While 105MBPS won’t get headlines in much of western Europe, Japan or Korea, it’s a glimmer of hope in bandwidth starved America. Waterloo Iowa now leads the US, shaming the major cites that continue to languish with DSL and old DOCSIS speeds that are pretty much the same as they were a decade ago.

The Courier article quotes a Mediacom exec on the reason for picking Waterloo. “First of all, the physical network in place is very robust,” he said. “It is in great shape, and we know that the product will perform well from a technical side… We also wanted to select Waterloo as indicative of a typical Midwest community. We had heard that the business community was questioning whether Waterloo was keeping pace. …We think this says Waterloo is keeping pace.”

It was certainly sporting of a company like Mediacom to care about the feelings of Waterloo’s business community, but the city might also have been chosen for other reasons. Waterloo is contiguous with Cedar Falls, which houses the University of Northern Iowa and also features a city-owned cable and Internet operation. (ARS Technica)

Meanwhile back in Washington the feds are contracting out more broadband maps….and building nothing.

While broadband isn’t very competitive in the UK, the fact remains it far more competitive than in the US.  Case in point: Virgin just dropped the price of a 5oMBPS connection to around $65 with no mention of usage caps. In contrast, Comcast’s best deal is $99 if you are even in an area where you can get it.

U.K. cable provider Virgin Media has announced price reductions for its next-generation broadband services in response to the recession. The price of its flagship 50 Mbps broadband service, which includes a phone line, will be reduced from GBP 46 to GBP 39 effective September 1. (Communicatins Technology)

The problem here in the colonies is no competition. The telcos have brought their broadband upgrades to a hault.  In this non-competitive climate, the cable guys will most likely offer upgrades only where they can get a high take rate with a high premium price until someone goes them one better. With telco focus on a “stimulus” money pot for rural and wireless, and a couple more telco / cable chronies recentyl added to the FCC’s board , I predict no change.

Here’s a lesson for Time Warner Cable. If you want more revenue and happy customers, do something positive and outdo the telcos that you are supposed to be competing with. Cablevision rolled out free WiFi in its footprint about a year ago without charging a dime more for the service. Now the company is offering the biggest consumer bandwidth in the US for a price that undercuts FiOS.

The new service will offer download speeds of 101 megabits per second and upload speeds of 15 Mbps for a cost of $99.95 per month. It will be available May 11 to all 5 million of the people in areas served by Cablevision, mainly in the New York City suburbs.

Cablevision is deploying a new technology called Docsis 3 which can utilize more of the capacity of a cable television system for data, offering both higher capacity and lower costs. In Japan, J:Com uses the same technology to offer 160 Mbps service for 6,000 yen ($60) per month.

Yes, the new offering still lags behind the best of world standards, but it’s the best deal going here in the land of the free. It’s absolutely certain that Cablevision will see revenues grow and not a single protest or complaint call will be made in response to its roll out. I can only hope that the Time Warner crew has attended this short clinic. This is the right way to grow revenue.

While Time Warner pushes draconian usage caps onto its broadband customers, a simple $20 upgrade to the same DOCSIS infrastructure is pushing cable ahead of all competitors in Japan.

Pretty much the fastest consumer broadband in the world is the 160-megabit-per-second service offered by J:Com, the largest cable company in Japan. Here’s how much the company had to invest to upgrade its network to provide that speed: $20 per home passed.

The cable modem needed for that speed costs about $60, compared with about $30 for the current generation.

By contrast, Verizon is spending an average of $817 per home passed to wire neighborhoods for its FiOS fiber optic network and another $716 for equipment and labor in each home that subscribes, according to Sanford C. Bernstein & Company.

Those numbers from Japan came from Michael T. Fries, the chief executive of Liberty Global, the American company that operates J:Com.

His larger point: “To me, this just isn’t an expensive capital investment,” he said.

The experience in Japan suggests that the major cable systems in the United States might be able to increase the speed of their broadband service by five to 10 times right away. They might not need to charge much more for it than they do now and they’d still make as much money. New York Times

The reality is, my fellow Americans, that we’re being conned by the telco / cable duopoly and the federal government that it has paid to keep any real competition at bay.

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