If there was any lingering doubt that broadband was the new platform for technology innovation, new data out today from trade group The Broadband Forum should put it to rest for good. The number of broadband subscribers around the world grew to 445 million in the second quarter, led by China, with 93.6 million, followed by the U.S., with 86.2 million. Many of them are using DSL connections to log onto the Internet, the report found.

The data also shows that over the past 12 months, Latin America and Eastern Europe were the fastest-growing broadband regions. Meanwhile Europe has emerged as the hub of IPTV activity, with some 13.6 million IPTV users as of the end of June. France remains the “champion” IPTV country, with more than 7 million subscribers, the Forum said in a press release.

The number of broadband subscribers in Europe now stands at around 135 million. As we’ve noted previously, Europeans get much faster broadband than those of us in the U.S., largely due to competition in the region.

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Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  8 Comments
Tags: DSL, IPTV

For the longest time I, like many, have been beating the drum of faster-faster-and-faster-still broadband. When I had 2 Mbps, I wanted 4 Mbps. Once I got 4 Mbps, I wanted 8 Mbps. South Koreans and their speedy connections made me jealous. I was envious of all the Free.fr customers in France. I was mad about 50 Mbps connections in Japan and Scandinavia. Why can’t we have those speeds in the U.S., I often complained.

Thankfully, my wish was granted when Covad offered an ADSL2+ connection with a download speed of up to 15 Mbps. And ever since that connection came into my apartment, life has been good. The speeds have been fairly consistent, generally hovering around the 9 Mbps mark, while at times falling to around 7 Mbps or rising to as much as 12 Mbps. That made pulling down email, web pages, RSS feeds, tweets, videos, iTunes, Flickr, and Facebook incredibly easy.

The problem arose this past week when I decided to do two things: one, sync my music collection between two computers using DropBox, and two, back up my Macbook Air using using Mozy’s Pro online backup service. It’s been about four days since I set everything up, and the results are dismal. Only 1 percent of my hard drive is backed up and less than 15 percent of my music has been uploaded.

Why? Because I’m getting upload speeds that are abysmal. While a speed test shows an upstream bandwidth of around 860 Kbps — Covad promises up to 1 Mbps in upstream bandwidth — the actual data transfers are much slower, around 90 Kbps. And when I tried to do the backups in the office, the performance over AT&T’s Business DSL line was simply terrible. I looked around and it turns out most DSL service providers have terrible upload speeds — 768 Kbps or lower.

The cable guys are a little better, though not by much. On principle, I don’t use Comcast, especially since they instituted metered broadband. Of course I could move back to New York and sign up for either Verizon FiOS or Cablevision, but that isn’t exactly a realistic option.

The point is that inadequate bandwidth means the actual upstream speeds fall short of what the speed test claims — and that has left me unable to do practically anything. Forget sharing big files, and I can’t even make a decent Skype call. My T-Mobile BlackBerry Curve can’t use the UMA connection, and uploading photos to Flickr/Facebook is a pain. As more products come to market that need symmetrical high-speed Internet access, the paucity of bandwidth is going to become a bottleneck. The problem is that we get so enamored by download speeds, we forget that we need solid upstream capacity as well.

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Happy Thanksgiving from jkOnTheRun jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; Crime Doesn’t Pay, Except When You’re Rick Rollin’ TheAppleBlog – by Liam Cassidy "; Living by the Numbers: What Happens When You Quantify Everything? WebWorkerDaily – by Celine Roque "; 10 Things to Be Thankful For in Greentech Earth2Tech – by Josie Garthwaite ";

Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  74 Comments
Tags: AT&T, Cable Broadband, Cablevision, Comcast, DSL, Upload, Verizon FIOS

As you all very well know, I have little patience for Comcast and its anti-innovation policy of metered broadband. If you are like me and are looking for an option, in San Francisco you can get 18 Mbps ADSL2+ connection from Sonic.net, a small ISP which has puts its own gear in nine central offices in the city. The service called Fusion Broadband isn’t exactly cheap but at least you aren’t going to be metered. CEO Dane Jasper emailed to let us know that his service is also available in Berkeley, Albany, Santa Rose and bunch of other cities.

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Happy Thanksgiving from jkOnTheRun jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; Crime Doesn’t Pay, Except When You’re Rick Rollin’ TheAppleBlog – by Liam Cassidy "; Living by the Numbers: What Happens When You Quantify Everything? WebWorkerDaily – by Celine Roque "; 10 Things to Be Thankful For in Greentech Earth2Tech – by Josie Garthwaite ";

Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  17 Comments
Tags: Comcast, DSL, Sonic.net

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.

