comcast and Qwest started offering high-speed options after that announcement.) With the new digital divide becoming a case of urban versus rural, this lack of interest is a disturbing trend, especially since the feds offer grants for rural broadband.

(See full articles here and here.)