Broadband

St. Paul, Minnesota looks at fiber to the home

acohill — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 14:18:52 -0700

The City of St. Paul is taking a serious look at fiber to the home as part of a community broadband effort for the city. A local group has started a Web site that has a lot of good information on it.

U.S. Broadband: Almost as good as Nigeria?

acohill — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 08:28:25 -0700

Nigeria is using a high performance network for the national post office (1,500 locations) to jumpstart community broadband connectivity. A new national backbone will be built, using the post office needs as an anchor tenant. But the high performance network will be designed to support other community broadband and service needs.

This could work well in the U.S. at the regional and state level, and in fact, states like New Mexico are already studying just that--using state library, telemedicine, and research network needs to serve as the backbone for an open network available to businesses, residents, and service providers (Disclaimer: Design Nine was hired by the State of New Mexico to do that study).

Private, single use networks are expensive and often limit economic development potential, because a dedicated K12, health, or state agency network usually can't be shared with the private sector. By building a single high performance network like the one planned for Nigeria, several anchor tenants can help offset the cost and not only lower the cost of telecom for their own organization but for the whole community as well. Some places in the U.S. are planning these networks, including the Eastern Shore of Virginia Broadband Authority.

5% of users consume 50% of Internet bandwidth

acohill — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 06:24:41 -0700

Slate has an article about a phenomenon that network administrators have known for many years: a handful of Internet users gobble up a huge portion of bandwidth. Five percent of users typically consume 50% of a service provider's total capacity.

This may sound like bad news, but after toying for years with really poorly thought out policies like just cutting users off without notice, some of the providers are beginning to implement bandwidth pricing changes. For a basic DSL or cable modem subscription, you get so many gigabits per month. If you use more than that, they turn the meter on and start charging you by the gigabit used.

This is the first step towards a more rational approach to charging for network use. Instead of punishing their best customers (the old policy), the service providers are finally implementing price policies that communicate the real cost of bandwidth to users. So users can have all the bits they want, but they have to pay for them.

Eventually, most networks will move away from this model and towards a service oriented model, which is already happening in places like Danville, Virginia and the Blue Ridge Crossroads area of southwest Virginia. Businesses and residential users are really only interested in services, and forcing them to calculate how many bits a phone call or a YouTube video will use up is an inconvenience. What would work better is simply placing a price on the service, rather than on the bits used by that service. This is already beginning to happen with things like VoIP phone service, and as IP TV availability increases, charging by the bit will gradually disappear. For now, it is a step in the right direction.

Internet growth continues to double every two years

acohill — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 07:38:03 -0700

New data for 2007 and 2008 shows that the Internet demand has continued to grow significantly year to year, with an aggregate growth rate of doubling every two years. Growth is "down" slightly from 2007 to 2008, meaning the rate has dropped from 61% to 53%, which is still a huge increase, and is consistent with the fifteen years of data we now have on Internet bandwidth demand.

Power and broadband drive economic development

acohill — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 07:25:19 -0700

In a series of broadband planning meetings earlier this week, I heard about several companies that were seriously considering moving their operations to another city if the local electric power infrastructure was not improved. The firms said they were experiencing multiple outages per month that often lasted an hour or more.

It is not just "old" manufacturing businesses that are vulnerable to electric power interruptions. Any firm that uses IT to manage their business (i.e. almost all businesses) can be affected by power outages, and sudden power outages can not only stop business and manufacturing processes, but can also stop ecommerce as well, if the servers taking orders are offline because of power interruptions.

Economic developers: When was the last time you asked your businesses about the reliability of their electric service? Do you want to lose a relocation prospect because of lack of quality electric power?

Broadband enables telemedicine

acohill — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 06:08:40 -0700

Widespread availability of affordable broadband should bring better access to health professionals, especially in rural areas, where some kinds of specialists are not available locally. Wired reports on the results of a new study that shows that just using relatively low cost Webcam technology for diagnosing stroke patients results in better outcomes.

The long term implications are tremendous. As communities invest in broadband infrastructure that can support HD quality video, residents of those communities can expect even better medical treatment at lower cost, especially when travel costs (and the danger to the patient of long travel times) is factored in.

NATOA calls for local government action, fiber

acohill — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:05:46 -0700

The National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors (NATOA) has called for a range of policy changes and investments that includes a guaranteed right for local governments to invest in broadband and fiber as the preferred mode of access.

Design Nine: Top 100 broadband firm in the U.S.

acohill — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 13:12:22 -0700

Design Nine has been named as one of the top 100 broadband firms in the United States by Broadband Properties magazine.

[inline:BBPTop100_Round.jpg]

Do dial up users want broadband?

acohill — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 06:37:47 -0700

The Pew folks have rolled out another hilarious study that suggests most dial up users don't want broadband.

I have observed this phenomenon for fifteen years now--much longer than the Pew folks. It is very simple, really. People that have never had a broadband connection are, in fact, likely to believe it is something that they don't want or need.

But here is the problem. The Pew folks have never asked broadband users if they would go back to dial up. And you need to ask that question in order to be able to understand the survey results of the dial up question in the appropriate context. We all know the answer we would get from broadband users: no one wants to go back to dial up. In fact, I've been asking that question to rooms full of people for many years, and I have never had a single broadband user stand up and say, "Oh yea, broadband is waaaay too fast for me. I'm switching back to dial up next week."

You need to query both groups with the complementary version of the same question if you want to be able to draw any useful conclusions.

Broadband coops catching on

acohill — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 06:34:13 -0700

We are beginning to see the broadband coop as one very viable form of governance for community broadband efforts. Coops are a great ownership and governance model because they firmly vest the enterprise in the community--every subscriber is also a shareholder in the enterprise, and shareholder/members are able to vote and select board members. The Ripton Broadband Coop serves rural customers in rural Vermont via wireless, using an open access, open service model. Two service providers are selling services on the network.