I’m a geek groupie when it comes to technology. I can’t actually produce any of these life-changing products, but I can recognize something cool when I see it. And the 100-Gigabit data transfer demo that Ciena was showing off at SC 08 in Austin, Texas, today was very cool. Unlike previous demonstrations, Ciena’s was a 100-Gigabit data transfer over a single channel, rather than one aggregated over multiple channels.

The product isn’t available for commercial use yet (and there’s no date set for when it will be), but when it is, customers will be able to upgrade their existing fiber equipment with the Ciena kit to 100G. Other players, from Infinera to Alcatel-Lucent, are also trying to deliver 100G networks. Those speeds will help the core network handle the anticipated growth of Internet traffic, and lower the per-bit cost of delivering that traffic. In the video below, Dimple Amin, vice president of R&D and special projects at Ciena, talks about the demonstration, what it does and how far such traffic can travel. He also says there’s no technical reason why these speeds couldn’t be delivered at the edge of  the network to consumers’ homes. That would be the day.

Meraki, the Google and Sequoia-backed startup that focuses on citywide Wi-Fi networks, hasn’t let the demise of municipal Wi-Fi halt its efforts to make money or make the wireless network technology available in more places. It has scaled back considerably on its visions of open source, low-cost Wi-Fi for municipalities, instead focusing on Wi-Fi for apartment buildings, city squares and environments where someone is willing to pay to provide the service. Instead of connecting the world, Meraki wants to connect with paying customers. And that’s a good thing.

Today the company announced a Wi-Fi access point that plugs into a wall, and on Dec. 4 will release a lighter solar-powered access point to go places where power doesn’t. In a briefing about the products, it’s clear that Meraki still holds onto its altruistic views, with CEO Sanjit Biswas trumpeting the growth of Wi-Fi networks in Africa and small Chilean fishing villages. However, he’s quick to point out that hotels and apartment buildings can use the new Meraki products to rapidly install Wi-Fi networks that will cover a complex all the way from the pool to inside bedrooms.

In the last year, the startup has changed its business model several times, from trumpeting cheap hardware and charging a fee to access a dashboard, to tripling the price of its hardware and pushing ads. Such shifting hasn’t sat well with some citywide Wi-Fi network proponents, but the bottom line for many cities and customers is that Meraki’s Wi-Fi networks are still cheaper than those from vendors such as Cisco or Juniper. As Wi-Fi becomes more important, Meraki’s capitalizing on its cheaper gear with new packages that offer to unwire a city street for $10,000, or today’s launch of a residential package designed for apartments and hotels that costs less than $5,000.

Wi-Fi is of growing interest for both consumers and ISPs. Earlier this year, Quentanna, a Wi-Fi chipmaker hoping to build a plug-in home access point to boost wireless signals, launched with a few ISP customers on board. A few weeks ago AT&T purchased hot-spot provider, Wayport for $275 million. If Meraki can figure out a way to spread Wi-Fi and make money, it could be in a good position as ubiquitous access to the Internet becomes more important for gadget-toting consumers. Wi-Fi is one of the most common gateways to the web, and even in a down economy Meraki thinks it can make money on the tools to build those gateways rather than by managing them. Meraki has realized that instead of saving the world, it needed to save its business.

A report prepared for The Broadband Forum by research firm Point Topic and released today says that there are now 400 million broadband subscribers worldwide. In 1998, there were only 57,200 subscribers — that’s growth of nearly 600,000 percent. I was there — chronicling the emergence of now-forgotten names such as Northpoint Communications and @Home Networks. There was a time when the U.S. led the broadband race. Today we merely follow.

DSL is still the most widely used technology, but fiber is rapidly catching on. In 2002, there were 18,000 fiber broadband subscribers — now there are 45 million. Whichever way you look at it, this is a massive achievement and the numbers show that broadband is the platform. Had it not been for broadband, we wouldn’t have seen the emergence of Skype, YouTube, and countless other such innovations. But it’s all coming under threat, thanks to the backward-looking policies of companies like Time Warner Cable, Comcast and AT&T, all of which want to put a meter on bandwidth — and with it, innovation.

We will worry about that another day. For now, remember: 400 million broadband subscribers.

