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Content Tagged with level + broadband
4G Wireless & the Ensuing Bandwidth Boom
My previous post about LTE taking the lead in the 4G wireless sweepstakes prompted some interesting comments, including those of sharp readers who pointed out the pokey nature of the wireless backhaul networks. As luck would have it, I had a breakfast meeting this week with John Roese, chief technology officer of Nortel and one of the most astute people I know in the broadband business.
Whether because of a perceived fear of WiMAX or a sudden spurt in data revenues, the LTE announcements made earlier this year didn’t come as a surprise. In the U.S., two major carriers, Verizon and AT&T, are looking to roll out their LTE networks in the early part of the next decade.
Roese had correctly predicted that LTE would arrive much faster than people thought, and he seems to have a much better handle on the 4G timeline than others in the wireless industry. It seemed appropriate to ask him about the wireless backhaul business and the bandwidth demand that LTE will create.
Instead of giving me a pithy quote, Roese laid out the kind of compelling argument only an engineer can make. He pointed out that the wireless carriers are currently using around 3 T-1 or DSL-type connections to connect their 3G base stations. (In some cases they use microwave or passive optical network connections.) A 3G network base station typically has 10 Mbps of capacity.
In a 4G world, where three antennas will form an arc to provide coverage, each antenna will need a 100 Mbps, or about 300 Mbps total, Roese explained to me. The carriers would prefer more headroom, for if there are four carriers per base station, the bandwidth demand per base station could run closer to about 2 gigabits per second.
Clearly today’s pipes aren’t going to be enough. Optical/metro Ethernet might be one of the better options for the 4G bandwidth needs, according to Roese. There are point-to-point wireless backhaul solutions that could come in handy as well, but he said fiber is the real answer. Even at slower 3G speeds, today’s backhaul infrastructure isn’t ready to do the hard work. Level 3 is one bandwidth provider that could benefit from the LTE-driven demand in the U.S.; we’re told the company has fiber as close as 1,000 feet to most base stations in the country.
From an equipment standpoint, the wireless broadband buildout spells opportunity. Infonetics reports that spending on backhaul equipment will grow to $8.2 billion in 2010 from $4.5 billion in 2007. Juniper Networks wants a piece of that; it recently started offering the BX7000 family of products. (More on this @ Search Telecom)
Crowe: Online Video Will Keep Fiber’s Future Full
Given its proximity to the Broomfield, Colo., headquarters of Level 3, there’s always a good chance that the Silicon Flatirons telecom conference will get a visit from Jim Crowe, Level 3’s CEO. He made the short drive up Hwy. 36 on Monday afternoon for a well-reasoned talk about long-term trends in communications that had several key takeaways, among them:
- Internet video use is here to stay, and will only increase going forward
- Bundling services with devices is yesterday’s strategy
- Legislators and regulators are right to be concerned about the potential for monopolistic practices by AT&T, Verizon and cable companies
- Net Neutrality violations could be handled better by the FTC than the FCC
According to Crowe, between 60 and 70 percent of the IP backbone provider’s traffic is currently video, a trend that he thinks will only increase, perhaps even substantially should applications like Cisco’s Telepresence take off. “It’s kind of a full employment act” for backbone providers, he joked.
While it’s not too hard to say Internet video will be more popular, Crowe did take a somewhat divergent tack by forseeing a future in which communications services, devices and applications will separate into different markets, much like they already have in the PC arena. The popularity of the tightly bundled iPhone aside, Crowe said that standard interfaces and operating systems for wireless devices will eventually produce more innovation by the best of each market breed, putting bundled plans “on the wrong side of economics.”
On Net Neutrality — a topic practically invented at the Silicon Flatirons conference — Crowe said that when it comes to possible monopoly abuses by the big carriers, “you ought to be worried” since the Bell companies “have a long history of abusing” their facility-based advantages. And while cable companies might have “a far less colorful legal history, competition is not in their DNA,” Crowe said.
However, that doesn’t mean Crowe is in favor of pre-emptive legislation, which most Net Neutrality proponents prefer. Instead, Crowe (like many other speakers at the conference) said abuses could be better monitored by the Federal Trade Commission, under existing anti-trust laws.
“I just think after 10 or 15 years of getting everything they want, consumers will not tolerate” anyone blocking or limiting their access to applications and content, he said. If there are violations, then “anti-trust courts are only a few lawyers away, and may be a lot more efficient than regulatory bodies, who have to react to politics.”
