Doug on IP Comm » broadband

Comcast offers 105 Mbps to more than 40 million U.S. homes

Doug Mohney — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 15:09:39 +0000

Comcast (www.comcast.com) has announced that it’s Extreme 105 (sounds like a radio station!) broadband service is now available to more than 40 million homes in major cities across the country, including San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Denver, Chicago, Miami, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and the majority of Boston.

Pricing for the service, which includes up to 10 Mbps upload speeds, is available now for an introductory rate of … wait for it… $105 per month for 12 months as part of a triple play bundle. It also includes a wireless home networking gateway.

It’s all available through the wonders of DOCSIS 3.0. At 105 Mbps, customers can download a 4 GB movie in about 5 minutes and a standard 300 MB TV show in 20 seconds.

You look at the speed rates being offered today and you have to wonder a little bit about the FCC’s broadband plan that wanted 100 Mbps to 100 million households by 2020. Verizon FiOS offers up to 150/35 Mbps in most areas and passes 15.6 million “premises.”

The FCC National Broadband Plan was rolled out in March 2010. A little over more than one year since the release of the plan, two vendors cover more than 55 million homes with 100 Mbps.

Defenders will no doubt argue that 1) It’s homes passed, not homes buying and 2) It’s not symmetrical. Yah, ok, whatever. The point is private industry seems to be rolling along fairly well in meeting this goal without the “hand’ of government, so I’m going to be annoyed if I see people taking bows for this.

Level 3 acquiring Global Crossing

Doug Mohney — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 15:45:14 +0000

Level 3 (www.level3.com) is picking up Global Crossing (www.globalcrossing.com) for around $3 billion, including about $1.1 billion of debt on GC’s books and the rest in stock to GC shareholders. The total company will (well, would have) combine 2010 revenues of $6.26 billion and adjusted EBITDA of $1.27 billion “before synergies” (i.e., job cuts, streamlining) and $1.57 billion after “expected synergies.”

Global Crossing shareholders will get 16 shares of Level 3 common stock for each share of Global Crossing common or preferred stocked owned at closing.

Putting together the two companies is expected to add $300 million to the bottom line through “synergies” and reduce capital expenditures by about $40 million. Savings are expected to break out into 39 percent from network expenses, 49 percent from operational expense savings and 12 percent from the reduction in capital expenditures. Costs to merge the two are expected to cost between $200 to $225 million, with 55 percent coming from operational expenses (pink slips) and 45 percent for capital expenses.

In addition, the deal is expected to add Level 3’s free cash flow, improve Level 3’s credit rating, add an expanded service portfolio since Global Crossing has been focusing on adding more services, and give the combine company better reach into the enterprise between L3’s local fiber networks and GC’s services.

Singapore Technologies Telemedia, Global Crossing’s largest shareholder, will become a significant investor in Level 3 and get seats on Level 3’s board.

Some Wall Street analysts are skeptical. Piper Jaffray notes there were problems with Level 3’s earlier acquisitions, ranging from delays in integrating billing to “disruptions” in procurement and delayed installation times. However, “the company may have learned from its mistakes.”

It’ll also be interesting to see the regulatory comments. Level 3 does a lot of government business, so having a significant minority shareholder may cause some heartburn.

Cox gets 350 mile fiber network in Rhode Island

Doug Mohney — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 19:55:27 +0000

Cox has won a contract to build and operate a 350 mile fiber network throughout the state of Rhode Island.

Cox Business will build out a 48 strand fiber network that passes through 38 of the 39 towns and cities in Rhode Island for OSHEAN. The Beacon 2.0 fiber backbone will connect hospitals, colleges, universities, communities, government agencies, schools, and libraries.

Funding for the build includes $10 million in private founds and $21.7 million in a federal stimulus broadband grant.

Installation is expected to start in may 2011 with the project completion scheduled for spring 2013. Cox and the non-profit OSEAN consortium have signed an initial 20 year contract for Cox to install, maintain, and upgrade the cable, with an option to extend the contract for another 20 years.

France Telecom-Orange loads up on undersea cable deals

Doug Mohney — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 19:39:49 +0000

France Telecom Orange (www.orange-ftgroup.com) is making a heavy play into the submarine cable business. It has acquired Elettra, Telecom Italia’s submarine cable business and earlier this month announced an agreement for a new undersea cable in the Indian Ocean.