KPN and FTTH operator Reggefiber say theyare planning to roll out a fiber-to-the-home network that could cost as much as 7 billion euros. The network might take up to seven years to build out and is going to cover pretty much every part of the Netherlands. KPN, which is the incumbent in the region, wants to acquire 41 percent of Reggefiber, a decision that is pending approval. James Enck thinks the Dutch fiber movement is taking off because of a “forward-looking and pragmatic incumbent,” the fading of cable, and the presence of people who get its importance.

I spoke with Brad Booth, chairman of the Ethernet Alliance, at the SC 08 conference here in Austin, Texas today, and he noted that while Ethernet is entrenched in the corporate data center, it is the interconnect standard for little more than half of the Top 500 supercomputers. Other standards, such as Infiniband and proprietary cables, still hold sway over the high-performance computing set, but the Alliance hopes to change all that. To that end, Booth was happy to talk about how Ethernet is moving into HPC, storage, the home and pretty much everywhere else.

In the video below, he talks about how the emerging 803.1Qbb 802.1Qbb standard for priority-based flow control will help Ethernet win out over proprietary technologies, because it allows traffic traveling over Ethernet cables to be prioritized, rather than cut off if the network becomes too congested. It’s the difference between your brain shutting down when it gets overwhelmed with information, or valiantly trying to figure out what’s most important — something we can all relate to. For that, and updates on the timing for 40-Gigabit Ethernet and 100-Gigabit Ethernet, check out the video below.

Nothing like a deep recession to get a company’s management to focus. Carphone Warehouse, a major retail chain in Europe, is going to de-couple its broadband (telecom) business from its retail operations, according to various press reports. In the UK, spin-offs are called “de-mergers.” Funny how a downturn prompts companies to change their tune from “free broadband forever” to “get me outta here.” Some analysts estimate that Carphone’s Talk Talk telecom business is worth around $2 billion. It is the second largest broadband provider in Britain. Carphone’s decision, however, shows that the entire mobile phone ecosystem is very prone to the economic downturn.

A study out on Sunday from the Pew Internet and American Life Project took a look at a computers, Internet access and cell phones to figure out how often such devices failed in the last 12 months and what people do when those failures happen. Unsurprisingly, such failures were pretty common, with 44 percent experiencing some kind of web connection failure, 39 percent experiencing a computer failure and 29 percent experiencing a cell phone issue within the last 12 months.

Surprisingly, reboot was not an option for fixing the problem, although that pretty much solves whatever issue I happen to encounter. So how did people deal with tech breakdowns? Almost 40 percent called customer support, while 28 percent fixed it themselves and 15 percent called on friends or family. Only 2 percent found help online, and 15 percent couldn’t solve the issue. Most people found such failures to be frustrating as they went through the steps to figure out how to fix the issue:

• 72 percent felt confident that they were on the right track to solving the problem.
• 59 percent felt impatient to solve the problem because they had important uses for the broken technology (who are the other 41 percent?!).
• 48 percent felt discouraged with the amount of effort needed to fix the problem.
• 40 percent felt confused by the information that they were getting.

If, on top of the high percentage of failures, two out of five people are confused by the information they’re getting as they try to solve service issues, this is a problem for everyone — especially as companies and startups are using these devices and services as platforms to launch revenue-generating services. The more time a device is broken, the less time a consumer is clicking on ads, shopping or downloading applications.

Cable beat the telco carriers two to one for broadband adds in the third quarter of 2008, according to data out today from Leichtman Research Group. Of the 1.3 million total broadband adds in the quarter, 873,745 went to cable, as opposed to 425,868 who signed up for DSL service. We’ve pointed out that cable is gaining over DSL during the last few quarters, and even wondered what the telcos would do as DSL lines fell. Before we credit cable’s fast speeds compared with DSL for its advantage, however, Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for Leichtman Research Group said, “It is more a function of the telcos’ shift in focus towards higher value subscribers while cable has been consistent in marketing broadband as part of its nearly ubiquitously available Triple Play bundles.”

Basically, decent cable broadband is everywhere, but telco broadband worth having isn’t. Leichtman Research also found that that the 20 largest cable and telephone providers in the U.S. — representing about 94 percent of the market — now account for nearly 66.7 million subscribers, 36.5 million for cable and 30.2 million for telcos. With a recession here, I wonder if pricey speed boosts from carriers will have much effect on the telcos’ broadband decline.

