While our American duopoly noodles around with caps and new ways to charge more for less instead of making real improvements, the rest of the world keeps moving forward. In the Netherlands, DOCSIS 3 is not just for a few, but will soon be universally available to all in Liberty Global’s footprint. Competitors will have to respond with better, cheaper or both. All of this is happening in a part of the world that is considerably more regulated, taxed and has higher labor costs than the US. So much for the declaration that the US marketplace is competitive. Are you reading this FCC Chairman Martin?

Liberty Global Inc. has launched a 120 Mbit/s broadband service in the Netherlands using EuroDocsis 3.0 gear, and says it plans to roll out the equipment and launch similar services throughout Europe in the coming 15 months. (See UPC Deploys EuroDocsis 3.0.)

The company’s UPC Netherlands business, which passes 2.7 million homes and has more than 660,000 broadband customers, has launched its new “Fiber Power” service in a handful of locations, including Amsterdam, and will roll it out through the rest of the country during the next few months, reaching all of its customers by next year, says a company spokesman.(Cable Digital News)

Touting a $315 million investment in DOCSIS 3 sounds huge, except it works out to a measly $100 per subscriber. With the anticipated high cost of the Cablevision’s 30MBPS uncapped tier, that investment should be recouped in the first quarter or two. Very few businesses enjoy such handsome ROI’s. Having said that, I wish I could get it here at whatever price.

 Today, Cablevision’s fastest tier runs at 30Mbps over DOCSIS 2.0, and is truly uncapped — allowing users to get as much speed as the network will allow. Rutledge says the company spent nearly $20 million on both DOCSIS 3.0 deployment and their plan to offer Cablevision customers free Wi-Fi during the second quarter. “The total capital for that [combined project] over a three-year budget cycle is about $100 per customer or in the range of $315 million,” says the COO. (DSL Reports)

With last mile infrastructure that should be on life support, AT&T and Comcast keep nursing it along instead of just laying fiber. Never mind the fact they’ll need to do it soon anyway. The dead end comes with pair / coax bonding techniques and not every customer has 2 usable pairs / cables.

Comcast over the weekend announced that they’ve struck a deal to buy Cable Modem Termination System (CMTS) gear from Arris Group, as the cable giant speeds up their DOCSIS 3.0 plans. Last month, Comcast launched their first pre-certification DOCSIS 3.0 market, offering $150, 50Mbps/5Mbps service in the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. (Broadband Reports)

Though I’ve been unable to get official launch plans out of AT&T yet, our users are reporting that the telco is now offering dual-HD streams in a number of U-Verse markets. After seeing an initial launch in the St. Louis area, users in parts of Michigan and Georgia are also seeing the update. (Broadband Reports)

Coax and twisted pair served us well over their long and productive lives. I hope they will be allowed to die with dignity instead of trying to push them even further. C’mon duopoly, it’s time to let them go!

One of the least discussed properties of DOCSIS or cable broadband is that the more popular it is in you neighborhood, the less you can expect from it. With DOCSIS 3, this property is magnified. In comparison to a direct fiber connection it will only deliver consistently good performance if the take rate is low or if subscriber usage is limited.

Comcast is only bonding two channels down, one channel up for this service right now, which means they can offer 80 Mbps down and 30 up. But it’s not like that’s per-subscriber. That’s per neighborhood – to be shared among potentially 400 people (although at $150 a month, expect uptake to be substantially less than 100%).

But compare that to Verizon’s Fios, in which a maximum of 32 people share 622 Mbps downstream and 155 upstream. So when Comcast says their new offering is comparable to Fios in speed and price, that’s really bullhockey. On the upside stream we’re talking about hundreds of people sharing 30 Mbps up, compared to 32 people sharing 155. (ZDnet)

Cable has a dirty little secret. The faster speeds they are selling are a large scale shared resource. The sum of bandwidth as sold is exponentially larger than the amount of shared bandwidth available on their infrastructure. This is probably why most cable guys will attempt to throttle their customers sustained usage, and blame poor performance on “over usage” by “bandwidth hogs”. The cable guy needs to come clean. DOCSIS was designed to deliver stunning performance in an era of static content. If that is how the cable guy expects his customers will use his service then he should spell in out. If we had real competition, DOCSIS would soon find its proper place in the museum.

Is Comcast Bipolar? While working furiously to limit some traffic, they are also offering 50MBPS service in limited markets. The offering is made possible by DOCSIS 3.0, a technology standard that uses multiple connections to the nearest node to delivery higher speeds.

The new premium service was launched in the Twin Cities area of Minneapolis-St. Paul, and marks a leap in connection speeds for Comcast. The new service offers speeds starting at 50 megabits per second, compared with the previous fastest connection speeds of 16 mb per second.

Comcast said the new service is aimed at residential and business customers. But at $149.95 a month, compared with about $50 a month for its usual service, it is likely to attract businesses or very heavy residential users, such as video game players or movie download fans. (Reuters)

I think I get it. If you want unfettered access, you need to move to a neighborhood where Comcasts DOCSIS 3 is available, be sure you move to premises where the DOCSIS 3 limits have not been reached and then pay more than the average triple play customer for internet service alone.

