Category: Municipal broadband
October 21st, 2009
Antitrust: Time to break apart the phone companies -- again?
In the global meltdown of the economy, corporate earnings are the bellwether of survival. The old adage that the strong get stronger and the weak…. they just collapse. But some corporations now control significant market share that some believe borders on antitrust violations in the U.S. In Australia, Canada and Japan, corporate consolidation has risen significantly over the past several years. There’s no indications of policy direction or change at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the U.S, CRTC (Canada) or OFCom (U.K.). which would trigger antitrust or anti-competition hearings.
There are very few industries collecting guaranteed revenue. Utilities and financial institutions are the two biggest. Within utilities, telecommunications has had a unique blend of service ‘delivery’ since the beginning. Initially, a single entity that provided everyone the services, is what created instant monopolies. Fast forward 80 years, and antitrust had its second big challenge (after Standard Oil) with AT&T, which was broken up in the United States in 1984 and the Canadian “group” of telecommunications known as Stentor self-destructed in 1999 because regulator tariffs choked their ability to compete with new entrance into the market. Read the rest of this entry »
October 20th, 2009
FCC publishes rural broadband report
The FCC released its report on Rural Broadband Strategy. The report is classic government documentation with more footnotes on pages than actual content. The 77 page report was commissioned based on the 2008 FARM Bill law. (Hey, I don’t make this stuff up!) I understand the need for the FCC to work with other agencies, but what were senators or congressmen (and women) thinking ….
“ law requires the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, in coordination with the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), to submit “a report describing a comprehensive rural broadband strategy” to Congress.”
The report says the same things we all knew: That the U.S. Government wants to subsidize the cost to deploy broadband to rural areas with incentives. That it needs more reports and analyses and that there are a few application forms to fill out to receive grants. That there’s $7.2 billion available. It gives a reasonably accurate analysis on past, current and future technologies to facilitate broadband Internet access to communities that are currently under-served. What it doesn’t tell you is how it should be designed or how it will be regulated. That probably requires another report commissioned by Congress in concert with the Environmental Protection Agency or something.
October 19th, 2009
StatsCan reports 10.9% decline in computer and software store sales
Stats Canada has reported 3rd quarter economic statistics indicating broad declines in most sectors in consumer spending. Computers and software showed significant declines over 10%.
While many companies are indicating that the worst is over, Canada will lag behind U.S. economic recovery. The statistics don’t show new growth for many companies like Microsoft’s new SYNC platform in Ford cars and trucks, that are now seeing increased sales. Companies like Google are not required to report any numbers to the Canadian government’s Stats Can Bureau. Google is seeing growth in Canada but are not broken out in their U.S. SEC filings. Google did break out U.K. revenues which accounted for 13% of total revenues.
Canadian government incentives in computer and software technology R&D have been significant in the past. Consumer spending in IT and not corporate evergreen upgrades are likely to be the recovery source for computer and software sales. But when?
The Canadian Radio and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has conducted several hearings on broadband access focusing on rural communities. This has not translated into new consumer computer or software sales growth either. Bell Canada, Telus and Rogers have seen stagnant revenues in wireless sales as consumers continue to be hesitant in spending or even replacing existing phones. In fact, many are downgrading what they have. Many of the rural areas are planned service areas delivered by 3 & 4G broadband along with WiMax access points and expanded DSL and Cable services. Many of these roll outs won’t be completed until 2010. A detailed 2008 CRTC report shows continued growth in Internet access with revenues from Internet services now account for up to 15% of their bottom line.
November 12th, 2008
IBM to manage broadband over power lines at rural coops
Over three years ago, I wrote that broadband-over-power-lines was a “reality.” That was somewhat overstated. There have been numerous tests and occassional delivery, but the ubiquitous Internet access promised by the technology doesn’t really seem any closer.
So the announcement today that IBM has signed a contract with International Broadband Electric Communications Inc. to provide broadband over power lines might be, as the Wall Street Journal says, a “sign that using the electricity grid for communication … has finally matured.”
