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Added half a percent of the Internet's users each year over the past two decades." Iljitsch van Beijnum has captured the status in a great headline. There is no unifying force that implements Internet rules. Each of the network of networks takes its time.
While the world average is about 10%, Google's data finds the U.S. at 25%.
The Halo Effect: Announce you're offering a gig to a few thousand people and a million become more positive about your company. The pr is working well. AT&T discovered signups increased across 10X or even 100X more homes than they actually reached. At AT&T, ~5% have the option - and the large majority never will.
AT&T explains to Wall Street they believe 45-70 megabits is enough to compete with cable while teasing consumers with what's mostly a token rollout.
If so, my article that AT&T will use 400-700 megabit G.fast to five million is a mistake. AT&T's press release I just read (below) promises "Within 4 years, AT&T will offer its all-fiber Internet access service to at least 12.5 million customer locations, such as residences, home offices and very small businesses." It may well be that the pr people at AT&T don't understand the technology being used and much of the build will in fact be Fiber to the Basement and copper, probably G.fast, to the apartment. But if I may have an error, it's my job to issue a correction.
FT/Orange Spain going to 10M & 14M. Without much publicity, Spain has pulled far ahead of other large nations in fiber homes. The U.S., Italy and France have passed fewer than 25%, Germany and England less than 10%.
The center of the Internet has moved South. Carter Horney of Forward Concepts has just published a Global 4G analysis with a detailed geographical breakdown. His projection for 2018 is 315M smartphone Internet users in India and 317M Africans connected. The U.S. population is 315M, some of them under 4 years old and not connecting to the net. His estimate is close to the 300M in 2017 I projected with Cisco's help http://bit.ly/Africa300M last year.
These estimates are very rough but the trend is clear. Both India and Africa have over a billion people. $50 smartphones are affordable to hundreds of millions more than are connected today. Carlos Slim told me two years ago that $50 smartphones will connect two billion more people. He's proving right.
Verizon and Nokia refuse to wait for 2020 for 5G. Massive MIMO promises major speed jumps in the same spectrum. Testing in 2016 for Massive MIMO, beamforming and interference cancellation. Hopes for huge speed boost starting in 2017. Think 64 antennas and 5-10x throughput. Good engineers tell me it's possible but didn't expect it so soon. At the new 5GW News:
Confirms the importance of going beyond vectoring to eliminate other noise. Because I'm on the Advisory Board of ASSIA, I choose not to do any assessment of this competing product. The pr is below. Because there are almost no details of the product in the press release, I've also included a recent Broadcom patent filing for "reference noise technology" to suggest possibilities.
Gigabit (shared) to nearly all of 53M homes and businesses. Comcast is going to upgrade 40% of the U.S. to DOCSIS 3.1, offering a gigabit. Brian's boys are going to start in 2016, probably early, and continue for another year or two. Comcast VP Robert Howald dropped a bombshell. "We're testing it this year. Our intent is to scale it through our footprint through 2016. We want to get it across the footprint very quickly. We're shooting for two years," he said in Mike Dano's Fierce Cable interview. The story was picked up by the Washington Post and a dozen others. Everyone in broadband has known for years gigabit cable was on the way and now the big papers are getting the message.
"Shared" speeds will be 500+ megabits down 95+% of the time, I predict. That's similar to the 400-700 megabit speeds of AT&T's coming "gigaclear" G.fast fiber to the basement.
