Category Archives: Broadband

U.S. Presidential Candidates per WCA

The Wireless Communications Association International (WCA) has put up a website it says is:
…the authoritative go-to resource for comments by – and comparisons between – top U.S. policymakers regarding the pace and benefits of broadband deployments. The ongoing U.S. Presidential election campaign already features the policy positions of the candidates. Broadband services play a vital role in a host of areas in both the North American and world economies. These much-sought benefits go beyond consumer desires to include community economic development in rural and urban regions, plus critical applications in education, public safety, military preparedness and disaster response.

— WCA Thought-Leaders Forum: U.S. Presidential Candidates Debate Broadband, accessed 13 June 2007

It’s somewhat unfortunate that it’s phrased as Broadband, not Internet policy, but given the membership of WCA, that’s understandable. I can’t tell at first glance how thorough it is. They ask for comments.

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Slow and Expensive U.S.

Larry Cohen, President, CWA Speed is trivial, but you’d think we could do better than this:
The average broadband download speed in the US is only 1.9 megabits per second, compared to 61 Mbps in Japan, 45 Mbps in South Korea, 18 Mbps in Sweden, 17 Mpbs in France, and 7 Mbps in Canada, according to the Communication Workers of America.

— US high-speed Internet is slow, Submitted by Canada IFP, Press Esc, on Sun, 2007-05-20

And as we’ve seen, that list of countries could soon include Hong Kong and India, because they’re taking the problem seriously. More interesting was this was said to. Continue reading →

Speed Is Trivial

Sometimes Bob Frankston makes me shake my head in wonder:
Speed is trivial — the dial up modem completely trounced the entire Interactive TV industry thanks to the web which gave people a reason to find their own solutions without waiting for a service provider to deign to provision a path. As long as you don’t over-defined the solution you’ll get speed — it’s hard not to.

— Re: We’re Stuck In The Slow Lane Of The Information Trollway — it’s all about the billing relationship, Bob Frankston, Interesting People, Sat, 12 May 2007 20:13:50 -0400

Yes, back in the 1990s, video on demand and interactive TV were the big plans of the cablecos and telcos. They tried it. Users didn’t buy it. Instead, participants bought modems and the web boomed. Continue reading →

Content-Delivery Supply-Chain Usefulness

Susan Crawford hits the broadband nail on the head:
What content-delivery supply-chain usefulness is broadband providing?

—For, by Susan Crawford, Susan Crawford blog, 9 May 2007

That’s the question you get if you’re in a corporate strategy meeting trying to decide where this broadband thing fits in with your core competences. That plus they’ll be thinking purely in terms of broadband, because that’s their product, not the Internet. There’s nothing wrong with that, except when there are only a couple of first-mile ISPs deciding the answer for all their users. And the answer in such cases tends to be “video on demand” or “IPTV” or “our search engine”. Corporations are designed to maximize their own profits, not to think in terms of a supply chain that delivers participation, innovation, and prosperity for the general welfare. Continue reading →

Internet Neutrality

Derek Woodgate makes a very basic point that what we really need is Internet neutrality, not “non-internet services carried over broadband networks”. After all, the whole point of having an internet instead of the original ARPANET was to have a network of networks, run by many different parties. Derek is a futurist, and he understands the technical underpinnings of the Internet, and he understands their importance in “[P]reserving the internet as an open platform for speech and innovation without gatekeepers or centralized control”.

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FCC and Wireless Broadband

As we’ve seen, the FCC is trying to decide what to do with some 700Mhz commercial spectrum. Now we hear that:
The upcoming auction of wireless spectrum in the 700MHz band presents an opportunity for wireless technology to be a third broadband pipe beyond just DSL and cable Internet, Martin said.

&mdash FCC chairman champions wireless broadband access, Upcoming spectrum auction viewed as opportunity, By Paul Krill, InfoWorld, May 03, 2007

FCC Chair Kevin Martin said this at Microsoft offices in Mountain View, CA. One has to wonder why he’s announcing a purported competition measure at the offices of the world’s most famous monopoly. But nevermind that. Continue reading →

Early Termination Fees?

Does your cable Internet provider charge an early termination fee?
Several providers — including cable giant Comcast — assured us that they did not impose early termination fees, which we reported as part of our blog item.

So imagine our surprise when someone sent us a copy of a recent Comcast memo to a county official in Virginia about a looming rate increase, which, way down at the end, in a footnote, contained the following:

“Two year term agreement required. $150 early termination fee applies if any service is cancelled or downgraded during the 2 year period.”

Now That You Mention It, We Do Charge Early Termination Penalties… by Bob, hearusnow.org, at 04/18/07 01:15 PM

How could that be? Continue reading →

Industrial Internet Policy

Susan Crawford posted a laundry list of countries that have an industrial policy (she prefers economic policy) involving the Internet:
  • South Korea: “the government said where they wanted to go, invested in research and development, [and invested money and made micro loans], and they’re now seeing 70% of adults (not just kids) involved in online social networks. Very high speeds, very low cost.”
  • Hong Kong: “also not embarrassed to talk about economic policy and telecom.”
  • India: its “government ‘proposes to offer all citizens of India free, high-speed broadband connectivity by 2009.’”
  • Japan: Have I mentioned lately that almost every Japanese can get broadband, and usually it’s ten times faster than what we can get stateside?
Now the point here isn’t whether the specific country government policies are good, bad, etc. Continue reading →

Ramping Capacity

Hands Off the Internet notes that all major TV networks suddenly (since last year) stream programs over the net, and concludes:
But it’s also a timely reminder of how these deals are placing unprecedented strain on the web’s capacity. Internet traffic growth surged past capacity growth last year. Average traffic was up 75 percent while capacity grew only 47 percent, according to the folks at TeleGeography.

— Katie Couric, Expensive Date, Hands Off the Internet, April 20, 2007 at 12:55 pm

Poor telcos and cablecos; straining to keep up. Continue reading →

U.S. Number 25 Worldwide

While the U.S. is number 15 out of 30 OECD countries in broadband users per capita, U.S. is number 25 among all countries worldwide as of the end of 2006. That last according to a survey by Point Topic, as interpreted by websiteoptimization.com, whose writeup also contains more legible versions of graphics from the OECD report than the OECD report itself has (wso uses HTML while OECD used proprietary formats).

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