Paul Kapustka, former managing editor for GigaOM, now has his own blog at Sidecut Reports.
Ding dong, dial-up is (finally) gone
Broadband can finally declare victory over dial-up in the U.S. AT&T and Comcast are #1 and #2 when it comes to how Americans connect to the Internet. AOL dial-up, which for nearly a decade dominated the Internet landscape is dying a slow lingering death.
AT&T, as we pointed out earlier now has 12.9 million broadband subscribers, while Comcast has 12.1 million. AOL has 12 million — a sign of a change in strategy and shift away from access to an advertising-based destination model. (I wonder if this is going to have a negative impact on Level 3?)
The speed with which AOL’s access business has unraveled is quite amazing. At the end of December ‘06, AOL, as reported by Time Warner, had 13.2 million U.S. dial-up subscribers, a decline of 2 million from the prior quarter. Five years ago, AT&T had a million subscribers, while AOL had 25 million.
Now as the dial-up access rides into the sunset, I am going wax poetic, and be sentimental.
I miss the days when I would walk to CompUSA, hoping to get the latest 56 Kbps modem by US Robotics, or to save up dollars to buy a 3Com PCMCIA card. And oh the rage… of not being able get the Ricochet service.
More than anything, dial-up made going on the net a proactive act, unlike today when we live in a bit-bubble. The upside of dial-up, if you can call that an upside, was that the Internet Life didn’t feel so overwhelming. As an Internet user, the very act of dialing up put you in charge. People didn’t spend as much time on the net, and didn’t send so much email that Fred Wilson had to declare e-mail bankruptcy.
Ah the golden era of the Senior Slowskies — when email was on demand, instead of showing up every few seconds, becoming more annoying than an annoying mother-in-law. Or when IM meant I wanted to be messaged, and not instant migraine. The good old slow days, when Yahoo paid attention to the minimalism and crafted a lite-site. The golden days when YouTube viewing didn’t come between me and productivity.
Enough of being a Golden Oldie — I wonder what the Prom Queen is doing.
More metro for Level 3
Level 3 is trying its best to transform itself from a pure vanilla long haul carrier to a bandwidth operator with deep metro links. The company has been making acquisitions to go after the metro market opportunities, hoping that those will be enough to compensate for loss of AT&T and Verizon long haul business.
Today the company announced that it has bought metro assets from AT&T in six markets: Detroit, Hartford, Kansas City, Milwaukee, San Francisco and St. Louis. The price of the deal wasn’t disclosed. While we understand Level 3’s motivation to get into the metro services, it is not a slam dunk. It faces tough competition from smaller, more nimble rivals such as Yipes.
Ma Bell was supposed to divest assets in 11 markets as a pre-condition for the the SBC-AT&T merger. Six cities come with access to over 200 buildings and more than 1,600 metro fiber route mile. At present Level 3 has 6,500 on-net buildings and over 25,000 metro fiber route miles, while plans are afoot to add upto 1000 buildings in 2007.
Optical gear targets 100 Gigabit speeds
The massive online video boom is putting strain on the optical infrastructure, prompting researchers and equipment makers to come up with ways to transmit more data at higher speeds over the existing networks. The target everyone seems to have in their cross hair is 100 gigabits per second - at least when it comes the long haul networks that connect cities.
Today, Alcatel-Lucent owned Bell Labs showed off a technology that allows today’s 40 Gbps long haul networks to jump to 100 gigabits per second. They transmitted 10 100-Gbps WDM channels over a 1,200-kilometer distance.
“If you look at VOD — if it takes off, carriers will need to upgrade their networks. In a few years, 90 percent of traffic will be VOD, and bandwidth demand will go up by a factor of 10,” Martin Zirngibl, director of Bell Labs Data/Optical Networks Research Department told LightReading.
But he and his Franco-American corporate masters are not the only ones looking to zoom past the 100 Gbps mark. Tomorrow, CoreOptics and Siemens are going to present a paper (PDF) that claims that the two companies have been able to send data at 111 gigabits per second over 10 channels on a single fiber at 50 GHz channel spacing over a distance of 2,400 kilometers.
These speed tests show that older networks can be repurposed to support speeds of 100 Gbps. Bernhard Kubis, vice president of Research and Development at Siemens Networks in a press release said:
“This demonstration proved the feasibility of transmission of 100 Gbps over the 10 Gbps network infrastructure installed today.”
