Fiberevolution

I had a “wow!” moment this morning reviewing a presentation given by WiK’s Scott Marcus entitled State-of-the-Art Mobile Internet connectivity (thanks for Chris Marsden for pointing this out).

In particular, there’s one graph in there that blew my mind, I’m reproducing it here.

Source: Mobidia / Informa (2013)

This shows the proportion of mobile data traffic that is offloaded to private wifi networks (in blue) or public wifi networks (in light blue). Basically, only a quarter to a third of the data traffic consumed by mobile devices is actually delivered over mobile networks (except in Japan and India where it’s half).

Wow.

Take that, “we’ll only need mobile networks in the future” posse…

After the FTTH Council Europe Real-estate and FTTH webinar (the replay of which can be found here), I was sent this picture by a contact in Lebanon. It’s good to see that – especially in emerging markets – the perception of the added value of fiber for new developments exists.

I already published a humorous video on the Australian Coalition’s NBN plan last week, but this one is even better. Why don’t we get this kind of humour in France ?

The tech press has been abuzz last week when it was first leaked and later announced that Deutsche Telekom would soon apply data caps to their wireline broadband offers (see this Fierce Telecom article for details.) Unlike AT&T style caps, heavy users will not be charged overage, they will be throttled to service levels marginally higher than what we’d get in the days of dial-up.

The company, as is often the case with these stories, claims that this is to avoid the cost of bandwidth hogs spilling over to the general public’s subscriptions. It’s not.

Caps serve no purpose in managing traffic flows, as Diffraction Analysis clearly demonstrated in our study last year entitled Do Data Caps Punish the Wrong Users. In fact, that’s even been admitted semi-officially by the head of the US Cable lobbying association. Data Caps serve no purpose other than to create a very strong disincentive for customers to consume video “over the top”. The fact that DTs own video-on-demand service will not count as part of the monthly traffic allowance is to be expected, and is a clear giveaway.

DT is playing foul, but that is also to be expected: this is just a new front in the war against Net Neutrality. Since operators, incumbents in particular, can’t get a clear go-ahead on the ability to throttle online service providers to their hearts’ content or to make them pay a toll for delivering traffic to end-users who have already paid for the right to access that content, they’re creating barriers on the side of the end-users to make their own service offerings unfairly competitive.

The real question is what happens next: will DT lobby the government and regulator to apply the same caps to their wholesale bitstream offers ? I suspect they will, just as it happened in Canada. Otherwise, other operators in the market will start advertising no-capping policies, and if they’re smart they’ll even start partnering with online content providers to drive the difference (for more on that see Diffraction Analysis’ latest report Building the Optimal NGA Service Portfolio). That could mean loss of market share for DT.

Is the German market truly competitive ? Guess we’ll know soon enough.

Photo Credits: Gaffel Kolsch by Generallysceptical (CC)

The replay for the FTTH Benefits for Real-Estate Webinar is up on Vimeo. You can find it here:

Video Webinar 18 April 2013 – The Positive Effects of FTTH for Real Estate Projects from paftthcouncileu on Vimeo.

I’ve also uploaded the slides on slideshare if you’re interested, they’re here.

I have written a fair bunch recently about Net Neutrality, and I’ll be writing some more, because this is by no means an issue that’s going anywhere in the near future. Meanwhile though, I wanted to relay an example of a blatant neutrality breach that really stunned me. It was reported by Zachary Henkel on his blog last month in an article entitled ISP Advertisement Injection.

I encourage you to read it, but here’s the story in a nutshell: connecting through a wi-fi network, Henkel noticed some really intrusive advertising banners. He thought it was malware at first, but after extensive testing on multiple computers, he realised that it was the ISP superimposing advertising over his normal surfing.

In France recently we’ve seen an ISP deleting adverts, and sadly some people were in support of that, because they think they’re already subjected to too much advertising. But this is really the same thing at core: it’s the company that sells you internet access deciding what you should see or not see of the internet.

Now if that doesn’t make you scared…

Last week I was interviewed by Phil Dobbie on the Australian Telecom Podcast Crosstalk about the viability of on-demand FTTP. The whole show addresses issues of copper pull-through with an AAAC representative and on-demand FTTP as seen from the UK perspective as well as my own comments on the issue.

It’s not every day I see comedy that not only mentions but actually addresses fiber related topics, so I’m not going to let this one pass!

This is the fabled Australian comic duo Clarke and Dawe on the Opposition’s NBN plan.

One of the most interesting features of this week’s alternative NBN plan published by the Australian opposition (see my article Australia’s NBN becomes a political football on Telecom TV) is this notion of “on-demand FTTP”.

On paper, there’s a lot to be said for this concept. Basically, the operator (public or private) deploys Fiber to the Node, but a consumer can pay to get Fiber to the Premises if they really want it. This feature is not unique to the alternative NBN proposal, it’s also being trialled by BT in the UK as highlighted in this article. What’s interesting about the concept is that in theory it addresses the demand issue. In a nutshell, we’ll deliver “better broadband” to you for free, but if you really want “kick-ass broadband”, you can pay extra to get it.

Except it’s a technically absurd concept, for two reasons:

• firstly, because the costs of FTTP deployment that are commonly considered (say around €1000 per home in dense urban areas) are mass deployment costs. These costs can be met when you send teams on the field to connect every home. If you send teams on the field to connect one home, the costs are much much higher. Just look at how much large businesses are paying to connect their premises: it’s in the tens of thousands of euros. Presumably, there’s a comfortable margin built into that price, but it still gives a sense of what the real cost would be.

• secondly, and very ironically, both BT and the Australian NBN chose point to multipoint architectures. That means that if a customer was to ask for an FTTP connection in a given area, the whole active equipment chain from the customer’s ONT to the splitter to the OLT would have to be activated for a single customer. The costs of that are absolutely prohibitive.

And I won’t even mention the network management absurdity of maintaining two parallel infrastructures, one of which only serves a very small number of customers.

On-demand FTTP is a fallacy. It will either never materialize or be priced in such a way as to convince customers not to take it. The reason it’s being put forward is purely as a marketing argument for BT and the Australian opposition to be able to say “those that really want it will be able to get it”.

Not unless they’re filthy rich, they won’t…

Photo Credit: On Tap by Benoît Felten

At the FTTH Council Europe conference in London, I presented the results of a study commissioned by the Council on the benefits of FTTH deployment for real-estate players. 8 real-estate companies were interviewed extensively to understand how they viewed FTTH, having deployed it, and if they perceived benefits in integrating FTTH in the properties they build or manage. The results of this study will be presented in a webinar organised by the council on April 18th at 11 AM CET. If the topic is of interest to you, please register here.