CenturyLink gets gigabit fever … in Omaha
Guess who’s getting a gigabit network now? Residents of Omaha, Neb. woke this morning to news they are getting a fiber-to-the-home network. From CenturyLink. Read more »
How many people have a gigabit connection? Fewer than you think.
It’s tough to count how many homes have a gigabit connection, but we can try to get some numbers to give a sense of how prevalent such connectivity is. The answer is not very. Read more »
Take that, Google: AT&T ups the ante with plans for its own Austin gigabit network
Hot on the heels of Google announcing plans to build a gigabit fiber to the home network in Austin, AT&T has said it plans to do the same. Read more »
Who knew? Fiber is also good for a telco’s health
the number of homes that have access to fiber-to-the-home connections increased by 20 percent year over year, but at 9.7 million North American homes, the population that has FTTH still relatively small. Read more »
Some broadband is better than others, like fiber and …. satellite!
When it comes to broadband most Americas get at least 90 percent of what they pay for and those with fiber to the home or satellite may get even more. Read more »
Japanese youth dumping fiber lines for LTE
photo: Shutterstock / Paveonephoto
Japanese youth are choosing LTE over fiber to the home connections, which has forced NTT to drop prices for its wireline service. Will the possibility of that kind of cost cutting inspire applications developers to build must-have services for wireline too? Read more »
Gotta get a gig: KC startups are buying homes to get Google Fiber
photo: Leap2
Google Fiber offers a gigabit to Kansas City residents for $70, but the key word is residents. Businesses aren’t getting service. So a few startups have banded together to rent and buy homes slated to get fiber so they can experience the joys of a gigabit. Read more »
DOJ green-lights Verizon-cable deal with minor conditions
The Justice Department is giving Verizon clearance to close its $3.9 billion acquisition of the cable companies’ 4G airwaves. While it is imposing conditions on their joint-marketing agreements — basically non-compete pacts — to resell each others wireline and wireless services, the concessions are relatively minor. Read more »
Who’s driving your broadband bus?
Want to control your community’s broadband? Then you you have to own the process that determines how the technology is used, as Kansas City might be learning to its chagrin after Google didn’t seem keen a proposal for community Wi-Fi in one section of the city. Read more »
Top that, cable! Verizon offers 300 Mbps home broadband
Bored with your 100 Mbps connection? Verizon plans to offer customers up to 300 Mbps down via its FiOS fiber to the home service. That’s double Verizon’s current top speed of 150 Mbps down and a slam against cable companies trying to compete with Big Red. Read more »
Meet the startup that wants to speed up U.S. broadband
Gigabit Squared broke onto the scene on Wednesday, announcing it would spend $200 million to bring gigabit broadband to six college towns in conjunction with the Gig.U program. But the startup aims higher: It wants to change the economics of delivering fiber to the home everywhere. Read more »
An Ohio startup + $200M = Gigabit broadband for 6 towns
The Gig.U project, which aims to improve American innovation by deploying gigabit broadband networks to college towns, has teamed up with a startup called Gigabit Squared, which will provide $200 million to actually deploy those networks to six unnamed towns. Read more »
The United States of broadband: Location matters
The U.S. is falling in the quality of broadband its ISPs are offering, although in the fourth quarter of 2011 that drop in speeds was seen by several other counties, with overall broadband speeds falling to a global average 2.3 Mbps from the previous quarter. Read more »
The good and bad of niche broadband networks
Niche broadband networks built to cover areas big ISPs didn’t are doing well in the U.K according to a study out by PointTopic. Such news is welcome to niche players in the U.S. such as Sonic.Net, but is this the best way to deploy networks? Read more »
How fiber broadband changes a city
Boly, a tiny town in Hungary became fiber enabled and this video shows how it changed the society, its ambitions and its future. Now the entire video is in Hungarian, but the english subtitles tell the story aptly. As I keep saying — connectedness changes everything. Read more »
You’ve got a gigabit network, so now what?
Two news headlines of note this week highlight the challenges of getting what you wish for, especially if what you wished for is a gigabit network. One shows a community that’s reached a broadband objective, the latter reflects another’s uncertainty about what its objectives are. Read more »
London’s CityFibre to build a $800 million gigabit network
CityFibre, a London-based telecom operator, wants to raise $800 million to build a fiber-to-the-home network and compete with British Telecom in the race to wire up Britain with super-fast networks. It’s one of the many upstarts with big dreams for big and fast networks. Read more »
Google eyeing fiber network for Europe
A Google executive said the company is pondering a fiber network in Europe according to published reports. Google’s dedication to infrastructure is essential to the success of many of its lines of business, and it wants to understand what people will do with more bandwidth. Read more »
BT Openreach building a 300 Mbps open network
The U.K. will get 300 Mbps fiber to the home connections available on a wholesale basis. And that, my friends, is the sound of broadband supremacy passing us by in the U.S. as we lag behind other countries when it comes to upgrading our networks. Read more »
Fiber and caps are the future: A view from a small ISP
Much of the discussion about ISPs centers around the nation’s largest players in the telecommunications and cable fields, but there are a number of smaller ISPs that can also share how competition is faring in the U.S. and what might happen if more flourished. Read more »
Is broadband the gateway drug for the web or the drug itself?
