The source news article got this wrong and created an error in the Slashdot article. I've consulted on the design of the system and know it well
1) The $95M also covers LTE across the sate of Vermont including extreme rural areas as well as dedicated connections to many schools, libraries, clinics and other"community anchor institutions" across the state. It is far more than the 17,500 homes. It was very expensive to run fiber to rural homes, but the real figure for that part was about half the $8,500 quoted.
2) All 17,500 homes will get the full gigabit. The original article implied that only 600 of the 17,500 have subscribed. Actually, only 600 have it so far because that's as fast as VTel can install the links; all 17,500 will be connected to fiber in the coming months. The backbone is in but a crew has to go to every home, run fiber under the lawn as necessary, install the box and bring the connection inside.. VTel is actually the local incumbent phone company and is running the gig fiber to all. Those who take broadband for $34.95/month get the full gigabit connection.
As stimulus projects go, this is a good one. The network is superb: 100 gig backhaul multi-homes, extra fast home routers, 2 terabytes of cloud space for everyone,...Most of the Federal subsidy is passed along to consumers as a lower price, not retained by the company.
Whether it is good public policy to spend ~ $4,000/home in the future for great rural Internet is a subject reasonable people will differ. But when there was stimulus money to be spent, this was effective use.
One misleading story was picked up by 30 other reporters, none of whom bothered to check with Steve Wozniak. When I did, he emailed. “I am taking the first steps toward my goal of Australian citizenship, which is to apply for an extended visa so that I can reside here. I have desired to find the path to accomplish this for decades. It has nothing to do with NBN (faulty reporting) although I'm always a staunch advocate for technology and bandwidth and sharing and internet freedom. But the two things are not connected. NBN is good in my mind and is a side benefit but that's all.” http://fastnetnews.com/fiber-news/175-d/4856-woz-nbn-is-not-why-im-going-australian
Lots wrong with Comcast, but their Internet service will generally be as fast as any of the telcos except Verizon. Most of the U.S. has a slow future.
Comcast's DOCSIS 3.0 in 2008 probably will offer 20-50 megabits downstream and no improvement on the upstream. It's a 120 or 160 megabit shared downstream. This is already deploying heavily in Japan, J:COM, some in Canada (Videotron), UK, France, and Holland. The only chips shipping (TI) are limited to 120 or 160 shared downstream and do nothing for the upstream. Comcast CEO Brian Roberts announced they will offer it to 4 or 5M of their 22M homes. The assumption is Comcast will use it defensively against FIOS and take a long time (years) to bring it to the rest of the country. Other U.S. cablecos seem even further behind.
The full 3.0 is not available for a while (more likely 2009 than 2008 for any volume). Full 3.0 is a minimum of 160 (shared) downstream and 120 (shared) upstream. Given typical usage patterns, most customers will get 20-50 megabits most of the time. The specification goes up to a shared gigabit, but I don't believe anyone is close to offering that as a product.
FIOS (or DSL) does not share the local loop, so there's no bottleneck between your home and the ONU (DSLAM) control box. Behind the ONU is shared fiber to the local office and from there to the Internet peering point. It is absolutely possible for that shared connection to become congested, and it was a common problem in poorly designed DSL networks. FIOS backhaul has been built pretty robustly, so as far as I can tell they have close to zero congestion problems, and customers almost always get their promised speed if the other side of the Internet connection can keep up.
Unfortunately, FIOS is currently only available to about 8 million homes, and Verizon has indicated they will top out at 20M or so in 5 years. The remaining 85M U.S. homes will have a second rate Internet unless and until the high end of DOCSIS 3.0 rolls out widely. (?2012-2015). AT&T and Qwest are planning for 1 meg up and 20 or so down, with most of the downstream used for their IPTV. They call it "Fiber to the node" but it's really DSL with a press release.
Conclusion: 60-80% of the U.S, will have a second rate Internet for years. I'd love for an uprising that tells Kevin Martin, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Randall Stephenson and the pthers powers that be the U.S. Internet should match world standards. Houston and San Diego should not have slower connections than Paris, Berlin, Geneva, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Boston and New York.
Folks
I wrote a strong article following up this story but after talking with the CEO decided to hold it back. I believe strongly in the open net, and have publicly debated against Verizon and AT&T on Net Neutrality. I urge caution in this case. Besides the update that NRK and NextGenTel had resolved all differences and are peering at a gigabit, Stokke provided numerous details of his open video peering policy. There is ambiguity in their official statement about peering and commercial arrangements that I need to clear up and other details. Although Stokke directly supported Net Neutrality in what he said, the concept are easy to confuse. I'm witholding judgment until more facts are clearly available in English and the full situation explained.
Here's how I wrote it.
