Tag: next-generatin broadband

This is how you can make those cabinets part of the street fabric

Whenever any new infrastructure is laid down, there is an increase in the number of street cabinets that will appear as the result of this infrastructure. This is more so with next-generation broadband especially if the service is based around fibre-copper technologies, implements active components or is prepared to do so.

But these cabinets attract a “not in my backyard” comments or activism from local residents or neighbourhoods because of them looking ugly and becoming a surface for the local graffiti artists and gangs to scrawl their “tags” on to. Similarly, the street cabinets can effectively become obstacles in their own right.

There can be something better done about this. One way would be to encourage or commission local artists to paint these cabinets with designs that complement the neighbourbood or a local effort. They then look beautiful in their own right rather than as ugly boxes. Such paintwork can be directly applied or painted on to a vinyl “skin” or “wrap” which is applied to the box. The latter approach can apply to seasonal efforts like Christmas decorations or advertising campaigns if the “skin” can be removed.

Another approach would be to design the street cabinets to be integrated to other street furniture. This would work well if there isn’t a need to provide maintenance access or equipment ventilation from all sides of the cabinet. Examples of this could include a cabinet that is integrated in to a street bench or litter bin. Simply an infrastructure cabinet could benefit from being equipped with a closed rail especially if it is located close to a café or bar with a street dining area. This is because it can be used as a hitching-post for a patron’s dog or bicycle.

What needs to be done to prevent the NIMBY attitude concerning next-generation broadband and similar infrastructure in urban areas is to look at ways to integrate the cabinets in to the neighbourhood area’s fabric so they effectively blend in.

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Competitive next-generation broadband arrives at Massachusetts (Photo courtesy of Ian Britton (FreeFotos.com))

Massachusetts Town Builds Itself 2 Gigabit Fiber for $75 a Month | Broadband News & DSL Reprots

From the horse’s mouth

LeverettNet

Project Page

My Comments

Another attempt has taken place to erode the established telcos’ and cable companies’ dominance of the US fixed-broadband landscape. Normally, this would be Google rolling out their Google Fiber service but it is a local government rolling out a municipal fibre-optic infrastructure and selling a retail broadband service to the communities under their remit.

More it’s about access to real competitive broadband in the USA

This time, it is Leverett, a town in Massachusetts, who have established a municipal fibre-optic network with retail service. This network snaps at the heels of Comcast and co by offering unlimited symmetrical 2Gbps downloads for US$75 a month. This is compared to Comcast offering a similar service for US$300 a month with a myriad of installation and activation fees totalling US$1000 along with the cost of poor-quality customer service.

This was an effort to deal with a black hole concerning the provision of high-speed broadband Internet to Massachusetts communities. The LeverettNet network is the first to take advantage of the new statewide broadband backbone known as MassBroadband 123 which could easily light up the state with real broadband.

There will be people who will say that this is public money wasted and it could lead to an increase in local taxes levied by the community’s local government, But it isn’t so because the townsfolk approved a ballot measure put forward by the Leverett council to borrow US$3.6 million to start this project. As well, a local ISP called Crocker Communications was contracted to provide the retail service to the neighbourhood. The council’s tax base would increase because of the property values increasing due to availability of proper next-generation fibre-optic broadband.

I always reckon that this could bring Comcast and others to attention because of a broadband service that offers more “bang for the buck” being available and this results commonly in those companies offering improved service in to those neighbourhoods. Similarly, this effort could be a chance to wake up other local communities in Massachusetts to have next generation broadband across that state.

Articles

5Gbps comes on the scene courtesy of Gigaclear

Is 5 Giga bits a second enough broadband for you? | ThinkBroadband

Wowzers – UK ISP Gigaclear Trial 5000Mbps Fibre Optic Broadband Service | ISPReview

My Comments

Gigaclear are stepping out of the norm when it comes to providing Internet service in the UK.

Here, they are offering 5Gbps as a bandwidth option for all of their fibre-to-the-premises area as well as their regular Gigabit or lower-bandwidth options. This is due to them implementing a point-to-point fibre network as their data infrastructure which they fully own.

At the moment, a home user could sign up for this bandwidth at GBP£399 including VAT or a small business could sign up for a business-grade service for GBP£1500 excluding VAT. The bandwidth could theoretically allow 100 4K UHDTV channels to be concurrently streamed or allow a 1.5Gb file like a film to be downloaded in 5 seconds.

At the moment, most current download and cloud-computing services can’t provide the throughput necessary to allow these high-performance services to run to their advantage. Similarly, there aren’t any routers on the market affordable to most home or small-businesses that would take advantage of these high-performance services.

