Fractals of Change

Vermont Files in Support of Using White Space for Mobile Broadband Access

The Vermont Public Service Department and the Vermont Telecommunications Authority have joined in an ex parte filing at the Federal Communications Commission urging that the Commission “move expeditiously to adopt the necessary technical parameters … and help make this promising technology [use of the so-called ‘TV whitespaces’] a reality.” Given that the docket has been open since May of 2004, a little expeditiousness is certainly in order.

“TV white spaces” is the term used by the FCC but it’s a misnomer; no broadcaster has actually paid for any of the spectrum at issue; no one is using it; in short; it’s wasted. Originally, before cable and satellite TV and before the Internet, it was reasonably believed that this spectrum would eventually be occupied by a proliferation of over-the-air stations. That’s not gonna happen. Vermont has as much radio spectrum “reserved” for over-the-air TV stations as New York City – 50 channels worth. That “reserved” spectrum is not of any use to anyone and won’t be until the FCC promulgates some rules for its use.

The filing explains the many reasons why this spectrum is ideally suited to meeting the needs or rural America for much better broadband and cellular coverage:

“First, rural areas like Vermont have relatively fewer TV broadcasters and therefore more unused ‘white spaces.’ Moreover, rural communities also have the largest geographic areas without access to wireless services. Second, the ability of TV frequencies to propagate over great distances and difficult terrain provides an opportunity to reach locations too economically challenging for existing wireless services. Third, the use of TV ‘white space’ for the provision of rural broadband is an alternative means of accomplishing the Commission’s universal service goal of deploying advanced services to all areas of the nation without requiring additional funding mechanisms. In fact, the use of TV ‘white space’ could actually decrease the demand for universal service funding at a time when the level of funding is facing heightened scrutiny.”

The filing makes clear that the petitioners do NOT think that this spectrum should be auctioned off at a high price. The greatest public good will come from making these public resources available “at low or no-cost to those entities willing to utilize them for such purpose [broadband and mobile access].”

It will take the concentrated political power of rural America to free up this spectrum to meet the rural need for better communication. But this isn’t urban vs. rural; urban areas also have something to gain from better spectrum availability and nothing to lose.

Not to over-dramatize but I see this as the public interest vs. entrenched communications interests. The TV industry would like to sit on this spectrum without paying for it “just in case”; they also may be worried about Internet use of the spectrum becoming a competing “channel” for delivering entertainment. Traditional communications carriers benefit from LACK of competition in the US broadband market; they have no reason to want to see competition growing like weeds (or, more accurately, like WiFi) in fields of open spectrum.

Google and other “Internet” companies do have an interest in keeping their paths to the consumer unblocked; competition would be good for that. This post is about a proposal Google has made for putting the unused white space to work.

Disclosure: My wife, Mary Evslin, is Chair of the Vermont Telecommunications Authority.

Happy Hour

Next Tuesday, Feb 5th, I'll be a guest on the Happy Hour show hosted by my friend Cody Willard (2d from left). The show is on FoxBusiness Network every weekday from 5 to 6 PM; appropriately, it's broadcast from the Bull and Bear Bar in the Waldorf Astoria. Below is an episode from last week.

Note: If you can't see the video below, link here.

Even if your local cable or satellite network doesn't carry Fox Business (DirecTV channel is 359, not on Dish) all segments from the show are available as video at www.foxbusiness.com. Trick is to go there, click on VIDEO in the horizontal menu bar, then scroll down to the Search for Videos box in the middle of the new page (don't use the search box at the top of the page), enter "Happy Hour", and click Search.  Each segment (guest) of each Happy Hour show is then accessible. Since it's broadcast live (and then, again, at 11 PM) the segment obviously won't be on the web until after it appears on the air but they do seem to go up almost immediately after they happen.

Don't know quite what we'll talk about but Cody is good at making almost anything fun and puncturing pomposity in guests. Hope you'll join us on TV or on the Web. BTW, you can rate the segment on the web. If you come to the bar, we can have a drink and you can tell me how I did in person.

P2P – Boon, Boondoggle, or Bandwidth Hog? – Is Metering the Answer?

