Lets just get to the meat of it ok. Then more after the jump —

Google is planning to launch an experiment that we hope will make Internet access better and faster for everyone. We plan to test ultra-high speed broadband networks in one or more trial locations across the country. Our networks will deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today over 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. We’ll offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people.

From now until March 26th, we’re asking interested municipalities to provide us with information about their communities through a Request for information (RFI), which we’ll use to determine where to build our network.

That’s from the website.

Now notice this is not some high speed to the head end sort of offer. They specifically say FTH. So they intend to go right to the curb. Their testing will test some 50-500k patrons. What is not clear, is that a single site or a mix of smaller sites.

Google goes on to say they will provide —

* Next generation apps: We want to see what developers and users can do with ultra high-speeds, whether it’s creating new bandwidth-intensive “killer apps” and services, or other uses we can’t yet imagine.

* New deployment techniques: We’ll test new ways to build fiber networks; to help inform, and support deployments elsewhere, we’ll share key lessons learned with the world.

* Openness and choice: We’ll operate an “open access” network, giving users the choice of multiple service providers. And consistent with our past advocacy, we’ll manage our network in an open, non-discriminatory, and transparent way.

What I find of particular interest is the commitment to an open transport layer. A place where anyone can play? ISP and Google? If true that would be a game changer in the data transport marketplace. Fact if true it would complete a vision that was the reason that this blog was created for — create an open backbone and permit service providers to battle it out in the marketplace of products and services.

We keep our fingers crossed.

Linky.

While we keep hearing reports of performance and coverage problems with AT&T’s 3G network. Most of AT&T’s DSL subscribers have the same available bandwidth as they have had for years. But hey, mobile apps are hot, so why not invest in them and sell them to your captive wireless subscribers?

De la Vega noted the explosion in application growth in the U.S. cell phone market over the past year. “No country has seen the growth we have seen,” he said. In 2009, U.S. wireless consumers downloaded 832.7 million applications, a ninefold increase over the past two years. He also noted that revenue from these downloads has increased some 60 percent.

At the company-sponsored event held on the eve of the Consumer Electronics Show, de la Vega outlined AT&T’s strategy for pushing new applications onto a slew of new devices, and he provided a glimpse into how the company plans to help developers make this happen and make sure its network can keep up with increased demand for data, especially on its mobile network. (Cnet)

The FCC has pretty much indicated that “line sharing” is not going to happen, and the last talk of open wireless devices ended with departure of the prior FCC chair. AT&T customers should expect more add ons and nickel and dime services on the same underpowered AT&T networks next year.  With no competition, AT&T can keep charging more for less.

Mike Szczys over at Hack-a-day asks the question — Do we really need phone numbers. I will give you my opinion after the jump. But I’ll let Mike have his say first —

What works better than phone numbers?

How many different phone numbers does your family have? Many households have a home phone, a cell phone for each family member, and a work phone for each adult. What if all of these numbers were addressed similarly to how the Domain Name System works for internet addresses? Something like this:

phone://famiy.johndoe2155.voice/john_at_home

phone://family.johndoe2155.voice/jane_at_home

phone://www.your_company’s_domain.com/customer_service

This can be accomplished in the near future. All cell phones and many land line phones already have the ability to store numbers so that you only have to enter them once. Cell phones can already input web-style addresses and a firmware upgrade would allow for a new system of addressing and storing voice connection information. Service providers like Comcast and Charter are already providing phone service that utilizes VOIP, paving the way for dialing from your computer. For legacy hardware an inexpensive interface box similar to the digital cable converter boxes could be implemented. The new box would have a keyboard and character LCD and be rolled out in the same way that caller ID boxes were.

The idea of an address space of phone://some_voip_address merits a great deal of consideration. Played the right way it would be a boon to the whole VoIP packet based voice system. But that does not mean it will get rid of numbers. Nor does it have anything to do with legacy systems –

a) The Bell Folks did human factors research before they recommended the NPA/NXXX call plan. One thing was clear, digits only had the least amount of error. Even more important, the average American could remember a 7 digit number with 95% accuracy 30 min after being exposed to it. That saved operator time, during that period dominated by switch boards. The retention numbers still hold true today.

b) Numbers make the interface design for the cell phone dirt simple. Otherwise one must provide a QWERTY keyboard with every unit.

The solution? A DNS like service that would take a xxx.yyy.zzzz number and translate it to a user given phone:// address. Completely doable that could also be queried by the legacy SS7 network for POTS to POTS calls.

Digits only however is here to stay for a very long time.

Linky.

