Half of Europe fibered

Much of Europe has a 40% take rate, far more than even most industry pros realize. (Larger chart & pr below.) iDate, working for the Fibre to the Home Council Europe, finds 183 million homes passed. Subscribers are growing at 17% per year.

France and Spain are the standouts among large countries. France has covered 2/3rds of the nation. Italy, Germany, and the UK are far behind, but that;s changing.

France added 2.787.000 new FTTH/B subscriptions, whereas Russia came second adding 1.681.000 new FTTH/B
subscribers. Spain rounds out the top 3 with 1.436.000 new FTTH/B subscribers.

Russia was long the leader because many buildings have fiber to the basement. 

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Ericsson, Nokia oppose TRIPS waiver on Covid

The NY Times reported TIA, the DC association that speaks for Ericsson, Nokia, and others, opposed the TRIPS waiver that would allow poorer countries to make mRNA and other Covid vaccines. The right thing to do was clear to most of us, if only to protect people in rich countries from a rapidly mutating RNA virus. Trade rules allow governments to override patents in an emergency. If Covid isn't an emergency, I can't imagine what would be. Public Citizen explained

 More than 100 nations led by South Africa are proposing a temporary, emergency waiver of these WTO Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) rules, so governments and manufacturers worldwide can ramp up production of the vaccines, treatments and tests necessary to end the pandemic.  

CEO David Stehlin and the Telecommunications Industry Association signed on to a drug company letter opposing the TRIPS waiver to Biden while he was considering the US position on TRIPS. I'm sure Stehlin would never take such a position over the objection of his Board Members. 

Barbara Baffer & Maria Eriksson of Ericsson are on the board. So are Deepti Arora & Brian Hendricks of Nokia, as well as Jeff Campbell of Cisco.

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Ericsson paying Nokia $96M in bribery damages

Ericsson paid $billion to the US for 17 years of bribery in at least 5 countries. (Below.) Ericsson was different from other companies; it got caught. It's ironic that Nokia is collecting almost $100 million. Nokia's Alcatel branch was responsible for a huge multinational bribery scandal, including the President of El Salvador. ZTE has been implicated in the Philippines and probably other countries. Cisco is relatively clean and avoided prosecution in a Russian scandal. Samsung's CEO went to jail. Huawei has been very rarely accused, although there was an incident in Algeria. 

Huawei was competing with Ericsson in far more countries than Nokia. It would presumably be entitled to substantially more compensation. Other companies should also be entitled. 

Few of the implicated managers have suffered. The sums involved were large enough that most senior people at the company surely knew. The most prominent was Hans Vestberg, who rose through the ranks to CEO. He was pushed out for disappointing financial results, not corruption.

 The Verizon board had no qualms about making Vestberg the CEO.

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100+ Mbps Mbps cable ** upstream ** ready to take off

Faster cable upstreams are in field tests and ready to deploy widely within a year. Because there is little construction, a large cableco can be mostly upgraded in 2-3 years. The cost should be about $200/home, a very small fraction of the cost of running fiber.

Cablecos need to choose between dedicating 85 MHz or 204 MHz to the new upstream. 85 MHz provides 440 Mbps shared and 204 MHz provides 1.4 Gbps shared. Sharing works very well in cable. Either choice will generally support 100 Mbps upstream for almost all users most of the time.

CommScope CTO Tom Cloonan believes that the upstream improvement will, "Allow the operators to move very deep into the future without issue for a long time because that gives them a lot of extra bandwidth capacity for the upstream." The proponents of the new infrastructure plan agree. Some want to specify 100/100. Others believe government should subsidize up to 100/20. (Cable downstream across most of the US is already 900 Mbps down. That could be inexpensively doubled if customers demanded it.)

DOCSIS 4.0 triples the possible bandwidth, to 684 MHz.

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Adtran: "Highest product bookings for any quarter in our history"

The fiber boom, led by England, Germany, France, Spain, 4M at AT&T, and US regionals, is leading to remarkable results at suppliers. Adtran CEO Tom Stanton warns, "Supply chain constraints do present risk in the near-term or midterm. We continue to see lead times extend and expect that this will continue for some time into the future. "

Construction companies are raising prices, in some cases withdrawing bids and resubmitting at a higher figure. Government projects have to plan a 3-5 year ramp or waste an enormous amount of taxpayer money. The word is starting to get around Washington that spending more than $5-10 billion the next three years will be a very bad mistake. 

Adtran seeing demand for 10 Gbps fiber symmetric units. Some of the smaller regional carriers have made 10G their standard. The price is so close to the GPPON price they are going 10G in hopes of future demand. Adtran also has an order for 10G from a big cable company for backhaul. 

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LoRaWAN gains traction for in-building & campus

LoRa (Long Range) networks are optimized for low power, low-cost connections for the Internet of Things. The initial deployments were regional for applications like meter reading and pipe management. It works, but the takeup has been far less than hoped.

Adtran sees a better market serving individual buildings or campuses. It has just introduced the very small 7310-08 LoRaWAN IoT Gateway that can be mounted on a wall and powered over Ethernet. It can be managed by an iPhone using Bluetooth.

It should be able to transmit throughout most of a building, where 5G might need several units. The price hasn't been released, but it should be a heckuva lot less than 5G.

(Irrelevancy. The name comes from Harald Bluetooth, a king of Denmark in the 10th century. Some engineers have a sense of humor.)  

LoRaWan uses 900 MHz spectrum, free to use in many countries. The speed is only 0.3 kbps to 50 kbps, enough for even battery-operated devices to occasionally phone home. The protocol is optimized for, yes, long range. At low baud rates, it can be highly reliable.

There's a 60-minute video Everything you need to know about LoRaWAN if you want an introduction to the technology.

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India giant Jio, slower but profitable growth Q1

 Selling a 30-gigabyte plan for US$4, Jio grew at ~10 million subscribers per month for three years. Q1 2021 added "only" 5 million per month to 428 million. Incumbent Bharti is invigorated and the pandemic is strong in India. (The pandemic in April and May is horrifying, with a toll that may match the Bengali famine of 1943.)

Perhaps even more amazing, Jio claims a generous profit of ₹ 3,508 crore, about US$500 million, up 47%. Some think a low depreciation rate has inflated the profitability, but that's still a remarkable achievement.

No figures were released for Jio Fiber. That's been actively promoted but the take rate apparently remains very low.

The next task is growing Jio Platforms: Movies, music, JioMart, and more coming.

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Verizon CTO: We have massive overcapacity

Verizon's wireless network is reliable and CTO Kyle Malady intends to keep it that way by enlarging capacity for unexpected changes. The chart at left shows he has more than doubled "capacity margin" despite capex being flat to down since 2013. 

(Among other things, this means Verizon has the capacity to bring 25 Mbps down, 3 Mbps up to at least two to three million currently unserved school kids. Probably more.)

Chess Grandmaster Aron Nimzowitsch introduced the idea of "overprotection" in his classic My System. Nimzowitch recommended protecting an important pawn or square more than is apparently necessary. Your opponent may surprise you and need the "over" to respond.

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