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Happy Thanksgiving from jkOnTheRun jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; Crime Doesn’t Pay, Except When You’re Rick Rollin’ TheAppleBlog – by Liam Cassidy "; Living by the Numbers: What Happens When You Quantify Everything? WebWorkerDaily – by Celine Roque "; 10 Things to Be Thankful For in Greentech Earth2Tech – by Josie Garthwaite ";

Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  11 Comments
Tags: DSL, Fiber Broadband

Larry Dignan, who writes at the Between The lines blog, talked to Qwest CTO Pieter Poll about company’s future plans including fiber-based broadband. Unlike Verizon, Qwest has opted for fiber-to-the-node strategy. The company is pushing fiber to a point where it can feed 350 homes using VDSL2 over copper.

Some highlights from the conversation and my take on why faster broadband isn’t just an option but a necessity for the company below the fold.

• Qwest can offer 12 Mbps and 20 Mbps and using pair-bonding, it can squeeze around 30 Mbps from copper. It really wants to do 35 Mbps downstream so it can offer 3 to 4 HD streaming channels and other services.There is a shortage of VDSL2 modems limiting their ability to pair and offer higher speed services.
• The company is not going for all-fiber because its plant is buried (unlike Verizon, which was aerial) and it would involve massive scale digging.
• For now, Qwest is sticking to DirecTV for the TV part of its triple-play service. (Of course; who wants to give up the subscription service revenues that come with a DirecTV deal?)
• He dismissed cable’s DOCSIS 3.0 and 100 Mbps talk as “all hype.”
• Qwest is doubling capacity every 15 months on its backbone network.
• Qwest is saying “no” to network management, though it doesn’t rule out bandwidth cap-limits.

Many of these points were made earlier when I chatted with Qwest CEO Edward Mueller last year. That said, I wanted to point out a couple of things. All these moves, including FTTN are aren’t optional for Qwest; they’re a necessity. The economic downturn and current demographic shifts are impacting the company drastically. For the second quarter of 2008, look at the numbers that read like a synopsis of a Charles Dickens’ novel.

• Revenue down 2.3 percent vs. 1.4 percent drop in first quarter. Total revenue decline for the year: up to 2.5 percent this year.
• 10.2 percent decline in retail residential access lines vs. 9.7 percent decline in first quarter and an 8.3 percent decline a year ago.
• A mere 31,000 new DSL additions, a third of the 100,000 added last year. Of the 31,000 net adds, around 19,000 were in Qwest’s FTTN footprint. Broadband subscriber growth came at 13.6 percent vs. 17.2 percent last quarter and 33.8 percent a year ago.

What can the company do? Push higher bandwidth and pricier services and sell them to potential customers before they decide to switch to cable broadband, buy cable telephony or just drop wireline connections all together.

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Happy Thanksgiving from jkOnTheRun jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; Crime Doesn’t Pay, Except When You’re Rick Rollin’ TheAppleBlog – by Liam Cassidy "; Living by the Numbers: What Happens When You Quantify Everything? WebWorkerDaily – by Celine Roque "; 10 Things to Be Thankful For in Greentech Earth2Tech – by Josie Garthwaite ";

Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  5 Comments
Tags: AT&T, DSL, Ed Mueller, FTTN, Pieter Poll, Q, Qwest, Verizon

A new report from Pew Internet shows that broadband growth in the U.S. has slowed down to a crawl, a sign that U.S. broadband carriers would have to work hard to find ways to grow their overall businesses. Pew points out that 55 percent of adult Americans have home broadband connections.

According to some estimates there are over 64 million broadband connections in the U.S. Some additional interesting bits from Pew’s report:

Earlier this year, telecom operators like Qwest & AT&T, pointed out they were experiencing the impact of this penny pinching. Of course, what didn’t help was the fact that it was their geographic footprint that played host to the housing bubble. New home sales drove the demand for broadband connections and as foreclosures started, the broadband party also started to wind down. The net new additions for the second quarter 2008 will tell an interesting story.

My feeling is that this is hurting the DSL providers more than cable companies and they are scrambling to respond by offering higher speeds. The smaller providers like Embarq & Windstream could be impacted the worst by the slowdown.

