Tag: G Fast

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Looking Back at Looking Forward

I find it interesting to sometimes look backward a few years to see what predictions were made about the future of the telecom industry. Five years ago I went to an NTCA conference where several speakers made predictions about the industry, particularly as it would impact rural America. It’s interesting to look at what was predicted about today just a few years ago. Some predictions were dead on and others fizzled. Following are some of the more interesting misses.

Broadband Technologies. There were predictions that by 2020 that we’d see upgrades to G.Fast in rural copper networks and to next-generation PON equipment for fiber deployments. Neither of these happened for various reasons. US telcos have never accepted G.Fast, although there is widespread adoption in Europe where copper networks are delivering 300 Mbps speeds to customers. The big telcos in the US are making no investments in rural copper unless the FCC fully funds it. Many smaller telcos have taken advantage of changes in the Universal Service Fund to upgrade from copper to fiber rather than upgrade DSL. Next-generation PON electronics are still waiting for one big ISP to buy enough gear to lower prices.

Widespread 5G. It’s not hard to understand why this would have been believed in 2014 since the big carriers were already in hype mode even then. One prediction was that as many as 60% of cellphones would be 5G by 2020. There were several predictions that 5G was going to enable autonomous vehicles and that building fiber along highways would be routine by 2020. There was a prediction that we’d see small cells everywhere, with deployments every 3,000 feet.

The timing of 5G is far behind those predictions. I see where Cisco recently estimated that only 3% of cellphones worldwide would be 5G enabled by 2022. Most experts today believe that the cellular networks will still predominantly rely on 4G LTE even a decade from today. The idea of building a cellular network for autonomous vehicles died – it was always hard to imagine the revenue stream that would have supported that network. We may still get to a dense small cell network someday, but calling for a small cell every 3,000 feet still sounds incredibly aggressive even decades from now.

IoT and LPWAN. There was a prediction that by 2020 that we’d have deployed low bandwidth networks using 900 MHz spectrum that would connect to huge numbers of outdoor IoT sensors. The prediction was that there is a huge revenue opportunity to charge $1 monthly for each sensor. There are still those calling for these networks today, but it’s still not getting any widespread traction.

Widespread Adoption of Augmented and Virtual Reality. Those technologies were on everybody’s future list in 2014. Oculus Rift was the leader in developing virtual reality and Magic Leap had raised several rounds of funding to develop augmented reality. There is now a sizable gaming deployment of virtual reality, but virtual reality has not yet touched the average person or moved beyond gaming. Magic Leap finally started selling a developer headset at the end of last year.

We Should Be Overrun by Now with Robots and Drones. In 2014 there was a prediction of robots everywhere by 2020. New factories are manned today by robots, but robots are still news when they are used in a public-facing function. A few hotels are trying out a robot concierge. There are a few automated fast food restaurants. There are a few hospitals with robots that transport meals and medicines. Robots deliver take-out food in a few city centers and university towns.

Drones are quietly being used for functions like mapping and inspecting storm damage. Flying small drones is now a popular hobby. Amazon keeps experimenting with drone delivery of packages but it’s still in the trial stage. Commercial use of drones is still in its infancy.

Use of Data. My favorite prediction was that by 2020 we’d have software systems that can deliver data at the right place, at the right time, to the right person, on the right device. This harkens back to the old AT&T promise that someday we’d be able to watch any movie we wanted, the minute we wanted. To some degree that old promise came to pass, although it was implemented by somebody other than AT&T.

Some businesses are meeting parts of this prediction today. These are custom platforms that send trouble tickets to technicians, notify employees to connect a new customer, automate ordering of inventory, etc. However, nothing close to that promise has yet made it into our everyday lives. In fact, except for Candy Crush most of us probably still have the same apps on our smartphones we used in 2014. Many of us are still waiting for the digital assistant we were first promised a decade ago.

