Archive for Broadband

| June 28, 2012
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UN Internet Takeover

Stop the UNNetwork neutrality, the idea that an ISP can’t discriminate against the traffic traveling over its network, is an enshrined legal right in some areas and a hotly contested regulatory fight in others. over at GigaOm points us over to a post over at TechDirt  that says the International Telecommunications Union is trying to dictate terms that will affect how traffic flows on the Internet.

United NationsEarlier this month some of the proposed rules submitted by the European Telecommunications Network Operators Association (ETNO) surfaced on a blog.  The article says ETNO wants to gut network neutrality.  Glyn Moody at TechDirt has read those documents and clips the relevant segments to argue that these proposals would effectively make network neutrality illegal. As he writes at TechDirt:

“That may sound innocuous enough, but “supporting innovation to provide a value-added service” is a coded way of saying that the telcos should be allowed to abandon net neutrality, something confirmed in one of the accompanying proposals… “

The author says the key sentence in this proposal is “Nothing shall preclude commercial agreements with differentiated quality of service delivery to develop.”

Net neutralityGigaOm says that here in the US Comcast (CMCSA) has created a value-added service with its decision to exempt Xfinity traffic delivered via the Microsoft (MSFT) Xbox from its 250 GBPS/month broadband cap. The U.S. version of network neutrality regulations allows Comcast to exempt that traffic because it doesn’t travel over the public Internet, and because the FCC didn’t want to deal with the concept of value-added services on an ISP’s network when it made its network neutrality regulations.

GigaOm calls on the UN and the ITU to open up its process. Maybe then UN member countries will think twice about the types of rules they want to enshrine. Or maybe they’ll keep listening to the people who run the networks instead of the people who use them and depend on them for their businesses.

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Category: Broadband, Networking, Politics | Tags: , , , , , ,
| June 21, 2012
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White Space Broadband in Michigan

Wiireless broadbandResidents of Vergennes, Michigan a small community east of Grand Rapids, is taking matters in to their own hands to solve their lack of broadband. They’re using “white space” radios from Carlson Wireless, combined with lightly licensed 3.65 WiMax and cellular microcells reports Dailywireless.

MichiganRyan Peel, owner of Vergennes Broadband has been continuously frustrated with the lack of broadband access. Peel’s solution according to the article is to combine three different technologies to extend wireless broadband coverage in his community: WiMAX at 3.65 GHz; TV white space radios; and micro-cell mini-towers to extend cellular phone coverage as well. It’s currently being constructed.

“There’s going to be a hybrid network”, explains Peel. “The primary technology will be WiMAX using 3.65 GHz semi-licensed band. It’s going to use WiMAX radio technology with 6x diversity. But there are a significant number of people in the area that WiMAX cannot reach, because of the terrain and tree cover as is the nature of rural America”, Peel told the blog.

Television white spacesVergennes Broadband uses two 100+ foot towers, each with a WiMAX radio and a Carlson TV white space radio called the RuralConnect IP. The software-defined radio uses the slivers of VHF and UHF spectrum not used by television broadcasters Dailywireless says.

According to the article, Peel is adding supplemental value to the project by offering femtocells. Femtocells provide a local cellular connection and use broadband for the backhaul. It simply plugs into customers’ new Internet connection to work.

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The plan seems like a kludge with a mix of three technologies. However, Comcast (CMCSA) and Charter are never going to do a build out in rural areas. The Internet plans casts are

512 Kbps $39.99
1 Mbps     $49.99
2 Mbps     $59.99
3 Mbps     $79.99

This was a problem that RUS Obama money was supposed to address, but that has gone so well. Maybe Merit can do it.

Category: Broadband, Michigan | Tags: , , , , ,
| October 4, 2011
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825 Mb/s Over Copper

NetworkIts been a while since I have looked at DSL. My current job has spoiled me because we have private fiber going everywhere. It looks like DSL has evolved since last time I looked at it.

HuaweiHuawei, the Chinese telecom gear maker achieved speeds of 700 Mbps over Digital Subscriber Lines (DSL) using a prototype system for up to 400 meters according to Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOm. To reach the 700 Mbps speeds, Huawei is using what it calls SuperMIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) technology. SuperMIMO uses four twisted pairs to achieve its downstream speeds. This technology addresses crosstalk among multiple twisted pairs and increases DSL bandwidth by 75 percent, from an average of 100 Mbps per twisted pair to approximately 175 Mbps. It is unclear if SuperMIMO is the same as Wireless MIMO in 802.11n WLAN’s which uses spatially separated antennas and signal processing, so it can use radio reflections to create multiple paths for the radio signals between transmitter and receiver.

Shortly after, Nokia Siemens Networks claimed it has set a world record data rates of 825 Mbps over 400 meters for copper and 750 Mbps over a distance of 500 meters of DSL speeds. According to the NSN press release the Espoo, Finland based firm used phantom DSL (which I covered here) to do these speeds.

Man with hose

How fast is my at&t DSL?

NSN also said it obtained a speed of 750 Mb/s over 500 meters. This is a significant gain over the 300 Mb/s over 400 meters that Alcatel-Lucent demonstrated earlier (which I covered here). Alc-Lu also claimed they could support 100 MB/s over distances of up to 1 kilometer but provided no details to GigaOm.