The cost was considered to be too rich for most residential consumers except for a few wealthy early-adopters but could appeal to some small businesses like busy food/beverage/hospitality places such as cafes and bars running well-used wireless hotspots. These places can benefit because many users can concurrently transfer data including “high-demand” data like high-grade multimedia. videocalls and large file transfers.

What Gigaclear is showing is that 5Gbps could be ne next step for a high-performing Internet that can satisfy householders’ and small business users’ needs in the future.

Articles

Queensland council plans own optical fibre network | The Register

Council goes its own way on NBN, plans cables and telco | Morning Bulletin (Rockhampton, Queensland)

My Comments

Local government has been instrumental in improving broadband coverage for its citizens by encouraging the installation of the necessary infrastructure. This may be a public effort funded primarily by council taxes or rates that are levied on property owners; or it could be a public-private effort where a company also funds the same effort.

These efforts may be used as a method of providing data infrastructure between the local government’s buildings but they have been used to provide broadband infrastructure to citizens and businesses in that area in a manner that competes with established operators. It can also be about the establishment of a company or co-operative that is focused on providing telecommunications or Internet services to the local community.

But such services have raised the ire of incumbent telecommunications and cable-TV businesses and this has had the powerful incumbent operators in the USA like Comcast and AT&T lobby for state-level legislation to strangle community telecoms and Internet infrastructure projects.

Australia has taken a new stab at this effort with the local government that governs Rockhampton in Queensland putting forward the idea of high-speed fibre-to-the-premises infrastructure to cover the city’s central business district (downtown) area.

Rockhampton Regional Council’s mayor, Margaret Strelow showed dissatisfaction with the National Broadband Network heading down the fibre-copper path which would lead to substandard broadband. Instead the council established their own high-speed fibre-to-the-premises infrastructure in Quay Street alongside other council-owned road and water works. This is a “dig-once” effort to bypass the NBN in order to achieve that “smart-city” goal that Rockhampton wanted.

The council will own the infrastructure but create a local non-profit community telco who leases that infrastructure and sells telephony and Internet service to the local community. It is in a similar manner to how some other cities have provided utilities and telecommunications services to their communities.

A question that will be raised regarding these community-focused deployments will include the ability for the NBN or other next-generation-broadband infrastructure providers to build infrastructure parallel to this infrastructure; a practice that is described as “build-over”. This may allow Rockhampton or similar communities to benefit from infrastructure-level competition.

Another question that I also see raised is whether other retail-level telecommunications or Internet providers will be allowed to lease the council-supplied infrastructure in order to sell their services in to that town. This could allow consumers and businesses to benefit from retail-level communications-service and can also include mobile-telecommunications providers using this infrastructure as a backbone for their base stations.

As communities, ISPs, developers and other entities lay down their own infrastructure for their own next-generation broadband services, it could be a chance to raise the issues of “build-over” infrastructure-level competition for locations along with the ability for retail ISPs to compete with each other on the same infrastructure. If these issues are worked out properly, it could lead to increased value for money when it comes to broadband Internet service.

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Colorado Voters Shoot Down State’s Awful Broadband Law | Broadband News & DSL Reports

Voters Quiet the Drums At the Polls in Colorado | Community Broadband Networks

My Comments

This Election Day has yielded a break for community broadband infrastructure and real broadband competition in the USA.

This has occurred in Colorado which is one of many states that  enacted protectionist legislation written by incumbent telcos and cable-TV operators to prohibit local governments from setting up broadband infrastructure for community-broadband efforts. These laws are written with a veil of preventing mismanagement of public funds by local government when it comes to creating broadband infrastructure or municipal wireless broadband setups, but are really to protect the likes of Comcast in operating broadband-service cartels.

The law that was in place in Colorado required a ballot measure to be put to referendum by the local government if that government wished to set up broadband infrastructure that had any sort of public funding. 43 of these communities ran referenda about this topic on this year’s Election Day and the results turned up in the favour of the local government wanting to establish a community broadband service in these areas.

The victory was driven because CenturyLink and Comcast were suffocating the quality of broadband service that was offered in that state as is common in must of the USA. Citizens were seeing a reality that a high-quality broadband service that is value for money can only be achieved with real competition as has been noticed when competitive deployments like Google Fiber were rolled out.

Such laws were also found to be suffocating economic development and private investment because of the inability for public-private broadband infrastructure projects to go ahead. As well, it would be hard to do business in areas affected by these laws because today’s business operations are relying on information to be provided at the speed of light. This is more so with small and medium business who is after a decent broadband Internet service that doesn’t stifle them financially.