Britain that glimmering island that in many ways is the birthplace of both man’s political aspirations and freedom from want is also in many cases the test case for mobile digital. Britain is somewhere around 3-5 years ahead of the US. Not in technology, but in how to deploy, market it and have politicians screw it all up. –

But wait a minute - why would this be? Are telecoms companies salting away billions of pounds of profits in a great offshore lair, somewhere? Or are they merely reflecting the market’s demand for data? Plain vanilla 2G is enough to make a phone call, and that’s everywhere.

If the telcos are hiding anything, it’s the level of their debt. They’re broke, and running on empty (hence the nonstop rounds of refinancing), which explains their renewed focus on mature markets where they can squeeze higher revenues by diminishing competition. The UK is reckoned to be a full 10 per cent less profitable than other European countries, because retailers such as Carphone Warehouse are in the chain, and because of all this pesky competition. It’s true that the 3G auctions didn’t help, either, sucking £20bn into Brown’s piggy bank, and onto quangos like, well… Ofcom.

Which is in a sense reflected in the current apathy of the FCC, irrespective of pending ‘investigations’. But there is more —

What we now know, thanks to the 3G map, is just how expensive building out a broadband infrastructure will really be. What it shows us is that the definition of “rural” is much broader than we supposed. An analysis conducted for the Broadband Stakeholder Group last year put the cost of rolling out fibre to every home at almost £30 billion.

During the media orgy of coverage around Carter’s Digital Britain report two weeks ago, I only heard one journalist ask the obvious question: why tax all of us for something that 70 per cent of people don’t want. That was Jeremy Paxman on the BBC’s Newsnight, apparently waking up from a deep slumber.

But it was a lone voice, and I didn’t hear anyone - not a single one - go any deeper and follow this to its logical consequence. Which is that maybe people aren’t stupid, as the political and media classes suppose, and many find what’s on offer from the internet somewhat wanting. Maybe it’s not offering compelling services.

The US is ramping for a similar head long rush to round one of a universal service offering with $4Bn in taxes to be doled out. Its a known fact that even if available some 30% will just refused to sign up as broadband is NOT critical to their everyday life. What’s worse is that I have yet to hear any voice other than ourselves pose the question — “why tax all of us for something that 70 per cent of people don’t want?” Why indeed?

What Britain is experiencing is like a canary in a coal mine for the US. We face similar questions and much larger expanse of ‘white space’ in the 3G map than they. For the US it is more problematic. We have 10x their real estate and a carrier base loathe to leave the urban centers as they know that is where the profits are.

Chirp!

Read the whole article here.

Why I don’t know. But anyway it is going to happen in about two weeks. –

With Europe’s first femtocell deployment due in two weeks, it’s worth taking a moment to consider why you might want to spend your money on extending your operator’s coverage, if not just from general goodwill.

On Tuesday Vodafone announced that from 1 July UK punters will be able to buy their very own base station to extend Vodafone’s coverage, at their own expense and without so much as a discounted call or free data package to make up for the fact that punters could end up paying for the bandwidth twice.

So lets lay this out. Somebody will have to plunk down about $300 for the unit. They also have to provide a 1mb/s connection. They get no rebate from the carrier for doing so. And so why do I want this?

Its that wireless-wired interconnect that is the problem. The way things are here in the US as marginal areas morph to exurban homesites the wireless carriers follow right along. They are not stupid, and take note of traffic patterns. The problem is that on the wired side the cablecos and FIOS/uVerse guys don’t plant cable in the ground till a certain population density is reached. That is usually long after several cell towers have gone up. See the problem? The chances of having bad cell reception AND a cable connection is not going to be a plentiful situation for most areas. Maybe West Virginia, Western PA, some of the area of the Rockies. Femtocell is just not going to be a big seller.

More here.

In an article that reads like the world is facing impending doom, a Times Online article forecasts internet “brownouts” or worse in the near future.

Experts predict that consumer demand, already growing at 60 per cent a year, will start to exceed supply from as early as next year because of more people working online and the soaring popularity of bandwidth-hungry websites such as YouTube and services such as the BBC’s iPlayer.

It will initially lead to computers being disrupted and going offline for several minutes at a time. From 2012, however, PCs and laptops are likely to operate at a much reduced speed, rendering the internet an “unreliable toy” (Times Online)

To set the record straight for the tiny minority of our readers who don’t already know it: Bandwidth is not a finite resource. It’s never been cheaper or easier to deliver more of it. A foil hat award goes to reporter John Harlow for being suckered into taking this Al Gore style hoax seriously. I don’t know exactly what agenda his source Nemertes Research is pushing, but it’s probably not what it appears to be.