There is some research that shows that speed bumps are not quite the panacea for these carriers, though they might provide some temporary relief.

Bruce Leichtman recently conducted a survey and found out that nearly 72 percent of cable broadband subscribers, and 62 percent of telco broadband subscribers are happy with their broadband connection’s quality and speed. Only 24 percent are interested in getting faster connection and a mere 11 percent of broadband subscribers would pay an “additional $10 per month to double their Internet speed.”

In comparison, Pew’s report shows that 35 percent of dial-up users want broadband prices to decline further — fat chance of that happening when most carriers are dreaming of tiered Internet plans. Overall 62 percent of dial-up users say they are happy to be Slowskys. (That should make AOL and United Online rather happy.)

Download Pew’s Home Broadband Report (pdf.)

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Happy Thanksgiving from jkOnTheRun jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; Crime Doesn’t Pay, Except When You’re Rick Rollin’ TheAppleBlog – by Liam Cassidy "; Living by the Numbers: What Happens When You Quantify Everything? WebWorkerDaily – by Celine Roque "; 10 Things to Be Thankful For in Greentech Earth2Tech – by Josie Garthwaite ";

Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  21 Comments
Tags: AOL, AT&T, broadband speeds, Cable Broadband, dial-up, DSL, Embarq, FiOS, Qwest, United Online, Verizon, WindStream

DSL Speeds and prices around the world went up 4.7% and 9.3% during the first quarter of 2008, according to Point Topic, a consulting firm that tracks broadband tariffs around the planet. The average price for a residential DSL connection at the end of Q1 2008 was $61.36 a month, while the speed was 6.52 Mbps. The Business DSL connections cost $227 a month for a speed of 4.13 Mbps.

The big change came as a result of big boosts provides by Latin American carriers, who boosted residential speeds by 36% to 2.74 Mbps. Telecom Argentina and Telefonica del Peru were two carriers that boosted speeds. In comparison, the prices for FTTx and cable tariffs have not changed much.

Average entry level broadband service tariff (PPP rates)

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Happy Thanksgiving from jkOnTheRun jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; Crime Doesn’t Pay, Except When You’re Rick Rollin’ TheAppleBlog – by Liam Cassidy "; Living by the Numbers: What Happens When You Quantify Everything? WebWorkerDaily – by Celine Roque "; 10 Things to Be Thankful For in Greentech Earth2Tech – by Josie Garthwaite ";

Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  9 Comments
Tags: ADSL2+, DSL, Telecom Argentina

So all the noise, anger and finger-pointing at Comcast’s cheap traffic tricks didn’t impact its broadband business. The company just reported a decent enough first quarter, but what got my attention: It now has 14.1 million high-speed subscribers, compared to 13.6 million at the end of 2007. That translates to about 500,000 new subscribers. Given how broadband sales have slowed down for DSL providers (but not for FTTH services), this is pretty significant. Karl on DSL Reports is taking a glass-half-full approach to the earnings but writes that things are slowing down. Seems like extra speeds are helping push the revenues as well, according to the company:

The strong subscriber and revenue growth in the first quarter of 2008 benefited from the introduction of additional promotional offers and speed tiers, including Comcast’s BLAST and Performance Plus services (8Mbps or higher service) and Comcast’s Economy Internet service (768Kbps service).

Another astonishing number: Comcast added 639,000 Comcast Digital Voice (CDV) customers during the first quarter — penetration reached 12 percent or 5.1 million customers with revenues of about $587 million in the first quarter of 2008. Time Warner Cable also posted a similar kind of growth, adding 280,000 phone customers and 304,000 high-speed customers in the first quarter. In comparison, the phone companies keep losing landline customers. No wonder phone companies are worried.

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Happy Thanksgiving from jkOnTheRun jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; Crime Doesn’t Pay, Except When You’re Rick Rollin’ TheAppleBlog – by Liam Cassidy "; Living by the Numbers: What Happens When You Quantify Everything? WebWorkerDaily – by Celine Roque "; 10 Things to Be Thankful For in Greentech Earth2Tech – by Josie Garthwaite ";

Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  0 Comments
Tags: cmcsa, Comcast, DSL, Line Losses, Phone COmpanies, Time Warner Cable, VoIP

The demand for broadband in the U.S., after growing at an explosive rate for almost two years, has started to slow, largely due to high market penetration rates and a struggling economy. UBS Research forecasts that the number of U.S. broadband connections will grow 11 percent in 2008, down from growth of 16 percent in 2007. The carriers — the cable operators and phone companies — are beginning to feel the impact, and are subsequently looking for ways to squeeze more dollars out of the broadband business.