The community broadband services, which typically are maintained by the electric utility ran by the local government can also allow for a European-style shared-infrastructure model where retail broadband operators can rent bandwidth on the infrastructure to facilitate their Internet services This is in addition to the local government providing broadband to schools and libraries, covering their Internet-service needs and even being in a position to sell broadband service to the community.

As well, this competition can effectively give CenturyLink and Comcast the “kick in the pants” they need to raise their game when it comes to value for money and customer-service attitudes. Who doesn’t want all their customers churning to better service?

At least this Election Day in the US represented a step towards real competition for that country’s broadband Internet services.

Articles

Google Fiber Hiring Employees for Portland Launch | Broadband News & DSL Reports

Google Fiber Eyes Oklahoma City, Jacksonville, and Tampa | Broadband News & DSL Reports

Google Fiber Announced for Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (Updated: Jacksonville and Tampa Too) | Droid Life

My Comments

Google Fiber have put their foot in the Portland soil by opening some local customer-service jobs in that Oregon City. This is also in addition to liaising with the city’s local government regarding the placement of fibre-optic huts. These are effectively the hubs that can provide the fibre-optic service to neighbourhoods of 40,000 households and businesses.

The Oregon state government are making this easier by working on nearly-complete legislation that provides various state-level tax breaks for Gigabit next-generation broadband deployments. I see this as a state-level proactive step to open up real competition for broadband and allied telecommunications services.

But Google are also eyeing bring real competition to Oklahoma City in Oklahoma along with  Jacksonville and Tampa in Florida. These cities have signed up because they have a strong business and technology-driven economy that will benefit from the Google Fiber service.

Google have placed some requirements on the local governments to make the path clear for deployment of the fibre infrastructure including sharing city-infrastructure details. But they also have to deal with state governments that have passed legislation that prohibits the availability of Internet service that competes with local cable TV and “Baby Bell” interests.

As I have noticed from previous accounts, the arrival of Google Fiber in a US community has caused the local “Baby Bell” or cable-TV company to raise the bar as far as pricing and customer service goes. This is because they fear that customers in their locality will churn to Google Fiber as quickly as possible because of the improved value.

Similarly, Google have also used these deployments as a way o build up computer and Internet literacy in disadvantaged communities in some of the cities they touch like what has happened in Austin, Texas. This is because most business is being transacted online and some users like older people and blue-collar workers may find themselves floundering with this new life.

Keep up the work, Google!

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Cotswolds – part of the big 10000 for Gigaclear

From the horse’s mouth

Gigaclear

Press Release

My Comments

I have been following Gigaclear’s efforts in making sure that rural areas in Britain have access to real broadband. Think of places like Epping Forest, the Cotswolds, Underriver in Kent along with a few Oxfordshire villages gaining real broadband that attracts city dwellers wanting to “get away from it all”.

This effort started off in 2010 when Gigaclear was founded by Matthew Hare in 2010 with a focus towards real broadband in rural areas. The first effort was in Lyddington, Rutland where there was a VDSL2-based fibre-to-the-cabinet setup serving that village, then there was a fibre-to-the-premises setup in Hambledon shortly after that.

I did a Skype interview with Matthew Hare regarding the impact these broadband developments had on these towns in the early days of Gigaclear’s existence.  Through the interview, I had found that there was real interest in rural broadband with at least a third of Lyddington subscribing to the fibre-to-the-cabinet rollout and two-thirds of Hambledon pre-contracted to the fibre-to-the-premises rollout at the time of the interview.

As well, these deployments were satisfying business reality by allowing a “country-house” hotel in Hambledon to put forward a fully-functional public-access Wi-Fi Internet service as a drawcard feature; along with allowing small businesses to think of cloud-based software as a way of feeling “grown up”. It also encompassed the fact that an increasing number of villagers were using their computers for some form of income-generating work, whether to telecommute or to run a business or practise a profession from home. This underscored the need for reliable Internet service.

The interview also underscored Gigaclear’s rural-broadband effort as being a real commercial effort in a competitive market rather than philanthropic effort. This is because Gigaclear were coming through as an infrastructure competitor to BT Openreach for these rural areas.

Gigaclear found that the symmetrical FTTP technology was found to be more scalable than other technologies and this led to future-proof setups which can come about as a village or town grows. I would see this underscored more when the same village or town or one nearby acquires a larger employer and more people move in to these communities to work for the employer or work for new shops, schools and other employers that come on the scene to support a larger community.

There has been 40% takeup across the 36 communities in 5 different counties where this service has been deployed with a focus on the slower underserved communities. For that matter, construction activity surrounding a fibre-to-the-premises rollout piques interest because of the impending arrival of an Internet service that realistically serves local needs.

Keep up the good work with covering more villages, hamlets and small towns with real broadband Internet service, Gigaclear!