The $789 billion economic stimulus bill nearing final congressional passage designates $7.2 billion for broadband grants, but the measure lacks tax credits for wireless carriers and other service providers.

Crafting rules for broadband grants could become highly controversial, since guidelines governing eligibility, data speeds, nondiscrimination and interconnection obligations and unserved and underserved areas may well determine the ultimate winners and losers. The main objective of the broadband grant program is to create jobs in the near term, but the Obama administration and congressional Democrats plan to take additional steps later to expand the availability of high-speed Internet access in the United States.

The stimulus bill’s final language agreed to by conferees, who worked surprising fast to reconcile differences between House and Senate economic recovery packages, does not include a specific earmark of $1 billion for wireless broadband grants. Such an earmark had been included in the House measure.

The final conference bill provided $7.2Bn for broadband yet stripped ~$1bn of wireless from the House version. So who wins? The wireline incumbents. Who lost? The WISPs.

This bill will do little to expand service beyond the marginal density suburbs. The Exurbs and rural will be untouched. Especially since there are no tax provisions for the long term support of the network. Grants get the thing built. But the typical outside plant planner will be very leary of siting a low density Exurb location. Oh they use the grant to get it built. But when you run the numbers of revenue vs maintenance the bloom is quickly off the rose. This is where the WISP should come to play. The dollars are inelegantly appropriated.

Linky.

The last three months have been a whirlwind of proposals to many things broadband. Here, here and here. There is even a modicum of divergent thought on the issue here at ThirdPipe. I myself being camped on the side of the land rush is almost over. Adoption rates are flat because those that crave the speed or have the need have done so already. I am not saying there are areas still not served. There are. But the easy pickings have been fulfilled.

The next big chunk of user base are those in areas where laying cable just does not make sense. Here we enter the land of wireless and WISPs. It is the next logical step. But before we go off the deep end and blow a whole bunch of tax dollars we might want to reflect a moment on some interesting facts provided by a recent Pew survey –

Of dialup users

• 33% say the price of broadband would have to fall first. By how much was not indicated.
• 19% would not switch under ANY circumstance.

Of those not connected to the net at all

• Only 13% said they did not have access.
• But 33% just did not care to be online at ALL.

Of the combined group, 51% voiced some opinion that the need for broadband was not relevant to their life. That is a really telling number considering we are suggesting the expenditure of massive amounts of tax dollars for the privilege to lay cable past a house that will never use it.

Dog you must be a troglodyte! Actually no. I crave the speed that my current provider supplies me. If I have a valid reason to upgrade to even higher rates I would do it. Just don’t have the demand right now. My concern is more that of a taxpayer than a consumer. If a good chunk of the yet unserved are not going to use the service then is it wise public policy to spend the dollars to do so? One could make a very cognizant case that if the purpose of the program was to increase broadband usage then a more salient method might be a means tested tax break for those that have access to broadband but cannot afford it. (A 33% number of possible dial up switchers hampered by cost, that is a target rich environment for such a program.)

But I advocate an even better use for the funds so earmarked. Shift them to the unallocated 700mhz ‘D’ block that bombed 18 months ago. Forgo another auction in the space. It is for public service functions, treat it as such. Put those funds into the hands of the first responder communities as grants to get the build out done. Private enterprise will come along to get the sale. We as a society benefit 100% from the costs by improving our first responder performance and response times. We get a stimulus as a side benefit. The overall ‘payback’ will be much higher than that next increment of households many of which will never tap into the broadband plant even if it is available to them.

Link to Pew Report.

Harold Feld over at WetMachine has proffered some observations as to proposals for a nationwide network upgrade. Angst wells within me noting some of the observations without an anchor. Herein is a light rebuttal –

“But a really good communications system is a matter of continuous non-stop upgrade. Even with fiber, you are not going to just pull glass and go away for 20 years with regular maintenance and easy to predict upgrades. It’s going to be dynamic.”

Harold, actually you could. Do you really think that Verizon installed all that fiber to just make things faster?? Far from it. The delivery of FIOS is as much a Union Busting tool as anything that management could think of. Look, copper plant is subject to moisture infiltation. To defeat that the lines in areas of moisture are pressurized with nitrogen at about 2psi above ambient. (That’s why you see cylinders along the roads in some areas.) It takes labor to maintain those lines. Now if you come along and lay down fiber the labor has been reduced by at least a factor of 4 over the life of the installation so your outside union labor drops accordingly. Fiber is also impervious to wet so you eliminate all the pressurization plant and contractors. Short of a backhoe or gopher mating with the cable that transport plant could last 20yrs easily. I direct your attention to page 19 of this report. Corning already provides a 25 year life on its plenum rated fiber.