With Elettra, France Telecom will get two cable ships along with 100 percent of the Telecom Italia group. France Telecom Marine currently operates a fleet of four (4) cable laying ships and there aren’t a whole lot of the specialized vessels around the world, so this is truly a Big Deal in the infrastructure world. Elettra is valued at 20 million euros, FYI.

France Telecom now has stronger assets to service telecommunications operators in Europe, the Mediterranean basin and around Africa – perhaps one of the more strategic parts of this deal.

FT-Orange now operates in close to 20 countries in Africa and announced a deal as a part of the LION2 consortium to build a new submarine cable in the Indian ocean, running a 3,000 kilometer long cable from Kenya to the island of Mayotte and then linking to Madagascar, ending up in diverse routing for calls and data across Europe, Africa, and Asia, if you look at illustration below from FT-Orange

LION2 uses WDM and has a maximum potential capacity of 1.28 Tbps.

Verizon announces beefed-up Cloud Computing, big pipes for content providers

Doug Mohney — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 19:32:24 +0000

Verizon Business (www.verizonbusiness.com) announced enhancements to its cloud computing offering and dedicated delivery pipes for large content providers; Verizon is bragging about “flowing” up to half a terabyte per second from Internet and video content owners directly onto its network.

Verizon Computing as a Service (CaaS) now supports server cloning for rapid deployment of multiple services supporting the same app, SUSE Linux is a standard service offering, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 has been added as a “click to provision” database server option, and enterprise customers now can use virtual router and virtual private network solutiosn to connect back-end systems to Verizon CaaS and buy metered, burstable bandwidth up to 1 Gbps for surge needs.

Meanwhile, Verizon’s Partner Port Program provides direct connections with content owner servers to the Verizon network at content deliver access points across the country. The direct links allow big content providers to bypass traditional “peering” systems with multi-hop paths that can cause latency and quality issues for data delivery to end users.

The Partner Port Program is utilized by “a number of “ individual content companies as well as content aggregators that offer content delivery services to end users. Current “on-ramps” for customer network include 10 GigE and include support for IPv6 throughout the network.

Verizon plans to scale up this offering with a 100 gigabit Ethernet backbone in the “very near” future and the company is also expanding the offering to Verizon IP networks in Europe and Asia.

The emerging broadband wars

Doug Mohney — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:11:29 +0000

With members of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) flitting about dropping the broad outline of what a national broadband strategy could encompass, it is clear some service providers are much better positioned than others to live up to a goal of 100 Mbps in 100 million homes by 2020. Others are clearly scared and above it all Google has got municipalities performing cheap stunts – to borrow a phrase from Howard Stern, “Bark like a dog!”

Players who are ready to step up to the plate — See, Blair Levin, baseball analogy, wink-wink – include the cable industry and Verizon. Comcast’s Xfinity offering/marketing repackage includes a nice line about “100 Mbps soon” and they’ve nearly got all that shiny new DOCSIS 3.0 infrastructure out. Other cable companies, including Cox – my provider – are also on the DOCSIS 3.0 bandwagon, a technology capable of proving up to 600 Mbps downstream and 200 Mbps up.

Verizon’s FiOS fiber-to-the-home network is already positioned to one-up cable, however, depending on how you want to split hairs. While the company currently only sells 50 Mbps as its max speed, this is due to marketing considerations rather than actual hardware capacity in most markets. Initial FiOS deployments started with 155 Mbps gear, but shifted to GPON – Gigabit speeds, bunkie. A couple of years ago, Verizon engineers were scoping out 10GPON and wavelength-to-the-home gear for future deployments.

Needless to say, Verizon could crank 100 Mbps to most of its FiOS plant in an eye blink – and probably will about two minutes before or after a couple of cable companies start running at 100 Mbps. Again – this is one of those “We, the phone company, think this is what you need” attitudes driven by some sort of strategic thinking that is beyond me. If Steven Jobs or the Fake Steve Jobs were in charge, he’d open up the taps and steamroller the competition.

Carriers less-than-enthusiastic about 100 Mbps to the home include AT&T and Qwest. AT&T bet that fiber-to-the-neighborhood with a copper “last yard” deliver to the home would be good enough to get by, saving the company from the expense of having to trench fiber and make all that mess, but neighborhoods have not been happy with the eyesore distribution boxes necessary to successful pull of the scheme.

Qwest, well, god bless ‘em, it doesn’t have the cash for consumer broadband builds like AT&T or Verizon have done, plus it got saddled with the long-(Wiremile) end of the stick when it comes to its customers. I have this sad feeling that Qwest will ultimately end up as a ward of the U.S. government a la GM at some point because of the lack o’ cash.

