Ottawa, Canada may be the new model for breaking the last mile bottleneck. We’ve heard endlessly about how the telcos who were paid to run fiber to every home by the year 2000 just can’t manage it because it will cost too much. It may be time to take the matter into our own hands.

This may all sound rather abstract, but a trial experiment in Ottawa, Canada is trying out the consumer-owned model for a downtown neighborhood of about 400 homes. A specialized construction company is already rolling out fiber to every home, and it will recoup its investment from individual homeowners who will pay to own fiber strands outright, as well as to maintain the fiber over time. The fiber terminates at a service provider neutral facility, meaning that any ISP can pay a fee to put its networking equipment there and offer to provide users with Internet access. Notably, the project is entirely privately funded. (Although some schools and government departments are lined up to buy their own strands of fiber, just like homeowners.)

The main challenges with this model are economic, rather than technical. Most importantly, ownership has to be made appealing and affordable to consumers. The construction company is using conservative estimates that only 10% of homeowners will sign up and there will be a per-customer cost of $2700. If you assume 50% take-up, then the per-customer cost drops to $1100. Both figures might seem like a lot, but people pay for a variety of improvements to their home — like remodeled kitchens, or a deck — that also cost large sums. (Google)

Here’s what I find most interesting: On the scale of 400 potential connections, deployment cost is $1100 per at a 50% take rate. I’d be willing to bet AT&T has just about that level of investment in deploying Uverse.  Simple math shows that even with the outrageous overhead the telcos carry, they’ll fully recapture a similar investment in less than 5 years even at this tiny scale. Bottom line. We’ve been had by the telcos and a government that has insured their monopoly status. They are not interested in improving service.

I think it’s time for all of us to work locally and build our own. The little 400 home project in Ottawa could be the beginning of a new revolution.

For the first time the annual growth percentage of fiber outpaced both DSL and cable world wide. Unfortuantely for Americans, this growth is largely be attributed to deployments outside of the US.

“It’s a significant milestone for fiber-optic broadband; where it is available consumers will take fiber over other broadband technologies,” said Oliver Johnson, CEO at Point Topic.  In three to five years it will pass cable, and that it will be about 10 years before it becomes bigger than DSL (Digital Subscriber Line), he said. That is, unless something happens to make it possible for DSL to keep up with bandwidth demands.

Currently there are 42 million fiber broadband users worldwide, compared to 79.6 million cable and 238 million DSL subscribers. “DSL is adding more subscribers than fiber in absolute numbers, but not in percentage growth,” said Johnson. (Network World)

The big V seems to be determined to be the to dog inthe US speed race. With DOCSIS 3 deployments beginning to take shape, this might be due to a competititve threat formthe cable guys. While the new FIOS speeds would be substadnard in Paris or Korea, it keeps them king of the racetrack here in the US.

Verizon now tops out at 50 Mbps downstream and 20 Mbps upstream up from 30/15 Mbps ($90 or $140 per month, depending on area, with annual contract), while its slowest speed is 10/2 Mbps up from 5/2 Mbps (under $50 per month). Existing subscribers can request the faster speeds, which are available in some cases at no extra cost; in others, the monthly fee is slightly higher.

Since the introduction in the mid-1990s of residential broadband–often used for small-office and home-office connections as well–most places in which wired digital service is available have had either one or two providers, typically the incumbent telephone company and the incumbent cable provider. (PC World)

Now, if we could just get 2 or 3 more competitors into the game, we’d have considerably faster pipes at lower prices.

iProvo, once touted as a proof of concept for government run networks has gone private. The technically excellent FTTP never managed to grow and was hemorrhaging customers at the end.