5 a.m. New York, Olav Stokke, the CEO of NextGenTel called and told me the Slashdot story "Network Neutrality Threatened In Norway" was substantially inaccurate. So I held my story, "Norway Nixes Net Neutrality TeliaSonera Degrades Norwegian Broadcasting" and hope this proves a false alarm. Stokke tells me they've resolved a peering difficulty with the Norwegian Broadcasting Company (NRK) and gave me assurances that NextGenTel was completely open to outside video. Thanks to Stokke and Birgitta Grafstrom of parent company TeliaSonera for working with me on a tough deadline, and I'll have more info next week.
-------
Again, I cannot confirm the details of what he claimed, but they were consistent enough I need further research.
db
daveb at dslprime.com
Actually, it's me. Years back, wanting to make it a little harder to be tracked on the web if I went anti-government, I used a slightly misspelled version of my name, including for my slashdot login.
Since then, I realized I have no secrets or privacy, but haven't changed all my ids.
Send me a direct email to any address on the Dslprime.com website and I'll confirm if you still doubt.
db
Dave Burstein here, author of this one. Comments are right on target, so I thought to stop by with some followup.
1- The business plan sounds dubious, but heck, let's let Kleiner Perkins pay the bill to find out whether they are chasing a dot-com model. May or may not be decent business (smart folk like Dewayne Hendricks are skeptical), but it's good policy to get it built. They are only asking for a 15 year license, not perpetual.
2- The existing carriers will fight like hell to stop anything like this, as noted. So instead of whining, do something in D.C.. I hear more people making noise on these forums than I ever hear in Washington. I know you think Washington never listens, but I've seen ideas of mine in FCC regulations and congressional statements. You may not have the $million AT&T gave to Congressman Bobby Rush, but may of the people making decisions are honest and will listen to you as well. Email me daveb at dslprime.com for some ideas.
3- "So, will this be 95% of the population of the U.S., or 95% of the geographical area?" They are aiming for 95% of the population, with a sensible excuse not to get to the other 5%: excess cost of fiber to connect the towers to the Internet backbone. So my next editorial will be:
Serving the next 10%: FCC needs to bring down the cost of backhaul
Revive tough "special access" rules where broadband is hard to get
(suggesting that if the local carrier isn't offering DSL, make them lease fiber cheaply to someone who will.)
4- All that said about universal broadband coverage on land, some small portion of users (my guess is 1-3% but no one has hard data) are best served by satellite because of terrain/distance problems. Policy on that is to find a way to bring down the price/bring up the speed of satellite service. I always prefer to do that by competition when that can work.
Dave Burstein
Editor, DSL Prime
Slashdot Mirror
1) The $95M also covers LTE across the sate of Vermont including extreme rural areas as well as dedicated connections to many schools, libraries, clinics and other"community anchor institutions" across the state. It is far more than the 17,500 homes. It was very expensive to run fiber to rural homes, but the real figure for that part was about half the $8,500 quoted.
2) All 17,500 homes will get the full gigabit. The original article implied that only 600 of the 17,500 have subscribed. Actually, only 600 have it so far because that's as fast as VTel can install the links; all 17,500 will be connected to fiber in the coming months. The backbone is in but a crew has to go to every home, run fiber under the lawn as necessary, install the box and bring the connection inside.. VTel is actually the local incumbent phone company and is running the gig fiber to all. Those who take broadband for $34.95/month get the full gigabit connection.
As stimulus projects go, this is a good one. The network is superb: 100 gig backhaul multi-homes, extra fast home routers, 2 terabytes of cloud space for everyone, ...Most of the Federal subsidy is passed along to consumers as a lower price, not retained by the company.
Whether it is good public policy to spend ~ $4,000/home in the future for great rural Internet is a subject reasonable people will differ. But when there was stimulus money to be spent, this was effective use.
Dave Burstein Editor DSL Prime and Fast Net News.
One misleading story was picked up by 30 other reporters, none of whom bothered to check with Steve Wozniak. When I did, he emailed. “I am taking the first steps toward my goal of Australian citizenship, which is to apply for an extended visa so that I can reside here. I have desired to find the path to accomplish this for decades. It has nothing to do with NBN (faulty reporting) although I'm always a staunch advocate for technology and bandwidth and sharing and internet freedom. But the two things are not connected. NBN is good in my mind and is a side benefit but that's all.” http://fastnetnews.com/fiber-news/175-d/4856-woz-nbn-is-not-why-im-going-australian
Dave Burstein here, not anonymous coward.
Lots wrong with Comcast, but their Internet service will generally be as fast as any of the telcos except Verizon. Most of the U.S. has a slow future.
Comcast's DOCSIS 3.0 in 2008 probably will offer 20-50 megabits downstream and no improvement on the upstream. It's a 120 or 160 megabit shared downstream. This is already deploying heavily in Japan, J:COM, some in Canada (Videotron), UK, France, and Holland. The only chips shipping (TI) are limited to 120 or 160 shared downstream and do nothing for the upstream. Comcast CEO Brian Roberts announced they will offer it to 4 or 5M of their 22M homes. The assumption is Comcast will use it defensively against FIOS and take a long time (years) to bring it to the rest of the country. Other U.S. cablecos seem even further behind.