Got Some Things Right. It’s easy to pick on predictions that never came to pass and I’ve made plenty of those myself. There was some great prediction in 2014. One presenter said we’d continue to see the explosive growth of residential data usage, that would continue to grow at 24% per year – that’s still a dead-on prediction. There was a prediction that businesses would migrate employees to mobile devices and it is routine today to see employees in all sorts of businesses operating from a tablet. There was a prediction of explosive growth of machine-to-machine data traffic, and today this one of the areas fastest traffic growth.

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The Industry

Starry Resurfaces

I’ve written a few times over the years about Starry, a wireless ISP that is originally launching in Boston. The company was founded by Chet Kanojia who readers might remember as the founder of Aereo – the company that tried to deliver affordable local programming through a wireless connection.

Starry’s product set is simple – $50 per month for 200 Mbps broadband. There’s a $50 install fee and then $50 per month with no add-ons or extra charges. This easily beats the regular broadband prices for Charter and Verizon FiOS, both at $70+ for the same speed when considering the charge for the modem.

Starry has changed its business plan. They had first announced a launch in 2016 that was going to beam to a small antenna placed in a customer’s window. I’m imagining they ran into a number of issues with this, including technical issues, because that plan never went beyond the first round of beta testing and Starry went quiet.

The new technology will use millimeter wave spectrum to beam broadband to a receiver on the top of apartment buildings and will then use existing wiring to connect to customers. This involves point-to-point radios. Starry launched a few years ago using licensed millimeter wave spectrum at 38.2 and 38.6 GHz. The company says they are going to be using spectrum between 37 GHz and 40 GHz, so they must be planning to engage in the upcoming auctions for 37 GHz and 39 GHz spectrum.

At the spectrum they are using they could easily be beaming between 1 – 2 gigabytes of data to a given apartment building today. That will increase if they get access to more bands of spectrum.  That’s plenty of bandwidth to provide a 200 Mbps product to every tenant. The company is advertising that they are using pre-5G technology. That’s an interesting phrase because they are likely delivering Ethernet over the wireless connection to each building. Perhaps if they buy more spectrum they will then claim to be using 5G. This is an interesting concept for point-to-point radios because the 5G standard doesn’t do anything to increase the speed on a connection. However, they might get some advantages from 5G which will make it easier to link multiple frequencies on the same point-to-point path.

The current business plan is to use the existing wiring in a building. That is interesting because they are bringing broadband to the roof, and the wiring from apartment buildings today always originates on the first floor or basement in a communications space. I have to think that Starry is dropping a fiber from the roof to the communications room in order to get access to wiring.

The only wiring that is almost always available in a home-run configuration to each apartment is the telco copper, and I guess this is the wiring they are using. With today’s G.Fast technology it’s easy in most cases to achieve speeds of at least 400 Mbps and sometimes faster. I’ve heard that G.Fast is achieving near gigabit speeds in labs, so it’s likely over time that Starry will be able to step up the speeds. Coaxial cables are a different matter and there are numerous different wiring schemes around and also a wide variety of situations where the cable incumbent can lay claim to those cables.

Starry is creating yet another competitor for anybody building broadband in an urban environment. I have a hard time seeing this technology making any sense in a small town or rural environment. In cities the technology probably only makes sense for somewhat sizable apartment buildings, or perhaps multi-tenant business buildings. It’s an intriguing technology for landlords because they can offer tenants another option other than the incumbent cable or telephone company.

It’s been interesting over the years to watch the evolution of broadband in apartment buildings. For many years there were hurdles for a competitor to deliver big bandwidth inside apartment buildings. The cost of rewiring older apartment buildings was often prohibitive. But today there are lower-cost techniques for stringing fiber inside older buildings as well as creative uses of existing wiring such as using G.Fast. Where apartment buildings were often left out of fiber business plans they are now a big focus for competitors.

The bottom line is that anybody planning on competing for downtown apartment buildings will have another potential competitor. Starry plans on being in most major metropolitan markets and there are likely going to be copycat ISPs that do this elsewhere. Urban apartment buildings have gone from being underserved to perhaps having some of the best broadband in any market.