Reader Aswath posted a comment on Thursday’s post suggesting that charging users explicitly for both upload and downloads pricing is “an equitable  solution” to the congestion problem ISPs claim is caused when peer to peer (P2P) services use some of each user’s “unlimited” Internet capacity to serve other users and as a substitute for the service provider having to buy more Internet bandwidth itself. Aswath’s a smart guy and knows his telecom; he’s right that this is a solution to the problem; but I think it’s the wrong solution.

P2P does involve shifting bandwidth usage (and usage of other resources) from the service provider to the users. If users choose to let Skype or BBC or Napster use some of their CPU power or disk storage to serve other users (as they actually do when they sign up for Skype calling, BBC iPlayer, or Napster sharing), that’s a personal choice (as long as they’re informed that’s what they’re doing).

You could say the same thing about “their” access bandwidth; they are paying for it. They should be allowed to use it as they please. But ISPs do rely on the fact that most access bandwidth isn’t being used most of the time. If they assumed it would all be used all the time, backbone networks would have to be many times larger than they are today and Internet access would cost us all many times what it costs today (especially in markets which are more competitive than the US).

If, as Aswath suggest, we all paid for what we actually used, we’d be very careful of what was done with “our” access bandwidth and not place more load on the backbone than we’re willing to pay for. We’d be very sure that applications we choose to run, especially P2P applications, don’t run up huge bills behind our back

“Granted,” Aswath writes, “users need to be retrained from the flat-rate pricing, but it eliminates ISPs' cries of wolf.” Seems to me that usage pricing for Internet use is to draconian a cure to the problem, particularly if the problem IS just ISPs crying wolf.

I think unmetered use constrained only by the size of the access pipe one chooses to buy (and the actual capacity you can obtain over that pipe in true life) has helped to give the Internet the enormous utility it has. Several reasons for this:

1. usage billing systems are themselves expensive and drive up the cost of service. Lots of records have to be kept of lots of little things. Detailed bills need to be produced; expensive conversations have to be had to resolve billing disputes. What if I download 100meg of a 101meg file and my Internet connection blinks (or I think it did) and I have to start all over? Am I entitled to a credit? Do I have to pay for spam?
2. people are afraid of accidentally running up a large bill so refrain from many activities. How do you know how many bytes is a VoIP call is going to be? Are you gonna tell your kids not to send you big pictures? Videos?
3. people hate complexity. As long as you’re going to be billed at all, there’s nothing simpler than having your bill be the same amount each month. You don’t have to reconcile it; you don’t have to worry about being overcharged. There are no unknowns in your budget. My experience is that people will pay a premium for simplicity (see this old post).

Moreover, simply charging per byte transferred doesn’t reflect the load each user places on the network as a whole. In general, data transferred during non-peak periods cause no incremental cost to the ISP nor do they cause congestion for other users. It’s only when PEAK loads grow that congestion is experienced and ISPs need to buy more backbone. Those users who transfer data to other users offpeak are actually increasing the productive use of the network at not cost to the ISP and making the network more useful to other users. Should they be penalized or rewarded for providing this service using their own machines and bandwidth?

Even during peak periods, it’s not clear that users running P2P applications actually add to total network load. Take the example of BBC iPlayer whose use involves copies of TV shows being legally transferred from one user to another. If this service really is popular, many of the transfers will traverse only a small distance on a single network. If the transfers were all being done from central BBC servers, all of those people who do not use the same ISPs as BBC will cause long cross-network transfers. ISPs would argue, however, that BCC wouldn’t accept the cost of running the servers and buying the access necessary for running all of these transfers directly so they simply wouldn’t happen.

Net, as always I appreciate Aswath’s thinking. Don’t agree this time with the conclusion and will try to present a solution to the possibility of P2P arbitrage in a future post.

The first post of this P2P series is here.

P2P – Boon, Boondoggle, or Bandwidth Hog? – The Dark Side

Yesterday’s post explained how peer-to-peer (P2P) applications use the processing power, bandwidth, and storage capacity of participants in a service rather than centralized resources. This makes such applications generally less subject to catastrophic failure, much less subject to running out of resources (since each new user brings new capacity as well as new demand), and much cheaper FOR THE PROVIDER of the application in terms of hardware and bandwidth required.

