Fast Net.news

  • Fast Net.news
  • about
  • Wireless
  • Policy
  • Why advertise

Academician Ding Wenhua of CCTV: Our 36 megabit UHD is world class

Ding Wenhua 230Ding Wenhua tells me China will distribute the coming generation of TV, UHD, at 36 megabits. Bell Canada intends to use 24 megabits and I believe most in the U.S. 15-25 megabits. The comparison with America is mine. Ding merely provided his specification; I drew the conclusion.

The actual difference in the picture will be modest; most networks are sacrificing a little quality to save money. You'd have to look closely at an excellent TV to see the effect. It remains an impressive achievement.

China can support the higher data rate because of the extraordinary broadband network they have built in the last six years. 344 million homes have been connected directly to fiber, most capable of a gigabit. China Mobile continues to add four million more fiber home connections each month. That rate must slow soon: there are only 455 million homes.

Not long ago, many of those homes were effectively limited to speeds under 50 megabits by insufficient backhaul capacity. The situation has improved dramatically in the last year or two. A friend in Shenzhen tells me 500 megabit service is common in her city.  

Read more ...

Huawei won't stop: 50G PON, 50G Ethernet, G.fast Revision 3, 5G & 10G microwave backhaul for small cells, low-cost 4G, remarkable Kirin 980

Bionic greatestTim Cook claims Apple's "A12 Bionic is the smartest, most powerful chip in a smartphone." He's probably mistaken because Huawei's Kirin 980 will probably beat it by some measures and do about as well as Apple in many others. Both are great chips, produced on the same TSMC assembly line. Hundreds or more likely thousands of first-rate engineers worked for years on both. Neither is significantly superior; Qualcomm, Samsung, and Intel also will soon have chips. 

Similar rankings are true across telecom. Huawei spends US$15 billion each year on research and now has the broadest product line. At the Geneva UBBF, Swisscom told me the new G.fast (Amendment 3) is shipping and will deploy across the country. 10 GPON costs have come down so much that Xavier Niel's Salt Switzerland is selling 10G for the same price as GPON. I stopped by the Salt store and they told me customers love the 10G. If that's not enough, Huawei demonstrated 50G PON. 

50G Ethernet looks to be the primary backhaul in China and was display. Verizon is strong on NG-PON2 but most western companies are content with 10G. The boards featured state of the art HiSilicon network processors and some of Huawei's own optical units. 

Read more ...

Xavi's Intel strategy: Fiber to the home to 80+% of Ireland, France

Intel under Gordon Moore and Andy Grove stayed ahead of the competition by always investing, even in the periodic slumps. It worked very well: except for the Japanese memory chip onslaught, no one caught Intel for 25 years. (No longer true.) Xavier Niel had a down first quarter this year, the first since 2002, and only a modest recovery in Q2.  His response: FTTH built ASAP, in order to pull ahead of the competition. 

Most dramatically, he is offering 10 gigabits for a 1 gig price at Salt in Switzerland. He just added 1.4M passings to his plan for Eir, the former Irish incumbent he recently bought. That will take Eir to ~1.7M, more than the country has households. Even including businesses, that easily over 90%.(Below)  In France, he is at 8M, going to 20M in 2022. Meanwhile, in Italy he has signed up 1.5M mobile customers in just a few months.

Most of that growth is being financed internally, with low debt levels.

Read more ...

Remarkable success from FCC "unserved" reverse auction

700,000 unserved rural homes will now be connected. The cost, $1.488B, just over $2,000/home, startled me. Rural builds are expensive; I was involved in one in Vermont that came in over $4,000 home. $2,000 is half or less of the costs in the CAF program for the big telcos or New York State's separate program. The government saved $billions.

Nearly all will have speeds of 25 megabits or more. Half will receive 100 megabits. Some will get gigabit fiber. About 1/4th will receive Internet from a Viasat satellite, which keeps getting better. Bids were rated by the speeds offered, with a preference for higher speeds. Favoring faster service in the bidding process paid off. 

Almost half the money went to independent wireless operators, WISPs. Rural electric coops also are deeply involved. The traditional telcos won few of the bids.

Read more ...

50 kilometers Super-PON from Google

SuperPON 3 CO 230Google Fiber has developed Super-PON, designed to go 50 kilometers. That's more than twice the reach of today's GPON. The illustration at left is a mid-sized city served by three central offices. Below, the same city using today's PON. It requires 16 COs. 

Working units are in the field, probably from Adtran. That's not official, but I doubt DeSanti would have keynoted an Adtran event if an Adtran product wasn't close. 

DeSanti made the surprising comment, "Aerial is prohibitively expensive due to policy restrictions of pole sharing with utility companies." The common wisdom is that aerial is much cheaper than underground.

Read more ...

