Don't Worry about Blu-ray

There has been some speculation that the Sony victory in the high-definition digital video recorder war is somewhat "Pyhric", to the extent that content is moving to digital distribution, and away from physical media.

That might be premature,if a recent survey of U.K. consumers is any indication. The survey suggests Blu-ray DVRs will have the highest growth of any digital entertainment activity in 2008, according to Russell Hart, Chief Executive of Entertainment Media Research.

The survey asked about usage of 49 digital and entertainment activities. Around 24 percent of consumers surveyed reported they will start watching movies in the Blu-ray format in the next six months. "This is at least double the intention rate of any other entertainment activity," Hart says.

The other issue is that consumers are happy to watch on-demand programming as long as it is free. There's high interest in new movie releases (84 percent are interested and 48 percent say they are definitely interested.

Live music concerts are attractive to 72 percent of respondents. So is comedy, interesting to 79 percent of respondents.

When confronted with three options--subscription with unlimited content, PPV and free ad-supported models--the free model wins. About 70 percent of respondents would rather put up with the ads than pay for the content.

Still, 48 percent of respondents say they are "definitely interested" in new release movies and 53 percent are willing to pay to watch them.

Singapore Gets 10 Bidders for 100 Mbps Network

Singapore’s Infocomm Development Authority has pre-qualified ten bidders for a new optical access network that will be open to any retail providers who want to use it.

The proposed network would feature initial capacities of 100Mbps downstream and 50Mbps upstream, with the ability to upgrade to 1 Gbps.

Alcatel-Lucent Singapore, Axia NetMedia Corporation of Canada, BT Singapore, City
Telecom Hong Kong, NTT West, Nokia Siemens Networks Singapore, Singapore Computer Systems Limited, Singapore Telecommunications Limited, Singapore Power Telecommunications and StarHub are on the list.

Covad Dips Toe into Metro Wi-Fi

Covad Communications is trying a different approach to metro Wi-Fi services, targeting services at businesses rather than consumers to create a revenue base.

Covad will build a Wi-Fi test network in a square-mile business district in San Carlos, Calif., using an approach far more narrow than what a regional nonprofit and a consortium including Cisco Systems and IBM had once envisioned. Covad also will limit its downside by agreeing to operate the network for a period of three months.

An earlier proposal by the Silicon Valley Network and Silicon Valley Metro Connect didn't take off, and revenue was the chief culprit. Azulstar, the startup that was to build and operate the network, couldn't get funding for two test networks at about $500,000 each.

That was supposed to be the start of a project serving 1,500 square miles and about 40 cities.

Technology really isn't the issue. Covad wants to find out whether it can get enough small business users to anchor a larger or more permanent effort.

Covad’s wireless business unit already serves business customers in San Carlos, allowing Covad to overlay the Wi-Fi capability on top of its fixed wireless broadband service. Central to the test is discovery of whether a repeatable financial and operational model exists.

Following the completion of the test, Covad Wireless will explore expanding the mesh service to additional locations in the region.

Covad Wireless operates California’s largest fixed broadband wireless network serving businesses, and the company views the trial as a way to test a theory: that it can reach incremental new customers in the very-small and home office segments it so far has not focused on.

Up to this point, Covad Wireless has focused on business customers requiring a T1 or higher bandwidth. So the issue is whether a sustainable business case exists for users who may not need, or are not willing to pay for, nailed up T1 connections.

P2P Issue is Hairy

P2P users amount to only one percent of Comcast's users, but those users are consuming 50 percent of the company's bandwidth, according to George Ou, an editor at large at ZDNet and the former technical director at TechRepublic.

Some say the ultimate solution is "more bandwidth." The problem is, that doesn't really address P2P bandwidth consumption, which automatically will scale to devour the additional bandwidth as well, some point out.

The problem is figuring out whether or not P2P applications really do pose outsize network loads, and must therefore be managed to preserve quality of experience for the 99 percent of other users, or whether P2P constitutes a lawful application that shouldn't be subject to rate shaping.

It doesn't immediately appear clear that there is a single answer. Traffic shaping isn't blocking. And even outright blocking sometimes is socially desirable. Blocking of viruses and spam come to mind. But even voice networks are designed to block some traffic when peak loads occur. One has to re-dial. Traffic shaping is somewhat analogous to the means used to cope with voice congestion at peak hours.

And, unfortunately, "more bandwidth" isn't by itself a solution to P2P network loading, it wouldn't appear. At some point, market mechanisms will have to be applied. At some point, the business pricing model will be applied in the consumer space: you can use as much as you want; you just have to pay for the usage.

Access Bandwidth: Size Doesn't Matter As Much As You Think

AT&T has been doing some testing recently. It bought cable modem service and then tested peak throughput and average throughput.

As you might have guessed, there's a huge difference. But the point is not to show that Digital Subscriber Line access is any better. It is to emphasize the point that access is only part of what determines end user quality of experience.

Every element of the delivery chain has to be optimized or quality of experience will be bounded by the weakest link. In fact, the tests suggest that real-world performance is precisely what users encounter.

Peak advertised speeds are possible at 3 a.m. During the evening hours, when home usage peaks, average throughput routinely drops as low as 300 to 400 kbps.

And that's just the difference between peak and average bandwidth. IP-delivered communications and entertainment also is subject to degradation because of latency and jitter, port contention and any number of other issues. In fact, port contention might in some ways be a bigger problem for mobile providers than raw bandwidth.

Mobile Broadband is Inevitable: History Will Repeat

About 22 percent of U.S. consumers go online wirelessly outside the home, compared with 16 percent of U.S. online households a year ago, says Sally Cohen, Forrester Research analyst.

Almost half of consumers Forrester surveys say they would like to do so.

Cohen says the growing interest is due in part to familiarity with home Wi-Fi networks as well as public hot spots. About a quarter of of consumers use Wi-Fi at home, she says.

The issue now is how fast mobile operators, Clearwire and Sprint can move to capture additional demand in the form of handheld and PC card forms of mobile Web access.

Because one thing is certain: history tends to repeat itself in the communications business. And that story is that services and features once considered "luxuries" become necessities, and therefore mass market products or even commodities.

Once upon a time families would gather around a phone at Christmas and make a long distance call across the country or world, at some point being exhorted to "keep it short." Once upon a time homes shared a party line.

The point is that broadband use has expanded pretty much as wired voice did. It was place based. At some point a small number of people started to use mobile voice. Now virtually everybody does.

The same thing is going to happen with broadband. People used to share bandwidth at work. Then they got service at home. The next wave will be mobile broadband used by people, just as mobile voice now is.

U.S. industrialists and entrepreneurs have been turning luxuries into everyday experiences and necessities has been going on since the 1870s, depictions of many as robber barons notwithstanding. As with many other innovations, the key is to systematize and standardize and wring cost out of the production of former luxuries so they can be provided as mass market necessities.

Mobile broadband isn't going to be any different. History does repeat.

Online Video Viewed by Half of U.S. Internet Users

eMarketer predicts that over half of the U.S. population will have watched video on the Web before the year is out.

By next year, more than 80 percent of all Internet users will have done so.