Or it might be yet another news release that reperesents just a nibble at the goal of rural delivery of broadband.
The contract is for IBM to manage installation of broadband at 13 utility cooperatives in seven states. IBM anticipates picking up more of this business from the 900-some rural coops around the country.
International Broadband has developed technology from couplers and repeaters to maintain signal strength to BPL consumer modems and markets services to cooperatives.
President-elect Obama’s campaign platform included a promise to:
ensure that rural Americans have access to a modern communications infrastructure [and to] modernize an FCC program that supports rural phone service so that it promotes affordable broadband coverage across rural America as well.
May 14th, 2008
City walks away from $17m network
Who wants a free Wi-Fi network? Not Philadelphia. After Earthlink pulled out of Philly Wireless Tuesday, the city wants no part of the network.
Apparently Earthlink had been negotiating with the city and nonprofits groups to to hand the $17 million network over but couldn’t come to an agreement.
The bottom line was the bottom line, PC World reports.
Without going into details, city spokesman Oliver said there clearly were maintenance and upgrading challenges that came with the free infrastructure. “How many times has someone not taken $17 million worth of something without there being a pretty good reason?” he said.
Meanwhile, Earthlink wants a court to establish a $1 million liability limitation and affirm its rights to take down the network.
“No one was willing to accept the wireless network and the liability that goes with it, both financially and operationally,” the city’s Oliver said.
May 13th, 2008
Earthlink finally pulls out of Wireless Philly, but all is not lost
The final nail in the coffin of municipal Wi-Fi was hammered today as Earthlink pulled the plug on Philadelphia’s wireless program, as the Wall Street Journal reports.
“This was about a business model that simply didn’t work,” said Rolla Huff, chief executive of the Atlanta-based Internet services provider. “It’s very important for EarthLink to move on from this. It was a great idea. It wasn’t a great business.”
Wireless Philadelphia CEO Greg Goldman issued this statement in response:
Today we received an announcement that EarthLink intends to discontinue operation of its Municipal Wi-Fi Network in Philadelphia. The reason cited was that negotiations with a certain party failed to come to a positive conclusion. The transfer of the EarthLink network is by definition a complex, time-intensive, multi-party transaction. Despite today’s announcement, Wireless Philadelphia and the City are still working actively together to identify alternatives for preserving this network and applying it to numerous civic, commercial and social purposes. We remain optimistic for an orderly resolution of this matter. Regardless, Wireless Philadelphia is utterly steadfast in its determination to extend internet access to all members of the community, and we intend to do everything in our power to continue the momentum generated by WP in support of Digital Inclusion.
Huff says WP serves 5,000 customers today, compared with hyperbolic claims that it would reach 100,000 urban users. While the whole advertising model was a pipe dream, it’s still critically important that cities have wireless networks; but they won’t get them for free – and providing free access for the poor isn’t what it’s all about.
When I talked to Craig Settles about this last summer, he pointed out that cities like Providence RI use wireless for public safety and building inspectors. Glendale, Calif., “takes a tremendous load off the emergency room (by) remote monitoring electronically through a city network of the people who regularly use the emergency room as their primary health care provider.”
Tremendous ROI comes with the I, as in investment.
Cities don’t want it if it’s not free. That’s just plain silly. Municipal networks offer significant value to a city and key constituents as an anchor tenant. To just go from one knee-jerk reaction to another is absurd.
Now, he says on his blog, cities need to better control the conversation:
From day one, the purpose of Philly’s network is to increase digital inclusion and economic development. The measure of their success should be how lives and businesses are being helped in disadvantaged communities.
In a local way, treat initiatives the way Microsoft, IBM, Palm and others treat their products. Build anticipation, set realistic expectations, educate the market. There are enemies of muni WiFi who will broadcast every flaw and scar. Cities and their supporters must drive the public discussion, not their enemies.
