MUNICIPAL BROADBAND - Carlini's Comments

BLUEPRINT FOR BIG BROADBAND: NOT BIG ENOUGH

Filed Tuesday, February 19. 2008

EDUCAUSE’s latest white paper on America’s lack of broadband doesn’t shed light on the real issues.

After speaking about broadband connectivity at 1 gigabit or more at several conferences in January, one of the other speakers sent me an EDUCAUSE white paper entitled “A Blueprint For Big Broadband,” which was written by John Windhausen.

The EDUCAUSE group is made up of about 2,200 colleges and universities. Its white paper goes into detail on how the United States has failed to keep up with other parts of the world. While it’s a good attempt at providing a warning, their solution doesn’t get us close to where we need to be.

Setting Up a Blueprint

One of the highlights of the report deals with issues that U.S. policymakers should be addressing. This is from the white paper:

Leadership and goals: The executives of almost every successful government initiative began by announcing a broadband plan and setting specific broadband goals.
Public funding: Almost every successful government program has included significant government funding.
Open broadband networks: One of the most popular models has been to require that big broadband network providers provide service on a wholesale basis to multiple retailers.
Public/Private partnerships: Another consistently successful theme is government/private sector cooperation in building broadband networks.
Unbundling: The policy of unbundling local copper networks has been used successfully to stimulate broadband. The application of unbundling to fiber facilities is still under consideration.
Fiber: Except for Japan and South Korea, which are well ahead of the rest of the world in deploying fiber, municipalities are taking the lead on fiber deployment.
States focus on low-speed broadband: Most of the state government initiatives have focused on expanding low-speed broadband services to unserved areas [rather than] big broadband.

Unfortunately, the majority of state programs don’t address the need to promote big broadband capability that will be necessary in the next few years. While these state initiatives are certainly well intentioned, the question is whether the low-speed services used to fill the gaps today will become the dial-up of the future.

Most state programs are largely designed to expand the reach of DSL and make cellular broadband access more widely available. There remains a need for the federal government to address the need for big broadband. The white paper goes on to make a summary of building a blueprint for big broadband connectivity and ends with:

U.S. broadband policy should focus on the future. Cable modem, DSL and wireless technologies are unlikely to meet our future needs. The United States needs to set its sights toward the 100 Mbps speeds that are commonplace in Japan and increasingly the focus of European countries.

They discount wireless and DSL as not a solution, which has been discussed in this column for several years. There’s no earth-shattering discovery there. The 100 Mbps speed, though, is not the right goal. They have set the bar too low.

100 Mbps is Already Obsolete

EDUCAUSE focuses on getting U.S. broadband to a higher speed, which in a way is stating the obvious. The author says 100 Mbps is a good goal. In reality, they are still aiming too low.

If you have ever planned a large-scale network, you have to have a very high objective because going from planning to implementation takes a good several years. Ask the engineers at the phone companies. They don’t plan for the next two to five years. They look at 20 to 30 years (at least they used to). Also, if you’re trying to plan for the future, you can’t assume the network traffic that’s here today.

Adopting the recommendations in this EDUCAUSE white paper will still put the U.S. behind other countries. Some would still argue that 100 Mbps is too much bandwidth for users. Those people don’t have a clue about new applications flooding the Internet including social networks as well as video applications like YouTube and its imitators. What’s on the horizon?

Though the paper started to focus on the importance of going beyond servicing the digital divide, they don’t discuss it enough.

Rural areas aren’t the only areas of interest for broadband. Keeping up with a global market means setting metropolitan areas into multiple gigabit network infrastructures. Gigabit speeds are already a requirement if you want to attract corporate facilities in intelligent business campuses. With 100 Mbps, you will be passed over to the next municipality.

Incumbent Phone Companies Don’t Have the Answers

The tired arguments by government affairs people at the incumbent network carriers that we don’t need that much bandwidth reminds me of the same government affairs people saying we didn’t need fiber running to the Chicago 911 center back in 1995. Now those same entities take credit for what they tried to block 16 years ago when the planning was taking place in 1992.

If you leave it up to network carrier government affairs people, we will be further behind than we are now. I always thought the incumbents would be encouraging new services and “blinding speed” network offerings. Instead, they are playing a protection game and choose to promote antiquated services. They’re trying to ring the last buck out of old, copper-based technology instead of upgrading to new infrastructure.

They also want to stifle any entity wanting to build new network infrastructure. This is incongruent with the way the market is headed. Either you lead, follow or get out of the way. While the incumbents don’t want to lead, they also want to get in the way because they don’t want to follow competition and lose market share.

In terms of their rhetoric and arguments, any network carrier’s government affairs person who doesn’t know the difference between gigabit and gigabytes when he’s talking shouldn’t be listened to.

In all marketing classes that discussed buying technology and network services from vendors, my general rule of thumb was how can they be trusted with complex infrastructure issues if they don’t have the basic definitions right in their own industry? It would be like a general manager from GM not knowing the difference between a Chevy Cobalt and a Cadillac Escalade.

You expect the person from the industry to know the industry’s basic terms and definitions. As for this blueprint for big broadband white paper, there are some good points but the speed is already obsolete on paper. Potential corporate sites have to offer multiple gigabit speeds today. For many, this means going back to the drawing boards.

Carlinism: Broadband should be viewed as 1 gigabit or more today if planning a network for tomorrow.