Free UTOPIA!

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.

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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.

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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.

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Some of Verizon's union workers are accusing the telco giant of letting its older copper lines rot while it builds fiber optics elsewhere. The accusers have alleged that training and repair equipment have been almost exclusively focused in areas where FIOS is being built out. Based on Verizon's history in Virginia, where the complaints emanate from, it seems that lengthy repairs of old copper lines aren't unusual for the company.

As happy as I am that Verizon is building FIOS (better late than never), doing so while letting the poor and rural copper customers get second-rate service just can't fly.

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In a move that surprised pretty much nobody, AT&T's CEO, Ed Whitacre, took a few more potshots at Net Neutrality in a speech that used alarming candor. Referring to getting anti-neutrality legislation passed, he said it's not 'cashing in', it's 'deregulation'. It seems that his replacement is taking a similar tack, wanting to double-dip content providers and destroy the "inter" part of Internet.

Time Warner hasn't wasted a lot of time on scrapping Net Neutrality before legislation goes through. They're recently implemented packet shaping to slow down certain kinds of traffic. Tops on their list are data-intensive applications like BitTorrent and Joost. Essentially, Time Warner is selling high-speed connections with the promise that you get fast downloads… right up until the point you actually want to use it. That smells like lawsuit in the air with a hint of false advertising.

Even cell phones aren't safe. Despite AT&T just about getting its head chewed off for blocking certain numbers in Iowa, T-Mobile has started blocking calls to numbers from a competing provider in the UK. So far, the block seems to only extend to users in the UK, but it'll be a matter of time before they start trying to pull the same stunt in the US. 

Maine, however, isn't content to sit this one out. In response to the assaults on Net Neutrality, they've passed a resolution demanding that more be done to ensure that all data is treated equal. Given Maine's history as a maverick state, this is none too surprising.

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Salt Lake City is home to major fiber optic cables, a renowned university… and a city government that has no idea what to do to get better broadband. Three years after rejecting UTOPIA membership, candidates to succeed Rocky Anderson as mayor can't say what exactly they'll do about increasing speeds or lowering prices. It seems that Ralph Becker is the only one to speak up and support reconsidering UTOPIA, though it comes in the form of a "put it to the voters" cop-out, a fancy way of saying "I don't want to personally commit to it before I get some poll numbers." Even then, the council has already shown that it favors bringing in private competitors, neglecting that building a universal network to rival Comcast or Qwest requires a deep-pockets company like Verizon or AT&T. Is that really progress?

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San Francisco is intent on using WiMax to reach more rural areas around the Bay Area's numerous hills. Clearwire has bought access from AT&T to start operating a national WiMax network and Qualcomm is set to laugh all the way to the bank. In a move all too reminiscent of Rambus sneaking their patented bits into memory standards, Qualcomm owns a series of patents covering the 802.16 WiMax standard after purchasing a small company that was involved in defining those standards. With that club in hand, they'd had no issues with threatening companies looking to deploy services with heavy royalty fees. With this case of patent trolling likely to drag on for years, WiMax seems like the wrong technology for new wide-spread broadband platforms.

(See full articles here, here and here.)