Communications

eComm 2011

I'm at eComm 2011 in California for the next three days (#eComm). eComm is one of the best events I attend for the content and for the people who are there.

I'll be speaking tomorrow afternoon, basically giving an update on netBlazr.  Meanwhile, I'll be keeping my notes using my personal Twitter account (@brough).

Comparative broadband speeds - US loses again

Recently Google Labs added the Ookla Speedtest data set to their wonderful Public Data Explorer so I just had to try it out.

Here's my first graph:

These are not bogus statistics. These graphs show the average of all the millions of actual speedtests run in the respective countries over the past 4 months.

The apologists for the US's poor showing usually start by pointing out that the US has much lower population density than South Korea, Sweden or Bulgaria. Of course that doesn't hold water if you compare Seoul, Stockholm and Sofia to New York, Los Angeles or Chicago. In Seoul, Stockholm and Sofia consumers can get 100/100 Mbps Internet access at affordable prices (e.g. $13/month in Stockholm) while such service isn't even offered to consumers in New York, Los Angeles or Chicago.

 

My Column has moved to NGN Magazine

"Next Wave Redux," which has appeared in Internet Telephony magazine for many years has moved.  I'm now writing for NGN Magazine.

With my attention focused on netBlazr, I wasn't in a position to do justice to Internet telephony topics.  I thought of abandonning the column entirely, but the folks at TMCnet urged me to move to a different magazine, more in line with my current focus.  Of course, the term NGN carries a lot of baggage which I address in my first article, NGN: ITU Misses the Boat, written last fall for the November 2010 issue.

If you followed by columns in Internet Telephony, you may want to sign up for electronic delivery of NGN magazine (i.e. via email), as the issues typically don't appear on the TMC website until a couple of months later.

Extending white spaces rules to other under-utilized spectrum

Few seem to have noticed, but the FCC has an open Notice of Inquiry in which, among other things, they say,

48.  ...  An alternative approach for enabling dynamic spectrum use is to extend the concepts underlying the rules for Television Band Devices to additional spectrum bands. ... Commenters should address whether they believe this concept is practical for other bands. If so, they should identify in which bands they believe such a system could work and provide details on how it would work.

Wow! 

This is action on Recommendation 5.13 in Section 5.6 of the FCC's National Broadband Plan.  While I'm generally disappointed with the National Broadband Plan, this is one place where there's a (perhaps remote) possibility for real long term progress.

As I've commented in the past, the largest value of the TV White Spaces ruling is that it provides a path for opening up more of our incredibly under-utilized spectrum.  This NOI is the first step.  Comments are due by February 28, 2011 and reply comments by March 28, 2011.  Directions and links are available on this Federal Register page.

Cable trounces the telcos

Yesterday, Netflix posted graphs of how well various ISPs deal with Netflix video streams.  The results are striking.

All the cable companies easily beat all the phone companies with the exception of Verizon where we're seeing a mix of DSL and FiOS results.

And just in case you believed the hype about 4G, notice that Clearwire's Clear service comes in below DSL.  There is no reason to believe LTE networks will do any better once they have customers, i.e. once they are carrying commercially viable levels of traffic.

 

International Summit for Community Wireless Networks

I'm off to Vienna to attend a conference.  Conference info is here.  On Friday afternoon, I'll be leading a session in which I hope to get useful feedback on the "freemium" business model we're using for netBlazr.

Europe has a number of community wireless networks that have been very successful.  The networks in Vienna, Berlin, Athens and Catalonia stand out in my mind.  Of course, in the US we've had active legislation that's made it hard for governments to create community network.  But the EU networks mentioned above are member-based.  They may have benefitted from government funds at some point, but they formed independent of any government effort (at least as I currently understand things).  The other issue I've observed in a number of US community networks is a reliance on grants that aren't renewed and/or on enthusiasts who eventually leave to go to grad school or otherwise move on.  Something is different in the EU networks mentioned above.  Hopefully I'll better understand this by Sunday.  :)

As is my habit, I'll be taking notes in real time using Twitter (@brough).  After the conference, I'll gather those notes into a single page for a blog post.  This is primarily for my own benefit, as it's been an extremely useful way for me to take and save notes (assuming it's an event like the ISCWN where I want to keep notes!).

Comcast: Use your bandwidth and we'll throttle you

Recently a friend decided to use an on-line service to backup his 750G raid array. He selected CrashPlan which, among other things, generates a projected completion time. With his existing DSL service it was going to take months, so he signed up for Comcast Internet with a plan that offered "up to" 10 Mbps down and 2 Mbps up. As he put it:

... when I was signing up for Comcast I specifically asked about high-volume on-line backup, and in particular whether it was Ok for me to buy the 2x10 service and run a heavy duty upstream job 24x7 at 1 mbit, and I was reassured that this was OK.

To see what happened, look at the "wan-out" statistics in gray above. Comcast came on-line in late March and CrashPlan was configured to use 1 Mbps of the "2 Mbps upstream" bandwidth. This worked for less than two weeks, then Comcast throttled the upstream to less than 600 Kbps.  Over the next six weeks, he was further squeezed to ~400 Kbps. Nothing in his house changed during this period, so the data above reflects Comcast's performance. As my friend puts it:

I guess what they meant was "... it's OK to try, since we can rate limit you ... to anything we want, you won't bother us by trying.  You won't get your bandwidth either, but that's not our problem. "

Comcast:  "Up to X Mbps," but only for occasional use.

Word use as a key to US Broadband Plan

The inestimatable Frank Coluccio has finally started to read the US National Broadband Plan but, before starting, he did a very interesting document analysis.  He counted the number of times various words and phrases are used.  Here's a suggestive subset I picked out from Frank's more detailed document.

Commons - 1
Symmetric (not "symmetrical") - 1
Backbone - 1
Line of sight - 1
Gigabit Ethernet - 4
Dark Fiber - 9
Wi-Fi  - 10
FTTH/B/C/P (combined) - 20
Cellular - 31
Backhaul - 39
DSL (all types) - 40

TV - 122
Video - 201
Rural - 266
Wireless - 377
Mobile - 397
Internet (all contexts) - 453
Government - 669
Spectrum - 715
FCC - 1439

One free ticket to eComm

Also, one 50% off ticket...

 I'll be at the Emerging Communications Conference, eComm Americas, beginning Monday April 19th at the San Francisco Airport Marriott.  If you're not familiar with eComm, I highly recommend it.  Interesting people, fascinating presentations, none of those trade show pitches... Check it out.

And, as organizer and moderator of Tuesday's panel discussion on the US Broadband Plan, I get one free ticket and one 50% off ticket that I can give to a friend or colleague.  If you're reading my blog, you clearly qualify.  If you are interested, send me an email - send it to my initials "rbt" at my personal domain, i.e. broughturner.com.