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Faster copper speeds are necessary because of massive existing copper networks around the world and the cost of upgrading all of those networks to fiber. The problems are:

  • Lab results over pristine copper wires are not the same as ‘in the wild’ copper pairs’ with all their cross connects, bridge clips, beanies, squirrels and other issues.
  • Copper access lines deployed by U.S. telcos often are considerably longer than the demonstrated 500 meters which means that to use the phantom DSL technology, many service providers would still need to deploy fiber in local networks to support the new technology, just not as much fiber.
  • Neither NSN nor Alcatel-Lucent has provided an estimate of when phantom DSL will be available.

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| September 20, 2011
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Super-Fi OK’d by IEEE

White spaceI usually don’t have a problem getting a wireless signal where in my Bach Seat. However there are some areas where I coordinate technical service that don’t get wired or wireless Internet. In these rural areas, where AT&T (T), Verizon (VZ), Sprint Nextel (S) and Comcast (CMCSA) and their fellow travelers fear to tread because they can’t make a buck in these areas, some help maybe on the way.

IEEEIn 2009, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) started development of IEEE standard 802.22, which addressed the need for broadband wireless access in rural areas, those where it is not economical to deploy a wired infrastructure. In July 2011, the IEEE announced that it has published the standard titled: “IEEE 802.22-2011 Standard for Wireless Regional Area Networks in TV Whitespaces” (PDF).

The IEEE press release states: “This new standard for Wireless Regional Area Networks (WRANs) takes advantage of the favorable transmission characteristics of the VHF and UHF TV bands to provide broadband wireless access over a large area up to 100 km (60 miles) from the transmitter. Each WRAN will deliver up to 22 Mbps per channel without interfering with reception of existing TV broadcast stations, using the so-called white spaces between the occupied TV channels.”Digital televisionThat part of the spectrum, known as white spaces, sits between broadcast TV channels and will become available when broadcast TV stations switch from analog to digital in 2009.The White Space Coalition led by Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG), Dell (DELL) and other tech titans strongly support the use of the white spaces in the U.S., going up against strong opposition lead by Michigan’s own John Dingell and big media like the NFL, MLB, NASCAR, NBA, NHL, NCAA, PGA Tour and ESPNwho say unlicensed devices in the TV bands would interfere with their signals.IEEE 802.22 reportedly will not interfere with TV broadcasts, because it incorporates advanced cognitive radio capabilities including:

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I met Mr. Dingell about a dozen years ago, at a school to encourage the politician to support schools when the USF started the eRate program for schools. I recall Mr. Dingell telling me he could not support eRate because he did not trust the FCC to get it right. At least he is consistent.

I believe there is a very good chance this technology will never be a commercial success. The wireless carriers will squash this technology like they have squashed municipal wi-fi and community fiber networks. The improved speeds and coverage areas are a threat to their limited 4G coverage and they would lose out on their monthly pound of flesh capped rate limited data plan.

It will be up to use in the public sector to implement this technology for our clients.

What do you think?

Will Super-Fi ever see the light of day?

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Category: Broadband, Wireless | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| August 18, 2011
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LED Broadband Wireless is D-Light-ful

TEDGlobal has an intriguing presentation by Harald Haas who is developing a new type of light bulb that can access the Internet using light instead of radio waves. According to TEDGlobal, the professor of engineering at Edinburgh University, has been designing modulation techniques that pack more data onto existing networks, but his latest work leaps beyond wires and radio waves to transmit data via an LED bulb. The new technology will turn LED lights on and off, so fast the change is imperceptible to the human eye to enables data transmission without any noticeable change in room lighting.

The system, which he calls D-Light, and hopes to commercialize under the new VLC (Visible Light Communications) brand uses OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing), The article reports the signal can be picked up by simple receivers. As of now, Haas is reporting data rates of up to 10 MBPS (faster than a typical broadband connection), and 100 MBPS by the end of this year and possibly up to 1 GB in the future.

He says: “It should be so cheap that it’s everywhere. Using the visible light spectrum, which comes for free, you can piggy-back existing wireless services on the back of lighting equipment.”

“As well as revolutionizing internet reception, it would put an end to the potentially harmful electromagnetic pollution emitted by wireless internet routers and has raised the prospect of ubiquitous wireless access, transmitted through streetlights.

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LED-Fi Could Replace Wi-FiSo in 2008 Boston University under a National Science Foundation grant started this the research to piggyback data communications capabilities on low-power LEDs to make an LED light the equivalent of a Wi-fi access point.

Some of the advantages of this technology include:

  • Security: Since white light does not penetrate opaque surfaces such as walls, eavesdropping is not possible and should not extend beyond building perimeters like current Wi-Fi technology. It also requires line-of-sight which will allow the user to see where the data is going.
  • Green: The development of this new technology coincides with the switch from incandescent and compact fluorescent lighting to LEDs. LED lights consume far less energy than RF technology, making it possible to build a communication network without added energy costs and reducing carbon emissions over the long-term.

One down-side is that the technology seems to be a one-way (down) transmission.

Possible applications could include automotive safety be enabling car brake lights to alert the car behind or traffic signals could alert cars when they change.It could also have applications in indoor mobile location and positioning services.

What do you think?

Does D-Light have a future as a green, wireless access point light?

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