Cable visited the FCC and suggested the U.S. build a system like Britain's OFCOM/SamKnows. The U.K. study that found typical cable speeds within 20% of the advertised speed. The broadband planners stated "Actual median speeds lag advertised by ~50%." That's been widely quoted but seemed unlikelty to me based on what I know about U.S. networks. I've seen actual logs of major networks. The problem turned out to be bad data from Comscore. The carriers shouldn't have been surprised people have this wrong. They have been refusing for a decade to give an honest answer on speeds.
 Britain's OFCOM hired SamKnowsand GfK NOP Ltd, to put monitoring devices at 1,600 carefully selected homes. Overall, the average speed was 4.1Mbit/s or 57% of the average advertised headline speed. They fell to around 3.7 megabits in the evening peak.Cable did much better, with average speeds over 8 megabits on a line advertised as 10 megabits.
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Consumentenbond, a respected consumer group, finds that fewer than half of “20 meg” DSL subscriptions get even 10 megabits. http://bit.ly/7Nt944 This matches OFCOM's study in Britain, with cable generally within 20% and DSL often far worse. “Up to” advertisements are being misleadingly used around the world.
I'm guessing the KPN shortfall is because of long loop lengths, not congestion, but don't have the data. Ziggo cable delivered around 80% of promised speeds, and I bet some of the 20% shortfall was unavoidable system overhead, not congestion or similar problems. Most developed countries are dominated by large carriers with plenty of fiber backhaul, hence few congestion problems. Britain is going that way, with the big four taking over. Carphone, Sky, and Virgin are getting rid of their congestion problems, but smaller carriers who have to pay BT for backhaul often don't buy enough and bring down the average.
The U.S. is wildly confused about speeds ever since an FCC presentation said they typically were less than 50% of advertised. It turned out to be based on a mistake by Comscore, but has been often copied.
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Kyle McSlarrow may not yet be up to admission to the 2+2=5 club, but he's adapting remarkably well to the Democratic takeover. NCTA just awarded Jim Clyburn a "Leaders in Learning Policymaker Award." Clyburn is the House whip, a key Obama supporter, and a mas ter politician. His daughter Mignon is expected to take his seat when he retires, and meanwhile will acquire credentials as an FCC commissioner.
Cable needs to counter Clyburn's strong support from AT&T. That's the usually reclusive AT&T CEO Randall Stevenson, Hollis of ADE, Clyburn and Cohen of the CWA in the picture. I call it the $10M picture, for the amount of money from AT&T others likely to result from friends like this.
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Minimum EuroDOCSIS 3.0 downstream is 200 meg - shared - compared to 160 meg in the U.S. version. EuroDOCSIS uses 8 MHz channels, compared to 6 MHz channels in the U.S. Of course, those speeds aren't reached if more than one home is drawing bandwidth, but it's amazing how often people will come close. 100 homes in Kent are in a trial with bursts "up to 200 meg," which they will likely come close to the majority of the time. Jeff Baumgartner calls them "lucky duckies."
Virgin reminds us that "there are no wireless routers able to deliver throughput of speeds as high as 200Mb, and computers require very high specification in order to be able handle data at such a high rate." In fact, there have been frequent problems with speed tests and computer capabilities that have led to misleading low speed measures.
Virgin is far away from this as a regular offering, while the technology for even higher speeds is advanceing rapidly. Both Broadcom and TI have announced chips that bond 8 downstream channels, for 400 megabits (shared) in the EuroDOCSIS version. Henry Samueli of Broadcom invested some of his earlier chip profits in a hockey team, the Anaheim Mighty Ducks. (logo above)
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Every 3 months, 200K new homes subscribe in Germany to the booming cable business. The sub count at the end of 2008 was 1 .85M, up 87% from the previous year. They now have passed 2M. The pricing is fairly aggressive, such as the 19,90 euro modem + phone package at Kabel BW in Baden-Wuerttemberg. The largest, Kabel Deutschland, currently has a 22,90 special rate for 32 down, 2 up and a phone package. Owner Providence Equity charges 50 euro for a similar package at Spain's Ono. In two years, cable has gone from insignificant to a driver of German broadband.
