[1st-mile-nm] Bandwidth - How Much is Enough?

[Steve Ross]

Chris makes a great point. Just remember that you don't 
really want to lay new copper, which has little headroom for 
more bandwidth growth, when fiber is roughly equivalent in 
first cost, even for the 2 Mbps, and lower in opex.

BUT operators can save a bundle (roughly half the cost of 
setting up a customer) by cheating on the home's internal 
network, and using various network geometry strategies to 
cut the cost of OLTs (lighting only what you need).

Also, never ignore the power of word-of-mouth, even in a 
Facebook age.

My mother (who lives independently at age 89) started 
downloading Netflix over her "6 Mbps" Comcast hookup (I 
upgraded her from the slower but more reliable Verizon DSL). 
She actually averages 3 Mbps on Comcast over the time she's 
downloading a video.

When FiOS comes to her town, in about a year, I'll go back 
to Verizon there.

No one else in her complex (a pleasant warren of 
state-mandated, state-subsidized low-rise housing aimed at 
elderly, built by a developer 30 years ago so he could build 
to a higher density nearby) thought they needed that kind of 
bandwidth a year ago. Since then, my mother ("My son is an 
expert on these things... he edits a magazine") has had me 
set up a half-dozen neighbors the same way -- and others had 
their own kids and grandkids do the trivial job (connecting 
to a TV if they have a new one, or buying a bigger monitor 
for their desktop or laptop).

The complex's site manager says she thinks almost everyone 
now has that kind of bandwidth. I was out at the pool with 
mom two night ago (yes, state-subsidized housing in 
Massachusetts sometimes has a pool) and half the people 
there said they were waiting for a download to finish. One 
guy was watching the Red Sox game on his laptop via slingbox 
(there's no hotspot -- his wifi router was in his apartment 
just 20 feet away). I had set up his place -- he had none of 
this stuff a year ago.

The drivers are clearly Netflix and video VoIP (usually 
Skype) for "visits" with the grandkids. Telemedicine is not 
far behind. My mother complains about the Skype image. 
"Steven... it's television...why is the image so fuzzy?"

Can't really get the idea across that it's because the 
upload speeds aren't as good as the download speeds.

BTW, Verizon uses flat-screen TV giveaways when it markets 
FiOS in Massachusetts. Cheaper for them that trying to hook 
up an old TV, I guess.

No market survey would have caught any of this.

Steven S. Ross
Editor-in-Chief
Broadband Properties
steve at broadbandproperties.com
www.bbpmag.com
SKYPE: editorsteve
+1 781-284-8810
+1 646-216-8030 fax
+1 201-456-5933 mobile

Christopher Mitchell wrote:
> Though I think it is great to talk about how much bandwidth some of us 
> will need in 5,10,x years I wanted to note a problem that some of us 
> have been developing.
> 
> I was at a discussion recently and a person from the MN Dept Commerce 
> was saying that not everyone needs that much more bandwidth.  That many 
> people are happy with 2mbps.
> 
> While I think that most of us recognize 2mbps will not be sufficient for 
> what we want to do, there are millions of people on dialup right now who 
> think they are doing alright.
> 
> So I think we need to avoid talking about what everyone will *need* and 
> talk about what should be available for those who *need* it.  I think 
> people are more receptive if it is clear that we need to move to a world 
> where they will have a choice between their slow 2Mbps if they want for 
> rather cheap even though much faster is necessary for others in the 
> community, especially schools, businesses and whatever.
> 
> My point is that if we are not nuanced and we talk about what everyone 
> will *need* in x years, we will enable those who oppose us to drag the 
> discussion in whether some grandparent will need to download HD movies 
> in minutes.  Though it is an argument I believe we can win, we need to 
> avoid getting sidetracked into that and focus on the real goal, which is 
> giving everyone an actual choice of whether they want fast broadband or 
> the DSL crap they are used to.
> 
> Christopher Mitchell
> Director, Telecommunications as Commons Initiative
> Institute for Local Self-Reliance
> http://www.newrules.org/info/
> 612-379-3815 x209
> 
> Steve Ross wrote:
>> Great link. Haven't found the UK one, but here's one of ours 
>> from 2006, predicting 30 Gbps to the home by 2030.
>>
>> www.broadbandproperties.com/2006issues/sep06issues/george_sep.pdf
>>
>> It comes from John George at OFS.
>>
>> Steven S. Ross
>> Editor-in-Chief
>> Broadband Properties
>> steve at broadbandproperties.com
>> www.bbpmag.com
>> SKYPE: editorsteve
>> +1 781-284-8810
>> +1 646-216-8030 fax
>> +1 201-456-5933 mobile
>>
>> Dale Carstensen wrote:
>>> I'm looking for a URL about a speech given in England sometime since
>>> last October, about how traffic at a single home will exceed all
>>> current backbone internet traffic by some date in the near future.
>>> The speaker was a manager at a US telecom company.  Maybe AT&T,
>>> maybe Verizon, maybe Qwest.  I guess those are the only three,
>>> and how long will it be before there's just one again??
>>>
>>> I haven't found that yet, but I did find an amazing review, which
>>> appears to have been written around 1999 (the web page is dated
>>> Oct 18, 2002), about a paper written at Bell Labs in 1961 predicting
>>> telecom traffic demands for the year 2012.  The title is "Through a
>>> Glass Darkly".
>>>
>>>  <http://www.boblucky.com/Papers/green.htm>
>>>
>>> In addition to that entertaining digression, I'll mention that I
>>> think it's pretty silly to keep installing copper when fiber is
>>> cheaper.  And with fiber, the question is not on the order of
>>> kilobytes, it's on the order of gigabytes and tens of gigabytes,
>>> and it won't be long before it's terabytes.  Per second.
>>>
>>> Now, I think it is also silly to ship hundreds of copies of the
>>> same huge file (a movie, for instance, or updates to Microsoft
>>> Windows or Apple Mac OS or Linux) to the same small city from a
>>> centralized data center several states away.  But maybe if "the
>>> phone company" began thinking it's in the communications carrier
>>> business instead of something it did decades ago.  That is, the
>>> advertising, billing, satellite TV, "bundling" or other marketing
>>> schemes and string between tin cans business seems to be what they
>>> think they do.
>>>
>>> Maybe if they concentrated on being communications carriers,
>>> the incredible bandwidth of fiber, that wouldn't cost as much as
>>> the copper they're still installing, would handle the delivery of
>>> those duplicative huge files, and the demise of theaters and
>>> television could proceed, the same way cell phones have just
>>> about eliminated pay phones.
>>>
>>> Or, the remnants of the Bell system can just disappear when some
>>> other company does what they should have done.
>>>
>>> If I find that URL about the coming exaflood, I'll pass it along, too.
>>> Oh, searching for exaflood on google will yield some related reading,
>>> too, I'm sure.
>>>
>>>   Mr. Dale
>>>
>>>
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