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Malcolm Turnbull, likely soon Communications Minister, wants to bring down cost
Julia Gillard’s Labour government is only a vote or three from falling and far beyond in the polls for an election next year. If the opposition Coalition takes over, Shadow Minister Malcolm Turnbull will likely be in charge. He’s serious about a “Cioffi flip,” canceling the fiber home build and using VDSL over copper for the home connection.
     Turnbull made a forceful speech to the CommsDay event, asserting NBN as currently planned is “on the path to price gouging” due to heavy capex running fiber to 93% of Australian homes. They also are launching a satellite and building wireless networks for the remaining 7%. The budget is over $40B - $5,000/home for 8 million homes.    
    Turnbull is on target on one crucial point: $5,000/home is off the wall, given that the extremely remote will be served by satellite. Other large carriers are fibering for far less, even adjusting for the NBN goal of reaching 100%. Something is profoundly wrong with the NBN budget. The $11B+ being paid to Telstra to not compete is part of the problem. Turnbull wants that renegotiated; NBN is paying too much, apparently a bribe to Telstra not to fight the network.
    A second cost escalator is a schedule that goes too fast at the beginning, before the field installers develop the skills they need. Verizon deliberately went slowly the first two-three years, developing systems and crew experience. They easily met every schedule milestone after that and constitently lowered costs. At Qwest, the more experienced teams could connect a home in half the time of those with less experience.
    Much of the budget problem is clearly political choices made by a management unwilling to be tough to bring down the price. The Australian taxpayer deserves better.
    Turnbull is also right that the NBN pricing is distorted for political reasons. NBN artificially is pricing moderate speeds low and the higher speeds much higher. The price on minimum service was deliberately set at about the price of current Australian broadband. The price for the higher speeds - which cost very little more to deliver - will be much more. That misses the whole point of the NBN, which is a faster Internet for all Australians.

 3 customers, 15 trials complete. Alcatel's first to the field with announced deployments at Belgacom and Telecom Austria. Stefaan Vanhastel writes

" - we now have 3 customers: Belgacom, Telecom Austria pilot deployment in Korneuburg, + 1 other tier-1 in Europe (not yet public)

- we expect more customer announcements in the next 3-6 months

- we have 15+ trials completed, and many planned. (trials not only in Europe and NAR, but also in the Middle East, Latin America, and APAC)"

   In the lab, vectored noise cancellation (John Cioffi's DSM Level III) doubles speeds on short loops. Those results are common but not universal in the trials, with lots of issues everyone is working hard to resolve. 

   Until large carriers invest in more remote terminals and updating the networks, only a very few lucky customers will get vectored speeds.

Letting any almost company legally get all your phone and email records. CISPA would allow companies to share any information they have with government if claimed related to cyber-security. Civil libertarians hate that; others think anything done in the name of security needs to be allowed. You can and should make up your own mind on what's right. The bill (below) goes much further, including allowing essentially any company to share essentially anything with other companies. They merely need to claim it's somehow related to "cyber-security."

     But it's ridiculous to allow say Microsoft to ask Verizon for all my phone call records and who I emailed because I break a story about Microsoft, say how they price Microsoft Mediaroom that disadvantages community television. They could claim that a "trade secret" and hence intellectual property. This "cyber-security" bill provides near total protection to private companies sharing information about "theft or misappropriation of private or government information, intellectual property, or personally identifiable information."  The plain language of the bill would allow Verizon to hand over my email and phone contacts if I reported, as I have, that three separate senior FCC employees thought the Spectrum Crunch report was a fiction invented for political reasons. That's government information not officially released I may have "mis-appropriated."  Cisco, I discovered, was damned mad I reported they were offering to sell AT&T femtocells (quantity 10M) for $50 and certainly both companies believed it "private information." Especially because Cisco was selling the same unit to others at $125-150. Gucci would love to get the complete list of emails from a company they think is selling counterfeits on eBay. They could follow up with (legal) questions to every customer asking about counterfeits and probably destroy the business even if they found nothing. Think of the possibilities for a lawyer chasing "pirates" of pornography if they could get someone complete email and phone records. 

