Broadband

Satellite Cell Service: What’s Coming

T-Mobile and Starlink made a joint announcement recently about an arrangement where Starlink will enable voice and texting capabilities to T-Mobile cellphones by the end of 2023. This is a service that would work with existing cell phones and would supposedly kick in when a phone can't find a signal from a cell tower. Starlink said the technology would be enabled by new satellites that have significantly larger antennae than the current satellites in the constellation. more

Google Serving 25 Percent of Consumer Internet Traffic Through North American ISPs

Google is now serving close to 25 percent of all consumer internet traffic running through North American ISPs, according to a report from Wired. "That's a far larger slice of than previously thought, and it means that with so many consumer devices connecting to Google each day, it's bigger than Facebook, Netflix, and Instagram combined. It also explains why Google is building data centers as fast as it possibly can. Three years ago, the company's services accounted for about 6 percent of the internet's traffic." more

An End to Data Caps?

All of the major ISPs that were enforcing data caps have lifted those caps in response to the COVID-19 crisis. This includes AT&T, Comcast, Cox, Mediacom, and CenturyLink. All of these companies justified data caps as a network management tool that was in place to discourage overuse of the network. That argument no longer holds water if these ISPs eliminate them during a crisis that is overtaxing networks more than we are likely to ever see again. more

SpaceX Starlink Comes to South America

SpaceX has roughly 90,000 Starlink beta test customers in North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand and now they have one in South America -- in Sotomó, an isolated town at 41.6° South in Chile's Lake Region. Chile's second terminal will be online at a school in Caleta Sierra in a few days and other pilot locations will follow. Twenty families live in Sotomó and it is only accessible by private boats or subsidized services that navigate the Reloncaví Estuary on which it is located. more

Google Fiber Expanding to Four More Cities

According to news sources Google's fiber-to-the-home service is expanding to four additional cities: Atlanta; Nashville, Tennessee; Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. Google Fiber currently is available in Kansas City, Austin, Texas and Provo, Utah. At a price tag of $80 per month, the service offers speeds around 10 times greater than that of the average Internet connection. more

Loving to Hate Our Big ISPs

The American Customer Satisfaction Survey (ACSI) was released earlier this summer that ranks hundreds of companies that provide services for consumers. Historically cable companies and ISPs have fared poorly in these rankings compared to other businesses in the country. The running joke reported in numerous articles about this survey is that people like the IRS more than they like their cable company (and that is still true this year). more

Open Access for Apartment Buildings

San Francisco recently passed an interesting ordinance that requires that landlords of apartments and multi-tenant business buildings allow access to multiple ISPs to bring broadband. This ordinance raises all sorts of regulatory and legal questions. At the most recent FCC monthly meeting, the FCC jumped into the fray and voted on language that is intended to kill or weaken the ordinance. more

My Telecom Predictions for 2021

It's that time of the year for me to get out the crystal ball and peer into 2021... The FCC Will Have Egg on its Face from the RDOF Grants. The reverse auction was a disaster in many ways, with a lot of the money going to companies that can't possibly do what they promised or companies that largely intend to make a profit by pocketing a lot of the grants. The FCC will have a chance to rectify some of the problems during the review of the long forms... more

Broadband Tariffs: The Significant Gap Between Residential and Business

Analysis from Point Topic's recent reports on global broadband tariffs has revealed a significant gap in residential and business tariffs worldwide. Clearly businesses are paying more for their services than residential consumers but the relative differences in the ratios is more marked than might be expected. The first thought is that they are paying for more bandwidth and that is true to an extent. more

Can Cellphones Capture the Broadband Market?

Linda Hardesty wrote an interesting article in FierceNetwork that asks the question, "What if, in ten years, young people don't subscribe to fixed broadband at all?" Her story is based on a U.K. research group that predicts that within ten years, there will be a lot of young people who will never have subscribed to a landline broadband product. more

Shame on the Regulators

It's clear that even before the turn of this century that the big telcos largely walked away from maintaining and improving residential service. The evidence for this is the huge numbers of neighborhoods that are stuck with older copper technologies that haven't been upgraded. The telcos made huge profits over the decades in these neighborhoods and ideally should not have been allowed to walk away from their customers. more

FAA Announces $175,000 Fine Against SpaceX for Failure to Submit Required Pre-Launch Information

SpaceX, the leading provider of commercial launches in the United States, is subject to FAA regulations and must provide safety data prior to any attempt at launch. Last year, SpaceX performed a record 61 launches, with 34 of them primarily for the Starlink program. more

Will Electronically Steered Antennas Replace Parabolic Antennas in Satellite Ground Stations? (ChatGPT-Assisted Version)

In a previous post, I asked whether electronically steered antennas (ESAs) would replace parabolic antennas in satellite ground stations. I read a few articles suggested by others and by Google search, used some common sense, produced a list of advantages of ESAs, and concluded that it was likely they would eventually replace parabolic antennas for many applications. more

Google Announces Its Super Fast Fiber for Kansas City

Google today announced the launch of its "ultra-high speed" Internet access in Kansas City as part of its Google Fiber project... "Google Fiber is 100 times faster than today's average broadband. No more buffering. No more loading. No more waiting. Gigabit speeds will get rid of these pesky, archaic problems and open up new opportunities for the web."
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Google, Facebook Latest to Join Net Neutrality Protest on Wednesday

Google and Facebook, two companies that generally stay on the other side of the Net Neutrality debate, have told reporters they will be participating in the July 12th net neutrality protest. more