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Improving Your Business Technology

Fiber in Apartment Buildings

For many years a lot of my clients with fiber networks have avoided serving large apartment buildings. There were two primary causes for this. First, there has always been issues with getting access to buildings. Landlords control access to their buildings and some landlords have made it difficult for a competitor to enter their building. I could write several blogs about that issue, but today I want to look at the other historical challenge to serving apartments – the cost of rewiring many apartment buildings has been prohibitive.

There are a number of issues that can make it hard to rewire any apartment. Some older buildings had concrete floors and plaster walls and are hard to drill for wires. A landlord might have restrictions due to aesthetics and not want to see any visible wiring. A landlord might not allow for adequate access to equipment for installations or repairs, particularly after dark. A landlord might not have a safe space for an ISP’s core electronics or have adequate power available.

But assuming that a landlord is willing to allow a fiber overbuilder, and is reasonable about aesthetics and similar issues, many apartment owners now want fiber since their tenants are asking for faster broadband. There are new ways to serve apartments that were not available in the past that can now make it possible to serve apartments in a cost-effective manner.

G.Fast has come of age and the equipment is now affordable and readily available from several vendors. A number of telcos have been using the technology to improve broadband speeds in apartment buildings. The technology works by using frequencies higher than DSL and using existing telephone copper in the building. Copper wire is mostly owned by the landlord, and they can generally grant access to the telephone patch panel to multiple ISPs.

CenturyLink reports speeds over 400 Mbps using G.Fast, enabling a range of broadband products. The typical deployment brings fiber to the telecom communications space in the building, with jumpers made to the copper wire for customers wanting faster broadband. Telcos are reporting that G.Fast offers good broadband up to about 800 feet, which is more than adequate for most apartment building.

Calix now also offers a G.Fast that works over coaxial cable. This is generally harder to use because it’s harder to get access to coaxial home runs to each apartment. Typically an ISP would need to get access to all of the coaxial cable in a building to use this G.Fast variation. But it’s worth investigating since it increases speeds to around 500 Mbps and extends distances to 2,000 feet.

Millimeter Wave Microwave. A number of companies are using millimeter wave radios to deliver bandwidth to apartment buildings. This is not using the 5G standard, but current radios can deliver two gigabits for about one mile or one gigabit for up to two miles. The technology is mostly being deployed in larger cities to avoid the cost of laying urban fiber, but there is no reason it can’t be used in smaller markets where there is line-of-sight from an existing tower to an apartment building. The radios are relatively inexpensive with a pair of them costing less than $5,000.

It’s an interesting model in that the broadband must be extended to customers from the roof top rather than the basement. The typical deployment would run fiber from the rooftop radio, down through risers and extended out to apartment units.

The good news with stringing fiber in apartments is that wiring technology is much improved. There are now several different fiber wiring systems that are easy to install, and which are unobtrusive by hiding fiber along the corners of the ceiling.

Many ISPs are finding that the new wiring systems alone are making it viable to string fiber in buildings that were too expensive a five years ago.   If you’ve been avoiding apartment buildings because they’re too hard to serve you might want to take another look.

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Technology

G.Fast over Coax

There is yet another new technology available to carriers – G.Fast over coaxial cable. Early trials of the technology show it works better than G.Fast over telephone copper.

Calix recently did a test of the new coaxial technology and was able to deliver 500+ Mbps for up to 2,000 feet. This is far better than current G.Fast technology over copper which can handle similar data speeds up to about 800 feet. But telephone G.Fast is improving and Calix just demonstrated a telephone copper G.Fast that can deliver 1 Gbps for about 750 feet.

But achieving the kinds of speeds demonstrated by Calix requires a high-quality telephone copper network. We all know that the existing telephone and coaxial networks in existing buildings are usually anything but pristine. Many existing coaxial cables in places like apartment buildings have been cut and re-spliced numerous times over the years, which will significantly degrade G.Fast performance.

This new technology is definitely going to work best in niche applications – and there may be situations where it’s the clearly best technology for the price. There are a surprising number of coaxial networks in place in homes, apartment buildings, schools, factories and older office buildings that might be good candidates for the technology.

