Posts Tagged ‘broadband’
National Broadband Map Goes Live, Shows Vast Swathes of Unconnected Country
The map cost about $200 million (provided by the National Recovery Act of 2009), and offers a database of over 25 million documents showing the type, speed, provider, and location of broadband service. The most obvious way to use the map is simply to search for an address or zip code, and then narrow down results by type of broadband. Then you can see the maximum advertised speed of broadband, if it's available, which theoretically could be of use to businesses (they might not want to move to a location without reliable internet access) and consumers (ditto).
It also throws into sharp relief the fact that much of the country lacks broadband. Major population centers, like the Northeast Corridor, Chicagoland, Bay Area, Pacific Northwest, and Los Angeles-San Diego are blanketed, but much of the west, and even much of the southeast, are spotty at best. According to released alongside the map (which last June), 68% of American households now have broadband access, up from 63.5% last year, but that leaves a pretty significant number out. This map may help the national broadband effort to spread the gospel of high-speed to more of the country.
You can search for yourself at the itself.
Nokia to make phones for LightSquared’s wholesale 4G network
Nokia has announced that it will develop mobile devices for billionaire Philip Falcone’s — an ambitious 4G cellular network venture meant to compete with established carriers like AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint, .
Falcone’s Harbinger Capital hedge fund is backing the project, and Nokia Siemens has committed $7 billion to building up the 4G network over the next few years. LightSquared plans to have 92 percent of the U.S. population covered with its network by 2015. Given the involvement of Nokia Siemens, it’s not a huge surprise that its parent company would be providing handsets for the project.
Unlike typical cellular carriers, LightSquared doesn’t plan to sell directly to consumers. Instead, it intends to wholesale its network to retailers and other network providers. As , a retailer like Wal-Mart could use LightSquared’s network to offer a branded wireless service of its own. Other mobile carriers like T-Mobile could also license the network for 4G coverage without the need to build their own infrastructure.
While it may seem crazy to attempt building up a new cellular network from scratch, LightSquared’s wholesaling ambitions may prove successful. It opens the door for more companies to offer wireless services of their own and has the potential to drive down costs of 4G network access nationwide.
The company plans to build its network in nine U.S. metro areas in 2011, and it is beginning trials early next year in Baltimore, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Denver. LightSquared is also considering supplementing its cellular network with satellite coverage. It’s working with Qualcomm to develop chips that would allow phones to use both cellular and satellite networks.
Reston, VA-based LightSquared says it has amassed $1.75 billion in initial funding commitments.
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Country’s Fastest Broadband Internet Will Soon Chug Along in Chattanooga
The small southern city’s municipally owned utility is expected to announce today that it will offer ultra-high-speed Internet service up to one gigabit per second — that’s 200 times faster than the average American broadband speed, in case you were counting. At $350 per month, the cost may be prohibitive for many customers, but the utility, EPB, is still working out the kinks: “We don’t know how to price a gig. We’re experimenting,” said Harold DePriest, chief executive of EPB, in the Times.
The U.S. lags far behind other developed nations in broadband penetration, prompting the Obama administration to announce plans to improve matters. The calls for connecting 100 million American homes with 100-mbps broadband in the next 10 years. Chattanooga leaves those hopes in the dust.
it will provide 1-gbps service to a half million Americans, and 1,100 communities have applied to be Google’s test case. The firm will choose a winner later this year.
Chattanooga’s utility has been ramping up its Internet services for some time now. In June, EPB announced it had deployed its 100 percent fiber-optic network ahead of schedule — it’s the largest of its kind in the country. Customers can already sign up for a 150 mbps symmetrical Internet service, called Fi-Speed Internet.
These superfast speeds are apparently just a bonus, however — EPB's overall goal is a networked smart grid that can provide increased power reliability and efficiency. The fiber-to-home network is the backbone of that plan, . If only all broadband providers were so forward-thinking.
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“Auto-Tune” For Data Can Boost Speed and Capacity of Existing Fiber Optic Networks
Data travels through fiber optic networks when our electronic equipment encode it into light beams, which are then beamed through the optical fibers, often over great distances. But the integrity of the light signal decreases as those distances increase, due to both imperfections in the timing of the various parts of the light signal and because of interference caused by other signals traveling along the same fiber.
