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Saturday, 14 April 2012 14:09 |
 David Cohen is on a mission to make broadband affordable for poor families. He has strong backing from his CEO Brian Roberts. He's raised the speed of the discounted service from a back of the bus rate designed to limit watching video over the net to an HD friendly 3 megabits. Comcast also changed a half-dozen requirements that had meant many applicants were rejected. They are doing massive promotion working with the schools.
Two obstacles remain and Cohen set a path forward on each. Current customers don't qualify, but Cohen reminded us that nothing prevents the family from switching to the telco service, as soon as the telcos match the program. Verizon and AT&T just got a $2B/year favor from the FCC in USF/ICC; if Julius can't leverage that into affordable telco broadband for the poor, he should resign and fire Josh Gottheimer along the way.
Comcast also excludes families who owe Comcast for old unpaid bills. Cohen pointed out that Comcast in the ordinary course of business settles old bills for whatever they can collect and urged prospects to negotiate a reasonable settlement. I've no evidence of how it works in practice and we'll need to see results, but they've shown good faith so far.
Kudos also to Cablevision who promise to provide a standard 10-12 meg rather than the semi-crippled rates expected from Time Warner and others. Julius scheduled the cable discount program to launch in the fall in time for the election. That could backfire if they don't drastically change the rules, as Comcast has. Good reporters including Bob Fernandez and Karl Bode made mincemeat of the early, inadequate Comcast program. If the President associates himself with the fall program as currently planned, Ed Wyatt in the Times or Cecilia Kang at WP could make him out a hypocrite. Fewer than 15% of the poor will be reached, in many cases with back of the bus speeds. The telcos need to be included and the fine print that excludes so many needs eliminating.
Hundreds of thousands of families stand to benefit from the Comcast deal. |
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Friday, 08 July 2011 16:29 |
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Between 21% and 40% of Britain's Virgin cable customers are paying extra for speeds faster than 10 megabits, Merrill Lynch calculates. Virgin charges £13.50 for 10 megabits and £18.50 for 30 megabits. The £5 ($8) difference is enough to dissuade 61% of new customers from taking the higher speed. Only 8% take the 50-100 megabits service, although the price (£25-£35) is half what U.S. cablecos demand for similar
The real but modest demands for higher speeds corresponds to empirical data since 2008. In Japan, 26% were willing to pay about $5 more. In the U.S., nearly no one is willing to pay $99 for 50 megabits. Cablevision, facing FiOS, has lowered the premium for high speeds from $50 to $10, because nearly no one was buying at the higher price.Results aren't in yet, but I hope one of the analysts asks Dolan in the next call.
On the other hand, cable at 10 mbps has long led DSL at a typical 3 mbps in the U.S. The ratio is 56-44% and (slowly) increasing despite generally higher prices for cable. Virgin has 42% of the broadband customers in the half of the U.K. they serve, despite facing more competition. Britain has 4+ major carriers, the U.S. only two. The result: prices 20-50% lower than the U.S., but not quite as low as France.
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Tuesday, 20 September 2011 20:54 |
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I respectfully disagree, Karl.You're right about the limits and I am unsatisfied with "back of the bus" slow service. But unlike most of what comes from D.C., there's some substance in Comcast's $10 offer to poor families.
It's not like the AT&T/BellSouth plan that tried to make sure no one signed up. Comcast is actively promoting the program around the country. Sure that gets them good pr, but when they are doing the right thing I don't begrudge them.
All the "demand side initiatives" funded literally into the billions have produced unbelievably few signups and certainly less than 2M. Nearly everyone in this society knows what the internet and broadband are. They don't need some middle class bureaucrat "teaching" them about the "value of broadband."
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Thursday, 16 June 2011 14:03 |
 I've been reporting since 2005 that (shared) gigabit cable would come so this is no surprise. John Chapman and Anton Wahlman provided the roadmap at Fast Net Futures. ARRIS at the 2011 cable show demo'd 4.5 gig down by eliminating any TV programming and using the full bandwidth (128 6 MHz channels) for data. Comcast bonded more than 25 channels and showed 1 gig down and 300 meg up. These are improvised demos, not close to production equipment. It will take two to five years for gear that would make this practical for regular customers; lots of other obstacles beside the technical mean you will not see these speeds at home for a very long time. Here's how it works.
Coaxial cable by design carries robust signals, divided in the U.S. into typically 128 channels. In DOCSIS 3.0, every 6 MHz channel delivers about 40 megabits downstream.
- 4 channels bonded give you the shared 160 megabits now available to 70% of the U.S. It's all done on standard chips and needs no special hookup, so 160 meg gear costs little more than 10 meg gear.
