[RTC List] Broadband - Fast enough for you?

[Sean McLaughlin]

FYI -


http://telephonyonline.com/broadband/news/telecom_fast_enough/

*Fast enough for you?*
By Ed Gubbins

May 7, 2007 3:21 PM

The telecom industry has forever wrestled with the question of how much 
bandwidth to deliver to residential consumers. But this year, a chorus 
of authoritative voices is offering new proposals for specific speed 
goals. How those target speeds should be calculated, however, is one 
more tough question to ponder.

In January, Vermont's governor proposed a plan to ensure all Vermonters 
at least 3 Mb/s of symmetric bandwidth by 2010 and at least 20 Mb/s 
symmetrically by 2013. In March, the Fiber-to -the-Home Council called 
on Congress to ensure 100 Mb/s of symmetric broadband to most Americans 
by 2010 and to all Americans by 2015. And a bill introduced in the 
Minnesota state legislature the same month called for the availability 
of 1 Gb/s of symmetric bandwidth to all Minnesotans by 2015. How did 
they arrive at these numbers, and whose methodology makes sense?

Joe Savage, president of the FTTH Council, admits that one of the main 
reasons he's calling for 100 Mb/s in particular is to promote FTTH, the 
council's raison d'etre. "When you get to 100 Mb/s, there's really no 
question that it will be fiber all the way to the home," he said. But 
the chief reason the group fixed on 100 Mb/s was to help the U.S. catch 
up with countries such as Japan and South Korea, where some citizens 
already enjoy those speeds. "100 Mb/s is perceived as the standard in 
most of the municipal networks in Scandinavia and is the competitive bar 
in France," he said. "Our call for 100 Mb/s is in part to keep us at 
least in the hunt with some of the other more advanced infrastructure 
countries around the world."

Keeping up with the Joneses is one of the recurring themes in 
discussions about how to set bandwidth goals among some of the parties 
currently taking a crack at it. Ask Minnesota legislators why they're 
calling for 1 Gb/s, and they'll point to similar initiatives in 
California and Singapore. This approach might seem backward to broadband 
equipment vendors and service providers, which typically base 
assumptions of broadband needs on the services they think customers want 
and the cost and capability of their networks. So are these bandwidth 
arms races-between states or nations-a good way to decide how much 
capacity to roll out to consumers?

"No," said Vince Vittore, Yankee Group analyst. "In fact, it's about the 
worst way to decide bandwidth goals. It's like saying because lots of 
people in rural areas drive pickups, the entire country should drive 
pickups. The race to 100 Mb/s is a laudable goal, but you have to be 
realistic about it and fit that goal to each market."

Jim Baller, a broadband advocate and partner in the Baller Herbst law 
firm, concedes that a one-size-fits-all approach is probably not a 
realistic way to address the country's broadband needs. But initiatives 
such as the FTTH Councils' --- no matter what speed they set as a goal 
--- are at least useful in spurring discussions that are long overdue, 
he said. "The more voices we hear, the more our country will be pushed 
toward figuring this out, and we'll arrive at the right number as a 
goal. We don't know if it's 100 Mb/s or 1 Gb/s or something else, but we 
need to find out what it is and start working toward it."

Still, he underscored the need to keep pace with global broadband trends 
and applauded 100 Mb/s as a reasonable goal for the U.S.

To others, however, 100 Mb/s is not enough. "In part, I think the speed 
was put out there to initiate the discussion," said Tom Garrison, 
communications director for the city of Egan, Minn., a supporter of the 
Minnesota bill calling for Gigabit speeds. "We heard from residential 
home-based business folks who said they could get to a Gig fairly 
quickly. One could argue the speed should be even more."

Garrison, too, cited Japan and Korea as competitors. "We have an 
international law attorney based in Egan whose practice is worldwide," 
Garrison said. "He's competing against anywhere that work could be done 
elsewhere."

In a white paper two years ago, the Institute of Electrical and 
Electronics Engineers called on Congress to make 1 Gb/s symmetrical 
broadband ubiquitous, citing the need to compete with other nations but 
saying little about what consumers would do with that much bandwidth. A 
paper co-written by Gartner analyst Mark Gilbert in 2003 in support of 
California's "1 Gb/s or bust" initiative (whose goal was 1 Gb/s 
everywhere by 2010) pointed out that average desktop computing bandwidth 
requirements grew from less than 10 kb/s to 100 Mb/s over the past 20 
years. "A similar increase applied to the FCC's 200 kb/s broadband 
standard results in an anticipated speed of 20 Gb/s within 20 years," 
the report said. "Consequently, 1 Gb/s broadband to every education 
institution, business and home by 2010 is a realistic goal."

