Where AT&T Gigabit Access is Now, and Where it is Going Next

Where AT&T's gigabit Internet access services are available, and where they are going next.

AT&T plans to expand its 100 percent fiber-optic network in up to 25 markets, and expects to reach more than 14 million residential and commercial locations.

New Zealand Wholesale Fiber Network Gets Ready for Next Stage

Crown Fibre Holdings, the New Zealand entity responsible for the New Zealand Ultrafast Broadband (UFB) network across the country, has issued a new request for proposals to extend the network from coverage of 75 percent of New Zealanders to at least 80 percent of the population.

The New Zealand government has committed up to $210 million for the effort, which will provide minimum download speeds of 100 Megabits per second, upgradable to 1 Gbps for households and 10 Gbps for businesses.

Up to this point, Chorus, the wholesale provider of access services, has built about 70 percent of the UFB network in a public-private partnership with the government.

Chorus has 24 areas around New Zealand where it is deploying the UFB network. At completion, the Chorus UFB network will run past more than 830,000 homes, businesses, schools and health facilities throughout the country by the end of 2019.

The average cost per premises passed of NZ$2,948 was at the bottom end of the guidance range previously given of NZ$2,900 to NZ$3,200, Chorus said. One might charitably argue such network costs are on the high side, even compared to neighboring Australia, which uses a similar infrastructure model for high speed access.

The standard cost to connect premises averaged NZ$1,680 during the period, and Chorus remains focused on reducing these costs, the company said.

“In particular, the process to connect premises in multi-dwelling units currently averages $6,500 per building in addition to the standard connection costs,” said Mark Ratcliffe, Chorus CEO. “This will be an area where Chorus will work with the industry to seek solutions that remove blockages in the current processes that drive cost and complexity,”

As I read it, that suggests the network costs US$1866, while connecting a customer costs an additional US$1063.

Communications Minister Amy Adams said four and a half years after the first fiber trench was dug in Whangarei, the government’s broadband initiative is more than 50 percent complete with around 750,000 citizens already able to connect to faster, more reliable broadband.

More than 110 towns and communities are cited as potential areas for inclusion in the project.

Internet of Things--as an Idea--is 16 Years Old

Kevin Ashton, many suggest, coined  the phrase Internet of Things in 1999.

The basic concept remains the same: ‘If we had computers that knew everything there was to know about things, using data they gathered without any help from us, we would be able to track and count everything, greatly reducing waste, loss and cost,” he said. “We would know when things needed replacing, repairing or recalling, and whether they were fresh or past their best.”

“In the twentieth century, computers were brains without senses: they only knew what we told them,” Ashton said. “In the twenty-first century, because of the Internet of Things, computers can sense things for themselves.”

The point, should it bear repeating, is that major and successful innovations often take quite a long time to move from conception to mass adoption. As much attention as now gets paid to IoT, we are 16 years out from inception.

Many predict quite substantial diffusion by 2025. That would mean a quarter century from “idea” to “widespread commercial adoption.”

That is not unusual, even if we often point to the rapid adoption of new and fundamental technologies ranging from use of personal computers to use of the Internet.

Consider the automated teller machine, one example of a useful and now ubiquitous technology routinely used by consumers.

ATM card adoption provides one example, where "decades" is a reasonable way of describing adoption of some new technologies, even those that arguably are quite useful.

Debit cards provide another example. It can take two decades for adoption to reach half of U.S. households, for example.  

You might call those examples a case of the normal product life cycle for any successful product. In consumer electronics, for example, an inflection point leading to  mass adoption tends to happen when adoption hits about 10 percent of homes.

Determining how long the ramp up to 10 percent might take is an imperfect art. Much depends on when one starts the clock. Do you start from “first discussion of the concept” or “first effort to sell to the mass market” as the starting point?

Even when you use the latter start point, it can take three to 10 years to reach the inflection point of 10 percent household adoption.

Compounding the problem is that IoT will develop separately in each industry. And, in some cases, such as the energy industry, sensor networks have been used for many years. Has the clock already started, or will there come some point where we say a genuine IoT platform has begun to replace the older sensor networks? It is a judgment call.

The other issue is definitional as well: are smartwatches “IoT” or not? Some of us might say “no,” since IoT centrally s about autonomous machines, not computing devices used by humans in a direct sense (PCs, tablets, smartphones, game players, book readers, smart watches or eyeglasses).

The larger point is that IoT, by one possible measure, already has taken as much as 16 years to reach the commercial deployment stage. Where that has happened, we will be watching for an inflection point.

To be sure, it does not make sense to mechanically or rigidly forecast adoption of machine-to-machine services and products using the history of consumer electronics product adoption.  

But the principle is valid: even important and highly-significant innovations, leading to creation of big markets, take time to develop. “Decades” is not an unreasonable expectation for widespread adoption.

Home Gateway Initiative to Shut Down in 2016

Rarely do organizations established to solve some particular industry problem abolish themselves once they have succeeded. That will not be the case for The Home Gateway Initiative (HGI), an organization founded in 2004 by nine European telcos to set home gateway standards.

HGI will cease operations in 2016.

HGI was established to create standards for consumer home gateways supporting triple play services.

Belgacom, BT, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, KPN, Teliasonera, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT), Telefonica, Telecom Italia) in December 2004.

Among the key aims were the creation of home gateway specifications, boosting take rates of triple play services and Improving gateway interoperability with home devices.

Among final acts, HGI published new requirements for improving the reliability and range of Wi-Fi networks using both 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz frequencies.

The new document, ‘RD-045: Wi-Fi requirements for Home Gateways - Automatic Channel Selection (ACS) and Repeaters’, improves the clarity of ACS requirements.

HGI’s new requirements for the Home Gateway aim to make ACS implementations more consistent and effective in selecting the appropriate Wi-Fi channels in the 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz bands. Interference is another issue discussed.

The second challenge addressed by these requirements is how to extend the coverage of Wi-Fi networks without cabling.

The document also specifies Wi-Fi repeater support for the WPS push button and functions.