    Adding fake handbags and basic reporting makes this far more than a bill about security and totally abusive. Reasonable people may disagree about how far government should go in the name of security. But giving private companies complete access with no recourse for abuses is off the wall. So shame on Christopher Padilla of IBM, Tim McKone of AT&T, Peter Davidson of Verizon, Michael Powell of NCTA and Fred Humphries of Microsoft for their strong support of the House bill. Maybe that didn't bother to read what they were signing on to and didn't realize the bombshell built in.  At minimum, all ISPs should make clear they will not provide information outside of government unless subpoenaed. 

    Those who believe this bill is important for "security" should be the first to strip "theft or misappropriation of private or government information, intellectual property, or personally identifiable information" out so the bill isn't blocked.

Ukraine 32%, India 24%, China 20%, Brazil 19%
66M new broadband connections in 2011 brought the world total to 597M,  up 12% on the year. China added 27M and the U.S. 4M. DSL continues to dominate everywhere except the U.S. and Canada, with 61% of the market while cable has less than 20%. Below the full chart with the largest broadband nations first. Here's the same data sorted by % growth.

      The vigor of the emerging economies gave us the best growth in five years. China's 27M net adds are almost 40% of the world total. Russia's 5.6M are more than France, Germany, and Britain combined. Add Brazil and India, both 2.6M, and that's well over half the year's 59M net adds.

All data from the ever-invaluable Point Topic via the Broadband Forum.

Mobile over 1B subscribers. China continues to add broadband subscribers at a rate of about 30M per year. MIIT puts the January growth at 2.5M to a total of 152.5M. Of those, about 1.5M were DSL. They don't realease fiber counts, but Jeff Heynen of Infonetics is reporting tens of millions of lines of fiber gear are in the pipeline. China has been consistently at 2-3M net adds per month.

   Two key policy moves are likely to maintain or even increase the growth rate. The government is leaning hard on China Tel and China Unicom to drop prices. They've begun the first major antitrust action against state-owned companies since the beginning of the Communist era. (The government continues to own over 70% of each telco.) China Telecom responded by promising to cut prices in half, but some of that is empty rhetoric. (link) As China goes through a government transition, forceful action is on hold. Evidence around the world is that nothing increases customers nearly as effectively as lowering prices.

   China Mobile jumping into landlines, hard, with an investment in the emerging national cable operator, Marbridge speculates. At the highest levels, government has also been calling for more competition through "convergence" of telcos, broadcasters, and cablecos. The central government continues to make proclamations that would allow the cablecos into data while the political power of the telcos holds them back. A series of maneuvers, some orchestrated by the media regulator SARFT, are consolidating cablecos across the industry into the China Radio and Television Network and allying them with the powerful "media groups." The companies in turn are expressing interest in huge purchases of equipment. If the political problems clear, over 100M cable customers will soon have new, attractively priced broadband choices.

    10M new “subscribers” purchased mobile in January to reach 996M. China passed 1B subscribers sometime in February. Like mobile figures everywhere, the totals are distorted by the large number of customers with multiple phones or just multiple SIM cards. People take a new subscription to get a new phone or just to take advantage of a good deal on a SIM. In India, common phones have 2 SIM card slots. A dozen companies in the most competitive market in the world for mobile are constantly offering deals and customers simply add a second SIM to take advantage of the best prices for local and national calling.

   The official figures of 70+% penetration therefore do not imply that the vast majority of Chinese 15 years or older have a mobile, but most do. 8M in January upgraded to 3G, nearly ubiquitous and not too expensive.  4G LTE is essentially on hold, with the ministry holding back frequency allocations until TD-LTE is fully ready. TD is in "trials" that will soon amount to millions of customers, but expect 2-3 more years before the ministry thinks the device ecosystem is ready for full fledged competition with FD-LTE deployed by China Telecom and Unicom. The continuing patent farce in the West - It's Yahoo against Facebook against Apple against Motorola against Kodak against Samsung against Microsoft against Ericsson - provides continuing motivation for the Chinese to develop their own standard by whatever means necessary.