However, the "1 Gb/s or bust" initiative has since been subsumed by Gov. 
Schwartzenegger's broadband task force, which no longer maintains the 
Gigabit goal.

"I don't think anyone could show you we'd need 1 Gb/s of bandwidth in 
the next fifteen years," said Teresa Mastrangelo, senior analyst with 
broadbandtrends.com. "With three streams of uncompressed HDTV, you could 
see 60 or 70 Mb/s consumed fairly quickly. 100 Mb/s is a nice round 
number to put on it. But a Gig is just ... out there."

Vermont's governor is setting his sights much lower. Or rather slower. 
State lawmakers will likely vote in May on his proposal for 20 Mb/s of 
symmetric ubiquitous bandwidth by 2013. That speed was chosen in large 
part to allow the initiative to remain technologically agnostic. "It's 
great to say 'Gigabit speeds everywhere,' but you're setting yourself up 
for pretty much a fiber-only build," said Tom Murray, Vermont's chief 
information officer. "We don't want to set ourselves up to discourage 
innovation in other technologies. I don't think anybody argues that FTTH 
is ideal, but I don't want to set people up for the impossible."

For example, proponents of wireless broadband have cautioned the authors 
of the Vermont bill not to set blanket bandwidth requirements too high, 
lest they exclude wireless technologies that may otherwise be the best 
choice for some rural areas. "To the extent that government wants to be 
on the bleeding edge of technology that changes monthly, we've got to be 
careful," Murray said.

Current calculations of bandwidth needs often focus on the long pole in 
the tent: high-definition television (HDTV) service, multiple 
simultaneous streams of which can raise total capacity requirements well 
above 50 Mb/s. Vermont's call for 3 Mb/s and 20 Mb/s reflects the 
state's uncertainty as to what extent video service should dictate the 
speeds of its broadband initiative. If the U.S. isn't lagging behind the 
Koreans in terms of TV, why should that be included in our broadband 
goals? "Today's video market is generally met through cable and 
satellite," Murray said. "Tomorrow's video market is [video-on-demand]."

The aforementioned proposals share one notable common trait: a call for 
symmetric bandwidth, a controversial notion because consumers generally 
use far more downstream bandwidth than upstream. "What are you going to 
use the upstream path for?" asked John Celantano, president of Skyline 
Marketing. "You don't need 100% symmetry today or in the near future."

According to projections made last year by Corning Cable Systems, video 
and gaming applications might require nearly 25 Mb/s of upstream 
bandwidth by 2012. Heavy users might require as much as 65 Mb/s upstream 
by then, but average users would need only 20 Mb/s, Corning predicted. 
What would users do with 100 Mb/s or 1 Gb/s upstream? Some say distance 
learning. Some say telemedicine or videoconferencing. But the catchall 
is the "X" app: The one that hasn't been invented yet, which users will 
nonetheless become addicted to once they have a Gigabit going both ways. 
That argument was easier to dismiss before YouTube-in the year following 
its launch, the Web site generated more traffic than the entire Internet 
did in 2000.

Part of the reason a number of disparate goals have surfaced, by many 
accounts, is the vacuum created by a lack of national broadband 
strategy. President George W. Bush's 2004 call for "universal, 
affordable" broadband was roundly criticized for being too vague, which 
may have encouraged others to avoid the same mistake.

Still, calls for blanket bandwidth, ubiquitous and symmetrical, may 
clash with the cultivated wisdom of the telecom industry. In an 
interview with Telephony last year, Carl Russo, CEO of broadband access 
vendor Calix, decried any quest for an abstract ideal broadband speed 
because real-world speeds are determined by a range of factors that vary 
by market-everything from a carrier's network plant quality and its 
local competition to the soil type in a given area.

"You hear all these arbitrary numbers," Russo said. "27 Mb/s. No, 42 
Mb/s. It's always going to be more over time. But the specific answer 
for any given market at any given time has many variables in it."

To the extent that the bandwidth debate hinges on which specific speed 
to deploy everywhere, Russo said then, "It's the silliest debate I've 
ever heard."


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://redwoodtech.org/pipermail/list_redwoodtech.org/attachments/20070520/717b24f6/attachment.html