The Salt Lake Tribune reports that one of Utah’s two struggling municipal fiber networks, iProvo, is going to be sold to Broadweave Networks for $40.6 million. Broadweave will lease the existing network operations center from the city to service residential and business fiber, while the city continues to use the network for municipal functions. Last December I mentioned the city brought in consultants to find out why the project was losing customers, and discovered it was thanks to incumbents undercutting prices, and poor customer service.iProvo now becomes a private enterprise, which should thrill regional incumbents like Qwest and critics like the Libertarian Reason Foundation, which had consistently targeted the project as an example of government dysfunction. According to the Provo press release, the FTTH network reached some 36,000 residences. However, only 10,300 actually subscribed, and 120 were leaving per month. (Broadband Reports)

While the usual cast of government network advocates are busy formulating reasons for failure, I can tell you the real reason is government itself. I can also predict the gov net advocates will conclude that the problem was not enough money was spent. While there’s no denying a government entity can build anything given a blank check, they are not accustomed to competing for customers. In the end that’s the underlying problem that no amount of taxpayer dollars can fix. Our incumbent duopoly of private access providers isn’t accustomed to competing much either, but they do have shareholders to please. It’s also important to remember that the existence of the duopoly is due to governmental meddling on a colossal scale. Assuming any government entity can improve things by an attempted end run around a beast of government’s own creation is pretty naive.

Traditionally, local governments have undertaken the delivery of utilities when they have been under served by private enterprise. Traditionally when a monopoly is granted, lobbying of politicians continuously erodes regulation of these monopolies to be done in the public interest. In America, we have a duopoly that is increasingly interested in creating scarcity in open access and using new capacity exclusively for the delivery of proprietary, extra charge services. They defend their “turf” like mafia dons. AT&T and Cox fought hard to end the city of Lafayette, La’s self build of a fiber network, and lost.

The city of Lafayette, Louisiana fought hard against BellSouth and Cox, who tried desperately to scrap voter-approved plans to wire the city with fiber. While residents won’t be getting the promised symmetrical 10Mbps connections and IPTV bundles until next year, the city says they’re planning to offer free local Intranet connectivity to those who plug in to the fiber ring, according to App Rising. (Broadband Reports)

I seriously doubt the duopoly players have accepted the defeat. They’ll be back to try to kill this again, and again. If we had real competition in the marketplace, this would never happen. These companies would then have to focus on offering better faster cheaper instead of political skullduggery.

Right of ways to the last mile have been the largest barrier to new access. The UK’s H2O networks thinks they have a work around through the sewers. The sewers do interconnect every building in most cities, and the addition of a few cables probably won’t impact their proper function.

It’s always been hard to argue with the logic. Sewers are deep underground where cable would be protected from clumsy drilling. They also run into the heart of virtually every building in Britain.

Best of all, they were dug in the 19th century when Irish labour was cheap, and planning and safety restrictions were lax. You’ve just got to buy cable that the rats can’t gnaw into.

It all works in theory, and Merseyside-based H2O Networks says it’s finally cracked the practical stuff. The good burghers of either Bournemouth, Dundee or Northampton will be first to ride the 100Mbit/s wave with fibre to their homes with plans to complete the first of three “Fibrecity” deployments within three years.

The final decision on who’ll get the maiden rollout is set for April and will be made by whichever council gets its works permissions sorted first, according to H20 Networks managing director Elfred Thomas. Engineers should be on the ground in September, and work will be completed in 18 months to two years, he said. The 100Mbit/s figure is claimed as a minimum. (from The Register)

As a side note, we are seeing a common thread in the world marketplace for what constitutes next gen broadband, and it is in the 100MBPS ball park. AT&T in particular should be paying attention.

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)

Congrats to our brothers and sisters across the pond! 10,000 families in Kent will soon have access to fiber connectivity from a major provider that is only available to a tiny minority of Verizon customers in the US. Look for dramatic economic growth in this neighborhood as small and micro businesses flourish.

BT is boosting Britain’s attempt to remain at the top of the global broadband market with plans to install a network at Ebbsfleet in Kent that offers speeds 20 times faster than the average UK household connection. The company hopes its deployment of the UK’s fastest ever residential network, at the development of 10,000 new homes, will be a crucial testbed as the government, regulator Ofcom and industry come to decide how to upgrade the country’s broadband network.

From August, BT’s Openreach unit will start installing super fast fibre connections rather than traditional copper phone lines at the Ebbsfleet site, owned by Land Securities. It will offer the lines to BT Retail and rival ISPs and media companies such as Carphone Warehouse’s TalkTalk and BSkyB, on a wholesale basis, enabling these companies to provide a host of bandwidth-hungry services such as high definition TV and film downloads. (from the Guardian)

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)

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.