October 2nd, 2007
The summer that Muni Wi-Fi died
Speaking of Tim Wu, the good professor has written an intriguing piece for Slate subtitled Why Municipal Wireless Networks Have Been Such a Flop.
Wu says it’s not that public wireless is a bad idea. Rather, cities have screwed up by refusing to treat Internet like a public utility. Cities have no problem with paying for sewers or roads but when it comes to Wi-Fi, politicians were happy to smoke crack and believe that Earthlink would pay for the whole thing.
That illusion has run straight into the ancient economics of infrastructure and natural monopoly. The bottom line: City dwellers won’t be able to get high-quality wireless Internet access for free. If they want it, collectively, they’ll have to pay for it.
Wu points out that the problem with delivering Internet is the “last-mile problem” — the bottleneck tightly controlled by telcos and cable companies. It’s a problem the market has failed to address.
I remember going to industry trade shows where grown men demonstrated robots designed to crawl through city sewers and deliver a fiber-optic cable to your toilet. (That firm, CityNet, received $375 million in funding and actually wired the sewers of Albuquerque, N.M.) …. While both the FCC and paid industry analysts have continually predicted an “explosion” in broadband over power lines, its current market share is approximately 0.008 percent.
Enter Muni Wi-Fi. Cities would use the genius of Wi-Fi to deliver Internet across dozens of square miles.
By 2005, it became clear that major cities didn’t really want to build out Wi-Fi networks as public works projects. Instead, places like Philadelphia and San Francisco announced “private/public” partnerships. That meant giving a private company the right to build a wireless network and try to make money off of it. Often, this simply meant giving a company like Earthlink the rights to install Wi-Fi devices on street lamps and charge citizens for access. The cities then washed their hands of the issue of success or failure.
While Wi-Fi does have technical limitations, technology wasn’t the problem, Wu says. The problem was economics.
Today, the limited success stories come from towns that have actually treated Wi-Fi as a public calling. St. Cloud, Fla., a town of 28,000, has an entirely free wireless network. Cities like St. Cloud understand the concept of a public service: something that’s free, or near-free, like the local swimming pool. Most cities have been too busy dreaming of free pipes to notice that their approach is hopelessly flawed.
Bottom line, so to speak? If you want leave public access to the private sector, the system will be bottlenecked or incomplete. True public-private ventures mean both sides need to pony up.
Real public infrastructure costs real public money. We already know that, in the real world, if you’re not willing to invest in infrastructure, you get what we have: crumbling airports, collapsing bridges, and broken levees. Why did we think that the wireless Internet would be any different?
August 29th, 2007
Earthlink cuts 900 jobs, tries to transform muni wireless biz
EarthLink — formerly the name in municipal Wi-Fi — has been signaling its exit from the business of building wireless networks for cities without getting paid upfront. Tuesday, CEO Rolla P. Huff dropped the axe, announcing a restructuring and the layoff of 900 employees.
“While we recognize this is a difficult time for those affected individuals, this was a needed action for the company to better align our cost structure with our existing business,” he said in a statement.
Earthlink is also laying off Don Berryman, its president of municipal networks.
TopTechNews.com interviewed Craig Settles, who has long criticized the building ot muni wireless networks just to provide free access across cities.
“I think that we are at a much-needed point of getting the focus back to where it belongs,” Craig Settles, a municipal wireless consultant and author of the book “Fighting the Good Fight for Municipal Wireless,” said in a phone interview.
The explosion of Earthlink signing up cities who want their own free wireless networks was something of a Frankenstein monster that threatened to swallow the whole company, Settles said.
Now that companies like Earthlink are telling cities to put up by signing up as anchor tenants on the networks, politicians are swinging the other way, putting out RFPs to other companies to get their networks for free.
“Cities don’t want it if it’s not free,” he added. “That’s just plain silly. Municipal networks offer significant value to a city and key constituents as an anchor tenant. To just go from one knee-jerk reaction to another is absurd.”