I suppose the Google-ites are chortling about Topeka, Kansas renaming their town to Google (Psst, Hey, Topeka, if any town is going to get renamed, it’ll be Mountain View, California…)

But more seriously, you’ve got municipalities setting up Facebook pages begging for Google investment and who knows what else behind the scenes. You’d think we were in the Great Depression rather than an ugly recession at some of the urgency and pleading going on to get Google to come to town and it’s only going to get worse.

Be interesting to see if The Goog actually writes a check or two, but Baltimore, seriously, come off your knees with the begging.

Google and Gigabit to the home – It smells funny

Doug Mohney — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 21:31:33 +0000

Google (www.google.com) says they’re going to invest in an “experimental” gigabit to the home network for anywhere between 50,000 to 500,000 subscribers. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this the same Google that said they were going to bid on 700 MHz wireless spectrum a couple of years ago?

Let’s look at the details on this vague and puffy blog piece–

1) Google says they’re going to have a “small number’ of trial locations across the U.S.

2) It plans to offer service at a “competitive price” to “at least” 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people – that’s a factor of TEN variance.

3) It’s all an experiment to generate next gen apps, new ways to build fiber networks, and how to teach the grubby phone companies a better way to do business

OK, I’m making up the last part, but seriously, it’s getting rights-of-way and digging ditches. Verizon and others have figured out how to put down fiber to the curb and to the home, so how is Google going to “learn something new” here?

4) It will supposedly be an “open access” network to give users the choice of multiple service providers and be managed in an open, non-discriminatory and transparent way.

5) Here’s the kicker for me: “We’re putting out a request for information (RFI) to help identify interested communities. We welcome responses from local government, as well as members of the public.”

Add on that The Goog hasn’t said how much MONEY (cash) it will invest in this “experiment” and you get a verrrrry interesting fishing expedition.

Let me speculate how this goes–

1) The Goog will “select” townships offering free rights-of-way and potentially some of that FCC broadband build out cash. Anyone expecting Google to actually p-a-y for right-of-way is probably out of luck.

2) Looking to 1), I would expect a rural build out or two or three. And a lot of splash, waiving of the American Flag, big speech, marching bands, etc.

3) Fat chance on an urban build out with the potential exception of one place – San Francisco. Comcast is the dominant home broadband provider and AT&T just hasn’t gotten its act together to deploy higher speed service beyond hyped-up DSL.

I could see Google playing some Jedi mind tricks in/on one of the San Fran municipalities — “This is the broadband you’ve been looking for…” and try to shake AT&T out of its penny-wise/pound-foolish lethargic approach to home service.

Will this play work to shame providers into more/better/faster speeds? Verizon should feel pretty secure with FiOS and AT&T just doesn’t care.

FYI for the techies out there – later deployments of Verizon FiOS (like those going into my neighborhood) use GPON (Gigabit Ethernet PON) technology, so if Verizon wants to pull a media stunt to counter Google’s hype, it could (in theory) offer Gigabit speeds to the home in newer deployments overnight

Of course, GigE to the house translates to what you put on the backend network and doesn’t THAT make for some interesting network discussions?

GAO has swine flu broadband panic

Doug Mohney — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 02:51:06 +0000

If you weren’t worried enough about getting your H1N1 shot, now the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has sounded the alarm about The Internet blowing a fuse from a sudden influx of daytime telecommuting workers bogging down broadband links, causing bottlenecks and slowdowns. It could get so bad as to slow down Securities industry trading during a pandemic — and that would be a bad thing?

GAO’s last tech-panic report had the GPS dramatically going away in a few years despite U.S. Air Force and DoD efforts to keep things rolling, so it’s hard to take them too seriously. There’s also a sense of “Huh” here since the GAO seems to be doing this on behalf of worries by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), along with a side-slam that Department of Homeland Security wasn’t doing enough to plan for such an eventuality.

According to the GAO: “Increased demand during a severe pandemic could exceed the capacities of Internet providers’ access networks for residential users and interfere with teleworkers in the securities market and other sectors, according to a DHS study and providers” (My emphasis on could in italics.)

If there’s a major pandemic, let me repeat: Should stock market trading go on as business as usual? *sigh*

But wait, there’s more!

“Private Internet providers have limited ability to prioritize traffic or take other actions that could assist critical teleworkers.”

