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G.Network raises £1bn to fibre London

gnetwork 2301.4 million premises - about half the city - are set for fibre over the next five years.  100 Mbps goes for  £22 ($30) and900 Mbps symmetric £48 ($65.) 10 gig will also be available. 1,250 workers will tear up around 4,500 km of streets.

G.network - also the company's web address - received a permit from OFCOM in 2017. Mark Jackson reported in 2018 it had raised £60 million to run fibre to London businesses. For the consumer build, G.network is getting £295m from a big pension fund and the rest from banks. 

BT is rapidly becoming the sick man of European telecom, with half a dozen well-funded companies running fibre and soon taking millions of customers. Unlike the French and Spaniards, the Brits didn't run fibre home, relying on DSL (including G.fast) and the absence of cable across half the country.  It is paying a very high price and doesn't have a good turnaround strategy.

Marc Allera of BT thinks he can raise prices 3% above inflation.

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Are 20% of Comcast Gigabit Homes Actually Not Gigabit?

Tyler Cooper of BroadbandNow checked claims of gigabit service from the FCC. He founded that the carriers did not actually sell "gigabit" to a quarter of the claimed homes. Only 56% of addresses listed as "gigabit" could be served at over 900 Mbps.  I reviewed the findings with him. For certainty, more than 75 addresses need to be tested but his methods were sensible. 

Joe Biden wants to spend $20B to bring broadband to unserved rural areas and others in DC are talking $50-80 billion. Given that the recent FCC auction promises to bring 100 Mbps to about 98% of the country, that's a mistake - unless all the data we have being used is mistaken.

95% of the kids without connections could have one if the money is there. Comcast and Chicago are connecting all the kids for ~$10/month.  Charter, T-Mobile, Cox, Verizon, and AT&T have similar programs. This is a "just do it."

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5 US Net Giants $7,000,000,000,000 Trillion

Nov 2020 top five market cap 230Decent people lead Google, Facebook, and the other giants. They are very smart and hard-working. They are no more greedy than anyone else. However, corporate leaders in America put shareholders first. That does not always serve users and the public interest.

Seven trillion dollars of corporate power is unprecedented in my lifetime. These five companies are worth over three times as much as the top twenty-eight telcos across the world (below.) I believe each is now spending over $100 million/year for influence.

Consider a thought experiment. Would the world be better off if the giants were broken into smaller parts, say worth up to $500 billion? 

Capitalism works best with strong competition. If Instagram, Whatsapp, and Facebook how to contend with each other, they would be more innovative. One might even offer a service that didn't abuse your privacy.

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Telefonica Brazil passes AT&T, Verizon with 16M FTTH homes passed

Enrique Blanco, Telefonica CTO, is telecom's strongest believer in fiber. His Brazilian operation has now passed 16 million homes, almost a quarter of the country. The goal is 24 million in a few years. Only 3 million have purchased so far, but fiber generally catches 40% of broadband after a few years. 

From the financial call:

FTTH revenues were up 56% year-over-year, while IPTV was up 26.9% resulting in a combined growth of 47.3%. Analyst Carlos Sequeira noted, "The FTTH operation is growing super fast. Net additions are impressive. So everything is going super well." He went on to ask if Vivo could even speed up the construction.

This is part of a worldwide trend of adding fiber. In the US, Frontier is building again and talks of 3 million as it exits bankruptcy. BT is passing ~2M homes/year, up from almost nothing three years ago. Orange has just announced it's "accelerating fiber." It has 22 million connections available, most shared with Free. That's over 60% of the country. 

Two years ago, almost no one expected this kind of growth. I didn't.

AT&T killing DSL (Dave in USA Today)

AT&T will "phase out outdated services like DSL and new orders for the service will no longer be supported after October 1." Thanks to Rob Pegoraro for including me in his story. AT&T will continue offering the DSL from their field terminals, calling it fiber to the node. It's the central office connections that are being closed, most under 6 Mbps.  

DSL is now often delivering a gigabit with G.fast. Adtran is actually seeing an uptick in G.fast in Germany, served from fiber to the basement. G.mgfast is still moving in standards, for 3 and 6 Gbps. But the faster DSL requires a terminal in the field, normally backhauled by fiber. That cost money the telcos didn't feel like spending.

Verizon and AT&T, around 2011, “basically gave up on fighting cable over a third of its territory,” I told Rob. Both decided they ultimately saved money with a single, wireless network. They continued to milk the territories for whatever they could get, and hemorrhaged subscribers to cable. Bruce Kushnick discovered that both companies are now down to under 700,000 pure DSL customers, losing more every quarter.

I estimated that DSL remains the only landline choice for 3 to 6% of the U.S. LTE is now routinely 50-125 Mbps. Elon Musk is launching hundreds of low orbit satellites with DSL like latencies. There's little need for slow DSL.

Cable is the best choice for the 2/3rds of the US where the telcos haven't built fiber home.

 

ASSIA Equipe Work-From-Home Manager

John Cioffi pretty much invented DSL and has spent most of the last 30 years making your connections better. ASSIA developed CloudCheck, which delivered optimum Wi-Fi experience. It announced this week EQUIPE, which manages employees' WI-Fi and connection reliability.

