February 07, 2008
Reed Hundt and EDUCAUSE are Wrong - And here's why...
Everyone from Reed Hundt to EDUCAUSE has called for a $25/50/100 billion investment in making fiber available to every home in the United States to provide at least 100 Mbps of broadband from sea to shining sea, along with picking up all businesses along the way. But they're all wrong, wrong I tell you... Wireless is the way to go, ba-be.
Let's ignore the fact for a moment that the new guy in the White House in 2009 -- Republican or Democrat -- is going to have a serious challenge digging up $100 billion to throw into a glorified public works project that (under some proposals) would do nothing more than recreate the glory days of the old Bell System in fiber, except with Net Neutrality provisions for access (Maybe).
Let's also ignore the fact that, quite on their own, the cable companies and the telcos are leapfrogging their way up to 100 Mbps (and higher) speeds on their existing customer bases. (Hello! Verizon can deliver 100 Mbps tomorrow if they just got the product marketing people out of the way, Hello!) You'll see cable companies talk about DOCSIS 3.0 and that's good for around 160 Mbps or so per household.
So, without spending a dime of (your) tax money, there are a bunch of market and competitive issues that will bring faster speeds to many households in the next few years and bring us up on the too-often-quoted World Per Person Broadband speed indexes, so we can start catching up to South Korea, Japan, and the others ahead of us.
We need to take a page from the (so called) developing world - wireless. There are three (3) issues that are interlinked here: one technology, one economic, and one social.
TECHNOLOGY: LTE is king of the hill. AT&T has decided to join the LTE bandwagon, joining Verizon Wireless and the rest of the GSM world, so we have a growth path for a world-wide cellular high-speed broadband technology. First generation LTE is promising speeds of at least 100 Mbps to handsets/users and there's already some lab testing for using more channels and 4 MIMO-linked antennas to do 300 Mbps.
The WiMAX crowd is not standing still; they realize LTE is coming to gun for them, so you'll likely see a rapid push in IEEE world to get a 2nd generation WiMAX standard refined, defined, and out the door. How fast will 2nd gen WiMAX be? Likely fast enough to be put side by side LTE in (so called) developing world countries and be a good deal.
ECONOMIC: Digging trenches is expensive. Bless the guys at Verizon for biting the bullet and pulling fiber to the home in order to put the sweats on cable (and to find new revenue streams as people disconnect their second lines for cell phones and DSL for cable modems). But, still, it's expensive, it is disruptive, and it is man-power intensive. Requires a lot of infrastructure.
Now the (so called) developing world doesn't have the institutional biases or legacy infrastructure/mindset having wires everywhere. Yes, this is a contrary view, but stick with me. You put up the cell tower. To go faster, you upgrade the handsets and upgrade the electronics on the cell tower. And that's it. No truck rolls. No trenches. No guy symbolically cutting your copper...
SOCIAL: Let's face facts -- Many people under the age of
It would not surprise me if today's toddlers grow up to consider wall-based broadband connectivity (cable or fiber) as "quaint" and something that Grandpa had back in his day to send text-based e-mail...
If you already can get 100 Mbps out of your cell phone, why are you going to pay more money for a landline connection (Maybe as a way to feed the femtocell or get pay-per-view on the big screen).
My meta point here is that people have been pimping the idea of 100 Mbps fiber to the home for almost a decade in some form or another and wireless is going to blow straight by it in terms of technology, economics, and social use.
Of course, there's probably some not-so-minor details about spectrum that I'm glossing over, but LTE and WiMAX usage over the next few years will only drive competing companies into pestering regulatory agencies (here in the States, the FCC) to free up more spectrum.
Posted by dmohney at 03:49 PM | Comments (0)
February 01, 2008
A coming building boom in Mid-East Undersea Cabl
A pair of cable cuts affecting India and nations throughout the Middle East are likely to spur proposals for more fiber optic cable in the region over the next twelve months, as well as a review of satellite capacity.
Information, not oil, is the rising coin of power for many nations. Bahrain, UAE, Qatar and Kuwait easily have the cash to spend to upgrade redundancies in their telecommunications infrastructure, and they are likely to want to move fast to get more capacity in.
Will India benefit from this building boom? Interesting question. If you want redundant connections out of the region to the East, certainly they would pass through/by India.
In an ideal world, the Gulf states would be able to pull fiber to their west than north through Iraq, then go across Turkey into Europe. But....
Who knows? I wouldn't put it past some daring(crazy) company to 1) Cut a deal with the Iraqi for a right-of-way through the country and 2) Figure out a way to keep things stable enough to lay fiber up to some connection point in Turkey. Plus 3) Pull fiber over the mountains of Turkey...
Posted by dmohney at 11:52 AM | Comments (0)