Verizon, for example, is pushing people to sign up for its more expensive FiOS service. Others are looking to use “speed boosts” as a way to lift their ARPU. This is not a new strategy: BellSouth, before it was acquired by AT&T, made good money by selling higher-speed tiers at a premium.

The latest company to follow this path is Windstream, a Little Rock, Ark.-based RLEC. The company said recently that it’s offering 12 Mbps ADSL2 service in some parts of its 16-state network. More importantly, it has increased its lowest-speed tier to 3 Megabits per second. Our good friends at DSLReports add that Windstream is offering the 12Mbps/1Mbps tier for $19.99 for the first six months, and $45 per month after that.

In recent months, Comcast started experimenting with 50 Mbps service (in Minneapolis), while Qwest said it it will start offering two new, higher-tier services — Qwest Connect Quantum (20 Mbps) and Qwest Connect Titanium (12 Mbps) — in certain cities. Broadband providers will have to convince consumers that they need the speed boost, however — that speed can improve their online experience.

It should come as no surprise that the carriers have let go of incremental speed upgrades and have gone ahead and doubled or tripled the speeds of their offerings. Why? Because bumping speed to 2 Mbps from 1 Mbps doesn’t really feel like a big boost. A 6X speed bump, on the other hand, makes the Internet much faster — and worth paying for. Suddenly, Hulu and YouTube become much more fun to watch. If a subscriber believes that he or she can download music, stream videos and connect to their favorite social networks faster, they will pay a premium price for that speed.

Never mind the fact that how fast content gets delivered to our computers is mandated by not just access speeds but several factors, such as congestion on the backbone networks and servers’ ability to dish out data. As our accompanying chart shows, the downstream speeds might be going up, but the carriers are stifling innovation by controlling the upstream speeds.

Broadband 2.0 is all about collaboration and sharing, and that requires just as much upstream bandwidth as it does downstream speeds. Regardless, this coming year is going to be fun as the cable companies and phone operators will do unnatural things to entice new subscribers, starting with offering faster connections at lower prices. Nothing wrong with that.

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Happy Thanksgiving from jkOnTheRun jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; Crime Doesn’t Pay, Except When You’re Rick Rollin’ TheAppleBlog – by Liam Cassidy "; Living by the Numbers: What Happens When You Quantify Everything? WebWorkerDaily – by Celine Roque "; 10 Things to Be Thankful For in Greentech Earth2Tech – by Josie Garthwaite ";

Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  32 Comments
Tags: Cablevision, Comcast, DSL, FiOS, FTTP, Surewest, Time Warner Cable, Verizon

Comcast, thanks to some stiff competition from lower-priced DSL offerings and Verizon FiOS combined with economic woes and fears of a recession, is beginning to see some slowdown in its broadband growth. Broadband has traditionally been a growth engine — and a big moneymaker — for Comcast, so this is a disturbing sign. Of course, the stock market is pretty pleased with Comcast today — dividends, stock buybacks and the perceived pragmatism of management (exemplified, in Comcast’s case, by not buying Sprint or Yahoo, as if they really can) usually provide a short-term boost to shares before reality kicks in.

The company reported its fourth-quarter 2007 results today, saying it added about 331,000 broadband subscribers in the three months ending Dec. 31, 2007. That’s down sharply — 26 percent — from the 450,000 subscribers it added in the third quarter. Comcast had 13.22 million broadband subscribers at the end of 2007.

It seems Comcast’s Digital Voice business is also running out of breath. After adding 662,000 new subscribers in the third quarter, Comcast’s total CDV net new additions dropped to 604,000 in the fourth quarter.

Numbers like this means Comcast, like other cable operators, will have to work harder and offer better-priced plans in order to keep making gains against the phone companies. At this point it’s safe to say that 2008 is going to be a tough year for the largest cable company in the U.S.