Could this be a trend? RCN is doing a hard cutover to all digital to reclaim the bandwidth used by analog signals. The downside is providing set top boxes to all analog customers.

Cable overbuilder RCN Corp. is in the process of making a hard cutover in Chicago to an all-digital cable TV service. That move will free up 80 analog channels and give it the bandwidth required to pipe in an expanded menu of high-definition channels and video-on-demand (VOD) services. (See RCN Reclaims Analog.)

Rather than recapturing a few analog channels here and there and redeploying them for digital services, RCN has made the decision in the Windy City to move its entire service portfolio to the digital domain.

More on RCN cable dumps analog, reclaims bandwidth for digital services

It may be that someone at Comcast actually gets it. License all of the content you already distribute for net distribution. Geeze, what a concept! Move your big library out onto the net where anyone, including non Comcast customers view ad supported programs or can pay to view your premium content.

Quoting CNet: Although the television component is still at a nascent stage–Comcast’s existing video-on-demand service has about 300 titles, compared with the 6,000 it eventually hopes to offer–the Web portion is further along.

Comcast has set up a site called Fancast.com where viewers can watch more than 3,000 hours of television shows from NBC, Fox, CBS and MTV and where they will soon be able to remotely program the digital video recorders in their homes. The shows on Fancast are available free. Comcast has yet to say how it will price the rest of the content as its plan moves forward.

Worst case scenario, this is just a lot hot air for getting press attention at CES and maybe pumping up the stock price.

Hey Comcast! Here’s another idea for pumping up your stock price: spin access and content off into 2 different companies. Give the world a fat pipe at a fair price, and sell content to anyone anywhere. Both are winners. One more suggestion: when your customer calls with a problem, answer the phone and be nice.

With France in the lead, thanks to local loop unbundling, European broadband continues to blow past the US in terms of available speed and declining cost at an accelerating pace. While market penetration is low, most of those who have access have more than a single provider competing for their business.

Competition among European telecoms has led to significantly decreased consumer bandwidth cost. In the UK, headline speeds of 8 Mbps are available for less than $20 per month — or even for free if bundled — from some operators, compared with $80 in 2004. Over the past several years, service providers have maintained the same price level while providing much higher connection speed. (from Ecommerce Times)

With no accurate data on penetration, and low service levels at high cost, the US is far from being a leader in the connected world. The FCC is more fascinated with regulating competition in the dying broadcast media, subscription video and POTS services than they are in ensuring healthy competition in access. We’re in a new age where it’s not about access providers supplying services, it’s about access suppliers supplying access. You can’t get that without healthy competition in access. We need an FCC who gets it.

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts did an interview with Fortune mostly focused on shareholder concerns over the company’s poor performance on all fronts. No mention was made about traffic shaping or spoofing. I have to assume that the interview was conditional on not posing any questions on this subject.
Robert’s remarks regarding poor customer service:

We do 250 million phone calls a year between orders and services, and, inevitably, with that many calls, you are going to have failures. We have added 11,000 technical and customer-care employees just in the past 18 months. And we are beginning to call customers before and after service appointments to make sure we did the work properly. It is a major goal to continue to improve.

As for network performance:

At the national cable convention this year I demonstrated a technology called DOCSIS 3.0. We’ll start rolling this out in 2008. It provides up to 160 megabits or more of speed per second — that should give more than enough bandwidth to do multiplayer online gaming.

We’ve heard repeated references to improving customer service capabilities and network performance from Comcast often with little action thereafter. We’ll keep tabs on these quotes. Comcast has been very good a talking the talk, but will they walk the walk? We’ll let you know.

We may have a small bandwidth war in the making depending on what cable system operators do or do not do with it.

Cable Labs now has DOCSIS 5 modems from 5 manufacturers for certification testing. The conservative estimate for the modems capability as a deployed service is 100MPS down, with less going back up the line. The technology has the potential for 160MBPS downloads with 120MBPS up.

Cable ISPs currently use DOCSIS 1.1, which has been “good enough” in the past. Unfortunately, when compared to fiber, DOCSIS 1.1 lacks in the speed department. DOCSIS 3.0 has the potential to drastically change that, with download speeds of up to 160Mbps and uploads of up to 120Mbps possible. In addition, DOCSIS 3.0 also offers full support for IPv6, along with enhanced network management and security features. DOCSIS 3.0 also offers enough bandwidth for IPTV and other high-def video services.

Trials of pre-DOCSIS 3.0 gear have been promising. One of the deployments mentioned above has resulted in download speeds of 100Mbps for customers of a South Korean ISP that has a reach of 1.1 million subscribers. Another DOCSIS 3.0 trial in Singapore earlier this year saw speeds of up to 145Mbps. (from ARS Technica)

Any new competition is good. If the cable companies expect to stay in the game, they will need to deploy DOCSIS 3. We still need a third pipe to make the fields a bit more competitive. So far US cable operator has committed to any deployment.