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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$45 Billion for Spectrum? Cheap!

"Even on a cost avoidance basis, the AWS3 bids could reflect economic values," a reliable source emailed me. More spectrum makes it cheaper to add wireless capacity, especially now that LTE-A aggregation is widely available. I ran some numbers and to my surprise even $45B is plausible - if not exactly cheap!

AT&T certainly didn't intend to pay $15-20B for about 40% of the 50 MHz available. John Stankey put $10B on the table for the auctions. That seemed like enough to scare off smaller bidders.  Someone wasn't scared, probably Charlie Ergen, and pushed the bidding up. 

Telcos need to keep up with traffic increasing at 30-70% per year. They can increase capacity with more cell sites, more antennas, and network efficiencies instead of spectrum. They calculate how much less they could spend on capex if they had additional spectrum available. They calculate cost avoidance numbers from that and develop a maximum bid range. Then they hire nobel-calibre game theorists and auction economists to ensure they spend much less.

The savings in capex just might justify the high prices. AT&T has just cut capital spending by $4B, the largest decline in the last decade anywhere in the world. Just a quarter of that, $1B, would support over $30B in spending on spectrum, at 2.8% effective interest rate.

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Capex flat, not rising, across Europe

EU investment "incentives" already failing. The latest Dell'Oro projection is that capex in Europe will be flat in 2015 despite a strong turn in EU policy in favor of the telcos. Julie Learmond-Criqui of Dell'oro emailed me  In 2015, we expect Capex in Europe will be flat." That's consistent with what the larger carriers are telling investors about their plans for the next several years. 

    I've found that the three most important factors in the level of capex are competition, new technology and direct return on investment. Policy changes rarely make much of a difference unless far more forceful than what most Western regulators would consider. The exception are policy changes that create or protect competition.  

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Deutsche Telekom, Telstra didn't know NSA had cracked them

Possibly using spies and black bag jobs. Update: Further Snowden documents confirmed NSA used spies in Germany & Korea. The undoubtedly excellent engineers at Deutsche Telekom couldn't find how the NSA was tapping them. "Reporters for Der Spiegel, working in collaboration with The Intercept, contacted Deutsche Telekom and NetCologne several weeks ago in order to give them an opportunity to look into the alleged security breaches themselves. The security departments of both firms say they launched intensive investigations, but failed to find any suspicious equipment or data streams leaving the network." Those NSA guys have to be really good to fool the Germans.

    We all "knew" that surveillance was everywhere, but continuing revelations from Laura Poitras & Edward Snowden remain startling. The latest report suggests heavy use of undercover agents and physical intrusion. That's what spies do, after all. England's GCHQ is deeply involved, along with the Aussies and the Canadians. 

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