John writes me:
The work-from-home trend brings significant challenges to residential connectivity and remote collaboration of business teams. SMB and enterprise companies don’t have the same visibility or control over their remote employees' quality of internet connectivity. To help maintain business continuity and work productivity in this new remote-working era, ASSIA invented new ways to measure, monitor, and optimize internet connectivity that targets remote teams’ internet-connection-related productivity.
Equipe also is an opportunity for IT services to expand to the WFH employees, diagnostics, improve productivity, etc.
One feature that I strongly believe in is the additional connection to 4G wireless. Equipe uses the wireless to provide a better experience when the primary connection is not adequate. The cost of a wireless connection is so low it almost always is a good idea, if only as insurance against downtime.
Important conflict of interest note: I'm on the ASSIA Advisory Board. 

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Sao Paulo 10T busiest Internet exchange; Traffic falling despite COVID

Sao Paulo IX traffic 230

Frankfurt DE-CIX has long been the busiest Internet exchange, but Sao Paulo is the first to reach 10 terabits of traffic. I shouldn't have been surprised. 2/3rds of the Internet is in the global South. Brazil is building fiber faster than the U.S. (So are France and Spain. The U.S. fiber record is dismal, perhaps because gigabit cable reaches ~90% of the country.) 

In Frankfurt, traffic is down from the April-May COVID peak. (Chart below.) Traffic in March peaked around 8 terabits, then went up to 9 in May. August peaks were down to about 8.5 terabits, about where they would be with normal traffic growth since 2019.

Scare stories and cheap headlines spread panic, but actually nearly all networks in the developed world handled the traffic without major problems. Cable upstream occasionally hit minor congestion. The cable companies have been holding back on upstream improvements for 5 years, expecting Full Duplex to cheaply raise upstream bandwidth around now. The technology is barely out of the labs, however, and the costs are higher than expected.

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US cable and especially telcos fail miserably on adding new customers

Even conservative Republicans like David Redl believe the pandemic proves the 20 million or so American homes without broadband need to be connected. But in Q2, AT&T reports 114,000 fewer connections and Verizon 23,000 less. Charter came through with 850,000 new homes and Comcast 323,000. 1,243,000 connections is absolutely unacceptable when children have to learn at home. 

The three big phone companies have essentially abandoned consumers in large parts of their territory, leaving about half of America -- including me -- with only one choice for decent broadband. No wonder we have some of the highest prices in the world.

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More Articles ...

  1. Live conferences virtually impossible where Corona problems continue
  2. "Churn Approaches Zero with Fiber" Carl Russo
  3. BT's KPMG Auditor: We don't trust the numbers
  4. Biggest Chip Tool Maker May Produce in Singapore to Evade U.S. China War
  5. The Big Backbones: Level 3, Orange, AT&T
  6. China Unicom's Big Edge Claims First in World (Eng Newsbreak)
  7. Bravo Pai! Doubling Wi-Fi One of the Most Important Moves of the Decade
  8. Verizon Running Scared of T-Mobile 5G
  9. B_______ "Our priority continues to be investing in technology and capabilities that will ensure Canadians remain leaders in the global digital economy over the long-term."
  10. Verizon CEO Vestberg: "No major impact from a network point of view, the wireless, the wireline, or the fiber network."
  11. Germany: $8B for 6M Fiber Homes in Ill-served Germany
  12. Historic: China Broadband Falls in December 2019
  13. New Coronavirus Already Affecting Telecom
  14. Equinix/Packet Deal Bringing Cloud Everywhere
  15. Understanding Telco People
  16. Slumbering giants not needed
  17. Q2 worldwide: 18M new terrestrial connections
  18. Wrong, Elliott! AT&T has one of the best managements in world telecom
  19. Adtran will build PON in Egypt
  20. From $10: Jio expects 35M FTTH
  21. Landline traffic growth 30%, >terabyte users becoming significant
  22. Chip bottom: Sales down 7%
  23. Mobile World Congress 10 gig - on fiber
  24. Wikipedia edits Cloud & Edge computing
  25. AR/VR: China's Gov says Go!
  26. Guo Ping complete speech: Huawei New Year: $108B sales, "The greater the difficulty, the greater the glory."
  27. US$170M fine for Charter consumer fraud, $330M Sprint tax cheating, FCC investigating Verizon & T-Mobile for False Claims
  28. Frontier, Windstream bankruptcy predicted by stock price
  29. Digital Kenya: A book about an extraordinary community.
  30. Nokia gets EUR 250M from govs to lend to AT&T
  31. BT & others fight back against the China boycott
  32. "Gigabit is almost everywhere"
  33. Calix AXOS: "It's delivered, it's working, it's deploying."
  34. 2 Days, US$25B gap between VZ (More networks) & AT&T (DirecTV, TimeWarner)
  35. 20% of Britain getting fibre from Goldman Sachs supported CityFibre
  36. 10 biggest Internet & telecom stories 2018
  37. Cable future: Gigabits of upstream, 5G latency, worldwide gigabits
  38. Stanton "We have seen component shortages throughout the year"
  39. GPON is Dead! Long live 10G. From Poland to Hong Kong, the low price of 10G is inspiring the switch
  40. Academician Ding Wenhua of CCTV: Our 36 megabit UHD is world class

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