broadband

Netflix and YouTube are still eating the Internet

17 May 2013 by Steve Blum
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And the hits just keep on coming.

One-third of prime time Internet traffic on North American wireline networks is generated by Netflix viewers. Another third comes from other video sources – legal and otherwise – and anything else people do on the Internet accounts for the remaining third. That’s according to the latest semi-annual report by Sandvine, an Internet technology and research company based in Waterloo, Ontario.

Mobile viewers, however, prefer shorter videos on YouTube, which accounts for 27% of peak mobile download traffic, as well as coming in second place on fixed networks at 1%.… More

Five broadband trends shaping communities


A good place to talk about water, land and technology.

I was asked to do a presentation on broadband trends at the Urban Land Institute’s spring meeting in San Diego today. Specifically, it was for one of the ULI’s community development councils, which is focused on planned community developers. I had to narrow the list down to five:

  • Conduit is gold. Cities and private developments can build a base for jobs and industry just by putting conduit in the ground whenever a trench is opened.
… More

Santa Cruz supervisors move forward with broadband policy initiative


Pioneering surfing of all sorts.

Model broadband development policies are on a fast track in Santa Cruz County. On a unanimous vote yesterday, county supervisors gave staff three months to evaluate four specific recommendations and come back with an action plan.

“This is a far-reaching agenda for increasing the region’s access to broadband by lowering the administrative barriers to entry for, and increasing coordination between, private telecommunications providers,” wrote Zach Friend, the county supervisor behind the effort.… More

Waiting for the FTTH feasibility case in Longmont

14 May 2013 by Steve Blum
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Art is nicely presented in Longmont, too.

The city council in Longmont, Colorado considers today whether to move ahead with plans to build a municipal fiber-to-the-home system. They’ll be reviewing a feasibility study prepared by a consulting company and then deciding whether to direct city staff to come up with a financing plan.

Longmont is near Boulder, in the Denver area. The city runs its own electric utility, serving about forty thousand households, and has a backbone fiber optic network that was installed about fifteen years ago to support utility operations.… More

5G mobile means more fiber in more places

13 May 2013 by Steve Blum
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Qualcomm graphic.

“Bringing the network closer to the user is key to 1000x,” said Prakash Sangam, director of tech marketing for Qualcomm, speaking to the Wireless Communications Alliance in Santa Clara, California last month. 1000x is Qualcomm’s shorthand way of saying that with mobile data traffic more or less doubling every year, we’ll need one thousand times the amount of available bandwidth in a few years.

“Reaching this 1000x is a matter of when and not if,” Sangam said.… More

Survey finds Google Fiber getting high take rates in Kansas City

12 May 2013 by Steve Blum
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If the hare has staying power, the tortoise will lose.

Google’s early results in Kansas City have to be giving incumbent carriers the shakes. According to a survey done by Bernstein Research, one-third of the homes in neighborhoods where Google is already offering Internet and television service have signed up. And even more are thinking about it.

Bernstein surveyed 200 homes in the relatively small area where Google Fiber is up and running. One-third were already taking the service and of the rest, about three-quarters were thinking about it.… More

Asia leads in Internet speed and disruption

11 May 2013 by Steve Blum
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Asia-Pacific 4th quarter 2012

Asian countries hit the top of the charts in the latest “State of the Internet” rankings released by content delivery network pioneer Akamai. The numbers for the last quarter of 2012 rank Korea, Japan and Hong Kong 1-2-3 in terms of average broadband download speed, with scores of 14.0, 10.8 and 9.3 Mbps respectively.

Before the hand-wringing over the U.S. not being number one starts, consider that 1. it does pretty well coming in at eighth place with average broadband download rate of 7.4 Mbps and 2.… More

Municipal broadband under attack in the California legislature

9 May 2013 by Steve Blum
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Cable lobby streams war channel in Sacramento.

It’s doubtful that telco and cable lobbyists could get an outright ban on municipal broadband as far as a floor vote in the California legislature. They managed that much in Georgia, with no result. Democrats and rural Republicans combined to vote down a ban in March, and a similar dynamic is likely here in California.

What they can do, though, is try to hamstring municipal broadband projects bit by bit, and they’ve made good progress so far this legislative session.… More

California senate committee lets industry lobbyists rewrite broadband subsidy rules

8 May 2013 by Steve Blum
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Oh, please, monsieur. It is a little game we play. They put it on the bill, I tear up the bill. It is very convenient.

The latest version of a proposed bill to add money to the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) and extend eligibility beyond traditional telephone companies is bad news for everyone except incumbent cable and telephone companies.

Last week, the senate energy, utilities and communications committee approved senate bill 740 on the basis of a promise by the measure’s author, Alex Padilla (D – Los Angeles), to make it more to the liking of the lobbyists from AT&T, Verizon, Frontier and the cable industry who testified at the hearing.… More

Google's goad sinks a little deeper into Kansas City

7 May 2013 by Steve Blum
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Wanted in Grandview.

Grandview, Missouri is latest addition to Google’s wish list of Kansas City suburbs. The city council – board of aldermen as they call it in Missouri – took a no-brainer decision tonight to invite Google to expand its existing fiber to the home network into their community. Google’s response is to say thank you, but “it will still be awhile before we can build fiber in Grandview — we need to plan and engineer our network there first.”… More