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Monday, 08 February 2010 17:23 |
 "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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Wednesday, 20 January 2010 04:06 |
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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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Wednesday, 03 February 2010 00:00 |
 Switched digital video over the next three years will allow carriers inexpensively to transmit every program you can imagine. The tyranny of the cable package should disappear. This sounds like science fiction, but BigBand alone is shipping enough lines for 1/3rd of U.S. cable customers, and Verizon is ready to jump in. Traditional cable sends every channel to every customer. A 400 channel system needs enough bandwidth to 400 channels all the way to each home. A switched system only sends the 50-100 channels currently being watched, switching in any channel a user requests. For now, it's a way to get 100 HD and 800 SD channels to every home; soon, it will allow individual streams (Startover, timeshifting, network DVR.) The cost today is $2-5/month per home served. That will drop. Around 2012, everything from 5,000 channels through personalized ads on personalized programs, will be practical. That specifically includes LPTV, which the FCC wants but I agree is too expensive today.
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Tuesday, 04 August 2009 20:34 |
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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Wednesday, 27 January 2010 19:59 |
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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Friday, 19 June 2009 22:26 |
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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