What’s the right model? Wireless networks make sense if cities use them to innovate business processes, he said, such as facilitating mobile workforce apps and managing or tracking fixed and mobile assets. Another key win: enabling remote health care:
In Glendale, California, “they realized that if they could do remote monitoring electronically through a city network” of the people who regularly use the emergency room as their primary health care provider, “you can take a tremendous load off the emergency room,” he said. Making health care more efficient, he explained, could have ripple effects throughout a city’s budget.
August 17th, 2007
With WiMax roll-out, the face of wireless is changing
The future of wireless is getting closer, as Sprint Nextel says it’s ready to start offering WiMax-based services in two test markets by the end of the year, TopTechNews reports. Under the name of Xohm, Sprint will offer wireless Internet service in Baltimore/Washington and Chicago, with commercial services slated to begin in the first half of 2008.
“The demos were really impressive in the way that they showed how life on the mobile Internet would be,” said Sprint Nextel CTO Barry West during this week’s Sprint Ahead Technology Summit. … The throughput was very impressive and lived up to its promise.”
WiMax networks are five times faster than 3G cellular technology but the potential goes well beyond mobile phones.
“We have people talking about WiMax for all sorts of things, not just phones,” noted Gartner research director Carolina Milanesi. “It will take a while for the market to show growth, but the potential is there and we will be seeing vendors showing more WiMax products going forward.”
The technology might even change the economics of municipal Wi-Fi, which has been in retreat since EarthLink announced it would require cities to pay substantial fees as anchor tenants on the networks.
Sprint Nextel is partnering with Clearwire to try to reach 100 million customers by the end of 2008. Getting beyond that before the end of the decade, Sprint will invest about $2.5 billion in capital by the end of 2008 and another $2.5 billion by year-end 2010.
August 15th, 2007
Muni Wi-Fi in trouble unless cities cough up some (big) bucks
Not that long ago, municipal Wi-Fi was the talk of the town, so to speak. These days the latest rendition of the information superhighway is getting a bumpy ride, or plenty of static (choose your metaphor), as ISPs and telecoms are walking away from the business of partnering with local government to build free or cheap public networks, Business Week says.
As we’ve reported, EarthLink, once the most enthusiastic of partners for muni Wi-Fi, is running away as fast as it can. Even without EarthLink trying to extract itself, San Francisco’s Wi-Fi project has been stuck in limbo as the Board of Supervisors has succeeding in stopping the project, which was intended to built with EarthLink and Google.
EarthLink’s new CEO pronounced during a quarterly conference call: “The Wi-Fi business as currently constructed will not provide a return.”
Meanwhile, AT&T, is “evaluating” whether to pursue any new deployments or even whether to continue working on its four existing projects, says Ebrahim “Eb” Keshavarz, vice-president for business development at AT&T.
The problem is that companies like EarthLink and MetroFi have agreed to foot the bill for infrastructure and equipment, lease city property for equipment and even kick back revenues to local governments. The companies justified these concessions on models projected up to 30% uptake of the networks. But the reality is far different: 1% to 2% of populations have signed up.
Complicating the drive to boost subscription is competition: Wherever muni Wi-Fi networks are announced, phone and cable companies tend to lower their prices for broadband Internet access, says Glenn Fleishman.
To make the business more profitable, Wi-Fi service providers are trying to pass more of the cost to the cities. “There’s no one that I am aware of right now who’d build a network without the city as a paying customer,” says Lou Pelosi, vice-president for marketing at MetroFi, which six months ago stopped bidding for projects unless the city agreed to become the network’s anchor tenant.
ISPs want cities to pay — and not just a modest amount. Corpus Christi, Tex., not only pays EarthLink about $200,000 a year to operate its Wi-Fi network, it also sold the infrastructure, which it paid for, back to EarthLink at somewhere around a $1 million loss, says City Manager George “Skip” Noe.
But with that network, the city can automate gas and water meter-reading and other data collection, have an emergency communications network and use the network for surveillance cameras.
“We did an analysis, and over 20 years, there are multimillions in savings to the city,” says Noe.