UPDATED: The recession won’t cut too deeply into wireless data spending in the U.S. for now, according to data sent over last night by Chetan Sharma of Chetan Sharma Consulting. In his third-quarter wireless data report, Sharma concludes that the rise in the number of consumer smartphones over the last few quarters means that data spending by consumers will likely offset cuts in revenue caused by the loss of jobs and employer-subsidized data subscriptions.

Data is continuing to offset the loss in voice ARPU (average revenue per user), and is still rising as a percentage of wireless revenue, to stand at more than 23 percent for U.S. carriers as of the end of the third quarter. A year ago, the percentage contribution stood at 17.7 percent. Sharma estimates that in the U.S., that number is likely to exceed the 25-percent mark in the final quarter of 2008. Verizon Sprint leads the pack, with data ARPU of $13.58 $13.50. T-Mobile, which is only now rolling out its 3G network, has a scant $9 in data ARPU from customers.

However, economic uncertainly and rising data penetration (more than 35 percent of the U.S. now has a data plan), means that there may be some pressure on pricing. Sharma also notes that after the holidays, if times don’t improve, the industry might see declines in data toward the end of the second quarter of 2009.

After his keynote at NewTeeVee Live today in San Francisco, Jason Kilar, CEO of Hulu, took some time to talk with Om about infrastructure issues for the network-supported online video distribution platform.

(See the embedded video here)

As the world moves to fourth generation wireless networks, lawyers for chip firms, handset makers and other technology firms are moving into their bargaining positions on patents related to the technology that enables the WiMAX and LTE networks. When deploying an in-depth technology protocol, such as WiAMX and LTE, many firms will own the intellectual property needed to create a network, from the silicon to the handsets. Those IP owners want to get paid, but the more patent holders charge, the more expensive the end devices and network components can become.

Over at Fierce Broadband Wireless, they have a story noting that in-building wireless firm ADC thinks it has a several key patents related to deploying LTE and WiMAX. ADC says it’s willing to license those patents at a “fair and reasonable rate,” which is basically an invite to bring people to the negotiating table. Is ADC trying to be the next Qualcomm, which has aggravated the industry by controlling key patents and charging high royalty rates?

A group of handset makers has banded together to create a patent framework for LTE, but other key players, notably the silicon vendors are absent. ADC adds another player to that mix. Because ADC doesn’t make hardware such as handsets, it doesn’t have an incentive to trade its patents for the use of other patents needed for an LTE device to work. It also isn’t a member of a standards organization, which WOULD limit the royalties ADC could charge. We’ll see if the industry players attempt to deal with ADC or move straight to litigation. The results could mean pricier LTE handsets or even the halt of LTE- and WiMAX-enabled devices, should litigation go poorly.

Some two years ago, it started to become clear: The web was going to change the way we consume video. So in December 2006, in order to closely track and monitor the growth of online video, we launched NewTeeVee. Since then, Liz Gannes and Chris Albrecht have developed deep insights into the online video industry. Today the two of them will get on stage for our second NewTeeVee Live conference, where they will talk to dozens of industry experts, insiders, movers and shakers to help guide the conversation around the future of online video.

Some two years ago, it started to become clear: The web was going to change the way we consume video. So in December 2006, in order to closely track and monitor the growth of online video, we launched NewTeeVee. There we have chronicled the massive influx of venture capital investment into literally hundreds of startups — some of whom dream of being the next YouTube, others that hope to come up with the magic potion for video advertising.

In the process, Liz Gannes and Chris Albrecht have developed deep insights into the online video industry. And they have done a great job of separating the noise from the signal. Today the two of them will get on stage for our second NewTeeVee Live conference, where they will talk to dozens of industry experts, insiders, movers and shakers to help guide the conversation around the future of online video. The world of video finds itself in a pretty awkward place – watching videos on the web has become as natural as sending email.

When recovering from my heart attack, I turned to Hulu to provide on-demand fun. Today, I don’t think twice about spending $20 a month on TV shows from Apple’s iTunes store or $10 for a couple of movies from Jaman. My video-watching habits, while extreme, are precisely what is scaring cable companies into taking the self-destructive and short-sighted approach of imposing metered broadband on their customers. Phone companies are following suit.