These imperfections cause distortion of the signal at the receiving end and limit how much data we can fire across our networks, not because the fiber can’t handle the signal load but because the capacity of our electronics to decipher all that distorted data. If the data came across sharpened and intact, the amount of data we could put on a fiber would drastically increase.
The EU researchers’ prototype device takes advantage of both advances in fiber optics and laser technology to ensure signals remain sharp, reducing the reliance on electronics to pull signals from all the noise. In a demonstration, their device locked onto signals coming down the optical pipeline with a laser, distinguishing it from the “cross-talk” noise generated by other signals. When the signal reaches its destination, the device restores it to the crisp, sharpened digital signal needed for swift processing, just as auto-tune removes interference and imperfections from a singer’s vocals.
Such technology could push broadband to levels limited only by the fiber cable itself rather than the signal processing equipment at each end. Though it’s still in prototype phase, upon further development the device could plug right into existing networks, significantly increasing broadband capacity in a relatively short period of time.
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Google & Verizon’s Net Neutrality Proposal Is Kind of Scary
As we watch the future of the internet drastically moving toward wireless broadband access, a joint policy proposal by Verizon and Google could spell doom for openness on anything but the traditional wired web
For those that may be unaware of the issue, an exceedingly simplified fifteen-second net neutrality primer: The debate pits network providers (like Verizon) against companies and individuals who use said networks to deliver products and services to customers (like Google). As web applications become more central in nearly every aspect of public and private life, the network providers have grown increasingly interested in recouping the massive amounts of money they spend on building and maintaining network infrastructure by charging those companies who use an inordinate amount of bandwidth (like Google) for privileged access and delivery to customers. The internet has never worked this way, so the idea is obviously upsetting to many people, who cite the web's inherent openness as a key, if not the key detail that has allowed it to fundamentally change all of our lives in such a powerful way, and will allow it to continue to do so at the same breakneck pace in the future.
Google and Verizon's plan lays out specific rules to ensure that wireline internet services can not be used for any such tiered or paid access, and that all applications and services delivered over them (as long as they're legal) can be given no preference over any other traffic. That means established bandwidth hogs like YouTube and brand new bandwidth hogs built by Russian teenagers in their bedrooms like Chat Roulette will all get equal access to your eyeballs. This will also theoretically prevent broadband providers from intentionally limiting the speed of all BitTorrent traffic, something they've to avoid clogging their network with copyrighted materials; the protocol can just as easily be used legally.
But what has net neutrality activists worried--in my opinion, rightly so--is that in the new plan, almost none of these protections apply to wireless networks. Nor do they apply to a more ambiguously defined category of "additional, differentiated online services, in addition to the Internet access and video services (such as Verizon's FIOS TV)" using current wireline networks.
But it's the wireless exemption that strikes the most worry in the hearts of free-internet proponents. As anyone watching the future of telecommunications and the internet will tell you, wireless web access will almost certainly one day overtake traditional wired networks as most people's primary means of getting online. With the last five years' explosion of smartphone usage, we're already watching this happen. Heck, if your home is in a good coverage area, it's entirely feasible today to scrap your monthly cable or DSL broadband services for something like a wireless MiFi hotspot from Verizon or Sprint for all but the most intensive surfing.
Should Google and Verizon's suggested plan be implemented, whoever beams the signal to your MiFi hotspot can shape the traffic of the web however they choose. This means blocking high-bandwidth sites like YouTube, giving preference to one streaming service over another (like only allowing Netflix's Watch Instantly vs. any other movie-streaming service), or blocking certain protocols like BitTorrent altogether.
Their reasoning for this proviso is that current-generation wireless networks are exceedingly fragile to maintain and expensive to build. No one's debating that--just ask anyone who uses an iPhone on AT&T in San Francisco or New York City. But why many see this as shortsighted is because as technology marches on, wireless broadband bandwidth will become a less precious commodity. Remember when we all exclusively used our phone lines to access the internet? It's pretty easy to see that if we were all still connecting with 28.8 modems, the internet wouldn't be what it is today. And the Verizons and the AT&Ts of the world wouldn't have to be fighting nearly as hard to maintain control of their networks at the expense of good old fashioned voice telephone calls.
