Overseeing the world’s largest communications market could get a lot easier if the FCC doesn’t get their act together soon. Why? Because the US market will cease to be the largest if the present policy continues. The agency recently sought to fine ABC for a broadcast breifly showing butt cheeks in 2003 and has been pushing for a la carte cable channels (a good idea, but enable TVoIP with fat broadband pipes and the market will do it). What they have not done is enforce a 1996 agreement with the Telcos that was supposed to bring big investments in last mile infrastructure and open access for competetion:

In 1996, the government agreed to free the Baby Bells to compete in the long-distance market if they met certain conditions. Among other things, the Bells promised to share their facilities with other providers and pledged to run fiber to every home. “Almost every one of them reneged on their promises,” says David Passmore, an analyst at Burton Group.

Ironically, the rate relief the carriers were given over the years in return for their empty promises — by some estimates as high as $70 billion — would have gone a long way toward running fiber to every home in the U.S.

“The politicians gave away the store, and all of the networks that were paid for by the rate [payers] were handed over to the Verizons of the world,” says Passmore. source: Computerworld

Unwittingly, the FCC is shipping US jobs overseas every bit as effectively as wholesale factory closings did. The largest carriers, AT&T (aka SBC) and Verizon spent more far more capital on mergers and acquisitions than on the promised network improvements without even a harsh word from the FCC. An act of Congress won’t fix this. An executive order might. IF Mr Bush would lke to leave a more positive legacy, he could forcibly direct the FCC to enforce existing regs already on the books. We’ll recover from the naked butt cheeks most of us missed in 2003 and being forced to pay for Al Gore’s Current TV that no one watches. We will not recover from the rest of the world passing us by if we do not get serious about a 100MBPS pipe into every American home and start deploying it now.

One big advantage copper has had over fiber is that glass fiber tends to break in sharp bends, and light transmission can be impaired in even soft bends. While not capable of carrying backhaul speeds, Corning developed a new bendable fiber that was said to tolerate sharp bends. Corning’s first real world customer has found the fiber does work as advertised.

Verizon worked with Corning during trials and has plans to deploy the technology shortly, but a company by the name of Connexion Technologies this week became the first Clearcurve customer.

According to Connexion, a Flordia FTTH installer, the bendable fiber was a time and money saver when it came to MDU installs. “During our field trials, we saw firsthand the ease and speed of installation of the ClearCurve Drop Cable,” says company founder Glen Lang. “With this technology, we were able to realize at least a 30-percent time savings, in addition to material savings such as ducts.”

This demonstration video from the Corning website is worth watching. (from Broadband Reports)

Across the pond, Yorkshire has confronted the truth about what kind of infrastructure it will take to remain relevant as a center of commerce in the new millennium. As a pilot project, they have set out to deliver true high speed access to 600,000 homes.

The project in the South Yorkshire region, will involve replacing old copper based lines from telephone exchanges up to street cabinets with new fibre-optic cable. It will cover around almost 600,000 homes in the region, with possible speeds of up to 50 Mbps. (from Seek Broadband)

We’ve seen this as a trend in many affluent smaller cities in the US, but 600,000 isn’t exactly small. Congratulations to the citizens of Yorkshire!

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.

By releasing software into the ether as open source, Intel is hoping to get traction for it’s FCoE or Fiber Channel over Ehternet initiative. Along with Cisco, Intel has been pushing to get this high performance technology adapted to work on ordinary ethernet infrastructure. Getting the world involved by releasing this code should accelerate development. (article on Cnet)