Infinera and Level 3 had showed off their own capabilities in a test transmission held in November 2006.
Why did Level 3 Turn Off a Rural ISP?
With its business still recording losses and saddled with debt, you would think that Internet backbone provider Level 3 would be trying to keep as many customers as it can. That’s why the company’s decision to pull the plug on a small Pennsylvania ISP is puzzling, especially since the ISP heatedly disputes Level 3’s claims of acceptable-use violations.
Is it just a case of he said-she said between Level 3 and (no pun intended) Said, Inc. (owners of ISP Saidcom), or is it the sign of a bigger strategy inside Level 3 to cut costs by lopping off the least-productive customers of some of its recent acquisitions?
Whatever the case, the real losers so far have been the Pennridge, Pa., school district and several hundred area businesses and residents, who have been without Internet service since Level 3 cut it off abruptly on Feb. 22.
The ISP in question, the still-offline Saidcom, provides local Internet access via fixed wireless in and around Perkasie, Pa., a town located about halfway between Philadelphia and Allentown. Saidcom, which began operations in late 2002, recently added a dedicated-server hosting business which got popular quickly, but also appears to be the root of the problems. Saidcom inherited Level 3 as its sole fiber-based Internet access provider when Level 3 acquired Pennsylvania-based service provider TelCove last May.
While Saidcom executives admit that there were several usage problems (including instances of large-volume email blasts, sites with links to child pornography and an eBay “scam” site) originating from the ISP’s hosted-server business, they also felt confident that they were working to resolve any problems as quickly as they could, shutting down offending sites and reporting incidents to the FBI and local law authorities as appropriate.
“We shut quite a few [sites] down,” Saidcom CEO Art Siwert said in a phone call Wednesday. “If there was a problem reported, we dealt with it immediately and swiftly.”
Siwert said that Level 3 had sent Saidcom a couple of “cease and desist” notices in January, revolving around a large volume of email originating from a Saidcom-hosted server. While Siwert said the email in question wasn’t necessarily spam, Saidcom did comply with Level 3’s requests to shut down the offending site.
“The last conversation I had with Level 3’s head of security [in early February] was him telling us ‘thank you for complying, and keep going in the same direction,’ ” Siwert recalled. Then on Feb. 22, at about 5:30 p.m., Siwert said the same person called to say there had been another single violation, and “your network is going down.” Thirty minutes later, Siwert said, Saidcom’s sole 100 Mbps connection to Level 3 — and the Internet — was offline.
As Siwert told a local newspaper, Level 3’s decision “was a blind-sided surprise. It’s what a large company can do to small company.”
Level 3, which was conducting analyst meetings Wednesday, did not make a senior executive available for comment. A company spokesperson did say that the termination of Saidcom’s service was because of “a violation of the Level 3 acceptable use policy,” specifically regarding unsolicited commercial email that Level 3 had received repeated complaints about. The spokesperson said that “formal notices were sent” to Saidcom about the violations. The Level 3 spokesperson did not comment on what level of spam complaints or what types of ISP response times would trigger such discontinuances of service.
For Saidcom, the struggle now is to find another backbone provider to bring Internet service to its operations center. “We’re limping,” said Siwert, who expected a delay of at least another week to 10 days before an alternative provider could bring in service. That leaves Saidcom’s approximately 2,500 residential and business customers — as well as local schools and the fire department — disconnected from their broadband access.
Local message boards have provided an outlet for people to vent at both Level 3 and Saidcom, the latter for not having an adequate backup solution, and the former for apparently ditching a small-potatoes customer over a questionable dispute. Several telecom professionals contacted Tuesday and Wednesday expressed surprise over Level 3’s move, saying such problems are usually solved by mutual agreement, since both the provider and ISP typically have a vested interest in keeping the business relationship alive.
Siwert said Saidcom had previously negotiated with TelCove to add another 100 Mbps line, with more expected in the future. But he also acknowledged that small service-provider startups are often at the mercy of bigger carriers, who may or may not fully explain their actions.
“Until you build to a certain level, you have to rely on a national backbone provider,” said Siwert. “It just doesn’t seem right that they could shut us down.”
Which brings to mind another question, one which the Level 3 spokesperson did not answer: Is this a single, isolated occurence, or are there other small ISPs who have suffered a similar fate at Level 3’s hands? If so, let us know.