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!

Qwest formally announced their anticipated FTTN service for 23 markets today. The price is high and availability was not clearly defined in the press release. Here’s a few highlights:

• Qwest Connect Quantum: This is a premium fiber-optic Internet service with connection speeds of up to 20 Mbps, for lightning-quick broadband access for a bundled price of $99.99 per month. This is the fastest connection speed available in most cities in the Qwest residential service region. Quantum is designed for serious broadband users who want to optimize speed for streaming video, high-resolution photography, file-sharing, online gaming and other bandwidth-intensive applications. Quantum is backed by Qwest’s Price for Life and 100% 30-Day Satisfaction Guarantees.

• Qwest Connect Titanium: With connection speeds of up to 12 Mbps for a bundled price of only $46.99 per month, along with the Price for Life and 30-Day Satisfaction Guarantees, Titanium is the best value available in the Qwest residential service region. The service offers super-high speeds ideal for customers interested in online music, video and keeping in touch with friends and family. At less than $50 per month, Titanium offers robust speed at the best value.

• Availability: Qwest Connect Quantum and Titanium will be available in 23 of Qwest’s top markets across 10 states in 2008 as Qwest continues to execute its phased rollout of fiber-optic technology to the neighborhood. Customers can go to www.qwest.com and enter their zip code or phone number to check availability and sign up for notifications regarding the availability of the faster speeds in their neighborhoods. (Qwest)

At $99.95 the top tier service isn’t cheap, but I’ll bet there are plenty of takers. It makes me wonder why people like AT&T management are so afraid of the supposedly low margins from a big dumb pipe.

Qwest is offering 20MBPS DSL to some customers and is investing $300 million to bring it to a few more this year. Unlike AT&T who is pretty much devoting new bandwidth to deliver pay TV, Qwest will sell you the whole pipe as it were, but at a rather princely price:

The price for 20Mbps/1Mbps service without phone service is $105, a price that jumps to $115 per month after a year. The price for 12Mbps/1Mbps service in that market is $52 a month, a price that jumps to $65 a month after 12 months. Still no official announcement from the company, but we wouldn’t be surprised to see it surface this week. (DSL reports)

It would seem that Darth V wants to give a few of his customers an incentive to remain in the dark side. While the 7MBS down is pretty pathetic in comparison to the rest of the first world, it’s twice the speed they have now. After all, there is no rush to FIOS all of your customers when your main competior is Comcast who has also kept prices high and done little to improve service. It’s time for some real competition.

(more on GigaOm)

My grandmother once told me how Ma Belle used to bundle: a pleasant person would greet you, connect your call by name and give you the time and temperature - all gratis with your service. Of course, non-local calls were very pricey then and most people wrote letters instead. Anyway, I digress. Someone at AT&T seems to have a bundle fetish. Attractive new offerings are always advertised with pricing in “bundles”. And the bundles when bundled up amount to a bundle of cash. Now the latest is a small boost in DSL speed, and the price in ads is the price only offered as part of a bundle.

Quoting Broadband Reports: Though U-Verse users on very short loop lengths say their VDSL service is capable of great speeds, most users are distance limited, restricting their total bandwidth to 25Mbps. AT&T reserves the majority of that for video, leaving users with only 6Mbps of usable bandwidth — not particularly impressive for a “next generation” service.

More on AT&T plans a paltry DSL speed boost, Ad price only with a bundle

Qwest pretty much sat out the merger mania AT&T and Verizon engaged in, and they are making it abundantly clear they are staying out of the IPTV and triple play game as well. They are putting thier limited funds into building a big open pipe. Some investment advisers will cry foul, but I think it’s refreshingly forward thinking, especially in view of AT&T’s recent down guidance.

“We believe very much in video, and we also believe in the power of the Internet,” Poll said in an interview Thursday. “We are trying to look a little ahead. The young consumers of the future will want broadband on demand, and they are more interested in interaction and in the symmetry of the service. We have a great relationship with DirecTV [Qwest resells that service], and they have a core competency in content. What we want to be able to provide is that 20-Megabit Internet connection that is more important to the younger consumers of today. They not only don’t want a wireline phone, they also don’t want to have a TV – because they use video on demand.” (from Telephony Online)

Verizon is now offering a 7.1mbps down, 768kbps up. Fully double its last DSL offering. But you have have to ask, why not me, if you are an existing customer?

With that in mind, we’ve confirmed with Verizon technicians that the company has been taking orders since December for 7.1Mbps downstream, 768kbps upstream DSL. The biggest caveat? This is only being offered to new customers — at least for the time being.

According to insiders, the loop length for the new tier should be around 8,000 feet, and does require a technician visit. The price for the new tier should be somewhere around $47.99 a month. Officially this tier doesn’t exist yet; the only statement we could get from Verizon PR was that they’ll be “making an announcement about this at some point.” Internally, “early 2008″ is as close as it gets for a date when existing customers will be able to upgrade.

I suspect that V is being frugal. They are doing minimal investment in the POTS side of the house, especially in network assets. Most of their cash going to FIOS deploys.

DSL Reports

Once again finding a way to further leverage infrastructure that dates back to era when calls were connected by a person and 2 plugs, Qwest has tested pair bonding copper to deliver up to 38MBPS. Not very impressive in the larger scheme of things, but it’s about 7 times faster than AT&T’s fastest offering in my neighborhood.

The technology could enable the Denver telco to provide data speeds of up to 35 to 38 megabits a second. Currently, the company’s fastest advertised rates are 7 megabits a second.

It’s too early to say whether Qwest will ever go to a bonded DSL line platform. But if the technology proves to be commercially viable, it could be an option for providing video on demand.

“It’s well-suited to deliver video in many ways,” said Pieter Poll, Qwest’s chief technology officer, when demonstrating the technology recently.

We’re on record calling into question the viability of delivering consistent HD streams through an ADSL pipe that is also serving voice and internet service. Judging from a post at DSL reports we were on the mark:

Why? AT&T has told us the goal was to create “a consistent user experience across the board.” This user in our U-Verse forum is one of those lucky (unlucky) FTTH customers in Oklahoma who decided to give the service a spin anyway, and ultimately decided it wasn’t quite ready for prime time:

Well, that was short lived. We canceled it. Over the last few days we experienced lots of freezing on the HD channels. A reboot of the STB and/or RG fixed it for a bit, and then it would come back. Also, the HD quality was very mediocre. To add to that, it was even worse when played back form the DVR. When AT&T gets their act together in terms of reliability and features, I’ll give it a try again. No bad blood here, just disappointment. I WANTED it to work out.

Om Malik of GigaOm just posted report on his meeting with Mr Neil during his recent trip to Paris. Neil’s company and the state of broadband in France clearly demonstrates why the duopoly in the US has labored so hard to keep line sharing or local loop unbundling out of the marketplace.

On free.fr from GigaOm:

it has taken the French telecom market by the scruff and given it a vigorous shake.

How? By offering a flat-rate, high-speed Internet connection for 30 euros ($43) a month. That gives Free.fr’s three million subscribers a connection speed of roughly 28 megabits per second over DSL, free IPTV (and a free set-top box), a free Wi-Fi hub, and unlimited voice calls to some 70 countries.

Perplexed by the panoply of features offered by his service, I asked Niel how Free.fr does it. “We are a broadband service provider,” was his matter-of-fact reply. “Everything else — from voice to IPTV to storage – is just a feature that rides on this data service.” For the rest of the telecom industry, long addicted to metered minutes and billable items, this is rebellious thinking.

The rest of the report is highly recommended reading, especially for those who are not yet convinced that real competition will cure most of the ills currently associated with access providers.