The full 3.0 is not available for a while (more likely 2009 than 2008 for any volume). Full 3.0 is a minimum of 160 (shared) downstream and 120 (shared) upstream. Given typical usage patterns, most customers will get 20-50 megabits most of the time. The specification goes up to a shared gigabit, but I don't believe anyone is close to offering that as a product.
FIOS (or DSL) does not share the local loop, so there's no bottleneck between your home and the ONU (DSLAM) control box. Behind the ONU is shared fiber to the local office and from there to the Internet peering point. It is absolutely possible for that shared connection to become congested, and it was a common problem in poorly designed DSL networks. FIOS backhaul has been built pretty robustly, so as far as I can tell they have close to zero congestion problems, and customers almost always get their promised speed if the other side of the Internet connection can keep up.
Unfortunately, FIOS is currently only available to about 8 million homes, and Verizon has indicated they will top out at 20M or so in 5 years. The remaining 85M U.S. homes will have a second rate Internet unless and until the high end of DOCSIS 3.0 rolls out widely. (?2012-2015). AT&T and Qwest are planning for 1 meg up and 20 or so down, with most of the downstream used for their IPTV. They call it "Fiber to the node" but it's really DSL with a press release.
Conclusion: 60-80% of the U.S, will have a second rate Internet for years. I'd love for an uprising that tells Kevin Martin, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Randall Stephenson and the pthers powers that be the U.S. Internet should match world standards. Houston and San Diego should not have slower connections than Paris, Berlin, Geneva, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Boston and New York.
Dave Burstein Editor DSL Prime.
Folks
I wrote a strong article following up this story but after talking with the CEO decided to hold it back. I believe strongly in the open net, and have publicly debated against Verizon and AT&T on Net Neutrality. I urge caution in this case. Besides the update that NRK and NextGenTel had resolved all differences and are peering at a gigabit, Stokke provided numerous details of his open video peering policy. There is ambiguity in their official statement about peering and commercial arrangements that I need to clear up and other details. Although Stokke directly supported Net Neutrality in what he said, the concept are easy to confuse. I'm witholding judgment until more facts are clearly available in English and the full situation explained.
Here's how I wrote it.
5 a.m. New York, Olav Stokke, the CEO of NextGenTel called and told me the Slashdot story "Network Neutrality Threatened In Norway" was substantially inaccurate. So I held my story, "Norway Nixes Net Neutrality TeliaSonera Degrades Norwegian Broadcasting" and hope this proves a false alarm. Stokke tells me they've resolved a peering difficulty with the Norwegian Broadcasting Company (NRK) and gave me assurances that NextGenTel was completely open to outside video. Thanks to Stokke and Birgitta Grafstrom of parent company TeliaSonera for working with me on a tough deadline, and I'll have more info next week.
------- Again, I cannot confirm the details of what he claimed, but they were consistent enough I need further research.
db
daveb at dslprime.com
Actually, it's me. Years back, wanting to make it a little harder to be tracked on the web if I went anti-government, I used a slightly misspelled version of my name, including for my slashdot login. Since then, I realized I have no secrets or privacy, but haven't changed all my ids. Send me a direct email to any address on the Dslprime.com website and I'll confirm if you still doubt. db
Dave Burstein here, author of this one. Comments are right on target, so I thought to stop by with some followup.
1- The business plan sounds dubious, but heck, let's let Kleiner Perkins pay the bill to find out whether they are chasing a dot-com model. May or may not be decent business (smart folk like Dewayne Hendricks are skeptical), but it's good policy to get it built. They are only asking for a 15 year license, not perpetual.
2- The existing carriers will fight like hell to stop anything like this, as noted. So instead of whining, do something in D.C.. I hear more people making noise on these forums than I ever hear in Washington. I know you think Washington never listens, but I've seen ideas of mine in FCC regulations and congressional statements. You may not have the $million AT&T gave to Congressman Bobby Rush, but may of the people making decisions are honest and will listen to you as well. Email me daveb at dslprime.com for some ideas.
3- "So, will this be 95% of the population of the U.S., or 95% of the geographical area?" They are aiming for 95% of the population, with a sensible excuse not to get to the other 5%: excess cost of fiber to connect the towers to the Internet backbone. So my next editorial will be: Serving the next 10%: FCC needs to bring down the cost of backhaul Revive tough "special access" rules where broadband is hard to get (suggesting that if the local carrier isn't offering DSL, make them lease fiber cheaply to someone who will.)
4- All that said about universal broadband coverage on land, some small portion of users (my guess is 1-3% but no one has hard data) are best served by satellite because of terrain/distance problems. Policy on that is to find a way to bring down the price/bring up the speed of satellite service. I always prefer to do that by competition when that can work.
Dave Burstein
Editor, DSL Prime