Google Fiber's Provo deal is Internet on the instalment plan

24 July 2013 by Steve Blum
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A cashless transaction.

Google will be rolling out its fiber to the home offering in Provo, Utah next week. The company signed the deal to buy the city-owned system on Monday. Negotiated and approved by the Provo municipal council in April, the final details were ironed out and Google took possession of the system this week.

Google got the system in exchange for a token payment and a promise to finish building out the FTTH system to everyone in the city, and provide free service for seven years at something like 5 Mbps to any resident that pays a $30 installation fee.… More

Telco broadband slows at the edge, cable bottlenecks in the core

23 July 2013 by Steve Blum
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Speeds can drop suddenly at the edge.

Slow residential connections keep DSL speeds down, while cable’s problems are further back in the network. Researchers for the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology dug deep into data collected in 2011 by the FCC as part of its Measuring Broadband America program.

The NIST researchers asked the question: Where in the Internet is congestion? The results suggested that…

…a significant amount of congestion, especially for cable connections, occurs deeper in the network, perhaps, in the “middle mile”…or even farther, where the ISP connects to the “public Internet”.

… More

Cable for broadband speed, telcos for consistency in service and advertising

22 July 2013 by Steve Blum
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More likely so.

DSL is better at delivering advertised download speeds than cable, but cable modem service is still faster. That’s one of the conclusions reached by researchers for the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology after sifting through broadband test data collected by the FCC in 2011.

DSL broadband provided connections on average delivering download speeds above 80% of the assigned speed tier more than 80% of the time. By contrast, a significant fraction of cable connections received less than 80% of their assigned speed tier more than 20% of the time.

… More

Don't blame local government for a lack of California broadband competition

21 July 2013 by Steve Blum
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Kicking back in California is no kickback.

I admit to being a Californian, so my objections to (what I consider to be) a rant by senior members of TechFreedom, a think tank as they put it, might be specific to my native State. That said, their contention in a Wired editorial that local government is to blame for poor Internet service is not consistent with the facts.

The core of their argument is that local governments control access to utility poles and underground conduit, and they restrict competitors – particularly cable companies – from accessing it in order to extract kickbacks.… More

Tizen Foundation throws candy at mobile app devs


Game on.

A $4 million lolly scramble is underway to jump start the Tizen mobile operating system’s app store. The Tizen Foundation announced a developers’ competition with individual prizes that could go as high as $250,000, and released a new version of the software developer kit for the Linux-based and HTML5-centric OS.

Among other things, Tizen is Samsung’s coming replacement for bada, its in-house smart (or at least modestly bright) phone OS. While bada is a very functional, if lower end, platform, it’s suffered from a lack of developer love.… More

HTC won't help its shrinking share by shrinking a phone

19 July 2013 by Steve Blum
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It used to be bigger.

Combined, Samsung and Apple are selling about half the world’s smart phones, with 30% and 19% market share respectively in 2012 according to IDC. Much of Samsung’s growth from 19% in 2011 came out of HTC’s hide. Its share was cut in half over same period, dropping below 5% and putting it more or less in a tie with Nokia and Blackberry.

At least it was still in the top five then.… More

Muni WiFi still has utility, and at least two utilities


Originally, it was just the poles in Chaska that had a retro look.

The first generation of municipal wireless providers is mostly gone, as fiber takes precedence and mobile networks grow. One of the survivors deserves particular mention: the City of Chaska, Minnesota.

I visited Chaska several times in the course of building and running a similar WiFi-based broadband utility in Lompoc, California. Chaska’s project led ours by a few months and the lessons learned there saved us time, money and a lot of trouble.… More

Trading broadband subsidies for access to California public housing residents

17 July 2013 by Steve Blum
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A couple of apartments are enough to make cable companies lose their taste for monopoly.

Public housing agencies stand between residents and cable television companies. Like any other landlord in California, a public housing agency has considerable (but not total) control over who can install wiring in a building or complex, and consequently who can sell television, telephone and Internet service to residents.

That control is about to be trimmed back a notch.

Assembly bill 1299 proposes to use $20 million from the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) to improve broadband infrastructure in public housing, plus another $5 million to encourage residents to buy service, assuming lawmakers also add more money to the account.… More

Landlords face down Google: who benefits from broadband?

16 July 2013 by Steve Blum
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Complex issue for Kansas City complexes.

Google Fiber’s offer in Kansas City of at least 5 Mbps Internet service for at least seven years for a one-time $300 installation fee is a rocking good deal if you own a house, or even if you’re a renter who expects to be around for a couple of years. But the economics are different for apartment buildings, where landlords have to pay the fee and tenants get the free service.… More

Municipal broadband is an economic choice, not a holy crusade

15 July 2013 by Steve Blum
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The debate continues.

I’ve been taken to task for an article I wrote on the prospects for fiber-to-the-premise service in Palo Alto. It was just published in Broadband Communities, and was based on a study I did last year for the City of Palo Alto evaluating a particular business model.

Christopher Mitchell, the proprietor of MuniNetworks.org and an advocate of public ownership of telecoms networks, called it odd and misleading in a blog post.… More