Is broadband one step in the economic value chain or the only step? ISPs have decided it’s the only value and want to charge based on usage. A better model might recognize it is just one element and rethink how it’s offered. Read more »
The Dutch love their fiber (broadband)
Netherlands, a country that wants to have 1 Gbps connections everywhere now has 269,000 fiber-based broadband subscribers. Netherlands has a total of 6.29 million broadband subscribers including 2.66 million who use cable broadband and it is one of the fastest broadband nations in the world. Read more »
Netflix: Is it broadband’s cash cow or data hog?
Netflix may have become the new face of evil for wireline Internet service providers as they seek to impose caps or tiers on subscribers. But it also looks like Netflix is willing to play the part of consumer advocate, countering myths ISPs perpetrate around broadband scarcity. Read more »
A Tale of Two Kansas Cities and Google
Last week I visited two Kansas Cities – in Kansas and Missouri – on a broadband site visit. When I went to Chattanooga, Tenn., I got an “after” picture of what communities can do with a gigabit. The Kansas City trip was about figuring out the “before.” Read more »
Comcast likely to show off gigabit cable broadband
Comcast will show off a 1 gigabit per second connection on Thursday at The Cable Show in Chicago according to reports. An industry blog reports the nation’s top broadband provider would show off the gigabit connection and launch a symmetrical 100 Mbps speed tier. Read more »
Faster! Faster! Scientists Push 100 Terabit Speeds
Two research groups in the last few weeks have shown off 100 terabit per second speeds delivered over fiber connections. The advancement in speeds is both unexpected and necessary as we rely on broadband as the interconnect for our increasingly digital lives. Read more »
State of the Internet: Fiber, Fast Cities and Faster Broadband
Broadband continues to spread worldwide and the high-speed internet movement is going wireless, according to data collected by Akamai for its latest State of the Internet report. Here are glimpses of the report, including fastest cities in the world as well as some U.S. stats. Read more »
How It Feels to Have Been Passed Over by Google
Chip Rosenthal headed the effort to bring Google’s gigabit fiber network to Austin. He says the Texas capital was on the short list of cities, but thinks Austin was passed over because of a state law banning municipal participation in broadband networks. Read more »
Kansas City Gets Gigabit Speeds. What About the Rest of Us?
Kansas City may not be alone in getting gigabit broadband. In Google’s blog today, it said: “We’ll also be looking closely at ways to bring ultra high-speed Internet to other cities across the country.” Sounds like Google isn’t finished yet. And that’s a good thing. Read more »
Google Fiber Brings Threat and Opportunity for ISPs
James Nelson has been offering folks in Kansas City Internet access since 1995 through his ISP KCnet, where he is the CEO and president, but Google’s decision to deploy a Gigabit fiber network is both a threat and an opportunity for the area’s largest independent ISP. Read more »
Kansas City, Kansas, Gets Google Fiber
Google has chosen Kansas City, Kansas for its 1 Gigabit fiber-to-the-home network it announced last February, disappointing the hundreds of other towns that sent in applications in the hopes of getting their own Google-funded superfast network. Read more »
Was Google’s Fiber Plan Just Saber Rattling?
Google announced its plan to build a superfast, fiber-to-the-home network in a lucky town last February and it would name the town in 2010. But last December it named a new person to lead the effort and said it needed more time. Where is the network? Read more »
Broadband, Now Cheaper Than Ever
Latest data from Point Topic, a broadband research firm, shows that broadband prices are down by 50 percent on per megabit basis from 2008. Price declines, are being driven by competition, especially for DSL services which are struggling to keep pace with fiber and cable offerings. Read more »
The Rich Get Richer: Verizon Ups FiOS to 150 Mbps
Verizon Communications today announced an even faster fiber to the home tier of 150 Mbps down and 35 Mbps up. For folks like myself still stuck on first generation DOCSIS cable or plain old DSL the digital divide grew by a couple of feet. Read more »
Calix to Buy Occam Networks For $171 Million
Calix, a maker of next generation networking gear is buying Occam networks for $171 million in a stock and cash transaction. The deal values Occam at $7.75 a share — a 27 percent premium over current stock price and includes $3.84 a share in cash. Read more »
Thanks to Video, 10G Fiber To The Home May Come Soon
The growing popularity of video — online and on-demand — is making carriers rethink their network plans. Many broadband providers are currently experimenting with new 10G technologies so as to offer much more bandwidth to your home than even current fiber-to-the-home networks offer. Read more »
Verizon Tests Near-Gigabit Speeds in Massachusetts
Verizon has delivered broadband speeds of almost 1 gigabit per second to a customer in Taunton, Mass. as part of tests of its FiOS fiber to the home network. The test customer achieved throughputs of 925 Mbps down and 800 Mbps up. Read more »
Google Begins Using Its Planned Fiber Network to Flog ISPs
Google today launched a site that has the effect of creating a community action network around better broadband, starting with the more than 200,000 people who have already weighed in hoping to convince the search giant to build its planned experimental fiber-to-the-home network in their towns. Read more »
Sorry Fiber Fans, I've Got Some Bad News
More than 70 percent of U.S. broadband customers are happy with their overall service, according to Leichtman Research Group. And just 26 percent are “very interested” in receiving faster speeds at home. Which means that big, bold fiber efforts aren’t supported by today’s consumer demand. Read more »
OECD: U.S. Broadband Is Big But It Needs to Be Better
The U.S. is still the largest broadband market when it comes to the 30 OECD countries, according to data released late last week by the organization. The U.S. has 81.1 million connections, but it’s not enough to be a big broadband market. We need better broadband. Read more »
