AT&T Launches Gigabit Service in Chicago

AT&T is launching U-verse with AT&T GigaPower to residential and small business locations in parts of the City of Chicago during summer of 2015.  Earlier, U-verse with AT&T GigaPower launched in parts of Elgin, Oswego, Plainfield, Skokie, Yorkville and surrounding communities.

AT&T says the network is the first Chicago residential service to feature speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second.

U-verse “High Speed Internet Premier” speeds up to 1Gbps start as low as $120 a month, or speeds at 100 Mbps start as low as $90 a month, with a one year price guarantee.

The services also can be bundled with other services such as entertainment video and voice.

AT&T plans to expand its 100 percent fiber network in up to 25 markets. U-verse with AT&T GigaPower has officially launched in parts of the Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte, Chicago, Cupertino, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Kansas City, Nashville, Raleigh-Durham and Winston-Salem markets.

Plans have also been announced to launch AT&T GigaPower in parts of the Greensboro, Jacksonville, Miami, St. Louis and San Antonio markets.

Additionally, AT&T has committed that upon approval of its proposed acquisition of DIRECTV, the company will expand the AT&T GigaPower network to an additional 2 million customer locations. All of these 2 million locations are over and above what the company announced in 2014.

Bell Canada Goes Gigabit

Bell Canada President and CEO George Cope says Bell Canada is investing $1.14 billion to bring gigabit Internet access service to the Toronto area.

Bell Canada also will provide gigabit service to other cities in Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Canada as part of a $20 billion investment.

Bell will launch “Gigabit Fibe” in other cities in Ontario, Québec and the Atlantic provinces as soon as the summer of 2015 in some locations.

Service initially will be available at a maximum 940 Megabits per second and rise to a full 1000 Megabits per second or faster in 2016 as modem equipment suppliers catch up to gigabit speeds, Bell Canada said.

The service will be available to 50,000 businesses and residences in the summer of 2015 and will then be expanded to another 1.1 million premises over the next 36 months.

The upgrade requires about 9,000 kilometres of new optical fiber in the city both underground from 10,000 manhole covers and above ground on 80,000 Bell and Toronto Hydro poles.

Mobile Video Will Drive Global Consumer Data Demand

There is a very simple reason why lots more mobile bandwidth is going to be needed in coming years. The number of discrete users and devices will grow; while the types of apps people use is changing.

Notably, consumption of video on mobile phones is exploding, mobile devices are the primary Internet access device globally, and therefore mobile video consumption will drive aggregate mobile bandwidth demand.

According to Ooyala, mobile video consumption grew 367 percent between the first quarter of 2013 and the first quarter of 2015.

In fact, mobile devices represented fully 42 percent of all video viewing in the first quarter of 2015.

Bandwidth intensity is the issue. Video, for example, simply requires an order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude bandwidth than most other apps. A one hour IP-based voice call might consume 28.8 Mbytes. An hour of mobile video consumption might consume 120 Mbytes. An hour of high definition TV consumption might consume 2.5 Gbytes.

Sample Service and Application Bandwidth Comparisons
Segment	Application or Service Name	KB
Consumer mobile	SMS	0.13
Consumer mobile	MMS with video	100
Business	IP telephony (1-hour call)	28,800
Residential	Social networking (1 hour)	90,000
Residential	Online music streaming (1 hour)	72,000
Consumer mobile	Video and TV (1 hour)	120,000
Residential	Online video streaming (1 hour)	247,500
Business	Web conferencing with webcam (1 hour)	310,500
Residential	HD TV programming (1 hour, MPEG 4)	2,475,000
Business	Room-based videoconferencing (1 hour, multicodec telepresence)	5,850,000

source: Cisco

Summary of Per-Device Usage Growth, MB per Month
Device Type	2014	2019
Non-smartphone	22 MB/month	105 MB/month
M2M Module	70 MB/month	366 MB/month
Wearable Device	141 MB/month	479 MB/month
Smartphone	819 MB/month	3,981 MB/month
4G Smartphone	2,000 MB/month	5,458 MB/month
Tablet	2,076 MB/month	10,767 MB/month
4G Tablet	2,913 MB/month	12,314 MB/month
Laptop	2,641 MB/month	5,589 MB/month

source: Cisco

In Some Markets, Mobile Voice Represents Less than 15% of Total Device Usage

Once upon a time, mobile phones freed people from the need to be near a fixed network phone to make and receive calls. These days, communications, though still a key function, often represent less than a third of total smartphone activities.

In a significant development, social networking actually dominates even “communications” usage. In other words, voice is a fundamental capability for a smartphone, but often is not even the most-used communications mode.

Smartphones are multi-function devices, used 30 percent of the time for communications in the United States, United Kingdom,  Japan and South Korea, and about 47 percent of the time in India.

Web browsing, games, entertainment and utility or productivity functions represent the other major categories of usage.

But which communication apps dominate varies widely as well. In the United States and United Kingdom, it is social networking which dominates communications. In the U.S. and U.K. markets, social networking represents 53 percent of total communications activity.

In other markets, such as India, voice represents 66 percent of communications activity, while in South Korea voice usage is 51 percent.

Bharti Airtel Plans Urban, Not Just Rural Deployment of OneWeb Terminals

Bharti Enterprise’s  investment in OneWeb was substantial enough to earn it a seat on the board of directors. One might wonder why the investment was deemed important.

Aside from other considerations, likely includes favorable pricing terms for substantial deployments. And OneWeb might not be viewed simply as a way to reach rural areas affordably.

But that should be the initial reaction most observers should have: OneWeb should help Bharti Airtel in its rural India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, sub-Saharan Africa markets.

“These areas will benefit, because this will feed into my mobile network, and wherever, we cannot reach today,” said Bharti Chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal.

As planned, Bharti can drop in a solar-powered earth station and create a small cell providing 3G and 4G mobile signals over an area about 300 meters (985 feet) to 400 meters (1312 feet) in radius.

That suggests a cell site with a diameter of up to 2600 feet, or about half a mile square.

What observers might not have expected is that the same network will help Bharti Airtel with dropped calls, something that has been a problem even in urban areas.

Even if the percentage of dropped calls seems not especially high (one to two percent), dropped calls apparently are a big customer irritant. Even in many developed markets, dropped call rates of two to four percent would not be terribly unusual.

So urban applications might be as important as rural solutions, as it turns out. It often will be the case that an area requires signal reinforcement but there is no available fiber backhaul, or zoning permission cannot be quickly obtained.

That allows Bharti to rectify signal coverage issues immediately, and then bridge the gap until more traditional solutions are possible (new towers and required backhaul).

Bharti and Airbus are among the largest investors in the $500 million funding round.  

What Happened to Tablet Market?

source: Business Insider

As recently as 2011, annual global tablet shipments growth surged 305 percent over a year’s time. By 2014, total tablet shipments growth had slowed to just eight percent annual growth.

The issue might be that tablets, which might once have been viewed as the successor to the personal computer, are in turn now being cannibalized by phablets (smartphones with bigger screens).

If so, the smartphone is the replacement for the PC in a great majority of cases, not the tablet.

Between 2015 and 2020, tablet growth rates might fall further, to about a 2.5 percent compound annual growth rate.

LTE Still has Only 9% Adoption Globally

Long Term Evolution adoption has a long way to go, even as suppliers gear up efforts to create 5G standards. Globally, LTE has about nine percent adoption and three percent adoption in Latin America.