Goodbye, Lantiq. Hello, Intel

Late arriving chips push DSL pioneer into Intel deal. Intel is back in the DSL business more than a decade after losing about $2B without bringing a DSL chip to market. Lantiq is a solid company with excellent engineers around the world.

Not long ago, CEO Christian Wolff was planning for a $1B IPO. Imran Hajimusa was exhibiting spectacular demonstrations of world-beating performance WiFi, some of the first publicly shown vectored VDSL and more. The chips haven't made it to market. Update 3/03 Vectored VDSL chips for modems are shipping, although other chips are not. 

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Ikanos: Still waiting on chips

Very limited sales of ADSL, VDSL chips for now. Ikanos was the first with VDSL2 DMT, today's standard. They've incorporated Globespan-Conexant, once the largest ADSL chip provider. But until their vectored & G.fast chips ship, sales are dismal. With investments from Alcatel and Tallgrass, they have time to turn things around - when the chips get out the door.  Tallgrass and management bought an additional $12M in equity early in February.

    They are particularly enthused about G.fast. On their investor call http://bit.ly/1BcvVC1, "One is that G.fast is obviously the flagship of the 1-gig push forward, if you will. We expect that market to be -- as the percentage of the total to be around 25% of the mix of the balance of the DSL technology, but one of the things that interesting around G.fast is an end-to-end replacements or deployment takes place.

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Obama's Seven Percent Broadband Plan

Program will help far fewer than 10%. Barack has a delightfully folksy video chat about needing better and more affordable broadband. http://bit.ly/WHbunkum He flew out to Ceder Falls to make a second speech. http://bit.ly/WHCedar Unfortunately, his proposals are highly unlikely to impact 5% of Americans and almost certainly won't reach 7%. (Proposal below)

The only item of apparent substance is Obama's plan to override state laws in a minority of the country that prevent cities from building municipal systems. That's the right thing to do, but won't affect many people. Even if the proportion of municipal broadband in the states affected doubles or triples, that's less than 5% of U.S. homes. Doubling or tripling would be a surprise.

If you want to help more than 10% or 20% you therefore have to make the incumbent bring down prices.

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Ten days to nominate DSL pioneers for the IEEE Ibuka Medal

The 2012 Ibuka Medal went to three people on the video standards committee for H.264/MPEG4-AVC. The 2013 award went to three on the High-Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding committee. For more than 20 years, the DSL Standards group has been advancing broadband from 1.5 megabits in the pre-DMT days to G.fast’s hundreds of megabits. It’s time to put together a nomination. This year's nominations are due January 31. The chair of the committee is Kenneth Wiegand of Fraunhofer, one of those who won the award for video standards. Balan Nair, also on the committee, installed millions of lines of DSL as CTO of Qwest.

The 2014 Award went to Marty Cooper, cell phone inventor and friend to many of us. Marty’s Marconi Panel in D.C. in October upended many people’s thinking about spectrum. Two dozen of the most influential in D.C. were in the audience to hear “We’ve never had a spectrum shortage and we never will.” The video is well worth watching http://bit.ly/Marconispectrum

For information on the award, http://www.ieee.org/about/awards/tfas/ibuka.html If we don’t get this together for this year, let’s make sure to do it next year.

 

CEO: Verizon Dumping DSL for LTE

Dropping 10M wired homes, 50-75% of territory. Please don't shoot the messenger - I still support DSL. CEO Lowell McAdam intends to shut most copper served homes, 10-15M. This is not because those homes aren't profitable, but they will be even more profitable if served by Verizon's LTE. 

Here's what Lowell told the CITIBANK conference.

"We're moving a lot off of copper onto wireless, as well, especially for voice services and lower speed DSL. And that allows us to have the maintenance savings and gives the customers frankly better service than they would on antiquated copper. So we're doing a number of things to sort of prune the assets down and be a bit more focused."  

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HD Voice getting Golden Spike Jan 6 in Las Vegas

Dan Berninger making it happen. “All major operators offer HD voice to at least a segment of direct customer,” Dan writes, ”But there remains no interoperability across operators.” More than a decade ago, Dan, Jeff Pulver and friends convinced everyone in  the industry HD voice made phone calls much better.

Broadband allows doubling the frequency range and better codecs improve everything. The additional cost is trivial, something like ten cents/month all in for better mics and network gateways. The gear is so cheap that many phones the last two years include HD. Carriers included Telstra in Australia are turning it on.

The bottleneck: no one carrier could make HD effective. Both ends of the call need to be HD and most calls go from one network to another.

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Last Bow for "The DSL Committee"

America's role changes. DSL speeds would be much lower and tens of millions of current DSL customers wouldn't be served without the extraordinary work of Tom Starr and dozens more on "The DSL Committee." We'd have far more problems with interference if the T1E1.4 committee hadn't developed a set of rules 20 years ago. Tens of millions of homes that today get 3-6 megabits would probably have been capped at 1.5 megabits if they didn't create competition for the first ADSL modem. Literally hundreds of problems were prevented or resolved by the work they've done.

     America is no longer the center of the telecom world, so perhaps it was inevitable that the American standards committee would fade away.

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300 Megabit 3 Band LTE in Korea

The world is on the way to gigabit LTE. Using 40 MHz, Korea's largest mobile company is upgrading 26,000 cell sites over the next few months. The maximum speed is 300 megabits, shared; if the cell site is crowded or you're far from the tower, the speed is lower. 95+% of the time, however, you can expect 50-100 megabits. SK is using 20 MHz in the 1.8GHz band, 10 MHz in the 800MHz band, and 10MHz in 2.1 GHz band. 

SK claims this is the first commercial 3 band deployment, but there are dozens to come. LG, Korea's #3, intends to deploy next month and KT is in trials. http://bit.ly/1BoDP7N. SK's 26K cellsites for 51 million people is about three times  the density of AT&T or Verizon's network. The American giants have < 50,000 cellsites for 315 million people.

Verizon was first, after Scandinavia, to LTE but now has a distinctly inferior network. While Germany has peak speeds often at 100 megabits, Verizon is still advertising 5-12 megabits. England, France, Finland and many others soon roll out common speeds of > 100 megabits.

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