Fast Net News, DSL Prime, DOCSIS Report

The British experience needs a closer look, however. Structural separation turns out not to be a magic bullet, and in the British case is significantly holding back the speed of the Internet. While France, Holland, Switzerland and the Eastern U.S. are getting fiber at 100 meg and more, BT is doing DSL from cabinets with a misleading press campaign to call it "fiber" and "superfast." The Internet across the BT monopoly half of the U.K. will run at 50-90% slower than in much of Europe, probably for a generation. Ed Richards has been deregulating most of BT because "competition is working" while ignoring that separation creates a strong monopoly in the network itself. That monopoly needs even stronger regulation, but Richards lacks either the understanding or the strength to do anything about it. Instead of building the fiber network universally recommended by their technical staff, BT invested elsewhere and now has lost $3B on "Global Services," Ben's misguided attempt to replicate IBM. BT's market price of a third of annual sales implies The City sees a strong risk of bankruptcy. That's a legitimate fear on any telco without wireless today, including Qwest, Bell Aliant and the U.S. regionals. Losing 5-10% of lines every year is devastating, and there's little growth in broadband to make up for it. (I expect the government will bail BT and they won't go bankrupt.)

Dogs of all ages can learn new tricks. "We learn," Dr. Alan Egelman told me when I wondered why his recommendation for my blood pressure medicine reversed what he said two years before. New research had shown adding an ARB to an ACE inhibitor had additive effects. When I asked Columbia's Eli Noam why his research on media concentration seemed to contradict what he had said a few years before, he answered "I was wrong." I was wrong earlier this year when I looked at high speed wireless towers in mountainous Vermont would require fiber backhaul, I discovered when a similar hilly West Virginia ISP told me he nearly always could find a way to make wireless backhaul work and a Texas ISP said similar. Since then, I've discovered that Clearwire expects to build its nationwide WiMAX network almost exclusively using wireless backhaul and that AT&T out of territory will be primarily wireless as well.

D.C. is a city of magical thinking, with discussion often dominated by sandcastles created by interested parties. With hundreds of millions at their disposal, the 2+2=5 crowd of lobbyists can create what appears a consensus around ideas that don't stand up. If a slew of "experts" repeat something half true, it seems reasonable, and it's something people want to believe, people believe it even if a quick look at the facts reveal it to be nonsense. Here's a couple from the August FCC Broadband workshops that are not true:

There are are or will soon be significant congestion and bandwidth problems on large networks like FiOS and U-Verse.

Prima facie rebuttal: At the workshops, David Young of Verizon said that FiOS doesn't have any significant congestion problems. Senior VPs Tom Tauke of Verizon and Jim Cicconi of AT&T have been saying the same thing for three years - I have them on videotape - about their DSL networks. ("We do not degrade. If we receive at our edge a stream up to 3 megabits for a customer who has paid for 3 megabit service they will get that three megabits to their home." ) Comcast filings state the same on the downstream, and their improved upstream network has all but eliminated upstream problems as well.

Why this matters: All the talk about network management, pricing tiers, etc. is based on a need for the carriers to recover costs caused by congestion and bandwidth demand. If bandwidth is so cheap congestion is almost never an issue, then none of these are necessary. In fact, in the most competive markets (France, Japan) major networks give all customers maximum speed (up to 100 on cable and up to 24 on DSL, limited by line conditions) with no caps or very high ones (900 gigabits at NTT) and don't use traffic management. The most common arguments about net neutrality, two sided markets, etc. depend on this assumption and it is garbage. (Other arguments against NN, such as the side effects or regulation, are perfectly sensible.) There are very serious issues for many small carriers, some of whom in rural areas are paying 20 times as much as large ones for bandwidth, a problem that needs to be fixed. Wireless is a tougher question, because incremental bandwidth is more expensive. The best solution for wireless net neutrality is to rapidly increase effective bandwidth, as Washington intends.

Talking up broadband and a little training significantly increases demand.

I wish it weren't true, but broadband just doesn't seem to do much for the economy. Countries who led in broadband are also leading the economic crash. That would be very surprising if broadband had such a huge economic effect. This is not a scientific survey, but the many datapoints should point to a lie in many claims.

• Japan reported that its economy contracted at a 15.2 percent annual pace in the first quarter Washington Post

• South Korea's economy contracted 5.1 percent in the fourth quarter of last year Bloomberg

• Taiwan economy contracts record 10.24% in Q1 Agence France Press

• Iceland's economy will shrink 10.6 percent in 2009, the finance ministry said Tuesday, revising downwards an earlier forecast in January of a 9.6 percent contraction. AFP

• California's unemployment unemployment rate reached a record 11.5%, far above the national average despite being a leader in broadband.

• There's a wonderful myth that broadband is a shortcut to economic growth, but the data is unproven at best, totally bogus far too often, and probably even less true in 2009 than when collected years ago. Verizon and AT&T paid for “studies” that came to the conclusion that subsidizing VZ & T would be good for the economy. A outfit called Connect Kentucky made headlines with a claim that their “demand stimulus” program would have a $134B effect on jobs and the economy, but their own data “proves” the effort was less than useless if you read it carefully.

Worth checking again

Fiber to the Home Council, claiming cable can't deliver 100 meg. "This approach was used by Senator Rockefeller and Representative Eshoo in authoring resolutions41 in the 110th Congress that called for the United States to have universal access to 100 Mbps, bidrectional broadband service - effectively all fiber access plant - by 2015." (Emphasis added.)

DOCSIS 3.0 is designed to go up to a full gigabit, both directions, with 320 meg chips already sampling. The gig will almost certainly be available before 2015. It's shared, but on most networks should easily deliver 100 Mbps 95% or even 99% of the time, if that's what the government mandates. In practice, few people are drawing 100  meg or even a large fraction of that much of the time. (I agree fiber is better, but if cable can deliver 50 meg for under $100/home and fiber costs $1,000 reasonable policy might choose either.)

May, 2009 ITU Study Group 5 is working on environmental standards. The meeting May 25-29 in Geneva will center on development of study questions on climate and environment, and the U.S. is hoping to send a delegation. This is an important change in the U.S. approach to international standards. The Europeans have taken the lead here, with with the European Code of Conduct driving DSLAM efficiency. If you are interested, email me for an introduction. Change is happening at the State Department. Danny Sepulveda, right with his boss in the background, is one of the new people in the State Department.

Here's some notes from SG5 about their work.

The Recommendations, Handbooks and other publications produced by Study Group 5 have four main objectives. The first is to protect telecommunication equipment and installations against damage and malfunction due to electromagnetic disturbances, such as those from lightning. The second is to ensure safety of personnel and users of networks against current and voltages used in telecommunication networks. The third is to avoid health risks from electromagnetic fields (EMF) produced by telecommunication devices and installations. The fourth is to guarantee a good quality of service (QoS) for high speed data services by providing requirements on characteristics of copper cables and on the coexistence of services delivered by different providers.