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The greatest favor you can do this reporter is to correct errors, whether of fact or analysis. I'll update this as quickly as I can get to it; apologies I am so far behind. Over ten years, I believe the most significant errors I've made have been overestimating the growth rate of the Internet ("Doubling every 120 days") for too long, expecting a more rapid shift to VDSL from ADSL, and an (apparently) mistaken report that Time Warner Cable was ready to sell the New York franchise area. All had senior and reliable sources, but that's not an excuse.

If I discover a mistake in anything I reported or put forth publicly  I believe it's my obligation to offer a correction. That's not just errors I make, but also errors in others I quoted or even a projection that proves mistaken years later.

40 Gigabit WDM PON from LG-Ericsson

Saturday, 12 February 2011 02:01

The original of this article was a huge error based on my misreading the press release. This probably is a 1.25 Gig WDM PON, with 32 wavelengths, not  40G per wavelength.

June 28 In the initial web posting of the Alcatel story.  I confused Alcatel's 100G long range optical unit with their 100G edge router. Alwan pointed out to me this may be the first time one company had the first units in both categories for a new generation.

March 10

Clarification
Linley Gwennap wondered why I was so sure that before 2020 90% of U.S. homes will be connected, wired or mobile. Far more than 90% of homes will have at least one mobile with the web built in, but will data service be turned on for everyone? I'm pretty sure that at least some data will be in nearly all bundles, but a prediction like that 10 years out should have been hedged.

April 3

I should not have written "CETF, entirely funded by AT&T and Verizon with $60M, is being given control of California's $B share of the broadband stimulus." I should have written something like "CETF, entirely funded by AT&T and Verizon with $60M, is playing a crucial leading role in California's $B request for broadband stimulus."

First, while CETF and others in California claim $1B is California's "fair share," the program is not designed to allocate money by state but rather to fund projects that meet the goals, primarily jobs and reaching the unserved. My comment was sloppy, as a senior D.C. person reminded me. They probably will get the billion, as House Leader Pelosi and key Senator Feinstein push hard for money for their state.

More important is that I should not have attributed to CETF decisionmaking over the entire California broadband stimulus. A senior source tells me that while CETF is taking the lead on some aspects, the PUC is reserving others. I was working from comments from people being told that if they wanted broadband stimulus money in California they should go to CETF and that California intended to prepare a single list of  recommended programs to fund.

The substance of the article, that Verizon and AT&T nominees were half of the board of the organization, remains true

March

Two years ago, I wrote a strong piece that the AT&T-BellSouth merger conditions had a huge hole. AT&T could bypass the “net neutrality” requirements by limiting the reliable speeds of their DSL network and forcing TV over the net to pay to be on their IPTV network. Tim Wu strongly disagreed, believing that for political reasons AT&T wouldn’t do that. Tim was right. AT&T has maintained the quality of their DSL backhaul so that video is rarely degraded. They haven’t even made a commercial offer for content delivery over their IPTV network; no one would buy it given the regular Internet is working so well. I don’t know whether that’s politics, as Tim projected, or simply that Microsoft’s IPTV software doesn’t work that well yet. In either case, vigilance remains necessary. Randall Stephenson, now AT&T CEO, several years ago told Wall Street he intended to collect from any TV over the net. I came to the dispute when Thursday December 28, 2006 AT&T released proposals with loopholes big enough to reverse everything they were promising. I stayed up most of the night getting the facts and making sure other reporters had them as well, who created a tempest. Friday morning, debate was intense, with the strongest defenders of the open Internet defending AT&T. That afternoon, the word came down the FCC approved the merger.

What I didn’t know is that what looked like an AT&T power move had been carefully negotiated with D.C. activists, and the vote was a foregone conclusion the day before. The activists believed that AT&T concessions in principle were crucial and decided to go along. I saw the technical details meant there was no substance to AT&T’s commitments. The D.C. folks - most good friends - were inside the FCC veil of secrecy. They believed they had a good compromise, because AT&T wouldn’t take advantage of the loophole.

I’m very glad they were right.

February:

Apologies to Dennis François of KPN and Steen Garbers Enevoldsen for the mis-spelling.

In calculating AT&T’s DSL figures for the last quarter, I apparently used a number for their U-Verse IPTV, not U-Verse data.  I’m probably off by 15K. Thanks to Lawson Key for catching that. Correcting an error is always a favor to a reporter.

