ITNews

The Business Week posting The Sad State of U.S. Broadband tells the story

The U.S. has a dismal showing among nations in terms of broadband availability, with no easy solution to bridge the gap

For the second year running, the U.S. ranked 15th among the 30 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development in terms of broadband availability. Denmark ranked first again in the annual OECD survey, followed by a host of European and Asian nations. Indeed, while the number of Americans with access to broadband service rose 20% last year, to nearly 70 million people, the most in the OECD, that amounted to just 23 of every 100 residents. By contrast, the top five countries in the OECD ranking all sport per-capita penetration rates of better than 30%.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission seems to playing the Telecom industry lap dog role when it quickly points out differences in population and geography that have made it more difficult for the nation to catch up with smaller countries.

Yea, right, sure. Lame excuse. My take on this situation is control is paramount for the telecom industry. The Telecom greed mongers will increase broadband speeds once they have stifled any and all Internet video on-demand competition, and the Telecom industry is firmly in control. This business model has worked well for the Hollywood greed mongers for decades, so why not for the Telecom greed mongers.

…John

The Washington Post posting Comcast Accused of Falsely Taking Hearing Seats tells the story of Comcast admitting it hired seat-holders for the Federal Communications Commission hearing on Net neutrality where one of the focuses was Comcast’s practice of “limiting,” also known as blocking, access to P2P file sharing applications such as BitTorrent.

Now in the aftermath of the Comcast seat-warming storm, the metaphorical gavel is coming down on Comcast. First, New York State Attorney General Andrew Coumo was reported to have issued a subpoena for Comcast’s records regarding P2P networks.

The other bit of retribution on Comcast is that site Valleywag is reporting that a second hearing is being scheduled to take place at Stanford. The Stanford community is already in favor against Comcast with big time Net neutrality advocate Larry Lessig on faculty. But the seat blocking incident may spur even more people to attend the hearing and voice out against Comcast.

Talk about a calamity of stupidity. Comcast was stupid to throttle their network services when net neutrality is such a hot topic. Then compounded their stupidity by hiring seat-holders.

I think Comcast has earned the right to join the ranks of stupid corporate antics, studied in business schools.

…John

AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon are all over each other offering $99 or less unlimited voice plans. The New York Times posting Verizon Stabs Sprint With Unlimited Wireless Plan gives the lowdown.

The stupid part is some of the “unlimited” plans limited text and data usage while others only include them at extra costs.

Most users rarely use up their plans voice minutes. Those with text and data enabled mobile devices are looking for cost effective plans that also include these services.

Myopic telecom greed-mongers are so short sighted they fail to see where the business is really going. I guess the hope of wringing out a bit more short term profit is more important than doing away with primitive handsets, restrictive contracts, obsolete technologies, and become telecom world leaders, not laggards (See Analog Sunset).

This stupid situation seems analogous to the early days of the Internet when modems were required to connect to an ISP. They had hissy fits with users staying connected for long periods of time, and erected all sorts of barriers including extra costs. The local phone companies rattled their swords and spewed forth threatening words.

Finally it dawned on IPSs and phone companies they could make a bundle off this Internet thing, if they offed unlimited services. Maybe someday telecoms will see the light. When they do, handset manufactures will get onboard in a big way with devices that are data centric that treat voice as just another type of data.

…John

The PCWorld posting Get Ready for a Crackdown on Broadband Use
subtitle says

As traffic increases, experts say ISPs may start charging by the gigabyte, limiting use of some services and snooping at the data passing through their networks.

Major broadband ISPs shrug off criticism that their networks can’t handle the increased demand for bandwidth. “We’ve been successfully delivering broadband services to our customers for 10 years, and that’s not going to change anytime soon,” says Mitch Bowling, senior vice president and general manager for Comcast’s high-speed Internet group.

I usually don’t comment on “maybe” postings. This one is a sort of “maybe” since some ISPs are in the planning stages for charging by bandwidth usage.

Time Warner Cable is experimenting with managing bandwidth by billing its customers, not at a flat monthly rate, but on the basis of how much bandwidth each customer uses. The cable company is rolling out a trial version of a consumption-based billing system in Texas later this year. “We have more than enough bandwidth, but we are looking to the future,” says Alex Dudley, spokesperson for Time Warner Cable.

Under the new billing scheme, customers who exceed their monthly bandwidth allotment risk incurring an overage charge. A spokesperson says that the billing scheme isn’t in place yet, so the company doesn’t yet have any hard numbers available regarding these charges.

Also, some ISPs are already throttling bandwidth.

Comcast spokesperson Charlie Douglas explains that a single customer who uses disproportionately more bandwidth than his or her neighbors can slow down the Internet for everyone on the block. Comcast has faced a user uproar for manipulating the way file-sharing programs work and for introducing bandwidth caps on individual accounts without identifying what those caps are.

I smell greed in the air here. The cable ISPs are claiming they are loaded with bandwidth, and

According to network monitoring firm Keynote Systems, broadband users rarely feel the impact of bandwidth bottlenecks today unless a big media event causes a brief spike in Web use or unless a major component of the Internet infrastructure suffers unexpected damage. Keynote describes these types of Internet slowdowns as virtually imperceptible brown-outs.

So why throttle and charge extra for bandwidth? I speculate it is all about movie downloads. The greed mongers smell money and are preparing to stifle any competition, such as iTunes download movie rentals.

We’ll see.

…John

Cringely thinks so. He explains why in the I, Cringely posting The Once and Future King: Multicast looks to (finally) be the future of television.

IP Multicast is the not-so-simple carriage of the same digital signal to thousands or millions of people at the same time. This is as opposed to unicast, which can also serve millions of people but requires millions of parallel video streams to do so. Multicast was built into the structure of the Internet from the very beginning but was generally not turned on because net admins hate it as a resource hog. But one man’s resource hog is another man’s chance to sell a lot of new equipment, so Cisco has long been a huge supporter of multicast because it requires ever bigger and more powerful routers to implement. Years ago Cisco bought Judy Estrin’s Precept Software and its IPTV product primarily to have an application that would drive the adoption of multicast in the enterprise and beyond. Only that didn’t happen because net admins weren’t giving in, there was no YouTube, and the x386 computers of the era really weren’t capable of handling much video anyway.

See, multicast IS a resource hog.

But to more and more ISPs multicast is looking like the best answer to a huge bandwidth problem, while also being a sneaky way to take back control of the Internet.

Both Comcast and Verizon are rapidly rolling out IP multicast, as I am sure most big cable and telephone ISPs are. Even Verizon’s fiber-to-the-home service, FiOS, is moving to multicast because it was architected in a dumb way that sorely limits what should be a lot of throughput.

There are only two ways for today’s ISPs to carry tomorrow’s Internet video traffic. They can embrace wide-open P2P or they can implement IP Multicast.

Cringely makes a case for IP Multicast in the article. If experience is any indicator, I don’t think the Comcasts and Verizons of the world get the IP TV thing yet.

…John