Tony Werner: In 12 months, Comcast will offer a gigabit coast-to-coast

"Gigabit without a backhoe. ... We don't have to dig up the streets and can go incredibly fast. You're going to see us go coast-to-coast in the next 12 months," Comcast CTO Tony Werner tells Amy Maclean in a short but important interview. I'm told there are unannounced Comcast deployments of DOCSIS 3.1 in Chicago and California, as well as the large public trial in Atlanta. I'm guessing that Comcast has already upgraded the CMTS for millions of lines, ready to turn on large systems when they believe everything is ready. (That's consistent with what manufacturers are shipping but I don't have confirmation.)

Cable supplier Arris expects substantial sales of DOCSIS 3.1 modems starting early next year, which is consistent with Tony's prediction. Note that the high speeds are likely to be download only. Upload looks mostly to be 90% slower.

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Hedge fund billionaire Paulson backing Chicago AT&T competitor Layer3

Drahi's Altice also is financing Layer3. They are offering a 4K set top with up to three terabytes, apparently designed to connect wirelessly to a simple network interface device. That avoids needing to wire in the home, which Fran Shammo says is often the largest cost in a Fios connection. They are about to launch in a Chicago neighborhood and are also hiring installers in Alexandria, Virginia. 

Cable tech legend Dave Fellows and partner Jeff Binder have raised $100M, hoping that Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T have loads of unhappy customers who will switch.  Paulson is a gambler who made $4B betting that triple-A rated mortgage bonds would default in 2008.

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Verizon earnings didn't cover the dividend

Takeaways: The strike contributed but fundamental problems remain. They have been cutting capex since 2007 and they no longer have a major edge in quality. VZ is and will be a very profitable company, but maybe not worth $200B. Wireless data growth is way down (< 40%) as I've been forecasting for several years. 5G Highband will start rolling for fixed wireless in 2018, but probably slowly. It will not add to earnings until well into next decade. The CFO forecasts very slow revenue growth. McAdam thinks best quality, video and IoT growth, and large content revenue will solve these problems. I raise doubts. 

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3M fiber, 19M LTE June adds: China Mobile's broadband mensis mirabilis

China is now 1/3rd of the broadband Internet. Over 240M are now connected by fiber home. The 3M added by CM in June was more than the entire rest of the world. It surpassed the previously monthly record, 2.65M at CM in March. China Telecom added 590,000, China Unicom 250,000, and China Mobile 3,189,000, for a total net gain over 4M.  

China Telecom's landline broadband total is 118M, Unicom 74M and Mobile 66M. Add about 20M for the smaller operators and the total is 278M. That's more than the EU 28 (166M) combined with the U.S. (103M). Nearly all are on fiber home or fiber/DSL. In two years, almost 100M have shifted from pure DSL to fiber.

LTE in China in July reached 600M LTE subscriptions.

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AT&T fiber taking on other telcos

Windstream, Fairpoint watch out. T plans 3M lines of fiber to the premises (including G.fast) each of the next four years, expecting to get to 20-25% of their territory. Some of them will be "out of territory," including some of the ~2M homes they have reached with fiber already. I can't recall either AT&T (almost half the U.S.) or Verizon (about a quarter) expanding this way in the last decade. 

AT&T, France Telecom, and Telefonica have discovered that fiber costs are down in favorable locations. Google Kansas City has proven fiber can be profitable, including pulling many customers from AT&T. Fiber in some places can be run for < $500/home; in others, the cost is $4,000-$5,000. It's a great business if you can cherry pick areas with low costs and weak competition.

That's exactly what AT&T is doing,

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Unbundling obsolete in the age of vectoring: an inconvenient truth

Sharon White can raise Internet speeds across Britain by 100 megabits with smart policy.  British Telecom, Vodafone, Sky, and TalkTalk would all benefit if White gets this one right. More important, the Brits get a much better Internet. The only losers would be John Malone's cableco and the now outdated policy for sharing of the binder. (BT has promised 10M lines of G.fast at speeds of 200-800 megabits. My examples here are from Britain, but other countries will face similar issues.)

Competition doesn't have to die. It does have to move from the cable to the exchange. Unbundling was a great idea in 2000 and is the main reason European broadband is 30-70% cheaper than American and Canadian. The 25 or 50 twisted pairs that run together from the exchange could be split between several carriers and performance was unaffected.

Future competition will require BT's local loop monopoly to hand off to others at the local exchange at the right price. The "right price" would include a profit proportionate to the investment. BT would be welcome to recover costs plus a profit; regulated prices would prevent exploitation of the monopoly.

That was the near-ubiquitous model for unbundling until recently. Currently in the EU, monopolies are being allowed to charge far more, after Kroes and Richards were blinded by a lobbying campaign brilliantly orchestrated by Luigi Gambardella.

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Chips: Negative 2016, only +3% last five years (Datapoint)

Outside of China, the entire industry may have been negative for years. I knew the chip business was struggling but this chart is startling. For the last five years, growth has been only ~3%. For the last ten, only ~4%. After inflation, everything stagnant. 

For 2016, the new forecast is -2.4%, with the largest drop in the Americas. They forecast +2% in each of 2017 & 2018. 

China has committed $60B plus to the domestic chip industry and is sure to take market share. Including Taiwan, that's the industry future. There are virtually no interesting chip startups in the U.S. The San Jose area continues booming with Google, Facebook and software/web companies but no hardware. 

Silicon Valley is dying.

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Cisco: Historic fall in Internet growth to (as low as) 15%

U.S. & Canada fixed 2016 +22%, 2020 +15%. The 2016 growth in U.S. & Canada mobile data looks to be 49%; the 2020 prediction is 38%. The VNI sees a major slowdown in both fixed and wireless growth around the world. Cisco estimates 2016 worldwide mobile growth to be 68%. They expect that to fall to 41% in 2020 when most people will have smartphones. Remember the world turns so no five-year forecast is certain.

Check the chart below and extremely rich data here and here. There's so much information I could spend a week in the analysis and still not catch all the inferences. Accuracy can't be perfect but they are clearly the best in the business.

The 100% mobile growth was an artifact, driven by people first getting smartphones. The average smartphone user is increasing data usage ~40%/year, per AT&T.

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