Municipal Broadband Sometimes is Not a Good Idea

Digital Region Limited was set up in 2006 by "Yorkshire Forward" and four south Yorkshire local authorities--Sheffield city council and Barnsley, Doncaster and Rotherham--for the purpose of providing Internet access in the area.

The intent was to provide access to about 20 percent of households, or about 108,000 people. The project has cost almost £100 million. 

But Digital Region has managed to sign up just 3,000 customers, and spends about £10 million each year serving those 3,000 customers.

Some might say there was little demand for Digital Region's services.

The area already was served by Virgin Media, where adoption of Virgin Media access services was about 75 percent.

Those customers had access to 30 Mbps speeds at competitive prices. 

Digital Region was supposed to use fiber to the curb to provide faster speeds, but wound up delivering just 16 Mbps or so. 

Demand matters, even when intentions are good. 

Municipal Broadband Sometimes is Not a Good Idea

Digital Region Limited was set up in 2006 by "Yorkshire Forward" and four south Yorkshire local authorities--Sheffield city council and Barnsley, Doncaster and Rotherham--for the purpose of providing Internet access in the area.

The intent was to provide access to about 20 percent of households, or about 108,000 people. The project has cost almost £100 million. 

But Digital Region has managed to sign up just 3,000 customers, and spends about £10 million each year serving those 3,000 customers.

Some might say there was little demand for Digital Region's services.

The area already was served by Virgin Media, where adoption of Virgin Media access services was about 75 percent.

Those customers had access to 30 Mbps speeds at competitive prices. 

Digital Region was supposed to use fiber to the curb to provide faster speeds, but wound up delivering just 16 Mbps or so. 

Demand matters, even when intentions are good. 

NTT Docomo Preps 150 Mbps LTE Launch

NTT Docomo is readying an upgrade of downlink speeds for its Long Term Evolution network to a maximum downlink of 150 Mbps in Kawasaki and Kanagawa Prefecture starting July 30, 2013.

The verification tests come in advance of the planned launch of a 150 Mbps commercial “Xi” LTE service, the fastest in Japan, starting in parts of Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya this October, 2013.

Docomo already offers LTE at speeds of 112.5 Mbps downlink service to more than 130 cities. The service initially launched at 75 Mbps downlink speeds in 2010.

DOCOMO's LTE Data Transmission Speeds
Launch	Max. Downlink	Max. Uplink
Dec. 2010	75 Mbps	25 Mbps
Nov. 2012	100 Mbps	37.5 Mbps
Mar. 2013	112.5 Mbps	37.5 Mbps
Oct. 2013 (scheduled)	150 Mbps	50 Mbps

"Radical Transformation" of Communications Regulation is Needed, Phoenix Center Says

The U.S. communications business is headed for a radical transformation that will require basic changes to the the policy of providing a copper access line to every home in the United States, regardless of location or cost, says Larry Spiwak,  Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal & Economic Public Policy Studies president.

“With the rise of inter-modal competition, we are no longer in a monopoly world where in exchange for serving 100 percent of the service territory, the local telephone company has 100 percent of the customers bearing 100 percent of the costs of the network”, says Spiwak.

In fact, no service provider, using any network, can expect to get much more than 30 percent to 35 percent of customers for any application or service.

That necessarily will require rethinking of how universal service obligations are imposed and fulfilled.

Regulatory symmetry, the notion that providers of the same services should play by the same rules, is another requirement.

In other words, it increasingly makes little sense to regulate large telcos one way, cable companies another way, mobile service providers and satellite providers yet other ways,  non-facilities-based providers differently than facilities-based providers or “non-dominant” firms distinctly from “dominant firms.”

Smart Phones and Tablets Lead Consumer Electronics Sales

Mobile connected devices, including smart phones and tablets, continue to drive consumer electronics (CE) industry sales, according to the Consumer Electronics Association, representing 32 percent of all revenue in the consumer electronics industry in 2013.

Overall consumer electronics industry revenue will hold steady relative to 2012 levels, growing an estimated 0.2 percent in the United States in 2013.

Once upon a time, consumer electronics sales were lead by TVs and TV-related appliances. More recently, sales of personal computers took the lead.

But if you want to know why people in the mobile industry now attend the Consumer Electronics Show, it is because mobile devices now lead sales.

New categories such as fitness technology, desktop 3D printers and Bluetooth/airplay-enabled speakers are among the product categories CEA now tracks.

Smart phones are expected to maintain their position as the leading revenue driver for the industry in 2013, with unit shipments projected to reach 127 million in 2013.

Smart phone revenues are expected to surpass $37.8 billion in 2013, a 14 percent increase from 2012 levels.

Tablet computing will continue double-digit growth in 2013, with unit sales of tablets projected to reach 87.1 million in 2013 and revenues expected to surpass $27.3 billion.

Separately, researchers at Parks Associates estimate that 48 percent of U.S. broadband households own at least one tablet.

Tablet ownership increased by nearly 33 percent in one year, with 22 percent of households reporting a tablet purchase. About seven percent of households bought an e-reader in 2012, down from about nine percent of households in 2011.

Tablet purchases surpassed desktop purchases for the first time in 2012 and will match or exceed laptop purchases in 2013.

VDSL2 Gets Traction

VDSL2 vectoring is rapidly taking ground in the race to provide added bandwidth to meet the broadband needs of consumers. This was the conclusion reached at the TNO DSL Seminar held last month in Scheveningen in the Netherlands.

But service providers differ about their own plans to deploy G.fast or “fiber to the distribution point” (FTTdp) as prefered methods of upgrading all-copper networks.

How Much Traffic Will Carrier Wi-Fi Offload from the Mobile Network?

Mobile service provider use of Wi-Fi for data offload will  grow at a 215 percent compound annual growth rate from 2012 to 2017.

User-driven Wi-Fi offload, using at-home, at-work or other connections, will also grow at a significant growth rate of 49 percent.

Perhaps significantly, iGR predicts Wi-Fi-only connections from devices such as tablets, laptops, ereaders, and handheld gaming consoles will decline. That represents a predicted shift to more mobile carrier connections, something that already is seen as users shift to shared access data plans that allow a single account to use a shared bucket of data usage, across all devices on the account.

mostly driven by user preference for at-home, at-work or other Wi-Fi connections not directly provided by a service provider.

But the amount of Wi-Fi offload provided directly by a service provider, in high traffic locations, will grow as well, according to researchers at iGR.

Analysts at iGR estimate that in 2012, Wi-Fi-only devices consumed a total of about 0.38 gigabytes (380 Mb) each month, per active device. The analysts say this form of access is the smallest of the Wi-Fi offload usage scenarios.

User-driven Wi-Fi offload, where a subscriber or end user chooses to use a Wi-Fi connection outside the home or office in place of a mobile broadband connection, represented in 2012 about 0.41 GB (410 Mb) per month per active device of usage. This is the predominant form of Wi-Fi offload at the moment.

But carriers also are shifting to use of their own Wi-Fi offload services, directly shifting user access off a mobile network and onto a local Wi-Fi connection, either outdoors or indoors.

Analysts at iGR estimate that in 2012, a total of about 0.04 GB (40 Mb) per month per active device was offloaded to carrier Wi-Fi.

Some service providers, notably NTT, are less sanguine about such offload potential. In part, that is because high density in many Japanese urban areas also means high signal interference, which limits the effectiveness of Wi-Fi hotspots for traffic offload.