Author Archives: Jesse

As new entrants into the cable TV market look for more efficient means of delivering video compared to the broadcast signals of coax, more and more of them are turning to IPTV. AT&T is pushing U-Verse while Verizon pushes FIOS, but a number of smaller RLECs are getting into the game too. The advantages? By streaming only a few channels at a time, the compression isn't as aggressive leading to better quality signals and lightning-fast channel changes. As telephone companies seek more creative ways to push new kinds of data over aging copper, turning the whole thing into an IP network to cram as much voice, video and data as possible is the Next Big Thing(TM) until they can afford fiber… or get pummeled int he market, whichever comes first.

(See full articles here and here.)

I'm not a fan of most municipal wireless systems. They're usually greatly over-budget while delivering weak indoor signals and low speeds. Earthlink has been learning the hard way that municipal wireless is bad business, significantly scaling back the number of projects it had planned to handle.

Wireless does, however, go right from time to time. Witness the police department in Providence, Rhode Island. They took advantage of federal grants to install a city-wide WiFi network that has most cops only visiting a station for repairs, bookings and dropping off evidence. Now that the first responders have embraced it so fully, the city is now looking at ways to roll out the service to other departments as well as providing some public access.

That's where municipal wireless needs to go: build the network for internal use and gradually allow the public to have a slice of the bandwidth pie. Municipal fiber networks could also improve their financial outlook by building for the city first and residents second.

(See full articles here, here and here.)

(UPDATE: Another article here.)

While WiFi gets lots of press in the US, fiber seems to be making big splashes abroad. Countries like Lithuania, Slovenia and Norway are rolling out FTTH networks with speeds up to 1Gbps while Asia's FTTH base in Japan, Korea and Singapore is growing at a brisk pace. The number of worldwide broadband subscribers is expected to double in the next 5 years with fiber solutions comprising over 10% of those connections. Old-school pokey DSL, a technology that leverages antiquated copper networks, is expected to still be the world-wide dominator though mainly in under-developed countries that can't invest in new fiber networks.

Currently, the demand for high-speed fiber is rapidly making DSL and cable modems the new dial-up, leaving them in the dust in terms of speed, responsiveness and uptime. Users of Verizon's FIOS usually can't find anything but praise for the service and every UTOPIA and iProvo subscriber I've met is pleased as punch. Users of DSL and cable, however, usually have nothing but complaints about low speeds, poor service and unexplained outages. Them's the breaks of copper.

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

Plagued by poor signal strength, low subscriber numbers and generally botched installs, municipal WiFi is looking like the monorail of the 21st century. Most subscribers complain that not only do signals often drop or fail to get inside of their buildings, but the speeds experienced are slower than traditional DSL or cable modems. Since WiFi only supports Internet access, the investment takes many more subscribers to break even than do FTTP networks that combine voice, video and data. While some municipalities hope to boost subscribers by luring in cell phone users that can take advantage of built-in WiFi, it's a gamble that some cities just aren't willing to take.

Even with the high-profile failures and big losses reported to Wall Street, Earthlink is plunging ahead with WiFi in Philadelphia despite its uncertain future in San Francisco and cutting back on the number of projects it intends to tackle. With its dial-up business riding off into the sunset and co-branded DSL services not being widely available, you have to wonder how long the well-known ISP can continue to run in the red. 

Let that be a lesson: when you try and do something cheaply as opposed to correctly, it'll get you in the end.

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

The American Fork city council has voted unanimously to start negotiations with an Orem company to sell off their ailing municipal broadband network. Much like with the Packfront deal, Suphra would be required to upgrade the network to support triple play services and extend service to more homes than the network currently serves. Given the troubled history of the network (including some poor design decisions from the get-go), American Fork was left with few options. Council member Heidi Rodeback put it best:

Much as I love my high-speed connection to the AFCnet– in my part of town, it's reliable — I can't look the taxpayer in the eye and tell him we're leaving roads unfinished because we want to go $1 million in the red on municipal broadband.

The citizens and government officials in American Fork just don't have the stomach to fix a project plagued by a lack of purpose, subscribers and comprehensive service plans. This pretty much automatically precluded joining UTOPIA and making the small investments necessary to bring the network up to spec while automatically having contracts with 4 different service providers.

(See full article here.)