OK, they can’t under current regulations. And who decides who a “critical” teleworker is? We’re already into slippery-slope territory here.

“Some actions, such as reducing customers’ transmission speeds or blocking popular Web sites, could negatively impact e-commerce and require government authorization. However, DHS has not developed a strategy to address potential Internet congestion or worked with federal partners to ensure that sufficient authorities to act exist. It also has not assessed the feasibility of conducting a campaign to obtain public cooperation to reduce nonessential Internet use to relieve congestion. DHS also has not begun coordinating with other federal and private sector entities to assess other actions that could be taken.”

I guess GAO missed the big stink about telecommunications firms “cooperating” with the U.S. government after 9/11 — not to mention the retroactive immunity passed in Congress. I also suspect GAO missed the whole “Net Neutrality” debate, with the Federal Communications Commission explicitly proposing rules that carriers NOT be able to prioritize traffic.

There are so many policy and network variables here that it makes my head spin to think about them. However, the GAO also finds that securities companies typically operate their own closed network that bypass public bottlenecks on the Internet

Oh yes, and the GAO believes DHS should “do more to address potential Internet congestion.” Uh huh.

I’m going to go take a couple of aspirin now…

Republican indecision delays FCC Chairman vote

Doug Mohney — Tue, 12 May 2009 17:35:55 +0000

Yesterday, the Senate Commerce Committee announced it would hold a confirmation hearing for Mr. G, Julius Genachowski, to move forward on his nomination to be chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Today, the hearing was canceled.

If you are asking “WTF?,” join the club.

Apparently, says a Wall Street Journal blog and various other mutterings of sources around Capital Hill, the Republicans threatened to boycott the hearing because lawmakers want a REPUBLICAN FCC commissioner to be bundled with Genachowski’s hearing. A new hearing won’t be scheduled until after Memorial day, thereby further delaying the process.

Of course, the Republican leadership hasn’t announced a candidate for the Republican spot on the commission. Senators are also talking about kicking Robert McDowell — one of the more honorable personages to hold a commission seat, IMHO — to the curb, which is creating further behind-the scenes machinations.

Former Commerce Department official and daughter-in-law of former Bush Secretary of State James Baker Meredith Attwell Baker appears to be the favorite pick of Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson, ranking member of the Commerce Committee.

McDowell’s term is up in June. Apparently AT&T lobbyists, lead by a former crony of former FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, want “a new slate” and since McDowell recused himself from voting on the AT&T/Bell South merger — despite pressure from Martin — now is the best time for new faces.

Doesn’t hurt tha Dallas-based AT&T contributed $44,300 in various campaign contributions to Ms. Hutchinson, who is looking to run for govenor of Texas.

The delay in approving a new commissioner at the FCC is slowing things down, since acting FCC Chairman Michael Copps is focusing on the DTV transition and doesn’t want to set policy on other issues since he knows Julius is waiting in the wings. The not-so-little matter of a national broadband plan the FCC must produce by February looms large.

Best source: Wall Street Journal blog post.

Quick pictures – Cox DOCSIS 3.0 cable modem service

Doug Mohney — Fri, 08 May 2009 19:38:14 +0000

My other piece on Cox DOCSIS 3.0 service:

Cox DOCSIS 3.0 high-speed cable service delivers – but will your home gear?

Some quick and dirty pictures of what I’m using to trial/beta Cox’s 50/5 Mbps DOCSIS 3.0 cable modem service.

Test configuration - Linksys WRT310N router and Cisco DPC3000 DOCSIS 3.0 cable modem

You’ll note brother CPE here, a Linksys by Cisco WRT 310N Gigabit router is connected to the Cisco DPC3000 modem supplied by Cox.

Closeup of Cisco DPC3000 DOCSIS 3.0 modem in action

There’s nothing really special about on the front plate; it’s the same blinky lights as you’d find on a DOCSIS 2.0 modem. On the back side, there’s the stock trio of coax cable in, 10/100 Ethernet out, and a USB 2.0 port.

Comparison of generations - DOCSIS 2.0 vs 3.0 cable modems

For kicks, I put the DOCSIS 3.0 gear on top of the representative 2.0 gear; you’ll note the DOCSIS 3.0 cable modem and its power supply is petite in comparsion to the (Toshiba) 2.0 cable modem generation. This isn’t singling Toshiba; the form factor of the DOCSIS 2.0 gear is more or less the same, regardless of vendor.