Paul Budde writes: "Two relatively new mobile market entrants, Mobyland and Centernet, have launched Poland and Eastern Europe's first commercial LTE network. Vendor Huawei provided the equipment for the network, which operates in the 1800MHz frequency band. Both Mobyland and Centernet previously offered GSM services in the frequency band before refarming the spectrum to offer LTE. The operators aim to expand coverage to 20% of the population by 2011 by deploying 700 base stations." more
Are there any companies left that we can still call cable companies? Everything in the business press still refers to Comcast and Charter as cable companies and AT&T and Verizon as telephone companies. It's getting harder to justify using these traditional labels, and maybe the time is finally here to just start calling them all ISPs. After all, these four companies collectively have 80 million broadband customers... more
The National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) has ranked all 185 U.S. cities with that 50,000 households by the total percentage of each city's households lacking fixed broadband internet subscriptions. more
SpaceX Starlink Internet service will be available in several African nations in the second quarter of this year, and the price in Nigeria has been announced -- $600 for the "residential" terminal and a monthly fee of $43. Is there a market for Starlink at that price in Nigeria and other Sub-Saharan African nations? The IMF projects a GDP per capita of $2,580 for Nigeria this year (and $1,900 in Sub-Saharan Africa and $2,260 for Africa overall) so the market for individual consumer accounts will be much smaller than in what the IMF refers to as "advanced economies." more
While it was good to see that the Administration included telecoms in its new stimulus package - which was launched in September 2011 - the concerns expressed when the project was announced last year still persist. Wireless is not a solution to the significant broadband problems the USA is facing. ... The new plan seems to be driven more by the failed attempts in previous initiatives to roll out more broadband infrastructure. more
New Jersey on Monday became the latest state to implement its own net neutrality rules following the FCC's Repeal. more
Today NBC is streaming the NFL's Super Bowl live for free through mobile apps as well as their NBC Sports website. Given the number of "cord-cutters" and mobile users out there, I suspect there should be a good number of people watching the event through the live streams today. more
Our problem isn't the lack of capacity -- it's our inability to achieve simple connectivity. We have abundant capacity but can’t use it because we have gatekeepers who set a price on our ability to communicate and innovate. If we were able to take advantage of what we already have we would find ourselves with a wealth of opportunities rather than having to pay billions to "stimulate" the gatekeepers into letting us create new value. more
Starlink is available in 37 nations, and the price for best effort service was the same everywhere until August 3, when variable pricing with throttling became available in France. I predicted they would eventually shift from uniform to affordable pricing some time ago, but why did they do it now? Starlink first became available in the U.S. and Canada, and sales are beginning to outrun the available capacity. more
United States ranks 24th worldwide in the percentage of residents who use the Internet, according to the International Telecommunications Union's 2013 State of Broadband Report, released recently at a meeting of the Broadband Commission for Digital Development. Eighty-one percent of U.S. residents use the Internet, the ITU said. Countries with the highest percentage of people using the Internet was Iceland, where 97 percent of the people are Internet users. The top 10 countries all had usage rates above 88 percent. more
China's fiber adoption constituted 80% of global FTTH growth in the past 12 months, according to the latest report from Point Topic. The country has reported a 26 percent annual growth in FTTH connections. more
There is growing interest in the US for the FCC to look at White Space to enable more options for broadband wireless in rural areas. What is White Space? Last weekend, the Sunday NY Times published an article about wireless services that included this description: "In many areas, not all broadcast [television] channels are in use. The unused channels are "white spaces" of high-quality spectrum that could be made available to local Internet service providers. Unlike the much higher frequency of Wi-Fi, television broadcast frequencies can travel for miles and penetrate walls, providing a much broader range for Internet service." There is a coalition of eight technology companies driving the discussion in the US... more
European Union Internet Market Commissioner Thierry Breton called on streaming services on Thursday, urging them to switch video quality from high definition to standard mode in order to reduce increasing strain on bandwidth during COVID-19 pandemic. Following a phone call with the CEO of Netflix, Reed Hastings, Commissioner Breton, said: "Europe and the whole world are facing an unprecedented situation. more
We often forget that a lot of things we do on the web rely on broadband traffic that passes through undersea cables. Any web traffic from overseas gets to the US through one of the many underwater fiber routes. Like with all fiber technologies, the engineers and vendors have regularly been making improvements. The technology involved in undersea cables is quite different than what is used for terrestrial fibers. A long fiber route includes repeater sites where the light signal is refreshed. Without repeaters, the average fiber light signal will die within about sixty miles. more
At a recent shareholders' meeting in Stockholm, Ericsson's CEO has reaffirmed company's vision of having 50 billion internet-connected devices by 2020: "Today we already see laptops and advanced handsets connected, but in the future everything that will benefit from being connected will be connected." As an example of connected devices, a research engineer showed real life mobile health applications and how heart monitoring can be done remotely over mobile networks. more
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