Network management

Being Stingy with Broadband Speeds

I’m taken aback when I see fiber-based broadband providers offering what can best be described as stingy speeds. The other day, I ran across a broadband provider that offers a range of speeds between 25/3 Mbps and 100/20 Mbps on fiber. Earlier I ran across a provider that has fiber products as tiny as symmetrical 10 Mbps. This frankly mystifies me, and I always wonder why somebody with fiber would offer broadband products that are similar to their competitors. I figure that part of the reason is what I would call old thinking.

Starlink Sets High-Speed Data Cap at 1TB Per Month, Lowers Advertised Speeds

SpaceX quietly revealed the plan to cap residential Starlink service by publishing a “Fair Use Policy” for the popular satellite internet service. The document says residential Starlink subscribers in the US will receive 1TB worth of “Priority Access” per month.

The Price for Faster Upload Speeds

Comcast is introducing a new product in the Northeast that offers faster upload speeds – for a price. The company knows that its biggest weakness is upload speeds. The current upload speeds for products with download speeds up to 300 are only at 10 Mbps.

BT’s Openreach looking at lowering cost of wholesale broadband

BT networking division Openreach is looking to reduce its broadband prices to attract new customers and lock in big wholesale clients like Vodafone, TalkTalk, and Sky as rivals lay full-fiber cables across the UK. The incumbent network operator, part of BT Group, has met some of its biggest corporate customers to suggest a number of changes to its pricing structure that would make its offer more attractive and help them move customers from copper to full fiber. Openreach makes money by wholesaling its broadband to internet service providers, including its parent group BT.

South Korea “Sender Pays” Is a Warning, Not a Model, or Why (Almost) Everyone Keeps Telling the EU This Is a VERY Bad Idea

Many telecommunications companies are reviving the idea of having content companies pay for last-mile network connections because of the profit it would generate. South Korea serves as a useful predictor of how the bad consequences of this idea play out in real-time. Back in 2016, South Korea adopted a new interconnection rule based on a long-standing telco compensation rule called “sending party network pays” (SPNP).

Fast Forward: What makes our network different?

From the start, Google Fiber was designed to bring you Internet - fiber optic Internet.

Orange and FCC Commissioner Carr push for tech companies to pay broadband providers for network use

Orange Group CEO Christel Heydemann and Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr, called on technology giants to contribute a “fair” share to broadband infrastructure costs, arguing such companies are driving a need for continued upgrades and have disproportionately benefitted from telecommunications investments to date. Regulators in the US, EU, and South Korea are weighing rule changes that would force the likes of Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Netflix to pay telecom companies for the large amounts of traffic they generate.

Faster Speeds for Comcast

Comcast recently announced it is introducing a 2-gigabit download broadband product. Along with faster download speeds, Comcast is claiming new upload speeds of as much as 200 Mbps – at least for the 2 Gbps plan. The company made it sound like all upload speeds would be increased by five to ten times the existing speeds. Interestingly, the same announcement said that Comcast would be introducing DOCSIS 4.0 in 2023, at least for some business customers. That’s an announcement that has me scratching my head. Comcast just announced a successful test for DOCSIS 4.0 in January of 2022.

As broadband providers seek payments from Big Tech, Google criticizes “sender-pays” model

Big Tech companies shouldn't have to pay for Internet service providers' network-upgrade costs, a Google executive said amid a push in Europe to have tech companies pay for broadband expansions and improvements. In November 2021, the CEOs of 13 large European telecommunications companies called on tech giants to pay for a portion of the Internet service providers' network upgrade costs.

Network Investments, Staff Challenges and More: 2022 Telecommunications Benchmarking Study

The Moss Adams 2022 Telecommunications Benchmarking Study provides important data and takeaways influenced by this economic landscape, enabling you to assess where your business ranks against other telecommunications companies in key industry areas. The study compiles 2021 data from 115 companies. Participants comprised 55 cooperatives and 60 privately held businesses.

Are the Settlement-Free Peering Policy Requirements for ISPs and CDNs Based on Network Costs?

In this paper, we construct a network cost model to understand the rationality of common requirements on the number and location of interconnection points. We also wish to understand if it is rational to apply these requirements to interconnection between an internet service provider (ISP) and a content delivery network (CDN). We construct a model of ISP traffic-sensitive network costs. We consider an ISP that offers service across the US. We parameterize the model using statistics about the population and locations of people in the contiguous US.

Home Networks Are the New Industry Battleground

While the telecommunications industry has spent the past few decades touting the ever-increasing bandwidth of their various broadband products, a panel of top cable experts said that consumers are increasingly looking to how those services perform as they continue to pile devices and applications onto their networks. Users are becoming more concerned with how their different applications and services interact with their broadband network, Charter's Justin Colwell said. Home networks are getting more sophisticated as they increasingly have to handle more and more devices per home.