You also do not need to do much with the fiber in regards to capacity. Most of the fiber laid today does not take advantage of spread spectrum or wave division multiplexing in the last mile. So the maxiumum capacity of the current installed base is not even tapped for the most part. What you are suggesting is not the outside plant but CO based interior facilities. To take advantage of WDM one needs WDM capable cards in the CO adjunct systems. Buildout would not even be the right term in my view.

“Worse — from the point of view of the network manager, better for society as a whole — that expanded capacity has real use. Build fatter pipes, and people build better and more productive applications for fatter pipes. Sure, you can get by with dial up or dinky FCC-style “broadband” for a lot of things even today. But is that really our measure of success?”

That is the field of dreams approach to network design. Review any technology advance of the last 30 years and you will note that the Application demand came first then the technology to handle it more efficeintly came afterwards. The classic of course is Visicalc spurring the demand for AppleII’s, Postscript pushing the demand for laser printers and bicycles pushing the need for paved roads in the bygone era of two centuries ago. The reason ‘why’ must be defined in the public eye before the supply of ‘what’ can be addressed. It is not sufficient that you just get all your mail faster. There are only two applications that would push the demand button — TVoIP and multihead video conferencing. Problem is the latter is confined to business use in the public’s mind right now. The former has the issue of being tied at the hip to entertainment. That is a poor poster child to hang a public policy on for what is such a massive expenditure. (”Senator, you propose to spend $350B so that everyone can see ‘Santa Barbara’ on TVoIP HD?” The answer would be a doozy!) Higher broadband is in need of a ‘killer ap’ and right now I don’t see one that you can hang your hat on.

“…It focuses primarily on rural build out (although I am hoping that other pots of urban agenda and health IT reform money can go toward getting our poor and unserved urban folks connected). It boosts speeds, but remains asymetric and, no surprise, most of us would like to see better than 3/1 for wireless or even 45 mbps for wireline.”

A wireline rural buildout is Seward’s Folly. Anything that is below a 100 households per buried mile has little chance of being either profitable or good use of tax dollars. Better that WiMax or LTE wireless be fostered for that purpose. Or alternately BoPL be pushed. As to unserved regardless of economic status, that albatross should be laid around the necks of the municipalities that believed a tooth fairy was going to delivery it all. I speak of failed deployments in Chicago, SanFran, Philly, Atlanta, etc. All municipal targeted ideas that lacked planning and support and too much pollyanna from mush headed bureaucrats that don’t know the difference between a bauln and a NIC card.

As to the speed angle there is nothing wrong with asymmetric. The typical end consumer is a heck of a lot more down than up. The typical 6:1 ratio is reasonable in practice. What needs to happen (hence I agree with you) is that the overall bandwidth has to rise.

In the Beltway speak what is happening with all the funding proposals is that it is not ‘Comprehensive’. Seems to be the vogue buzzword right? Well let me tie one on for you. Why would we spend billions for both a upgraded network and a upgraded road system at the same time? If one is rationale one would not. What one would do is use the network upgrade to justify a reduction in road building by reducing the demand side of the commute cycle. You encourge substitution –

• Companies are incented to upgrade their networks to support telecommuting. The employees are provided tax incentives to utilize telecommuting. Companies that can get 20% of the work force to telecommute also get additional tax relief.
• Funds that would have been used for road building are pared down to only the essentials and the funds transferred to network infrastructure.
• In the shift away from a physical transport model the demand for transport fuel drops even further. That assists in the energy independence department. (How does $20/bbl oil sound?)

What’s not to like?

Linky.

More troubles for fiber cables traversing  congested Mediterranean shipping lanes.  For some reason the cable cuts keep coming in threes, and it’s most likely incompetence from ships dragging anchors rather than sabatoge. Having said this, those who do not wish the west well are probably watching.

“The causes of the cut, which is located in the Mediterranean between Sicily and Tunisia, on sections linking Sicily to Egypt, remain unclear,” a statement said, while a spokesman said it was unlikely to have been an attack.

The company said it was sending a ship to fix the lines but that it would not arrive until Monday and that it could take until December 31 before normal service was restored.

Most business-to-business traffic between Europe and Asia was being rerouted through the United States, the firm said, but regular communications between Europe and several Asian countries has been disrupted since early Friday.

Sixty-five per cent of traffic to India was down, while services to Singapore, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Taiwan and Pakistan were also severely affected, a spokesman said Friday evening. (Yahoo)