"Worldwide shortage of components"

Shortages in Venezuela WikipediaCarl Russo of Calix, Earl Lum confirm reports from Nokia & Joe Madden. Russo on the call said

"The caution on the revenue side is an extension of what we struggled a little bit within Q2. But we don't see that challenge going away and we're going to make some additional investments in inventory to deal with it, but there is a worldwide shortage of components that run straight through our product sets. Especially those product sets that are more subscriber edge premises oriented."

Read more ...

Broadband means you sleep less

Sleep by Mark Callow"Just one more level," and other Internet temptations cut your sleep. "Individuals with DSL access tend to sleep 25 minutes less than their counterparts without DSL Internet. They are significantly less likely to sleep between 7 and 9 hours... Furthermore, they are less likely to be satisfied with their sleep. These effects are mostly concentrated among younger adults."

I at first thought that claim implausible. Then I thought of all the nights I went to bed later to finish something on the computer, or when I just lost track of time surfing."High-speed Internet makes it very enticing to stay up later to play video games, surf the web and spend time online on social media."

Read more ...

Fiber to the Home near-explosive growth

Nyiragongos lava lake by Caitjeenk 23020% growth is common. Telefónica Spain has passed twenty million premises - over 70% - and continues at two million a year. Telefónica Brazil is going from seven million in 2018 to ten million in 2020. China has 328 million connected and added 5M in the month of June. AT&T on July 26 announced 5M more in the next 12 months. Fiber is now a proven moneymaker, bringing new customers every quarter.

What's going on? We're doing the edits on a report for the clients of STL Partners. The working title is Fiber to the Home near-explosive growth. I use the strategies of 15 major companies to frame the analysis. 

Credit Suisse believes that for an incumbent, “The cost of building fibre is less than the cost of not building fibre.”

Read more ...

More Articles ...

  1. Suri of Nokia: Component shortage real
  2. Latin America broadband growth ~6% in 2017: TeleG
  3. AT&T fiber run rate going from 3M to 5M/year
  4. China: 1.1B 4G, >400M BB, 328M fiber home, rapid growth
  5. Nokia, Ericsson, and Samsung ban could cripple U.S. 5G (Satire)
  6. Adtran expects G.fast boost from AT&T & Australia but Century still isn't buidling
  7. 300,000,000 connections at stake in rural India
  8. 5G Why Verizon thinks differently and what to do about it
  9. India unreal: Jio goes for 50M FTTH in 1100 cities, already 215M 4G and 96+% covered
  10. Fiberhome acquires wireless pioneer Datang
  11. AT&T, T-Mobile, & Huawei allies hire Trumpians
  12. 20M FTTH in Spain, 14M+ soon in Brazil, 20M+ in France, 3M/yr at AT&T, 300M connected in China
  13. Dave in South China Morning Post: China is already a leader in telecom
  14. YesandNo
  15. Jedi Xavier Returns After Orange Empire Strikes Back
  16. ZTE Freedom Will Cost $5-10B. Cheap!
  17. T-Mobile Watch: Chances Falling As Errors Reported, Missing Time Machine
  18. Goldman Sachs Puts $750M Into Brit Fiber
  19. Kuoppamaki of T-Mobile: NR Will Yield A (Modest) Performance Improvement
  20. Danger, Will Robinson! The Best on Wall Street Often Get It wrong
  21. Trillion Dollars ($1,000,000,000,000) Says China Must Never Be Dependant On Foreign Core Technologies
  22. CEO: AT&T's Existential Crisis. I Disagree.
  23. Xavi's Breakthrough 10 Gig For $53 in Switzerland. Believe It!
  24. Active Internet Connections: About 1,500,000,000; Users About Twice As Many
  25. 10 Gig: $100 in Japan, Smart City Adelaide
  26. Colorado's Jeff Storey Up, Louisiana's Glen Post Out
  27. U.S. Q4: Cable + 717K, Telco -193K; U.S. 2017 Cable +2,720K Telco -626K
  28. Gigabit Broadband Downstream Cable Available to > 50M U.S. Homes
  29. Unprecedented: China Unicom Down`~1M in December
  30. "Don't Buy From Huawei," The Senator Said
  31. 300,000 Indian Villages Fibered; 325,000 More Soon Come
  32. Breaking: Goldman $5B Writeoff, Adtran Warning Point to Telco Capex Cut & Highly Distorted Earnings to Come
  33. "A Brain Drain & An Empty Shell," If Broadcom Buys Qualcomm
  34. Iliad Free Already Bringing Italian Down Prices
  35. U,S. Q3: Cable +540K, Telcos -155K. Telcos clobbered across > 1/2 the country
  36. G.fast Reality Check
  37. Wireless Network Design: The Troika
  38. To Find Growth, Adtran Goes Wireless, ASSIA Goes GPON
  39. 272M Fiber Connections in China: The Most Remarkable Achievement in My 20 Years of reporting
  40. 50G & 100G Ethernet for Backhaul

Page 7 of 24

  • Start
  • Prev
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9
  • 10
  • 11
  • Next
  • End