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Verizon President and Chief Operating Officer Dennis Strigl made a big splash at NXTcomm 08 yesterday when he announced that the entire Verizon FiOS footprint could now get speeds of 50 megabits per second. Typically such bandwidth news wouldn’t cause that much of a furor, but there wasn’t much to write home about from the show, which was held in Las Vegas this week.

In his speech, Strigl pointed out that the U.S. has the highest number of broadband users when compared with other countries, in particular that broadband is available in every U.S. zip code. Good point — and one that I’ve made in the past myself — except that it’s no longer true. By that metric, China now leads. Yes, the FCC used to defined broadband as a service that offered, at a minimum, 200 kbps downloads, but it’s since changed that requirement to 768 kbps.

But where Strigl went too far was when he suggested that three-quarters of American households have two providers to choose from — aka a duopoly, which is not my idea of a competitive marketplace. If you factor in wireless and satellite, he said, there are actually six or seven competitors. Talk about twisting the facts to fit one version of the truth! This part of his speech, however, had me choking on my breakfast cereal.

“Massachusetts and New Jersey have similar population density to Korea and Japan and similar broadband penetration. Unlike other countries, what we have accomplished has come not through [government] policy but through private investment.

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Two non-profit organizations, Free Press and Public Knowledge, have ridden down the data trail of ad insertion technology provided by NebuAd and declared that it violates “several fundamental expectations of Internet privacy, security and standards-based interoperability.” In a report published today, the two compare NebuAd to malware and accuse it of Internet wiretapping.

NebuAd provides a deep-packet inspection appliance that sits on the network of an ISP. The appliance tracks information about the type of sites a user visits and serves up ads against that information. The company got a lot of attention after Charter Communications signed a deal to test the technology. Continue Reading

Remember the much-ballyhooed Wireless Philadelphia MuniFi networking effort that was going to be the cornerstone of a new EarthLink? The very same network that the Atlanta-based ISP had to abandon because it found itself sinking in financial quicksand? Many of us thought that the network that cost $17 million to build was dead.

EarthLink offered to give away the network for free to the city, but there were political issues that could not be resolved. To paraphrase Mark Twain, the rumors of its demise might have been greatly exaggerated. Later today, a new investor group will announce that it’s jumping in to save the network at the urging of local politicians, though the plan is to put the network to more governmental use.

The investor group, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, is made up of local money men Derek Pew and Mark Rupp. Pew was once an interim chief executive officer of Wireless Philadelphia; he now runs his own company, Boathouse Communications. Rupp, an ex-Verizon executive, works for Boathouse as well. I will try to update when the official press release comes out.

Cisco Systems, the San Jose, Calif.-based company that makes a living selling plumbing for the Internet (amongst other things), has come out with a prediction: Traffic on the world’s networks will increase (annually) 46 percent from 2007 to 2012, nearly doubling every two years. As a result, there will be an annual bandwidth demand of approximately 522 exabytes2, or more than half a zettabyte.

If these kinds of predictions remind you of the wild-and-wooly claims made by folks like MCI and WorldCom in the early days of Internet 1.0, relax –- these numbers aren’t that bad. And I would normally douse them with the cold water of skepticism, except that my dear friend, Andrew Odlyzko, who was the first one to spot the con in WorldCon’s traffic bunkum and has been tracking the growth of Internet traffic, says he expects, overall, an annual growth rate of some 50 percent to 60 percent.

That’s why I’m happy to take Cisco’s study and its newly announced Visual Networking Index (VNI) seriously. Cisco’s data is actually important to note, especially in the light of the recent tiered/metered broadband moves by U.S. carriers and their demagogy about bandwidth consumption.

Anyway, some interesting findings from Cisco include: Continue Reading

I would think that worries of tiered broadband pricing might be putting the kibosh on free public Wi-Fi, but there’s another culprit causing the City of Santa Fe to delay plans to install Wi-Fi in the local public libraries. In a clear case of the tyranny of the minority, a group of citizens has banded together to stop the proliferation of electromagnetic fields in the form of Wi-Fi signals. The leader of the effort, Arthur Firstenberg, says he and others suffer form electromagnetic hypersensitivity, or EHS, and city buildings are some of their last refuges in an increasingly wireless world.

I have a hard time with this one, partially because scientists have found that people do suffer from symptoms of EHS but have found no proof linking those symptoms to electromagnetic exposure. To deny the 150 people a month who have asked for Wi-Fi in the libraries for the sake of a few dozen people who think they are sick because of Wi-Fi signals is ridiculous. So maybe an enterprising entrepreneur can wander down to Santa Fe and do a bang up business selling Faraday helmets.

Let’s be honest: When it comes to the networked home, most analysts, press and consumers mainly think Wi-Fi. This is for good reason, of course, as Wi-Fi has been phenomenally successful as a consumer technology. It’s ubiquitous in laptops and portable gaming devices, is fast becoming so in portable media players and mobile phones, and new devices like TVs and set-top boxes are seen as the next big growth markets for this technology.

However, while many view Wi-Fi as a jack-of-all-trades technology that can be shoehorned into virtually any use case, at ABI we see things a little differently. While we continue to forecast a bright future for Wi-Fi, we view the home network as a multilayered one made up of individual sub-networks that are defined by their own specific use cases and applications, some of which may not involve Wi-Fi at all.

We ultimately see five types of networks in the home:

1. The consumer network for data and entertainment. Mainly Wi-Fi, with a mix of Ethernet and HomePlug as well. Where Linksys, Netgear and gateway vendors such as 2Wire dominate.

2. Whole-home backbone. This is the network being driven by IPTV deployments and, in the near future, cable. MoCA, HomePlug AV and HomePNA 3.1 have seen strong traction here.

3. High-speed, in-room video networks. Technology such as the new WirelessHD 60 GHz standard is specifically designed for this use case as it sends uncompressed video over high-speed wireless links to a TV.

4. Home automation and control. Low-cost, lower-speed networks for command and control of home systems and as part of the home entertainment stack through integration into universal remotes.

5. Personal area networks. Has been, and still largely is, defined by Bluetooth.

Of course, many of these networks use either the same underlying technologies or an offshoot of similar ones. UWB, for example, is being positioned as a solution for high-speed Bluetooth, as well as being used for whole-home backbone networks. Pulse~Link, in particular, has been pushing its UWB technology for a number of applications (and networks), seeing it as a candidate for UWB over coax as well as for high-speed, in-room video networks.

One of the most exciting and active areas for development today is the whole-home backbone. MoCA is being integrated into FiOS set-top boxes, while HomePlug AV (and to a lesser extent, UPA) powerline technology has been used for IPTV deployments in Europe and Asia.

But it is the in-room, high-speed video network that is both the newest and likely the one that will get much of the attention in coming years. And while some vendors may see Wi-Fi as a potential option here, the bandwidth needed for uncompressed HD video ranges from 3 to 5 Gbps. This is out of reach for Wi-Fi and where other technologies, such as the 60 GHz, UWB or proprietary implementations in 5GHz, are better suited.

We certainly expect that vendors such a Broadcom will continue to push Wi-Fi for applications such as whole-home video distribution. However, ABI Research believes that most pay-TV operators in the U.S. and Europe are more comfortable with the security and propagation capabilities of wires. To that end, many within the International Telecommunications Union have been working to develop a new standard that would succeed today’s coax, powerline and phoneline home backbone technologies: G.hn, a new triple-wire specification that ABI Research believes holds significant potential.

Michael Wolf is a research director focused on the digital home for ABI Research.