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Happy Thanksgiving from jkOnTheRun jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; Crime Doesn’t Pay, Except When You’re Rick Rollin’ TheAppleBlog – by Liam Cassidy "; Living by the Numbers: What Happens When You Quantify Everything? WebWorkerDaily – by Celine Roque "; 10 Things to Be Thankful For in Greentech Earth2Tech – by Josie Garthwaite ";

Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  6 Comments
Tags: Cable, cmcsa, Comcast, DSL, MSO

DSL-based broadband service providers may have started to catch up with cable companies in pure subscriber count terms, but when it comes to speeds, U.S. DSL companies are lagging behind not only the cable companies, but their peers around the world.

Between the second and third quarters of this year, the average DSL connection speed in the U.S. (and Canada) increased a mere 0.17 percent, according to research firm Point Topic, bringing the average download speed to just 2.971 megabits per second.

In comparison, the speeds in South & East Asia went up 132 percent to 3.582 Mbps, while Asia Pacific saw speeds increase 38.79 percent to 14.989 Mbps. Speeds in Western Europe gained by 6.22 percent to 5.552 Mbps, and in Eastern Europe, speeds are up 6.59 percent to 2.443 Mbps. In Latin America, speeds rose 29.06 percent to 1.652 Mbps, while the Middle East & Africa saw speeds dip 0.71 percent, to 1.404 Mbps. The carriers that gave DSL speeds a nudge include Korea Telecom, NTT, China Telecom, Fast Web, Telecom Argentina, and Telefonica and its affiliates.

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Happy Thanksgiving from jkOnTheRun jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; Crime Doesn’t Pay, Except When You’re Rick Rollin’ TheAppleBlog – by Liam Cassidy "; Living by the Numbers: What Happens When You Quantify Everything? WebWorkerDaily – by Celine Roque "; 10 Things to Be Thankful For in Greentech Earth2Tech – by Josie Garthwaite ";

Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  17 Comments
Tags: China Telecom, DSL, DSL vs Cable Broadband, korea telecom, NTT

Vodafone is adding Spain and Italy to a growing list of countries where it will be offering triple play services. London-based mobile services provider has acquired Spanish and Italian-assets of Tele2 for about $1.1 billion in cash, reports The Wall Street Journal.

It beat out competitors Tiscali and Fastweb in the bid for Tele2 assets. It already offers broadband service in UK, Portugal, Germany and Greece. Triple-play is part of CEO Arun Sarin’s Mobile Plus strategy that is necessary for the company to boost its revenues.

“What is clear to us is that mobility and broadband are the two core things that our company needs to participate in, ” Sarin said at a recent investor conference. (PDF Transcript.) “DSL is a local, country-by-country strategy. There is no one strategy for Europe, simply because the industry structure is very different, the regulatory structures are very different.”

The company is also looking at WiFi and Mesh WiFi as options as well, depending on locations, but one thing is clear – if Sarin continues on the current path of acquisitions, then Vodafone might emerge as a pan-European broadband supplier.

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Happy Thanksgiving from jkOnTheRun jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; Crime Doesn’t Pay, Except When You’re Rick Rollin’ TheAppleBlog – by Liam Cassidy "; Living by the Numbers: What Happens When You Quantify Everything? WebWorkerDaily – by Celine Roque "; 10 Things to Be Thankful For in Greentech Earth2Tech – by Josie Garthwaite ";

Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  1 Comments
Tags: DSL, Fastweb, Tele2, Tiscali, Triple Play, Vodafone

Best Buy (BBY), the large North American electronics retail chain, that recently snapped up Speakeasy, a DSL provider, is now interested in gobbling up Covad (DVW), a large wholesale broadband provider, according to Broadband Reports.

The discussions have a on-again-off-again nature, Broadband Reports says, and points out that the deal might be for Covad’s VoIP business. Covad which trades on American Stock Exchange for about 65 cents a share is valued at $194 million compared with $97 million Best Buy paid for Speakeasy. I have contacted Covad and am waiting to hear what they have to say.

If Covad is indeed in plan, then it could get some interest from the likes of AT&T (T), Qwest (Q), and Embarq (EQ). It currently has a line sharing agreement with AT&T. They are also one of the first to provide ADSL2+ in the US.

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Happy Thanksgiving from jkOnTheRun jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; Crime Doesn’t Pay, Except When You’re Rick Rollin’ TheAppleBlog – by Liam Cassidy "; Living by the Numbers: What Happens When You Quantify Everything? WebWorkerDaily – by Celine Roque "; 10 Things to Be Thankful For in Greentech Earth2Tech – by Josie Garthwaite ";

Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  12 Comments
Tags: ADSL2+, Best Buy, Covad, DSL, Speakeasy