It’s the FOR THE PROVIDER part that’s the rub. Let’s consider the case of BBC’s iPlayer service. For a seven days after most broadcasts, UK residents over 16 years old can download the show free and store it 30 days on their PCs for later viewing which can be offline. The current version doesn’t even download ads with the shows.

Sounds great, right? Just what TV should become on the Internet. Not so fast, according to British ISPs. They complain that this new service will overload their networks and that BBC has no right to do this (although the British regulator has given them permission). The ISPs say they may have to throttle the number of people who can get the shows or “protect” themselves in some other unspecified ways. Usually (by Fractals of Change, at least) the UK is held up as a model of a competitive market for broadband services where issues of net neutrality don’t raise their ugly heads. What’s going on here?

I suspect that the fact that iPlayer is a P2P service is at the root of the problem that ISPs have with it. If BBC downloaded shows to those who requested them directly from its own servers and if the service proves as popular as it might, BBC would have to buy huge (or huger) pipes of its own into the Internet and ISPs would get some revenue from that. However, in a P2P implementation, it is likely that only a few seed copies will be downloaded directly from BBC to the first people who ask for a particular show. Subsequent requestors will get their copies from the first requestors. BBC describes it this way in their terms of services (TOS):

“When you install the BBC iPlayer Library you will also install peer-to-peer file sharing software from Verisign Inc. This software has a file share feature that enables other BBC iPlayer users to download BBC Content through your personal computer (using part of your upload bandwidth), via a secure link, to their personal computers. … When you use BBC iPlayer Library you shall not have the option to 'switch off' the peer-to-peer functionality as this is a core component of the BBC iPlayer Library.”

BBC also warns: “… you are responsible for paying all expenses that you may incur in connection with your access to and use of BBC iPlayer including your internet service provider charges and any excess charges to that provider if you have a cap on downloads and/or uploads…”

OK, fair warning if you’re in the habit of reading TOS carefully. But this warning does NOT appear in any of the marketing information for the service which I saw.

So why should the ISPs be upset? If the users upload too much, they’ll be charged more and the ISPs’ll get paid more – not by BBC but by the users themselves. The problem is that not all ISPs have upload or download caps. Those that do usually don’t advertise them very prominently if at all. Moreover, most users may be well below their caps now – almost certainly are. So the users will use bandwidth which, from their point of view has been sitting idle, and either won’t pay the ISPs any more or will be outraged if they are presented with a bill or thrown off an “unlimited” service for overuse.

It is highly unlikely that you use more than a small fraction of the bandwidth on your connection to your ISP most of the time – usually your connection is idle. But ISPs count on the fact that most connections are idle most of the time; there isn’t nearly enough backbone capacity to handle all the traffic which would result if all the local connections were busy all the time.

“Oversubscription” isn’t fraud; it’s the correct way to design networks which are inexpensive enough for their users to use. The phone network wouldn’t work if all phones (or even more than a small fraction of phones) were offhook at the same time. The highway system wouldn’t work if every driveway were disgorging and engorging its maximum capacity 7x24. The backbone of most networks is designed assuming that most spurs will be idle most of the time.

So if BBC succeeds in low cost distribution of its content without buying new capacity of its own and users substantially increase their use of download and upload capacity without paying extra themselves, the ISPs face either providing degraded service or a sudden need to upgrade their networks (or higher charges for uses of other providers’ networks).

Are the ISPs right to try to make BBC pay directly or indirectly for use of enduser bandwidth? Next post a smart reader suggests that Internet access be metered to avoid even the perception of P2P arbitrage at the expense of ISPs.

Timely note: Ironically, as I write this, P2P network Skype is experiencing a rare outage. P2P services are generally more outage resistance than services which depend on a centralized bank of servers which can be subject to all sorts of catastrophes but they’re not invulnerable. Some networks which perform most of their functionality between peers may still rely on a central server to coordinate. Also new software is just as likely to act up in an unanticipated situation when it’s run on a distributed network as it is when it’s run at a central site – this appears to be Skype’s problem; in fact, it’s a bit harder to back out a bad upgrade on a P2P service than a centralized one.

