Xavi's Breakthrough 10 Gig For $53 in Switzerland. Believe It!

Xavier Niel's Salt is offering 10 gigabits to 1.3M Swiss homes for 50 Swiss francs, less than Verizon wants for 50 megabits. Salt includes an Apple 4K TV in lieu of a set-top, 300 TV channels, and unlimited. He will probably bring similar to other companies he owns: Free in France & Italy, Eir, and Singapore. 

His 30 euro triple play in France changed everything in Europe and made Xavi a multi-billionaire. Now, many of those lines are gigabit fiber.  He makes more money per customer on the 10 gig for 50 Swiss francs

The numbers suggest any large company with competition should be going for 10 gig rather than 1 gig GPON. 

Read more ...

Active Internet Connections: About 1,500,000,000; Users About Twice As Many

~65% in the Global South. Point-Topic, the most reliable source, found 913M fixed lines at the end of Q3 2017. By now (April 2, 2018,) fixed lines are over 940M. I don't know any way to be as precise for wireless-only. For Q3 2017, I find about 1B regular data users without a home wired connection. I'm estimating ~500M wireless only "connections" to compare with the landline figures (Follow links or charts at end.) Update 1/10to reflect a higher estimate for Indonesia.

25% have English as a primary language, per the chart below. 75% do not. Chinese is 19%; Spanish is 8%; almost 25% speak languages outside the top 10. Google translation is almost but not quite good enough to bridge that. 

Read more ...

10 Gig: $100 in Japan, Smart City Adelaide

10 gig to the home costs between $4/month (efficient high volume) and $10/month more than 1 gig GPON, I estimate. Respected analyst Julie Kunstler accuses America of dozing while the Sony & KDDI are now selling 10 gig service for less than $100/month. (Fierce) If anyone wants to buy 10 gig at $100, KDDI would net a little more than if they were selling a gig for $75.The equipment and bandwidth for 10 gig are now cheap enough that it's affordable anywhere there is fiber and a good use for the speed.

I very rarely wish I had more than the 100 meg down I have although a better upstream would be very welcome. (Jennie does video.) 10 gig is about enough to serve every apartment in Jennie's 20 story building. It's enough for 30 4K camera raw outputs or about 600 4K video streams.

Adelaide has a more practical plan: The city is building 10 gig to 1,000 buildings in the central business district and major commercial strips. They expect to finish in two years. I'd bet 95+% of Adelaide businesses would rarely draw more than 1 gig, although that could change in the future. However, the cost to build to 10 gig is low enough that it pays off even at a low take rate. 

It's a smart move for Adelaide and I'd recommend it to other cities with commercial buildings without fiber. It pays off directly if the high speeds draw even a handful of businesses. Unlike Smart City manifestos, the high speeds for businesses are more than pr.

Read more ...

Colorado's Jeff Storey Up, Louisiana's Glen Post Out

Big city data guy takes over from rural telco guy. Louisiana Senators John Kennedy and Bill Cassidy didn't even try to protect jobs by blocking the Century - Level 3 merger. Century, Louisiana's largest company and America's third largest telco, will now be managed by Jeff Storey from Colorado. Predictably, executive jobs will migrate to Denver. Storey never moved from Colorado.

Just a few months ago, Century wrote, "Glen F. Post III will remain CEO until Jan. 1, 2019; then expected to become executive chairman." Century stock has lost one-third of its value over the last nine months, so Storey probably had little trouble convincing the board to make the move early. They also blocked Post from the promised chairmanship.

In a parting shot, the official photos have Storey looking sleek and Post badly in need of a shave.

Century has a goal of 40 megabits to most by 2020. That's probably "up to 40 megabits" and actually less. Their fiber and G.fast plans, modest already, have been cut. They simply aren't competitive with cable, which by 2020 will have a gigabit to 90%.

Read more ...

U.S. Q4: Cable + 717K, Telco -193K; U.S. 2017 Cable +2,720K Telco -626K

2,095K adds to 95,056K. Over 100,000,000 including smaller companies. No surprises here. DSL - especially lines not upgraded - continues to be clobbered. Most U.S. cable is 100 megabits or more. Almost half the cable homes are offered a gigabit. In my Manhattan building, Verizon doesn't offer more than 3 megabits.

AT&T is apparently the anomaly here, adding 114K while the other telcos fell. However, without the 3M fiber homes and the joint marketing with DirecTV, they too would be negative. 

Century, Frontier, and Windstream lost between 5% & 10% of their broadband lines. They've starved the network in order to keep the dividend high and eventually it caught up to them. Leaders at all three have been promising investors they would turn around the 600,000 lines lost in 2017. Given the inferior networks, I believe they are lying to themselves.

Read more ...

Gigabit Broadband Downstream Cable Available to > 50M U.S. Homes

80% coverage at Comcast leads the way

By 2019-2020, more than 100M of America's 133M households will be able to get gigabit cable downstream. Comcast, the largest with 54M homes passed, is at 80% today and headed close to 100% by yearend. The second largest, Charter with 49M, is beginning to turn on the gigabit and will be deploying heavily in 2018 and 2019. #3, Cox, is planning complete coverage soon.

About 40M will be able to get 1 gigabit symmetric from the telcos. Verizon has essentially frozen at around 15M, which AT&T intends to match by 2020. Millions more are fibered at smaller companies.

The upstream for most cable will be 5-20 megabits, with a few able to receive 50 megabits. Higher cable upstreams will mostly wait until 2020 or later. John Chapman of Cisco tells me full duplex DOCSIS will yield hundreds of megabits upstream initially and gigabits eventually. He expects first units in 2019 and volume in 2020.

Read more ...

Unprecedented: China Unicom Down`~1M in December

One month decline amidst competition may be a statistical artifact. Update: 500K adds in Jan 2018

In December 2017, China Unicom fell from 77,503M to 76,539 broadband customers. That's still the third highest in the world, three times as much as Comcast.

Competition is a natural explanation. China Mobile has been adding ~3M/month for the last six months and 35M on the year. China Telecom added 660K in December and 10.4M for the year. China Telecom now has ~150M subs and China Mobile 113M. Nearly all (>90%) at CT & CM are on fiber all the way home. 

China has > 800M LTE subscriptions, with many of the 200M 3G customers soon to migrate. LTE speeds are often 50-150 megabits. It's inevitable that some people will go wireless only; 5M have chosen wireless for convenience in Japan even though fiber was available. But China Mobile and China Telecom continue to grow rapidly. 

Read more ...

"Don't Buy From Huawei," The Senator Said

Chinese social media is calling for a boycott of Apple in return.

The AT&T phone cancellation is just the latest unproven security accusation. A decade ago, I brought Huawei in to bid in a modest mobile network I was consulting on. We needed a better price for microwave backhaul gear; to get into the account Huawei came in about 30% lower for comparable equipment. Then the call came in to the company President from a Senator's aide. "Don't buy from Huawei," he said, and reminded the CEO how dependent the company was on government funding. There was no choice.

Since then, Huawei has been allowed to sell phones in the U.S. but not major networking equipment. It's somewhere between very difficult and impossible to use the phones covertly. There are dozens of Huawei phones and other products available at Amazon or Best Buy. Google phones are made by Huawei. There were no security issues raised, until Huawei committed to spending $100M on advertising to back up a large contract with AT&T. The ad at left is from the NY subway.

Read more ...