A number of telcos like CenturyLink and AT&T are starting to use G.Fast over telephone copper to distribute broadband to apartment buildings. Since as the incumbent telephone company they can make sure that these networks are available to them. But there might be many apartment buildings where the existing coaxial network could be used instead. The ability to go up to 2,000 feet could make a big difference in larger apartment buildings.

Another potential use would be in schools. However, with the expanding demand for broadband in classrooms one has to wonder if 500 Mbps is enough bandwidth to serve and share among a typical string of classrooms – each with their own heavy broadband demand.

There are also a lot of places that have coaxial networks that you might not think about. For example, coaxial wiring was the historic wiring of choice for the early versions of video surveillance cameras in factories and other large businesses. It would not be hard to add WiFi modems to this kind of network. There are tons of older hotels with end-to-end coaxial networks. Any older office buildings is likely to have coaxial wiring throughout.

But there is one drawback for the technology in that the coaxial network can’t be carrying a cable TV signal at the same time. The coaxial G.Fast operates at the same frequencies as a significant chunk of a traditional DOCSIS cable network. To use the technology in a place like an apartment would mean that the coaxial wiring can no longer be used for cable TV delivery. Or it means converting the cable TV signal to IPTV to travel over the G.Fast. (but that wouldn’t leave much bandwidth for broadband.) But still, there are probably many unused coaxial wiring networks and the technology could use them with very little required rewiring.

It’s more likely that the coaxial G.Fast could coexist with existing applications in places like factories. Those networks typically use MoCA to feed the video cameras, at frequencies that are higher than DOCSIS cable networks.

But my guess is that the interference issue will be a big one for many potential applications. Most apartments and schools are going to still be using their networks to deliver traditional video. And many other coaxial networks will have been so chopped up and re-spliced over time to present a real challenge for the technology.

But this is one more technology to put into the toolbox, particularly for companies that bring broadband to a lot of older buildings. There are probably many cases where this could be the most cost effective solution.

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AT&T’s Broadband Trials

John Donovan, the chief strategy officer for AT&T, spoke at the Mobile World Congress recently and said that the company was trying five different technologies for the last mile. This includes WLL (wireless local loop), G.Fast, 5G, AirGig and fiber-to-the-premise. He said the company would be examining the economics of all of different technologies. Let me look at each one, in relation to AT&T.

Wireless Local Loop (WLL). The technology uses the companies LTE bandwidth but utilizes a point-to-multipoint network configuration. By using a small dish on the house to receive the signal the company is getting better bandwidth than can be received from normal broadcast cellular. The company has been doing trials on various different versions of the technology for many years. But there are a few recent trials of the newest technology that AT&T will be using for much of its deployment in rural America as part of the CAF II plan. That plan requires the ISP to deliver at least 10/1 Mbps. AT&T says that the technology is delivering speeds of 15 to 25 Mbps. The company says that even at the edge of a cellular network that a customer can get 10 Mbps about 90% of the time.

G.Fast. This is a technology that uses high frequencies to put more bandwidth on telephone copper wire. Speeds are reported to be as high as 500 Mbps, but only for very short distances under 200 feet. AT&T recently announced a G.Fast trial in an apartment building in Minneapolis. The technology is also being tested by CenturyLink and Windstream. All of these trials are using existing telephone copper inside of existing apartment buildings to deliver broadband. So this is not really a last mile technology. AT&T brings fiber to the apartment complex and then uses G.Fast as an inside wire technology. If they find it to be reliable this would be a great alternative to rewiring apartments with fiber.

5G. AT&T recently announced a few trials of early 5G technologies in Austin. They are looking at several technology ideas such carrier aggregation (combining many frequencies). But these are just trials, and AT&T is one of the companies helping to test pre-5G ideas as part of the worldwide effort to define the 5G specifications. These are not tests of market-ready technologies, but are instead field trials for various concepts needed to make 5G work. There is no doubt that AT&T will eventually replace LTE wireless with 5G wireless, but that transition is still many years in the future. The company is claiming to be testing 5G for the press release benefits – but these are not tests of a viable last mile technology – just tests that are moving lab concepts to early field trials.