But what happened was, DSL and fiber optic cable technologies sprung up. That shifted the burden and changed the issue from one of maintaining century-old copper wiring to building and maintaining satellite links and fiber optic cables with exponentially more capacity. Still a burden, yes, but a completely new and different one. The wireless space could change just as quickly. We could, one day, be swimming in more wireless bandwidth than we currently know what to do with.
The plan does acknowledges the industry's potential for rapid change, calling for the Government Accountability office to "report to Congress annually on developments in the wireless broadband marketplace, and whether or not current policies are working to protect consumers."
Which is all well and good. But this isn't 2005. Some predict wireless access to significantly overtake wired networks in as little as five years. And if that happens, and the core philosophies of Google and Verizon's policy proposal make it into whatever net neutrality legislation we may soon see, the internet could be a very different place.
You can read Google and Verizon's own take on the plan on Google's Public Policy blog , which also links to the official two-page policy proposal.
MIT Study: USA Broadband May Not Be So Awful After All
The Federal Communications Commission released a back in March, which included the frustrating and surprising statement that most Americans' broadband speed is half what service providers advertise.
But it might not be that bad after all, MIT researchers say -- most Internet measuring methods underestimate the speed of the access network. That's the part of the Internet ISPs actually control.
Slowness can often be attributed to home networks, users' computers, and ISP servers instead, say MIT scientists Steve Bauer, David Clark and William Lehr.
In one example, Bauer ran a speed test on his home computer in Cambridge, Mass., using a test server in New York. Most of the time, he was getting rates close to those advertised by his ISP. One afternoon, the rate fell precipitously, and Bauer realized his ISP had re-routed his connection to a different server because the New York server was overloaded. The nearest free server was in Amsterdam -- explaining why the speed dropped so much.
It's hard to tease apart end-to-end performance tests and attribute bottlenecks to a specific cause, . Most testing methodologies don't do this very well, and the result is a potentially misleading diagnosis of a broadband network's quality.
In the study -- conducted by MIT labs which receive funding from telecom companies -- the authors analyzed a half-dozen systems for measuring the speed of Internet connections. They underestimated the access' networks speed for a variety of reasons, an MIT news release explains.
For instance, the FCC study analyzed data for broadband subscribers with different tiers of service. The analysis didn't know which data corresponded to which tier, so they assumed the tier could be inferred from the maximum measured rate, MIT says. But in reality, the lower-tier subscribers sometimes ended up with better data rates than they paid for. The study the FCC relied upon misclassified this, the researchers say -- good service on a cheap tier was classified as lousy service at a higher tier.
So maybe your ISP is treating you better than you think.
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Uncle Sam Wants to Know About Your Internet Service
Or, more specifically, diligently measure its speed with a special router
The Federal Communications Commission is hoping 10,000 Americans will sign up for a service that monitors broadband use, giving users — and the government — data about speed, availability and technical topics like packet loss.
Appropriately, the FCC contracted with a firm called SamKnows to do the monitoring. Sign up The firm will put 10,000 special routers in homes across the country to measure Internet service provider performance.
Earlier this week, a whopping 80 percent of Americans have no idea what their Internet connection speed is. What’s more, about 70 percent of Americans believe their ISP’s claims about that speed -- when, in fact, it’s often about half the advertised performance.
This is problematic for national broadband planning efforts, notes. Nobody really knows how fast broadband connections are and even what areas have broadband service. SamKnows’ routers aim to answer those questions.
The routers will perform speed tests at regular intervals every day, and send the results to a data hub that will compile information about individual ISPs. Along with speed, the routers will test connection consumption -- how much data is sent and received -- and more wonky details like jitter, DNS query resolution and others.
As the program's Web site notes, most people think of ISP speed as the most important performance metric. But it really depends on how you use your Internet. Gamers, for instance, should be more concerned with things like latency and packet loss. SamKnows tests all of that, unlike other speed-monitoring services. The test data can reach up to 2 GB a month.
It's a win-win: Volunteers will get individualized reports sent through a customized Web dashboard, and the government will get loads of detailed data that could inform future ISP disclosure rules and national broadband policy.
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