Tag: broadband access

Study finds EPB fiber optics generates over $865 million in benefits for Chattanooga

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by Dave Flessner
EPB

EPB (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A new study suggests that EPB‘s fiber optics has helped generate at least 2,800 new jobs and added $865.3 million to the local economy by cutting power outages, improving Internet links and attracting businesses to the “Gig City.”

The study by University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Economist Bento Lobo found that since its introduction six years ago today, EPB’s smart grid and first-in-the-nation citywide gigabit Internet service has helped local education, health care, business, arts and culture and municipal services. The smart grid is estimated to have avoided 124.7 million customer minutes of interruptions by better detection of power faults and better methods of rerouting power to restore service more quickly than in the past. Continue reading

Fiber Penetration Hits 42.5 Percent in U.S.

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Spinning Optical Fiber

Spinning Optical Fiber (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

BOSTON, MA — Business fiber penetration of commercial buildings in the U.S. increased to 42.5 percent in 2014, according to latest research from Vertical Systems Group. This compares to a penetration rate of only 10.9 percent in 2004. These statistics measure fiber availability at company-owned and multi-tenant buildings with twenty or more employees, which covers more than two million individual business establishments.

“Accessibility to fiber-based business services in the U.S. nearly quadrupled between 2004 and 2014, with hundreds of thousands of sites newly fiber-connected during this time period. As a result of this growth, our fiber penetration benchmark now exceeds 40 percent for the first time,” said Rosemary Cochran, principal at Vertical Systems Group. “Looking forward, the high stakes endgame for network operators is to deepen and broaden their service infrastructures around fiber – the future of wireline.” Continue reading

Want Google Fiber In Your City? Make It Easy For Us, Google Exec Says

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Google Inc.’s high-speed Internet service is slowly rolling out around the U.S., but so far has avoided major metropolitan markets – like New York and Los Angeles – as well as most smaller cities. One Google Fiber executive says bureaucracy is what’s holding back the rollout.

“If you make it easy, we will come,” said Milo Medin, Google Fiber vice president, according to Wired. “If you make it hard, enjoy your Time Warner Cable.” Continue reading

Gigabit plan officially launched; 25 Optico fiberhoods open

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Flag of Puerto Rico

Flag of Puerto Rico (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Governor of Puerto Rico, Alejandro Garcia Padilla, has announced the official launch of the ‘Gigabit Island’ plan, with the goal that in five years 99% of households will have access to download speeds of at least 10Mbps, while 1Gbps services should be accessible in 70% of homes within the same timeframe. As reported by Telesemana, the Gigabit programme is guided by the public-private Puerto Rico Broadband Taskforce (PRBT) under a remit to continue the work accomplished by Puerto Rico’s Strategic Plan for Broadband (2012), and the current strategy recommends a number of actions to promote the development of broadband, including: continuing geographical broadband expansion; beginning work on monitoring, measurement and evaluation of the impact of broadband on the economy; lowering costs of building broadband systems; ensuring access to poles, ducts and other public and private sites for the deployment of infrastructure; and promoting public-private partnerships to stimulate local demand. According to the executive summary of the Gigabit Island plan, by June 2014 around 77.8% of households were covered by broadband access networks with speeds of at least 10Mbps (download)/1.5Mbps (upstream), while an estimated 52.9% of households had the possibility of connecting at 100Mbps (download). Additionally, the report notes that 99.9% of households in the country had mobile broadband coverage with speeds of ‘up to 3Mbps downstream and 768kbps upload’. Continue reading

CenturyLink Unveils Denver’s ‘Gig City’ Neighborhoods

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Denver, Colorado, Downtown

Denver, Colorado, Downtown (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

CenturyLink has for the first time revealed the Denver neighborhoods where it’s offering 1 gigabit Internet service, aiming to show it’s keeping its promise to bring the city ultra-fast residential Internet.

The Monroe, Louisiana-based telecom (Nasdaq: CTL) said 1 gigabit-per-second is being offered in 16 neighborhoods in the city’s core, making it available to a substantial number of homes in each area and expanding the reach of the service every day. Continue reading

Google Fiber could be snared by thorny Oregon tax law

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A tangled thicket of Oregon tax rules might snare Google Fiber, and could have a big impact on whether that company opts to bring its hyperfast Internet service to the Portland area.

State lawmakers say they’re planning to address the tax issue during the legislative session that begins next month. It’s unclear if that would be soon enough for Google, which has said it could make a decision on serving Portland and its suburbs by the end of the year. Continue reading

US broadband: Overpriced, Underpowered and (for once) Over There

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Martyn starts his recollection of the history of ISP a bit late in time. We once had a vibrant ISP market before the telcos and MSO demolished the competition with superior speeds at competitive prices. Now we mostly have duopolies. Although Tim Wu’s report is generally accurate, he did not write anything about our static market that was not known before his report. Martyn’s typically European solution is more regulation, but it is the regulation and laws that have been put in place that prevent carriers and cities from building open-access fiber infrastructure by forming consortia or partnering along with arcane franchise regulation. 

We are challenged by geography in the U.S. that makes deploying fiber much more expensive than in most other countries. Elimination of the barriers that will allow carriers and cities to work together to build and share the last-mile infrastructure would encourage competition that will benefit all stakeholders.

By Martyn Warwick

As an Englishman and therefore, a European (by dint of geographic proximity if nothing more)  who is a very frequent visitor to the United States, I have, over many years now, been able to make my own informal comparative study of the state of the Internet on both sides of the Atlantic. My conclusion is this: in almost all circumstances the US Internet is slow, cumbersome and damnably expensive and in the Global Broadband Stakes, it comes in way down at the end of the field, a knackered, blowhard also-ran. Continue reading