P2P – Boon, Boondoggle, or Bandwidth Hog? – Introduction

Depending on whom you ask, peer-to-peer (P2P) services may be the best thing that ever happened to the Internet or a diabolical arbitrage scheme which will ruin all ISPs and bring an end to the Internet as we think we know it. Some famous P2P services include ICQ, Skype, Napster, and BitTorrent. Currently a new P2P service called iPlayer from BBC is causing some consternation and eliciting some threatening growls from British ISPs.

P2P explanation for non-nerds: a P2P service is one in which transactions take place directly between users’ computers rather than on some central server somewhere in cyberspace. Google search is NOT a P2P service; when you make a query, a Google-owned server somewhere searches a Google database and then returns the answers to your computer. Napster IS (or WAS) a P2P service; the music you downloaded from it wasn’t stored in any central site or sites; it was on the computers of the people who contributed it and was transferred directly from their computers to yours without passing through any central server.

Advantages of P2P

Scalability: P2P services are inherently scalable. If each user is sharing part of the load, more users mean not only more demand but also more capacity. By contrast, if a service runs on a central host, more users will eventually mean that more resources need to be added at the host. If new host resources aren’t added, the service breaks or slows to a crawl or suffers in some other way.

Survivability: If you don’t have a central server, you’re not vulnerable to central failure – nor can terrorists target a service whose elements are widely dispersed. Related post: America’s Antiterrorism Network – Distributed Data Storage. The Internet itself can be considered a network of peers since it has no central site; it was designed to be survivable and its headless nature was an essential element in its survivability.

Hardware Economics: ICQ, an early chat service, was one of the earliest free Internet services to net a small fortune for its founders. The founders could afford to make the service free even as it attracted hordes of users because of its P2P architecture. They didn’t have to have revenue to buy lots of hardware because the work of making connections and even storing the directory was done cooperatively on the computers of their users. Making a service free is a good way to get lots of users in a hurry. But, if it is free and not ad-supported, lots of users can mean a big unfunded hardware bill (even though hardware is much, much cheaper than it used to be, even in the ICQ days). P2P is a resolution to this quandary.

Bandwidth Economics: Here’s where the controversy begins! Suppose that all Skype calls had to pass through central servers; those servers would have to have huge pipes to connect them to the Internet. eBay, Skype’s owner, would have to pay huge sums to ISPs for those huge pipes. That would make ISPs happy but Skype doesn’t work that way. Calls go “directly” over the Internet from one Skype user to another; even call setup is done by using the shared resources of online Skype users rather than a centralized resource (see here if you didn’t know you agreed to help connect other people’s calls when you agreed to the Skype TOS). So the bandwidth needed for both the calls and the call setup is provided by the users. If eBay had to provide all this bandwidth, Skype-to-Skype calls probably wouldn’t be free.

BBC is planning to make most of its content available free over the Internet for a limited time after showing (remember, they are funded differently than American TV). They say their system is P2P meaning that the shows will mostly travel from one user’s machine to another over those users’ own Internet connections rather than being served directly from BBC to each user . “Foul!” cry the British ISPs, “BBC isn’t going to have to buy more bandwidth to offer this service; they’re going to use the bandwidth users already have. Usage’ll go up. We won’t get any more revenue from anyone. Customers’ll complain that their Internet connections are getting slow.”

Who’s right? More here.

Mass Customization

Computers and the Internet have made mass customization possible. The long tail of goods and services now available to us are a beneficiary of that trend.

Amazon doesn’t look the same way to any two of us (unless we take cookies off our computers). It’s personalized to the books we’ve bought and even looked at; it knows what country we’re in, what language we use, and even our screen size. It presents itself to us in as relevant a way as it possibly can.

Google doesn’t give us all the same response to the same query. It has our query history; it knows where we are and what language we speak. It tries hard to be relevant to us individually.

