Death of Gigaom: This one really hurts

NY Times, WSJ, WP: You need to make offers to Stacey at staceyhigginbotham dot com, Kevin Fitchard at gigaom.com (or via me if that email is shut down.) In the day, Om Malik and Saul Hansall (NYT) were the only reporters who consistently beat me to major broadband stories. Soon after Gigaom began, Saul was disappointed. We expected Gigaom would do well and now Saul would never have the chance to hire Om for the Times. To a large extent, Best Bits in the Times was based on what Gigaom was doing. 

    "Just watch. Stacey is going to be incredible," Om said to me when he hired her. He was right. Kevin Fitchard was in a tough spot just before Stacey & Om hired him, virtually singlehandedly trying to report every story in the business as Telephony dropped almost all the reporters. He remained productive at Gigaom while dramatically upping his game.

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10 Gig - repeat, 10 gig - to 800K apartments in Hong Kong

Soon, the cost to the telco for 10 gigabits will be little different than the cost of ten megabits.  1 gig service over fiber costs the carrier very little more than 10 or 100 megabits. Equipment going in today is almost all ready for a gig. There's rarely any savings using obsolete gear that tops out at lower speeds. PCCW's Hong Kong telco has now upped the ante, bringing a ten gig - presumably XGPON - to all 800,000 fiber customers. Trials have begun and they expect to cover nearly all 800K by the end of 2015. 

Hong Kong consumers are among the luckiest in the world. Despite wages often as high as the U.S., prices both for wired and wireless service are typically half what they are in the states. Pricing for the gig service isn't announced and will be determined by what the market requires. Even with the low revenue base, HKT is going fiber or vectored VDSL to nearly all the city while investing less than 10% of revenue. Their LTE is going to 300 megabits.

Hong Kong HKT's cost should be somewhere between $400 & $1,000 per home - probably closer to $400.

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Goodbye, Lantiq. Hello, Intel

Late arriving chips push DSL pioneer into Intel deal. Intel is back in the DSL business more than a decade after losing about $2B without bringing a DSL chip to market. Lantiq is a solid company with excellent engineers around the world.

Not long ago, CEO Christian Wolff was planning for a $1B IPO. Imran Hajimusa was exhibiting spectacular demonstrations of world-beating performance WiFi, some of the first publicly shown vectored VDSL and more. The chips haven't made it to market. Update 3/03 Vectored VDSL chips for modems are shipping, although other chips are not. 

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Ikanos: Still waiting on chips

Very limited sales of ADSL, VDSL chips for now. Ikanos was the first with VDSL2 DMT, today's standard. They've incorporated Globespan-Conexant, once the largest ADSL chip provider. But until their vectored & G.fast chips ship, sales are dismal. With investments from Alcatel and Tallgrass, they have time to turn things around - when the chips get out the door.  Tallgrass and management bought an additional $12M in equity early in February.

    They are particularly enthused about G.fast. On their investor call http://bit.ly/1BcvVC1, "One is that G.fast is obviously the flagship of the 1-gig push forward, if you will. We expect that market to be -- as the percentage of the total to be around 25% of the mix of the balance of the DSL technology, but one of the things that interesting around G.fast is an end-to-end replacements or deployment takes place.

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Obama's Seven Percent Broadband Plan

Program will help far fewer than 10%. Barack has a delightfully folksy video chat about needing better and more affordable broadband. http://bit.ly/WHbunkum He flew out to Ceder Falls to make a second speech. http://bit.ly/WHCedar Unfortunately, his proposals are highly unlikely to impact 5% of Americans and almost certainly won't reach 7%. (Proposal below)

The only item of apparent substance is Obama's plan to override state laws in a minority of the country that prevent cities from building municipal systems. That's the right thing to do, but won't affect many people. Even if the proportion of municipal broadband in the states affected doubles or triples, that's less than 5% of U.S. homes. Doubling or tripling would be a surprise.

If you want to help more than 10% or 20% you therefore have to make the incumbent bring down prices.

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Ten days to nominate DSL pioneers for the IEEE Ibuka Medal

The 2012 Ibuka Medal went to three people on the video standards committee for H.264/MPEG4-AVC. The 2013 award went to three on the High-Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding committee. For more than 20 years, the DSL Standards group has been advancing broadband from 1.5 megabits in the pre-DMT days to G.fast’s hundreds of megabits. It’s time to put together a nomination. This year's nominations are due January 31. The chair of the committee is Kenneth Wiegand of Fraunhofer, one of those who won the award for video standards. Balan Nair, also on the committee, installed millions of lines of DSL as CTO of Qwest.

The 2014 Award went to Marty Cooper, cell phone inventor and friend to many of us. Marty’s Marconi Panel in D.C. in October upended many people’s thinking about spectrum. Two dozen of the most influential in D.C. were in the audience to hear “We’ve never had a spectrum shortage and we never will.” The video is well worth watching http://bit.ly/Marconispectrum

For information on the award, http://www.ieee.org/about/awards/tfas/ibuka.html If we don’t get this together for this year, let’s make sure to do it next year.

 

CEO: Verizon Dumping DSL for LTE

Dropping 10M wired homes, 50-75% of territory. Please don't shoot the messenger - I still support DSL. CEO Lowell McAdam intends to shut most copper served homes, 10-15M. This is not because those homes aren't profitable, but they will be even more profitable if served by Verizon's LTE. 

Here's what Lowell told the CITIBANK conference.

"We're moving a lot off of copper onto wireless, as well, especially for voice services and lower speed DSL. And that allows us to have the maintenance savings and gives the customers frankly better service than they would on antiquated copper. So we're doing a number of things to sort of prune the assets down and be a bit more focused."  

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HD Voice getting Golden Spike Jan 6 in Las Vegas

Dan Berninger making it happen. “All major operators offer HD voice to at least a segment of direct customer,” Dan writes, ”But there remains no interoperability across operators.” More than a decade ago, Dan, Jeff Pulver and friends convinced everyone in  the industry HD voice made phone calls much better.

Broadband allows doubling the frequency range and better codecs improve everything. The additional cost is trivial, something like ten cents/month all in for better mics and network gateways. The gear is so cheap that many phones the last two years include HD. Carriers included Telstra in Australia are turning it on.

The bottleneck: no one carrier could make HD effective. Both ends of the call need to be HD and most calls go from one network to another.

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