Fiber internet activity explodes in Colorado Springs, Colorado

Colorado Springs Utilities (CSU) has stockpiled giant reels and other materials at a storage area near Highway 24 and the Hancock Expressway. The reels contain about 130 miles of bright orange plastic tubing that will be buried when CSU begins to build its new citywide fiber network in mid-September. The 3-inch conduit will eventually contain hundreds of tiny fibers that are capable of delivering data at a gigabyte per second or more. Brian Wortinger, manager of CSU’s Fiber Optic and Telecom Enterprise, says the new fiber network will allow the utility provider to better identify the source

Right to Place Telecommunication Infrastructure

A legal decision in New York State found that the Village of Flower Hill reserved the right to deny ExteNet, an agent of Verizon Wireless, from placing small cell sites within the Village. The decision raises interesting legal and other issues about telecommunications infrastructure. ExteNet was hired by Verizon Wireless to place 66 small cells site in and around the Village, including 18 within the Village, for the stated purpose of strengthening the existing 4GLTE network.

Cable Companies Tout Speed Increases

The NCTA—The Internet and Television Association, an industry trade and lobbying association for large cable companies, recently touted big increases in broadband speeds since the start of the pandemic. Specifically, NCTA states that the average U.S. download speed has grown from 138 Mbps in March 2020, the first month of the pandemic, to 226 Mbps in June 2022. Obviously, the cable companies are taking credit for much of the speed increase, and to some extent, that’s true.

Big Telecom Companies and the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment Program Grants

We’re finally starting to gain a picture of how the big telecommunication companies (telecos) are preparing to leverage the upcoming Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) grants. Chiefly, large telecos all say they will be building rural fiber with grant funding – which is what rural America most desires. But a lot of rural folks blame the big telcos for the current miserable state of rural broadband. There are several big fears that I hear voiced about the big telcos winning the grant funding.

Brightspeed’s planned fiber passings top 1 million across 13 states

New broadband provider Brightspeed is now planning fiber expansion work in more than a dozen states, outlining its ambition to reach tens of thousands of new locations across South Carolina and Kansas. The operator is targeting up to 14,000 passings in South Carolina, with plans to hit an additional 36,000 passings by the end of its five-year buildout; and in Kansas, as it aims to reach 10,000 new passings and an additional 45,000 locations.

Fiber Broadband Association thinks FCC idea for new broadband minimums 'already obsolete'

Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel recently proposed raising the minimum broadband speed requirement in the US to 100 Mbps for downloads and 20 Mbps for uploads. The move was generally well-received, but long overdue at a time when median download and upload speeds among US service providers still rank below several other nations. Still, Fiber Broadband Association President and CEO Gary Bolton said the FCC’s ongoing focus on speed minimums is a misguided approach.

Sens Luján and Booker Introduce Legislation Stop Unnecessary Data Caps and Promote Access to High-Speed Broadband

Sens Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) and Cory Booker (D-NJ) introduced legislation to prohibit predatory data caps that force families to pay high costs and unnecessary fees to access high-speed broadband. As Americans’ need for data is increasing, pricing structures for broadband services must encourage participation in the digital economy, promote competition and innovation, and ensure investment in national broadband infrastructure is used to its highest capacity.

Canada’s internet outage should encourage us to dismantle our telecom oligopoly

A recent telecommunications outage left millions of Canadians without access to internet and cell services for hours. It was a stunning reminder that Canada must revolutionize the industry and dismantle the oligopoly that runs it. On July 8, more than 10 million customers of Rogers Communications were left without internet and cell services when a maintenance update went sideways. At least two days later, some customers were still without service, while others had unreliable access. It was the second time in 15 months the Rogers service failed.

Rep Clarke Introduces GREEN Communications Act

Rep Yvette Clarke (D-NY) introduced the Generating Resilient and Energy Efficient Network (GREEN) Communications Act (H.R.8178), legislation that aims to harden our communications networks against climate change and natural disasters, while simultaneously reducing the carbon footprint of communications infrastructure.

A Comparative Analysis of Ookla's Speedtest and Measurement Lab's Network Diagnostic Test

Consumers, regulators, and internet service providers (ISPs) all use client-based "speed tests" to measure network performance, both in single-user settings and in aggregate. Two prevalent speed tests, Ookla's Speedtest and Measurement Lab's Network Diagnostic Test (NDT), are often used for similar purposes, despite having significant differences in both the test design and implementation and in the infrastructure used to conduct measurements. This paper presents a comparative evaluation of Ookla and NDT7 (the latest version of NDT), both in controlled and wide-area settings.

Russia Is Taking Over Ukraine’s Internet

Since the end of May 2022, the 280,000 people living in Kherson, Ukraine and its surrounding areas have faced constant online disruptions as internet service providers are forced to reroute their connections throu

VPN provider pulls out of India over push to ‘limit internet freedom’

An order by Indian regulators requiring Internet companies to store their users’ real names and track their usage history has alarmed digital privacy advocates and virtual private network providers, which have begun to pull out of the country in protest. ExpressVPN, a leading virtual private network firm based in the British Virgin Islands, said that it would shut down its servers in India.