Meanwhile, the broader economic downturn and subsequent advertising slowdown is threatening the vibrancy of this business I love so much. Layoffs have started to mar the online studios producing eclectic independent content, and a lack of advertising dollars is poised to plunder the meager treasuries of startups that are finding that the VC spigot has run dry.

But just as when you think the (online video) world is coming to an end, you have companies like Netflix, Blockbuster and others introducing devices that marry the web video to the living room experience, and in the process, inventing a whole new dynamic.

Today we will hear from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who is going to share his vision of the future, while Sling CEO Blake Krikorian is going to talk about the future of our living room in a fireside chat with yours truly.

The success of Hulu has awakened the Hollywood studio system to the possibilities of online video, among them the riches that don’t need to be taxed by cable companies and other gatekeepers. With that in mind, Jason Killar, CEO of Hulu, is going to be sharing his story.

CSI creator and executive producer of the CSI franchise, Anthony Zuiker, seems to have figured out the magic formula for cross-platform storytelling and he is one of our keynote speakers.

The online video industry is transitioning from being a gangly teenager to a grown-up; what remains unclear is exactly how it will evolve. I’m confident that by the end of the day we will have a better sense of what that will involve, allowing Liz, Chris and I to bring you the stories that will help all of us prepare us for this new future. We hope to see you there.

And if you can’t be present in person, we will be streaming the conference, thanks to the efforts of our partners, Ustream. We will also be posting to NewTeeVee Live’s Twitter stream, and will be live-blogging the conference over on NewTeeVee.

Over the years we have seen the gradual separation of phone numbers from geographical location. To date, Skype’s SkypeIn service has been the best demonstration of this trend; even though I live and work just outside Toronto, Canada, I have a Palo Alto, Calif., SkypeIn number for historical family reasons, and I recently acquired a San Francisco number for Truphone. The same separation can apply to most VoIP-based voice services.

Over the past couple of years Belgian-based Voxbone has also developed an international numbering service which offers its clients a “local” phone numbers in any of 5,000 cities in 45 countries. OnState has used Voxbone’s “local” numbers as access points to its virtual call center service; its clients’ businesses can offer customer service and support centers with worldwide “local” access. However, it would be even more convenient for businesses selling into multiple countries if they could simply offer one universal number worldwide. Now, they can.

Yesterday, three months after the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) made available the +883 “global” country code, Voxbone announced the launch of its country-agnostic iNum service. I first learned of Voxbone at last spring’s eComm 2008 where Voxbone CEO Rod Ullens first mentioned the iNum concept. This announcement starts to realize his vision of enabling low cost conversations with worldwide access by taking advantage of the technology around IP-based communications:

“iNum is a new kind of phone number for a new kind of world — a world with a new geography that’s about local presence and global relationships, not about distance or national borders,” said Rodrigue Ullens, CEO and co-founder of Voxbone. “We believe the new geography is defined by the markets, customers and vendors that businesses need to connect with most. We need ‘local’ communication with these people — whether calls originate on public-switched or VoIP networks, whether they are truly local or ‘virtually’ local.”

In practice, that means a Voxbone iNum Service Provider Partner will supply a customer, whether an individual or a business, with a number that has an 883 country code. Once the service is fully rolled out to Voxbone’s 5,000 local points of presence worldwide, that iNum number will be accessible for, at most, the cost of a “local” phone call from any PSTN or VoIP service.

“At most,” because fundamental to Voxbone’s services is that they are IP-based and therefore calls amongst iNum Partners’ services are free. Currently Voxbone has 10 iNum Service Provider Partners, including Truphone, Mobivox and Voxeo, who either have made iNum numbers available today or will do so in the next few weeks. (For those callers who don’t use an iNum partner’s service, iNum numbers can be called through 55 “local” access points in 45 countries for the cost of a call to these access points.) Ullens, in a SquawkBox conference call yesterday, said that Voxbone will be negotiating with carriers and service providers worldwide to build out their service to become universally available.

Voxeo has set up a demonstration iNum service example; call +883 510 001 800 028 024, give their virtual operator a U.S. postal code and you will get local weather reports. This call can be made via the iNum Partners’ services today; it will become available via the local access points as they are set up over the next week. Another example: iotum’s Callflower Conference Call service will be using iNum numbers in a few days.

