U.S. Q1: Cable fine, Verizon and AT&T go negative

Cable added 1,000,000 DSL/telco fiber 10,000. The data below are from Bruce Leichtman, who has been consistently accurate. The trend to cable is clear in the 50M homes that are still running DSL versions that are ten years out of date. AT&T & Verizon are doing fine in U-Verse and FiOS territory but are getting clobbered elsewhere.

DSL beats cable in Canada, France, and England. The U.S. policy types who say a cable monopoly is almost inevitable are uninformed. AT&T & Verizon have decided to go wireless-only across about 25% of their homes. They virtually stopped investment in those areas and have been very open with Wall Street about their plans. The wireline business is profitable in those areas but wireless-only makes more money. Or so they expect. 

China Mobile added 2.65M new wired subscribers in March.

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AT&T's $10 for the poor. Thank you Jim, Ralph, Randall, John. & John

Scrooge Verizon! AT&T did the right thing, offering $5 and $10 packages for the poor. Anyone in the food stamp program qualifies. Speeds are 10 megabits down where AT&T can deliver that speed, ~75% of their homes. It's 3 megabits or 5 megabits where that's the fastest AT&T can provide. Where AT&T doesn't have DSL (about 10%,) they do not offer discounted wireless. Of course a higher speed is preferable, but this is decent for a basic service. About 40M Americans are eligible for food stamps. More than a third of them live in AT&T territory.

With HD TV looking pretty good these days at 3 megabits, people will be able to access 90% or more of all Internet functionality. The main thing that is impractical at those speeds is keeping lots of music and video in the cloud. I'm finding that very convenient, especially because Amazon offers unlimited storage for $55.year. I have 6 terabytes now backed up. 

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G.fast comes of age with 10M lines for Britain

It works, finally. As always, the telcos were cautious and the vendors promised too much. The dam has broken now, with BT going at 3M homes passed each year. http://bit.ly/BThalffast CEO Patterson will keep going until “almost all” Brits can get what he’s calling ultrafast broadband.

AT&T looks to be the next big order, millions of lines with fiber to the basement and G.fast to each apartment. http://bit.ly/GfastATT. Chunghwa in Taiwan is covering almost the entire country. In Australia, Parliament is debating how much of the National Broadband network should switch to G.fast. Rio de Janeiro, Panama, Belgium, and Switzerland are on the way.  

Much more at Gfastnews.com

"Yes you can unbundle G.fast and vectored DSL!" - John Cioffi

Software unbundling could add 100 megabits to typical speeds in England. BT has just committed to 10M lines of G.fast in the next four years and "most of the country" soon after that. They are talking speeds of "up to 330 megabits" rather than the 500-800 now proven for G.fast from the local distribution point. Instead, they will put the DSLAMs in existing cabinets and save. 

Cioffi, who invented vectored DSL, believes using software unbundling would allow 100 megabits faster speed. Alternatively, you can extend the reach at a given speed. Traditional unbundling shares the physical lines in the bundle. Today's technology - vectoring and G.fast - provides much higher speeds but is very sensitive to other signals in the same bundle. The incumbents are saying hardware unbundling is now undesirable. They prefer to control everything and sell bitstream access.

ASSIA's multitenant software allows multiple companies to manage the parameters for each customer and troubleshoot many problems, The carrier would manage the physical network including the vectoring noise cancellation. Each company would have a management console and could support their own customers directly.  

BT's current plan is to run G.fast in frequencies from 22 MHz to 106 MHz. That leaves 0-17 MHz for other companies running older VDSL on unbundled loops. If the companies could agree that all would use the BT G.fast local loop, British homes would get 100 megabits more speed. BT would be able to use frequencies 2 MHz to 106 MHz rather than 22 to 106 MHz

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Africa Fiber in 3 Maps: Coast thriving, Center a desert

Africa in 2015 has ~400M people with mobiles despite no signal where almost a third of the population live. Ericsson counts 170M smartphones in sub-Saharan Africa in 2015 and expects a remarkable 500M more in the next five years. 3G coverage in Q1 2016 is only 43% (GSMA) but increasing rapidly. The first map, from Afterfibre, very colorfully slows the emerging fiber networks. (Red are projected.) The third, from Paul Hamilton, has similar data but less color. It's easy to see the fibre desert in Central Africa. #2 is from the remarkable Steve Song, showing the undersea cables. Almost all have been built in the last five years. South Africa is served by five cables; Kenya and most of West Africa by three. Prices are a fraction of what satellite used to charge but in many places still very high. Larger versions below.

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Hurricane's Expected Incredible Backhaul Prices to Joburg & Nairobi could kickstart Africa's Internet

Not quite as low as the $0.27/megabit price in Riga. Hurricane Electric, a major Internet backbone, is coming to Africa. Although they aren't announcing prices, I predict they will offer much less expensive backhaul/transit. Most of the continent suffers from brutally high, cartel-like prices for wholesale connections. If HE prices as I expect they will, that could easily reduce consumer Internet prices by 15% to 35%. In turn, that will allow tens of millions more to connect.  

In 2012 at the WCIT, a dozen Africans told me the high cost of transit/backhaul was by far the most important international obstacle to bringing the Internet to more Africans. A friend of mine was quoted $70/megabit for a Gig-E in Lagos last year. The cost in most European or American cities would be between $0.50 and perhaps $4.00. The current high price of backhaul raises the cost of a robust broadband connection probably $10-20 over what it could be.  Even a second-rate service with a low cap is probably $5 more expensive than necessary.  

There is a real cost involved carrying data 6,000 miles undersea but that explains only a small part of the 50-1 difference in the price between London and most of Africa. Most coastal countries are now served by more than one undersea cable.

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50 Million Chinese Fiber Home Connections Added in 2015. 130M Total, Unbelievable But True.

120M Chinese have fiber home connections, more than the entire rest of the world. That's actual connections (including businesses), not availability or homes passed. When I first saw that figure in Google translation from the Chinese, I thought it a program problem. But now the authoritative Point-Topic data confirms it. P-T counts 213M Chinese connected at the beginning of this year, a number confirmed by financial filings and government data.

The Chinese government decided a few years ago that a faster Internet was good for the country. They made it so, with the cooperation of government-controlled carriers.

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Gigabit+ Upstream Cable Possible with Full Duplex

Years away, while DOCSIS 3.1 can do an upstream gigabit today. If the wireless guys think they can go both upstream and downstream on the same frequency, why can't cable? Alcatel has already demonstrated a DSL full duplex prototype. Belal Hamzeh at CableLabs believes the answer is probably yes. (Blog below.) Cable worldwide is excited, as the comments below from Australia's NBN CTO Dennis Steiger, demonstrate.

Full duplex cable won't be delivered to most customers soon, even if things go well. "If all signs remain positive, the project will transition from an innovation effort into an R&D project, open to all interested participants," Hamzeh reports. I expect it will take months even to begin the research project and more time after that for the research to yield a reliable standard. Upgrading the equipment, including the subscriber boxes, will take additional years. We all know projects like this often take longer than hoped.

Meanwhile, Verizon is winning away customers with 50 and 100 megabit upstreams. BT has begun deploying 15M lines of G.fast, also capable of hundreds of megabits. AT&T is deploying 12M lines of fiber home or G.fast. France, Spain, Korea and Taiwan are moving rapidly to G.fast and fiber home.

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