- 8 channel bonded chips are now coming from TI and Broadcom and were used in the demonstrations. They will cost little more in modems and soon will allow 320 meg (shared) connections.
- 25 channels, bonded, yield a gigabit. It would take extra chips today but is completely possible. When in 2008 Singapore demanded a gigabit broadband system, both Cisco and CableLabs put top engineers to work on a gigabit over cable. The conclusion: perfectly practical but too expensive at the time. Moore's Law has brought down the chip cost, and commercial cable modems should be capable of a gigabit in 2014-2015.
- 100 channels bring capacity to 4 gigabits. ARRIS used 16 8 channel bonded modems to demo 4.5 gigabits in Chicago.
- 300 channels and over 10 gigabits is practical with better amplifiers and other field components. Cox did some experiments with 3 MHz cable equipment and they were a technical success.
- EuroDOCSIS, based on European television standard, uses 8 MHz channels and hence carries 1/3rd more data per channel.
Takeaway: Coax can carry gigabits, although that will rarely be a commercial product. The gigabit (shared) capacity will become important later this decade as data usage grows. Raising the shared capacity to a gigabit can maintain solid performance for all users at 50 and 100 megabits well. My guess is some nodes will need upgrading 2015-2018 and the increased capacity will support 50 meg service well into the 2020's.
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Saturday, 30 July 2011 20:48 |
Creating the model for the Big Telco Plan for USF/ICC, Jim Stegman found the data in the National Broadband map so unreliable he couldn't use it. Instead, he filled in many of the gaps by "augmenting the NTIA data on cable provided broadband coverage with Warren Media data." The number of homes unserved by cable according to NTIA is nearly twice reliable numbers from other sources. I estimate that if the six companies had used the NTIA map data, subsidies demanded would have been $billions higher.
Everyone in the business - including FCC staffers - know the data is garbage and needs to be extensively revised. Reliable sources tell me the next version will be better, although according to what NTIA is telling me it will still be far off. Fortunately for Larry Strickling, the media in D.C. haven't picked this up. If they had, even a great politician like Larry with a long time personal connection with President Obama would have to fix the problems.
With this confirmation from the big guys in D.C., maybe that will change.
Kathleen Grillo, Bob Quinn of AT&T, Kathleen Abernathy of Frontier, Steve Davis of Century, and Michael D. Rhoda of Windstream all signed the proposal, which includes:
"NTIA’s State Broadband Data and Development (“SBDD”) cable coverage data are generally known to understate cable provided broadband coverage, ... There are a number of alternative commercial sources of cable coverage data, two of which are Warren Media and Nielsen. These sources reflect dramatically more cable‐provided broadband coverage than NTIA’s SBDD data. ... The Coalition attempted to correct flaws in the NTIA data" Multiple sources including company SEC filings show a figure of 8% of the country unable to get cable broadband. NTIA's data said 18%.
After spending $100M, this is total incompetence or cowardice.
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Wednesday, 15 June 2011 16:31 |
 Shaw's $99 triple play now includes 50 meg DOCSIS. Including 50-100 meg at about the same price is working wonders for cable in Britain and France, pulling Virgin and Numericable well up in net adds. This isn't an introductory teaser rate but the new standard price; slower modem service only saves $10. On the other hand, 50 meg standalone is $75, 50% higher than slower speeds. Presumably, that's because the bundle buyer is not cutting the TV cord, as Karl Bode notes. Except for Cablevision and now Shaw, U.S. and Canada cablecos and telcos charge about $100 for 50 meg, twice the price of Britain or France or their own price for 10 meg. Because of the incredible cost-efficiency of DOCSIS 3 gear, 50 meg today cost the carrier less than 5 meg did a few years ago. Where competition is not totally hobbled, 50 meg today would therefore cost no more than 5 or 10 did. Most places, the U,S. telco/cableco duopoly has a "separate peace" that keeps prices high. Shaw is rapidly losing video customers to Telus' IP TV, where the intensifying Canadian wireless battle is producing spill-over effects.
Cablevision in the U.S. charges $50 for 15/2 and $65 for 50/8, only a $15 difference. They quoted me $150 for triple play at 15/2 and $165 for 50/8, also a $15 difference. They face Verizon FiOS in most of their territory, the best U.S. network, so need to offer more.
From Japan to Germany, and all stops in between, we're finding customers are willing to pay only a modest premium for speeds faster than 10 megabits. Many will pay $5-10 more. At $50 extra, almost no one is buying. http://bit.ly/iFEIjA
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