Access Providers

Cord Cutting in the US Continues in 4Q 2020

The largest traditional cable providers collectively lost over 1.3 million customers in the fourth quarter of 2020 -- an overall loss of 1.7% of customers. To put the quarter's loss into perspective, the big cable providers lost 14,158 cable customers per day throughout the quarter. The numbers below come from Leichtman Research Group, which compiles these numbers from reports made to investors, except for Cox, which is estimated.

Guowang, Renamed China SatNet, Will Be China’s Global Broadband Provider

In an earlier post, I described what looked like two forthcoming Chinese broadband constellations, Hongyun and Hongyan and in another post, I described a third, identified as "GW" at the time. All three were projects of state-owned enterprises China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. (CASC) and China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp. (CASIC). There was pushback from those contending that a broadband constellation was redundant ...

A Look at Cuba’s Digital Revolution

In spite of having a slow, expensive, government-controlled Internet infrastructure, Cuba is undergoing what Ted Henken and Sara Garcia Santamaria refer to as a digital revolution. The digital revolution might be said to have begun in 2007 when Yoani Sánchez launched her blog "Generation Y." Internet access was difficult -- she would get illegal connectivity at tourist hotels, and the blog was initially hosted in Germany. Soon, the Huffington Post began publishing her posts, and she has subsequently received many international awards, including the Ortega y Gasset Award for Digital Journalism in 2008.

The WiFi 6 Revolution

We're edging closer every day to seeing WiFi 6 in our homes. WiFi 6 will be bolstered by the newly approved 6 GHz frequency, and the combination of WiFi 6 and 6 GHz spectrum is going to revolutionize home broadband. I don't think many people understand how many of our home broadband woes are caused by current WiFi technology. WiFi has been an awesome technology that freed our homes from long category 5 wires everywhere, but WiFi has a basic flaw that became apparent when homeowners started to buy hordes of WiFi-enabled devices.

SpaceX’s Starlink Service in Cuba Would Benefit the Cuban People, SpaceX and the US

SpaceX has begun the process of securing licenses to operate its Starlink Internet service in the Caribbean. I don't know which nations they are considering, but would advise them to seriously consider Cuba -- Starlink service in Cuba would benefit the Cuban people, SpaceX, and the US. What's in it for Cuba? Fixed home and commercial connectivity in Cuba are limited, slow, and expensive, but they do have shared connectivity...

Quantifying the Benefits of Fiber

Dr. Bento J. Lobo, an economist at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga undertook a study to quantify the benefits of the municipally-owned fiber network in Chattanooga. Any citywide fiber network brings economic development to a community, but a municipally-owned system brings additional benefits because of the way that the business is more deeply integrated into the community.

Why Do We Assume Cable Broadband is Always Good?

One of the oddest aspects of FCC monitoring of broadband is that the agency has accepted the premise that any broadband product faster than 25/3 Mbps is adequate broadband. This means that the FCC has completely accepted that broadband provided by cable companies is adequate and is something the agency doesn't have to be concerned with. The FCC makes the automatic assumption that broadband from cable companies is good broadband...

The State of the Internet

The Mozilla Internet Health Report is packed with interesting statistics about the state of the Internet. Reports like this one remind us that broadband is a worldwide issue that is much larger than the US broadband industry I write about every day. The report contains a lot of interesting facts: A little more than half of the planet is still not connected to the Internet. As a planet, we still have a long way to go. While the largest percentage of a region still not online is in Africa, by sheer numbers, most of those still not connected are in Asia...

Why We Need Broadband Regulation

Anybody that reads my blog posts knows that I am in favor of broadband regulation. I'm sure ISPs read this and wonder why -- because who doesn't like being unregulated? My feelings on this go back to basic economics - monopolies must either be regulated or split up. By definition, monopolies always end up taking advantage of consumers - unregulated monopolies really can't help this behavior because employees and management of monopolies will inevitably take advantage of monopoly market power.

Macquarie Group Is Set to Shake Up the Digital Infrastructure Market

A few months ago, I reported on the broader market of which telecommunications infrastructure is a part. I mentioned data centers, cloud computing and data analytics (big data). All together, we can perhaps best call this digital infrastructure. While the importance of this merged set of infrastructures will benefit all economies and societies, I recently focused on regional developments as basically every region and every mid-size town will need to have a digital hub for local computing workloads and storage.