AirGig. This one remains a mystery. AT&T says it will begin trialing the technology later this year with two power companies. There has been a little bit of clarification of the technology since the initial press release. This is not a broadband over powerline technology – it’s completely wireless and is using the open lines-of-sight on top of power poles to create a clear path for millimeter wave radios. The company has also said that they don’t know yet which wireless technology will be used to go from the poles into the home – they said the whole range of licensed spectrum is under consideration including the LTE frequencies. And if that’s the case then the AirGig is a fiber-replacement, but the delivery to homes would be about the same as WLL.

FTTP. Donovan referred to fiber-to-the-home as a trial, but by now the company understands the economics of fiber. The company keeps stretching the truth a bit about their fiber deployments. The company keeps saying that they have deployed fiber to 4 million homes, with 8 million more coming in the next three years. But the fact is they have actually only passed the 4 million homes that they can market to as is disclosed on their own web site. The twelve million home target was something that was dictated by the FCC as part of the settlement allowing the company to buy DirecTV.

We don’t know how many fiber customers AT&T has. They are mostly marketing this to apartment buildings, although there are residential customers around the country saying they have it. But they have not sold big piles of fiber connections like Verizon FiOS. This can be seen by looking at the steady drop in total AT&T data customers – 16.03 million in 2014, 15.78 million in 2015 and 15.62 million at the end of the third quarter of 2016. AT&T’s fiber is not really priced to be super-competitive, except in markets where they compete with Google Fiber. Their normal prices elsewhere on fiber are $70 for 100 Mbps, $80 for 300 Mbps and $99 for a gigabit.

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Technology

Technology Predictions

Throughout history there are examples of people publicly declaring that something wasn’t possible and then a few years later the predicted impossible happened. There are some well-known examples of this in our own industry. Consider the following:

In 1961 Tunis Craven, an FCC Commissioner said, “There is practically no chance communications space satellites will be used to provide better telephone, telegraph, television, or radio service inside the United States.” Four years later the first commercial communications satellite was launched.

In 1878 Sir William Preece, the chief engineer of the British Post Office declared, “The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.”

The same year an internal memo at Western Union opined that, “This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.”

The famous movie producer Darryl Zanuck was quoted in 1946 as saying, “Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.”

In possibly the most famously wrong technology quote Bill Gates said, “We will never make a 32 bit operating system.”

Along the same lines, Ken Olson, the President of Digital Equipment Corporation and a major manufacturer of mainframes said in 1977, “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.

Our industry is full of predictions about the future. You always have to wonder which of these predictions will come true and which will prove to be totally wrong. It seems predictions are of two types. Some predictions are made about working technologies that aren’t going to make a dent in the marketplace. Our technology history is full of devices that nobody wanted to buy. But there are also many predictions made, like the examples above, about the limitations of technology and what is possible.

I know that technology improvements have taken me by surprise a few times. If in the early 2000s you would have asked me to predict the top data speeds that could be achieved on telephone copper or on coax I would have underestimated the speeds by a magnitude or more. At that time scientists in the labs all said that there were insurmountable interference issues that made higher frequencies unusable on both kinds of copper.

But some smart scientists doggedly worked on these problems and today we have G.fast that is putting gigabit speeds for short distances over telephone copper. And we have the potential for incredibly fast speeds on coax. I’ve witnessed a lab test that put 6 gigabits through a piece of coax.

I make a lot of predictions in this blog. But one thing I’ve learned is that you should never say never when it comes to technology (well, except maybe for tabletop fusion power). Instead predictions are better made talking about the likelihood of something being achieved in the foreseeable future versus the distant future.

A good example of this is gigabit cellular service. Unfortunately some of the press has confused millimeter wave wireless with 5G cellular and there are articles all over the web talking about the coming gigabit cellular service. Is gigabit cellular possible? I would venture to say that in a lab setting with a small number of phones this might be possible today or in the near future.