19M German homes take cable, about half the country, with video availability over 70%. The service until the last few years was mostly analog TV-only delivered through housing groups and costing only a few dollars.
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50 Meg DOCSIS will reach well over 60% next year, as Cox's new announcement brings the projection up.  Things are moving even faster around the world. The costs are so low it's a no brainer to upgrade very quickly. Cablevision said "under $100," Comcast said "under $50" and now Mike Fries of Liberty Global says it's as low as $20. He tells the NY Times "This just isn’t an expensive capital investment.”
The result is 160 Mbps (shared, downstream) service costs 6,000 yen ($60) per month at J:COM, a Liberty Global subsidiary, and they are considering speeding the upstream as well.
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 "Is it acceptable that the proposed lifeline broadband program only offer low speeds," I asked Jose Serrano, pointing our the cable and AT&T sponsored plan runs at a tenth the regular speed. "Absolutely not!" the Congressman replied. "Our students need the highest speed possible." NCTA, the cable association, calls their plan "Adoption Plus" or "A+" but it only offers the lowest tier of service, too slow for ordinary TV quality. They've said they'd revise their proposals, but with most of the broadband plan written I haven't heard any change. http://i.ncta.com/ncta_com/PDFs/AdoptionPlus_Overview_12.02.09.pdf I fear the broadband plan will limit the poor to this kind of "back of the bus" service. In 1999, all the U.S. cable modems ran at 10 megabits. In 2010, Comcast, Cox, and Cablevision have upgraded fifty millions homes to be able to get 50 megabit DOCSIS 3.0, leapfrogging all the telcos except Verizon. It's absurd to suggest 1 megabit as the right speed in 2012. That's especially true because the cablecos have 80% margins on broadband, per Wall Street's Craig Moffett. Bandwidth isn't free, but it's remarkably cheap. The difference in cost fo the carrier of 1 megabit and 10 megabit service is a few dimes. In more competitive countries, like France, everyone gets full speed. Softbank in Japan and Iliad in France have been giving full speed to all customers since about 2002. Iliad offers up to 16 megabits as part of a 30 euro triple play. Their cable rival, Numericable, is now offering 50-100 megabit DOCSIS 3.0, voice to a dozen countries, and a decent TV package for 32 euro, less than $50. If the U.S. had more than cable versus telco, we'd be seeing similar prices here.
We were in the South Bronx at Per Scholas, a community group that has trained thousands for computer jobs.
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Walt at USTA
They are only about 85% right, incidentally. Somewhere between 5% and 15% of U.S. homes will not be offered DOCSIS 3.0 by 2013 unless they change the rules of the stimulus and cable franchising. 8% of homes can't even get a cable modem today, according to Kyle at NCTA, and many of those will not be reached by 2013. Some of the rest will not be upgraded to DOCSIS 3.0. I suspected they took their claim from a Pike and Fischer press release that says "We conclude that the top cable operators will have DOCSIS 3.0 covering 100% of homes passed by the end of 2013." They forgot that millions of homes are not passed by cable and millions more that can get cable TV are not offered cable modems in any form. The cable operators below the "top" have far more unserved homes, and P & F does not claim they all will upgrade.
Sloppy, guys.
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Denmark: 5/30 Stofa Telia in Denmark is buying Motorola EuroDOCSIS 3.0 cable modems, designed for "up to 200 megabit" downstream and upstream almost as fast. They have 600K TV customers and 350K data customers, and are under strong attack from electric utility fiber. No details yet on deployment.
USA: 5/30 Comcast has turned on downstream 3.0 in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Delaware, and California. They are going to raise "peak" speeds to 100 megabits shortly. The telcos will respond with fear, uncertainty, and doubt which will be highly believable because Comcast is unlikely to give solid data about actual speeds. The performance of DOCSIS 3.0 is outstanding so far, and there's no good reason Brian should just say "The peak speed is 100 megabits, and customers receive 50 megabits over 90% of the time." I bet the real number is in the high 90's, but nearly no one believes that because cablecos are holding back the data.
USA: 5/30 Cox made the politically foolish move of launching first in Lafayette, Louisiana, where they are being criticized for unfair delaying tactics against the local independent. The second market is the D.C. suburbs in Virginia, and they intend to move very quickly, with a goal of 2/3rds of their territory in 18 months. Charter has launched in St. Louis.
