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Gigabit cable for Montreal, Suddenlink & Alaska

Every cableco has plans but how will they price? Using DOCSIS 3.0, Videotron now is serving customers in Montreal (pr below) with the whole city set to upgrade in the near future. Hitron modems are going into use in the U.S., presumably at Altice's Suddenlink and at GCI in Alaska. (Also below). Suddenlink is charging $109 for the gigabit.

Comcast and Cox also offer a gigabit in many areas but today it's mostly a pr stunt. Comcast is charging $300/month and $1,000 for the install. They run a dedicated fiber and deliver the service as they would for a large business.

Both companies tell me they will switch to using their existing coax when DOCSIS 3.1 is ready.

Gigabit of spectrum to Vodafone and Deutsche Telecom

DT 100 Vodafone buys 110 MHz in German auction, DT 100 MHz. DT & Vodafone already offer 50-100 megabit LTE, which will increase in the next few years to a gigabit. LTE Advanced in the lab delivers over a gigabit in 100 MHz of spectrum, 5 channels of 20 MHz, 8 x 8 MIMO.

As I write in August, 2015, a 450 megabit 3 channel, 4x4 MIMO is the fastest in field deployment. In the three years since Nokia demonstrated 1.5 gigabits over 100 MHz, engineers have been working furiously to deliver that speed in production.

Germany chooses 100-150 megabit 35b DSL

Bruno wanted G.fast but DT chooses cheaper 35b. February 2014. CTO Bruno Jacobfeuerborn startled the broadband world by suggesting they would deploy 500 megabit G.fast. Kabel Deutschland has been winning customers away by offering twice the speed of DT for the same price. BJ knows gigabit cable is close and he wanted to stay in the game. 25M homes were initially promised the upgrade and that's now been raised to ~30M, or 80% of the country.

A year later, his plans were cut back because of DT's financial problems. DT has lost billions on T-Systems, their computer outsourcing division as well as billions on T-Mobile USA. The losses in Greece and Eastern Europe are also high. Over the last four years, they've paid more in dividends than their net profits. Debt is up by six billion.

Vultures come out on the Qualcomm-Ikanos deal

Two hours after the announcement, Jim Baaker put out a national press release looking for clients to sue Ikanos, Qualcomm or their insurers. Since the price was reasonable - 50% above the previous share price in a tough market for chips - the suit has little merit. But the companies might enrich the plaintiff's lawyer to avoid the time and expense of a trial.

$50-60M Ikanos buy brings Qualcomm into DSL

Giant steps in. Ikanos, which absorbed Globespan, Virata, Conexant and Centillium, is a crucial part of the history of DSL. In a flat DSL market, they've struggled for several years. Promised products for node scale vectoring and G.fast are not visible in the market although I understand they are far advanced. CPE chip sales have declined as Chinese chipmakers entered the market. A year ago, Dado Banatao's Tallwood VC firm and Alcatel bailed them out in the belief the new chips would find buyers. Time and money have run out and they've accepted the offer. Ikanos has been on the block for a while, with an asking price of $80-100M.

Qualcomm's entry surprised me because they don't offer complementary chips for cable and fiber. The deal was presumably inspired by Intel's purchase of Lantiq, creating a powerful combined offering of DSL, cable (formerly TI) and wireless (formerly Infineon) chips for home connections. Ikanos also sells Fusiv, a network processor for gateways.

LTE + DSL gateways are in modest deployment in Germany and could play a surprisingly important future role. LTE with realworld speeds of 50+megabits is deploying widely around the world. Many people believe spectrum limits LTE capacity so much that the telcos can't afford to use LTE bandwidth to supercharge DSL. That's probably true in midtown Manhattan but 95+% of the time LTE towers run far below capacity. This is especially true in rural areas, where DT intends to sell DSL + LTE in volume.

Networks of the world, 2019. A first draft.

4G will be almost everywhere with peak speeds often over 100 megabits. 100 megabits will be slow for wired connections in the developed world. Most developing countries - except China - have very few landlines and it's not clear wireless will have enough capacity for much video over the net. Prices in strongly competitive markets will be flat to down because the costs of modems, Internet transit, and nearly everything else are going down. In the more common weakly competitive market, like the U.S., prices will creep up unless the regulator is strong.

Two billion more people will be connected to the net as LTE phones drop under $50. Africa will have more Internet connections than the United States by 2017, more than the 315M population of the U.S. India is growing almost as fast, and China already has twice as many connected as either the U.S. or Europe. The rich countries are today 40-45% of connections; by 2019, that will be down to 35-40%. 5% to 25% of homes will be screwed as rural areas have limited coverage and competition.

256 Antenna Transmitter & receiver for high frequency

UCSD TowerJazz 256 element array chip Massive MIMO for extraordinary speed. 256 60 GHz antennas and their control logic fit on a 4-centimeter square "wafer-scale phased array transmitter" prototype from TowerJazz Semi, working with UCSD and DARPA. It should easily deliver 10 gigabit wireless, at least over short distances.

Ted Rappaport and others are proving high frequency millimeter waves can work.

10% Speed DOCSIS 3.1 to Australia in 2016

Vombatus ursinus -Maria Island National Park wikipedia Australia's NBN damaged
by wombats and politicians As gigabits deploy, why throttle down to 100 megabits? Since 2005, DOCSIS 3.1 was designed to go to a gigabit and more, shared. But NBN will only offer 100 megabits when it rolls out in a year or two, NBN CTO Dennis Steiger tells Alan Breznick at Light Reading. The equipment cost for a gigabit will be similar to the 100 meg cost. Next year, most cablecos will begin using gigabit-capable modems for new customers whether or not they have gigabit service. The cost to the carrier of the extra bandwidth would normally be less than $2/month/customer, often far less.

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