But there are physics limitations that limit gigabit wireless speeds to short distances and for this technology to ever become pervasive we would have to massively rework all cellular infrastructure to literally surround ourselves with cellular transmitters. It is that limitation that means that this is an extremely unlikely application within any reasonable time frame. It’s certainly possible someday that we might be surrounded by tiny IoT devices that can somehow work as a mesh network to bounce around fast data signals. But there are a whole lot of technology breakthroughs needed first to implement such a technology. So is gigabit wireless possible – I think it is. Will we see it in our lifetimes other than perhaps in a few controlled settings – I predict not. Guess we’ll have to wait to see if I’m right.

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An Upgrade to G.fast

Nokia has announced the lab trial of the next generation of G.fast, the technology that can pump more bandwidth through telephone copper. They ae calling the technology XG.fast.

In a recent trial the equipment was able to send a 5 Gbps signal over copper for 100 meters and 8 Gbps for 30 meters. This is much faster than the G.fast top speed in trials of about 700 Mbps. In a real life situation using older copper the speeds will not be nearly this fast. G.fast in real life trials has gotten about half of the speeds seen in labs, and it would be impressive if that can also be achieved for XG.fast.

The technology works by utilizing higher-band frequencies on the copper. Traditional VDSL uses frequencies up to about 17 MHz. G.fast uses frequencies between 106 MHz and 212 MHz. XG.fast climbs the spectrum even further and adds on spectrum between 350 MHz and 500 MHz.

There are a lot of issues involved in using all of this frequency on a small-gauge copper. The main problem is crosstalk interference – when adjoining copper wires interfere with each other, and this degrades the signal and drastically cuts down on the distance the signal can be transmitted.

Nokia mitigates the crosstalk using vectoring, the same as is done with VDSL and other DSL technologies. Vectoring generates an –out of-phase signal that can cancel out some of the interference. But there is so much interference at thise frequencies that vectoring can only keep the signal coherent for the short distances seen the trial.

To date there has not been a lot of interest in G.fast. Adtran, the other competitor in the G.fast space claims to have now conducted ninety field trials of the technology worldwide. That’s an extraordinarily low number for a technology that can add speed to existing copper. But it looks like most phone companies are not interested in the technology, and they have some good reasons.

The short distances make G.fast and its new successor impractically expensive in the copper plant. In order to use the technology the telco would have to mount an XG.Fast transmitter at the pole outside each home, or in dense neighborhoods to perhaps serve a few homes. But if the telco wants to take advantage of the faster speeds that XG.Fast can get into the home they also would need to string fiber to feed the XG.Fast transmitters.

XG.Fast is largely a fiber-to-the-curb technology and the cost of the building fiber up and down streets is the big hurdle to using the technology. Any company willing to spend the money to build that much fiber probably isn’t willing to trust copper for the last 100 feet.

There is one application where XG.fast makes good economic sense. It can be extremely costly to rewire older apartment buildings with fiber. But every apartment building has existing telephone wiring and XG.fast can be used to move data from a telephone closet to the apartment units. This sounds to be far less costly than trying to snake fiber through older buildings. Since a lot of companies have avoided older apartment buildings this might offer a relatively inexpensive way to bring broadband.

You can’t fault Nokia for continuing to pursue the technology. There is a huge amount of copper still hanging on poles and the world keeps shouting for more broadband. But I get nervous about recommending any technology that isn’t widely accepted. I can picture a telco deploying this technology and then seeing support dropped for the product line.

But I can’t see this ever being much more than a niche technology. Telcos in the US seem to be looking for reasons to tear down copper and don’t seem willing to take one more shot at a copper technology. There might be a good business case for using the technology to extend broadband inside older buildings. But US telcos seem completely uninterested in using this in older copper networks.

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Technology

New Technology – May 2016

The following are some new breakthroughs that might eventually benefit our industry:

Better Long-haul Fiber. Researchers at the Moscow University of Physic and Technology, ITMO University of St. Petersburg, and the Australian National University have demonstrated a new technology that can drastically increase the efficiency of long-haul fiber.