Portugal: 5/30 TV CABO is using the open set top software from Jungo for their DOCSIS gateway. Smart operators watch Jungo closely because owner Rupert Murdoch could make open gateways a factor in many markets. |
Eric Rabe of Verizon needs to either present some evidence or pull off the Verizon policy blog, "Cablevision is offering very high speed service to a very limited number of customers. It is a parlor trick." Actually, around the world, services like Cablevision's new "101 megabit" offering generally do consistently hit 80-100 meg on speed tests, and rarely fall below 50 meg, Verizon's current top speed on FiOS.
The best way to resolve this is with facts. Verizon has hundreds of employees living in Cablevision territory. For less than the cost of an attack ad, a statistically relevant sample can sign up and test the service in the next few weeks. If Cablevision's service doesn't deliver 50 megabits 95% of the time, I'll report the test results with a big headline twice. (50 meg is Verizon's current top speed.)
In theory, Verizon certainly could be right. 160 meg shared would be blown out by even six to ten users all wanting peak speeds. In practice that's surprisingly rare.
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"We' ve received hundreds of phone calls," Congressman Eric Massa's spokesman tells me. "The Congressman will take all steps necessary to prevent this from happening," Jared Smith added, and he will be looking into antitrust issues. Rochester New York is part of Massa's district, and they are hopping mad about TWC's plans to cap their Internet use.
Massa is a decorated veteran of 24 years in the Navy, not a political hothead.
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With word from Cox they intend to do two-thirds of their territory by 2010, I've raised the estimate for 2010 to 75 million U.S homes able to get 50 megabit service DOCSIS 3.0 by 2010-2011, more than half the country. At  least half of the remainder will be covered in 2012-2013. 20+ million are ready today: 17M at Comcast, and Cablevision is ready to turn on 5M more. I've also raised my estimates of Time Warner and other companies after Saul Hansell in the NY Times reported DOSCIS upgrade costs as low as $20.
Few outside industry circles has thought this through, although it's a technological breakthrough that will change the Internet and should revolutionize policy thinking.
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Brian Santo at CED sagely notes "The announcement about trialing HD on a 4G network was short on details." I asked Cox what bit rate they tested, but they won't make that public. Cable video programming is multiplexed so there is no simple figure, but HD on AT&T runs at 6.5 megabits (last public announcement). Cable TV has similar quality so a single video stream requires about the same bit rate. On the other hand, some of the web video services are encoding 720p well below 2 megabits and calling it "HD". That's a different experience on demanding programming but possibly fine for a mobile handset. The actual performance of LTE is critical to broadband planning. One of the biggest issues when I go down to D.C. these days is how much LTE will substitute for DSL/cable at the low end. The heart of the broadband plan is going to be making more spectrum available with the thought the resulting competition will bring down the price. I've some good guesses, but no one is really sure what the performance under heavy load will be and how that will compete with DSL/cable.
Newsday imploding at Cablevision
Jimmy Dolan spent $650M to buy the Long Island newspaper less than two years ago and now is losing money at a rate of $10M/year. (NY Observer) He didn't realize just how bad the newspaper business is going. So they are trying a pay wall, to which NYO reports they have 35 subscribers. Not 35,000, 35. Admittedly, print and Cablevision TV subscribers don't have to pay, but that's astonishingly low. Meanwhile, the staff is in revolt, voting strike rather than accept a 10% pay cut. He made a mistake thinking it might be fun to own a newspaper.
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Mike Robuck in CED reports Thomson and Pace will probably receive a 3 year waiver of the CableCard requirement. They meet the “low-cost, limited-capability” exception the FCC applied to the Evolution Broadband DTA. CableCards are required so consumers can choose different set top boxes, including those built into TVs. I don't think a market for better or cheaper DTAs will ever develop so there's not much point in encouraging competition while requiring CableCords would add significantly to the price.
Tony Werner's (picture) Comcast is using these $35-$50 digital to analogue converters to go all digital across their 25M homes. That's over 2 gigabits of DOCSIS capacity, about 200 HD channels, or some combination. They will need the room as more and more viewers move to unicast, mostly for timeshifting. Currently, Comcast is less than 10% unicast, but heavy use of network DVRs and video on demand will drive up that ratio.