SponsoredWhite Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads
- Five Steps to Determine When to Virtualize YourServers VMware Server virtualization isn't just for big companies. Entry-level ... Download Now
- The True Costs of Virtual Server Solutions VMware In an economic environment that is repeatedly heralding the message "do ... Download Now
- VMware Infrastructure: A Guide to Bottom-Line Benefits VMware Frustrated by the costs of maintain ever larger data centers?or building ... Download Now
Recent Entries
- Internet: A threat to government or the other way around? (Part 4)
- Internet: A threat to government or the other way around? (Part 3)
- Internet: A threat to government or the other way around? (Part 2)
- Friday’s Throw out the trash day and Polls for the week of Nov 20th
- Internet: A threat to government or the other way around?
Blogs From Our Sponsors
Most Popular Posts
- Internet continues to lose its founding network partners
- Wireless users may be shut off if sharing copyrighted files
- Google hit again with Street View privacy concerns - in Switzerland
- FCC releases broadband agenda
- Human x-ray machines: Coming soon to an airport near you
- Politician wants Twitter banned from use by....wait for it -- politicians!
Top Rated
- Internet: A threat to government or the other way around?+8 votes
- Human x-ray machines: Coming soon to an airport near you+6 votes
- U.S. Ethics Committee staffer file-shares sensitive document+6 votes
- Internet continues to lose its founding network partners+4 votes
- Wireless users may be shut off if sharing copyrighted files+4 votes
- Internet: A threat to government or the other way around? (Part 4)+4 votes
- Royal Navy gets creative in attracting engineers - develop online game+3 votes
- FCC wants public comment on digital democracy - voting online+3 votes
Premier Vendor Content Whitepapers, webcasts & resources from our Power Center Sponsors
- Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online - Free Six-Month Trial for Eligible Organizations
-
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online provides fast online access, simple contact management and better sales performance for a low monthly cost - the best value on the market today.
- Learn more about the free, six-month trial offer>>
- Keep Up With The Latest In Document Management with The DocuMentor.
-
Doc delivers the scoop on today's enterprise content management, printer maintenance, and all other issues related to document management. It's the DocuMentor Blog.
- Learn more >>
- The best support in the Linux business
-
If Linux is going to power your mission-critical applications, you'd better have the best support known to business. Novell was rated the top provider of Linux technical support.
- Learn more >>
Archives
Favorite Links
Blogroll
Contributors
ZDNet Blogs
- All About Microsoft
- The Apple Core
- Between the Lines
- BriefingsDirect
- Collaboration 2.0
- Dev Connection
- Digital Cameras & Camcorders
- Ed Bott's Microsoft Report
- Emerging Tech
- Enterprise Web 2.0
- Forrester Research
- Googling Google
- GreenTech Pastures
- Hardware 2.0
- Home Theater
- iGeneration
- Irregular Enterprise
- IT Project Failures
- Laptops & Desktops
- Lawgarithms
- Linux and Open Source
- Managing L'unix
- The Mobile Gadgeteer
- On Sustainability
- Rational Rants
- The Semantic Web
- Service Oriented
- Smartphones and Cell Phones
- Social Business
- Social CRM: The Conversation
- Software & Services Safari
- Software as Services
- Storage Bits
- Team Think
- Tech Broiler
- Technology and the Global Supply Chain
- Tom Foremski: IMHO
- The ToyBox
- Virtually Speaking
- The Web Life
- ZDNet Education
- ZDNet Government
- ZDNet Healthcare
- Zero Day
White Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads
- Email Security and Archiving - Clearer in the Cloud Google The time is NOW for businesses and organizations of all sizes to implement ... Download Now
- Why Isn't Server Virtualization Saving Us More? A Few Small Changes May Dramatically Increase Your Efficiency VMware Companies have rapidly adopted server virtualization over the past few ... Download Now
- Can your business work smarter? IBM Today, productivity is at a premium and IT budgets are at a minimum. Work ... Download Now
Popular Sanity Saver Videos