They have found that introducing silicon nanoparticles into a fiber optics path can increase what is called the Raman effect. The Raman effect is where light interacts with some materials to produce wavelengths of different colors. In these materials the light causes the affected molecules to increase in energy, and at the higher energy level the materials then re-emit a photon that has a lower energy level than the original light stream.

Today’s lasers use metallic particles to induce the desired color of wavelength but the silicon nanoparticles generate light nearly 100 times stronger than the technology used today. While it will take a while to go from lab to production, this has a huge potential for the efficiency and the distance between repeaters on long-haul fibers.

A New Form of Light. Scientists at Trinity College in Dublin Ireland have been able to produce a new kind of light.  Physics has viewed the properties of light as a fixed constant. This was based upon the angular momentum of photons and Planck’s constant. But the scientists have been able to produce a form of light with an angular momentum that is half the value of Planck’s constant.

Scientists have long theorized that different fractional angular momentum is possible but this is the first time it’s been produced. The first potential use for this new form of light is with fiber optics transmissions. This new kind of light looks to have properties that would allow for the transmission of significantly more bits of data than with normal light.

Faster G.Fast. Israeli chip-maker Sckipio has developed a G.Fast chipset that will double the effective speed of G.Fast. The chip can support symmetrical throughput speeds of 750 Mbps. Sckipio says that they already have another chip set on the drawing board that might double that speed to about 1.5 Gbps.

Their chipset is the first G.Fast design to have fast speeds in both directions and provides greater overall data throughput. While the only trial of G.Fast in the country that I’ve heard about is being done by CenturyLink, it’s been reported that AT&T is thinking about adopting the technology. The company has made numerous announcements about expanding their U-verse product to millions of homes and G.Fast is basically a fiber-to-the curb product that would let them string fiber in neighborhoods but use the existing copper network to bring the bandwidth into the home.

New Data Storage Technology. IBM Research announced the first successful trial of storing data using phase-change memory (PCM). This technology can store 3-bits of data instead of just one.  There are many advantages of PCM storage – it retains memory without power, it allows for faster read / write and it can be overwritten over 10 million times (compared to flash drives which wear out after around 3,000 write cycles).

IBM sees PCM being used in conjunction with flash storage to allow for very fast launching of devices like cell-phones and computers. It would also allow for much faster inquiries, speeding up computer processing speeds on any device.

 

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Technology

US Telcos Indifferent to G.Fast

G.Fast is a new technology that can deliver a large swath of broadband over copper wires for a short distance. The technology uses some of the very high frequencies that can travel over copper, much in the same way that DSL does for lower frequencies.

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) just approved the final standard for the technology with the G.9701 standard for “Fast Access to Subscriber Terminals.” Several vendors including Alcatel-Lucent and Huawei have been producing and testing units in various field trials.

British Telecom has done a number of these tests. The largest such test was started in August for 2,000 customers in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire. During the trial they are offering customers speeds of 330 Mbps, but they expect at the end of the trial to be able to raise this to about 500 Mbps.

The technology involves building fiber along streets and then using the existing copper drops to bring the bandwidth into the home. This is the most affordable kind of fiber construction because a telco can overlash fiber onto its existing copper wires on the poles. That means very little make-ready work, no permits needed, and no impediments to quick construction. This kind of fiber construction can literally be done at half of the cost faced by other fiber overbuilders.

British Telecom has done a number of trials across the country. Alcatel-Lucent has also done trials with Telkom Austria. But for the most part American telcos have shown no interest in the technology. The only real trial here that I’ve read about is a trial with CenturyLink in Las Vegas.

And I frankly don’t understand the reluctance. G.Fast is a halfway solution on the way to a full fiber deployment. As cable companies and overbuilders like Google are stepping up deployment of gigabit speeds, either through fiber or through fast cable modems using DOCSIS 3.1, the telcos have been announcing fiber builds to remain competitive. AT&T has announced gigabit fiber builds in more than twenty markets. CenturyLink says it will be passing 700,000 homes with fiber in 2016.