Comcast is also introducing switched digital, which will give them near-infinite channel capacity at low cost. This point to another goal for good government work: must-carry low power TV and minimal cost for any network that wants access to the customers. Most U.S. cablecos will be SDV by 2012-2013, which will drop the cost of adding a network to very low - $100's in many cases.
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J:COM reports they reached 1,518,700 high speed customers, up 259K or 21% from a year ago, despite near-universal competition from fiber. During the same period, DSL fell dramatically across Japan. J:COM was one of the first to offer over 100 megabit downloads at a reasonable price, only $5 extra. They've reported that 26% of new customer take the highest tier. Parent company Liberty is looking closely at upstream 100 meg as well, which their equipment is ready to support with a very modest upgrade.
J:COM's has a service I've not encountered elsewhere: earthquake warning. For a fee, they provide a dedicated box that not merely gives a loud warning but also calculates when the quake is likely to hit that particular neighborhood. They get the information automaitically from Japan's monitoring network, including the predicted epicenter. The box in each house calculates how many seconds before the quake hits.
Warnings over the network make sense for everything from exurban forest fires to hurricanes. The technology is there for a broadband network to reach a targeted population almost instantly. Is there a bear loose in Highland Falls? Should everyone stay indoors until the Police chase the bear back into the woods?
Can your network provide the warning?
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Your phone service sucks, unless you are one of the handful using the new high bit rate codecs. Jeff Pulver and Dan Berninger – the VON  team – are doing the HD Communications Summit in New York on May 21. Think CD player vs. old transistor radio. I've been a true believer since I heard demos from GIPS at VON years ago. The difference is startling. Any cableco who switches over will have a huge advantage over telcos, enough to totally change the battle for customers. Some telcos in Europe are switching over, with Thomson promoting the technology heavily.
*** HD voice could change everything. Jeff Pulver and Dan Berninger the VON team are doing the HD Communications Summit in New York on May 21. Any large voice carrier not looking at this is putting their future at risk. Code "DAVEB" gets you 20% off http://www.amiando.com/hdcomm.html (ad) See you there, or at Jeff's June 16 event The 140 Characters Conference. Tweet tweet
The better codecs are why Skype calls over half a dozen hops on the public Internet often (but not always) sound better than regular calls across town.
The problem, of course, is that both ends of the conversation need to be on the same system. That keeps most independents out of the game, but makes it natural for an incumbent with a large local base. If Cablevision did Long Island, they'd have better voice than Verizon. Someone like that will soon show the way, and I predict remarkable results.
From Dan's “The HD Connect Manifesto”
There exists no difference between the end user experience of a telephone call in 1959 and 2009. The wireless industry made telephone calls mobile. The VoIP industry made telephone calls cheap. Yet, every penny of voice revenue requires the sale of a 1950 quality telephone call. Reversing the declining fortunes of voice requires the industry to finally get around to improving voice quality.
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Bravo to Time Warner Cable for a new low-end offering for people who don't use the Internet very much. The marginal cost of each broadband customer is somewhere between $5 & $8/month at a large carrier like TWC, so even a $15 price makes a significant contribution to the company. Verizon and AT&T have often used $15 prices to win customers away from dialup, and it makes sense to have a low end in a recession.
But Time Warner still faces a thunderstorm from those who believe that their price increases/caps are unjustified. Congressman Massa is talking antitrust, they are ducking questions from the N.Y. Times,
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 6M or 7M of Cox's 10M homes will soon be able to connect at 50 meg or more as they roll out DOCSIS 3.0. CTO Chris Bowick told Brian Santo of CED Cox would be reaching some markets in 2009 and many by 2010. Cox's Dave Grabert confirms "DOCSIS 3.0 will be further deployed in 09 and 2010, culminating in deployment to around two-thirds of our customers in 2010," although he adds that might change "based on competitive factors." I'd guess upstream will become common in 2010 as well, based on the results of trials now in Japan and soon at Comcast.
I've therefore updated the DOCSIS Chart, where I now project easily 60% U.S. coverage by 2010. Comcast is starting upstream trials Q4 2009, and I expect Cox will not be far behind.
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