Eli Noam points out to me I was offbase saying the 1990's U.S. FCC team drove the belief "competition is job #1" and "deregulation is job #2." Since they are coming back to power in the U.S. (Jules was counsel 1994-1996, Blair, Reed, Kevin Werbach and Don Gips were on the transition team,) I've been reading what they wrote at the time. Kevin's 1997 essay is a very clear presentation of these competition+deregulation = nirvana ideas, but Noam finds many precedents I didn't know. Apparently, that was the general consensus around the Western world around 1990. Two decades later, it's become clear that strong competition is unlikely in many parts of telecom. Where competition succeeds (French broadband) it requires very strong regulation. The normal trend in this business is consolidation, Eli's Columbia colleague Raul Katz points out. The history of the nirvana approach is important today, because I haven't met a policymaker with consistent ideas about what to do when competition is weak. It's a tough question.

Corrections from 2008

Corrections from 2007

Corrections from 2006

Corrections from 2005

"One-tenth of BellSouth customers should have 50Mbps+ service from fiber to the curb," I told DSL Reports. That was because BellSouth had promised the same to Kevin Martin in return for killing unbundling on those lines. AT&T has killed the project now, and Martin hasn't done anything about it. That's a surprise, because many of those lines are in Kevin's home state of North Carolina, where he hopes to run for office. I don't think Kevin wants his opponent to say "100,000 of thousands of you have an Internet connection that's 50-90% slower than it should be because Kevin Martin did nothing when AT&T broke a committment to deliver those speeds." I also said "by late 2006, VDSL2 low profile will be within $10 of the cost of ADSL, most carriers will switch over even for the small improvement." The price was about right, and several did switch, including Deutsche Telekom. But most carriers held off because of issues of power, heat, line card capacity, and interoperability. I made the mistake of believing the CEOs of the chipmakers and others who promised to solve those problems quickly. In 2008, BT and others are making the switch, but some of the issues are still not solved. DSL Forum folks - what happened to the interoperability you expected two years ago?

Corrections before 2005

One of my worst errors of analysis was from 1999 until I met Andrew Odlyzko. I had heard from FCC Chairman Bill Kennard, AT&T Chairman Mike Armstrong, and MCI's John Sidgmore "Internet Traffic is doubling every 120 days." I believed them, although we later discovered it was wildly untrue. I used that figure to extrapolate that by mid-decade the average U.S. home would require over a megabit of committed bandwidth, and present that idea to the DSL Forum in a speech. Odlyzko, a world class mathematician who then worked at AT&T Labs, discovered the numbers everyone was quoting were totally contradictory, as I discovered at a Columbia University CITI event. I went up to him afterwards, and said he couldn't be right, quoting a slew of seemingly informed people including his own company's Chairman. Andrew told me to "just look at the data." I did, he was right, and I was one of the first journalists to report that "everyone" was overestimating Internet growth. I got props from some for predicting the Internet bust that came soon after, but I've always remembered how long and publicly I made the same mistake. Andrew, now a friend, is at the University of Minnesota and burst another myth with his MINTS database. Internet traffic is growing rapidly, but the rate of growth is essentially flat to down since 2002. http://www.dtc.umn.edu/mints/home.php The average speed of the net is going up, not down. Extraordinary amounts of money have been spent suggesting the Internet is collapsing unless the lobbyist get what they want. Analysts at Deloitte, Bernstein, Nemertes and others made what I assume were honest mistakes that they haven't corrected despite overwhelming evidence. Their mistakes have been amplified so effectively that journalists at the London and New York Times, Guardian, and other many regulators (Ed Richards, Debbie Tate) believe some total nonsense. (Thank you, Bruce, Craig, Larry, Bob, Jim, Bob, Tom,  and the rest. You're incredibly effective at persuading people.)

E veryone make errors and it's the responsibility of any reporter, scholar or analyst to visibly correct them. In practice, most publications correct obvious errors when pointed out, such as when the Times mis-spelled Dave Burstein. The vast majority of errors aren't that direct, and most overt mistakes even in the most respected media go uncorrected, or simply mentioned in a letter to the editor. I believe that if I've printed something untrue, whether as my reporting or quoted from a source, a correction is the right thing to do, even if discovered five years later and no one had ever complained. I also correct in my publications similar errors I've made in other public settings, such as an industry speech or a newspaper interview.  As I moved the site to Joomla, I'm discovering with the help of hindsight many necessary corrections. It's embarrassing but the right thing to do, although before 2005 I'm including only the most important.