So why wouldn’t an American telo seriously consider G.Fast? With capabilities up to 500 Mbps in real-world applications it gives them a product that can compete well with other fast technologies. And by overlashing the fiber to deploy G.Fast the telco will have tackled one of the major costs of building an FTTP network, by getting the fiber deep into the network. And with G.Fast a telco can avoid the expensive fiber drops and electronics which are the most expensive part of a FTTP network for them.

I could envision somebody like CenturyLink building fiber to the more lucrative parts of town while deploying G.Fast to older copper neighborhoods. This would give them a far greater fast broadband coverage, making it easier and more cost effective to advertise their broadband.

But it seems like most of the US telcos just want out of the copper business. And so, rather than take this as an opportunity to milk another decade out of their copper networks before finally building fiber, they seem prepared to cede even more broadband customers to the cable companies. That has me scratching my head. The cable companies have clearly accepted that their entire future is as ISPs and that data is the only real product that will matter in the future. It just seems that the large telcos have not quite yet come to this same conclusion.

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The Industry

Large Telcos and DSL

There has been a spate of articles recently talking about how the number of cable customers at the large cable companies took their first big dip last quarter. This was the first time when the cable industry as a whole saw an overall significant customer loss, and this raises the question the question if cord cutting is real.

But there was another significant statistic in these same press releases. AT&T and Verizon together lost 474,000 DSL customers in the second quarter of 2015. The two made up some of these losses by adding 313,000 data customers to their FiOS and U-verse networks, so certainly some of the losses are offset by customers who shifted from DSL to something faster.

But this continues the trend that these two largest telcos are shedding DSL customers. The numbers just keep growing and this is the first time that number approached half a million customers.

Verizon has made it clear for years that they have no love for their copper networks. They have been selling significant chunks of the older networks to Frontier. They have been pestering the FCC for years to be able to turn down the copper in neighborhoods where they already have FiOS fiber.

Perhaps more surprising is that Verizon recently sold a significant number of FiOS customers to Frontier, and I have speculated before that Verizon doesn’t want to stay in any landline business. When you read their annual reports, any mention of their landline business is buried deep inside and they obviously have put all of their emphasis on the wireless business.

AT&T is a bit more perplexing. They have not been selling copper customers. But they have told the FCC a number of times that they would like to walk away from millions of customers on rural copper networks. AT&T recently promised the FCC as part of the DirectTV deal that they would aggressively add new broadband customers. While they have insinuated to the FCC that the new customers would all be on fiber, I would not be surprised to see a lot of them on U-Verse.

Many people speculate why AT&T bought DirectTV. My guess is that they want to get out of the business of delivering video over wires. U-Verse becomes a much better data product  if it doesn’t have to carry video so that all of the bandwidth would be used for data. There must already be a lot of current U-Verse customers bumping up against their bandwidth and wanting faster data connections.

It’s also interesting that AT&T hasn’t divested of rural copper networks in the same manner as Verizon. Again, I am only speculating, but my guess is that they don’t want those networks to be revitalized and then compete against their wireless networks. I think AT&T has a long term plan to serve rural areas with wireless only.

The one shame about cutting down the copper networks, particularly in urban and suburban neighborhoods, is that those networks could be upgraded relatively inexpensively with G.fast to deliver much faster speeds. CenturyLink just announced that they are testing 100 Mbps copper in Salt Lake City. Some of the copper networks in Europe are doing this with even faster speeds and the technology is generally referred to there as fiber-to-the-curb.

But obviously both companies have decided that G.fast is not a technological path they want to follow, and both are going to be aggressively decommissioning copper over the next five years.

I don’t feel too bad about a customer who is told they have to move from a copper network to a FIOS fiber network. But I am really worried about rural customers if somebody cuts down the only telecommunications wire to their home when the copper comes down. At that point those folks are going to be paying cellphone prices for both voice and data, and for some millions of them there is not enough coverage to provide those services over cellular. I predict we are going to be cutting customers off from communications and moving parts of the country back seventy-five years. I hope I am wrong.

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