Jim Courtney is an Associate Editor of Skype Journal.

Telephone companies pushing television services will gain customers by offering lower prices than cable or satellite providers, according to a survey being presented today by Heavy Reading. The survey, which consisted of about 200 consumer interviews, found that price, more than special interactive features, will dictate which provider consumers turn to. That’s grim news for the telcos, which have been spending heavily to lay fiber and upgrade their networks so they can offer the triple play of voice, video and data in order to better compete with cable companies.

The pitch on the part of telcos is that consumers tired of boring TV delivered by their cable company could switch to a more interactive experience through, such as those offered by AT&T’s  U-verse service or FiOS TV or Verizon. And for the privilege of such an experience, they would pay more. Of course many of those features, such as alternate camera angles and personalized channels, haven’t yet been rolled out. In the meantime, cable companies are offering digital video recorders and interactive services such as Start Over as part of their digital cable packages.

In fact, a survey in September found that consumers weren’t even happy with the current pricing or service being provided by their cable companies — suggesting that undercutting cable companies while providing better service is the key to gaining their business. That being said, many of the consumers in the September survey said they’d be happy to switch to telco TV if the price was right. It looks like that for all the technical innovation, the promise of the triple-play bundle isn’t about service, but about the bargain. Carriers will have to find other ways to boost their bottom lines for the time being.

By now even I am tired of pointing out that broadband over power lines as a viable broadband option just doesn’t work. Many, including Google, have spent millions of dollars to make a go of this technology with microscopic success, but that doesn’t stop others from trying. My friend Karl Bode in October said that 2008 was the year BPL died. Apparently not. Now there is news that International Broadband Electric Communications, a startup working to sign up electric cooperatives in rural U.S. areas where there are no broadband options.

The technology involves sending data on the same wires that provide electricity. Every half a mile or so, a device clamped to the line perpetuates the signal…The key innovation introduced in the past few years, Blair said, is the ability to remotely control the devices fixed to power lines. That way it can be told to switch frequency when it meets interference.

IBEC has signed up IBM, which is are going to get $9.6 million to provide and install the BPL equipment on a network that would reach 340,000 homes in Alabama, Indiana, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin. The venture’s promoter and CEO, Scott Lee, says the cost of the network would be as much as $70 million, an amount that they have received as $70 million in low-interest loans from the Department of Agriculture. I gotta be honest — this is going to be money down the drain.

Cisco today announced a new edge router capable of moving 6.4 terabytes of data — the equivalent of 200 full length movies — per second. Om anticipated the product last week, pointing out that the influx of data traveling over the Web requires better and faster equipment to manage such complexity and traffic growth. What we also need is a different type of chip.

Routers have to process a lot of data really quickly. They are the air traffic controllers of the Internet: Each time someone types in a URL, the router has to figure out how to get the request to the correct end point. Since the number of possible routes grows every year, as does the number of times a router is consulted, old processors just can’t cut it anymore, especially at the edge where this Cisco router will sit. Instead of making chips for such devices more powerful (and more power-hungry), engineers are following in the footsteps of the server world and adding more cores.

Multicore chips are gaining in use in the embedded world for networking gear, set-top boxes and other applications. In recent routers Cisco had turned to Tensilica, a maker of specialized embedded multicore chips that can take tasks such as routing and video encoding and speed them up without requiring a lot of power. Tensilica calls its products data plane processors or DPUs. Cisco used those DPUs on its QuantumFlow processor.

Cisco is still using the QuantumFlow processor, but has its own custom-designed cores replacing the Tensilica core, inside this latest router, according to sources. However, Intel uses Tensilica cores for audio processing in its new line of systems on a chip built for video players). Other chipmakers, such as Freescale, which in June announced a new family of processors called QorIQ (say “Core IQ”), are tackling the problem of dealing with real-time data in low-power environments with more flexible, multicore embedded processors.

As real-time data processing becomes more important in areas such as reading routing tables and video and audio processing, Tensilica’s DPU cores and Freescale’s chips offer a way to process that information using less power than a general purpose CPU or even a graphics processor that might also be used for the task. Scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab are even using the Tensilica cores to try to build an energy-efficient supercomputer. In a connected world where devices have to do more but consume less, this type of design may be the way to go.