The WSJ Online (paid service) says “welcome evslin”. When the front page remembers who I am (it regularly forgets even though I told it to remember), it contains information on stocks, companies, and subjects I care about.

In fact many of the newer web services are valuable only because they are configurable to include the people, places, and things we care about.

Broadcast television and radio are “one message fits all” media because of the technology they use to reach us. To the extent the audience is segmented by where they watch or what they watch, some tailoring of ads to audience can be done on traditional broadcast media. But the Internet, e-mail, and even traditional direct mail allow for much more targeting. So that’s where the action is in advertising. The next generation of ads we see – the ads we’re beginning to see now, in fact – are mass customized.

There was a fascinating article in the NY Times last week by Louise Story about the plans of advertising giant Publicis Groupe (Saatachi & Saatachi, Leo Burnett and more) for mass customization of the ads they create:

“The plan is to build a global digital ad network that uses offshore labor to create thousands of versions of ads. Then, using data about consumers and computer algorithms, the network will decide which advertising message to show at which moment to every person who turns on a computer, cellphone or — eventually — a television.

“More simply put, the goal is to transform advertising from mass messages and 30-second commercials that people chat about around the water cooler into personalized messages for each potential customer…

“Greater production capacity is needed, Mr. Kenny [David W. Kenny, the chairman and chief executive of Digitas, the guy in charge of the effort for Publicis] says, to make enough clips to be able to move away from mass advertising to personalized ads. He estimates that in the United States, some companies are already running about 4,000 versions of an ad for a single brand, whereas 10 years ago they might have run three to five versions. And he predicts that the number of iterations [sic] will grow as technology improves.”

I think he means distinct versions rather than iterations. And I don’t think this will eventually come to television as we know it; instead video will move to the Internet where mass customization is already embedded in the delivery technology.

IMHO, this is a positive development. Both consumers and advertisers gain by better targeting. I’ll certainly glad NOT to see the same old ad a million times. The losers are the broadcast middlemen who have a stake in selling the largely untargeted audience that they deliver with their technology.

Content will go where the ads which support it go (and where consumer ears and eyeballs are). So mass personalization is one of the reasons why content like TV shows and even professional sports will move out of the walled gardens of cable TV, will never really move into the walled gardens of individual cellular networks (but will appear on small screens), and we’ll each be able to enjoy more of exactly what we want – including the ads.

Prediction: Google WILL Bid for 700MHz Spectrum and WILL Win

There is an excellent business case for Google bidding megabucks in the upcoming 700MHz auction and investing even more to get a network up and running. I think Google is well aware of the value to them if they win and the harm they’d suffer if the duopoly wins instead. Google can make big bucks with a nationwide third network AND make things better for all Internet users AND improve the United States’ pathetic competitive position in the contest for broadband access. Hope this post doesn’t end up post-tagged “wishful thinking”.

Pessimists know that the spectrum which’ll be vacated by broadcasters in February 2009 is worth more dead than alive to the telco/cableco duopoly: it can potentially be used to provide a competitive service which will hasten the end of their landline phone business, force the mobile phone business to be open and much less profitable, end the telcos hopes of using their access monopoly to muscle their way into content ala cable, and end the cablecos hopes of using their current lock on content distribution to muscle their way into telephony. Oh yeah, and if a new open network with great roaming capability, high bandwidth, and low prices comes along which doesn’t have to say “Mother, may I?” to the owners of the wires that come into our houses today, there goes the duopoly’s ability to charge high prices for inadequate Internet access service.

So no question it’s worth the telco/cableco duopoly members bidding big bucks to make sure no one radical gets hold of this spectrum. The “use it or lose it” provisions that the FCC has proposed actually allow the winner to hold every square inch of territory and every hertz of spectrum for eight years with NO use and NO buildout before they forfeit anything. Not bad on a ten year license. Sure, they’ll build in the places where it’s profitable for even over-stuffed monopolies with high overhead to build and they’ll be careful not to create any surplus capacity anywhere which might rock the club.

How’s Google supposed to bid against that? And, if Google wins, it actually has to assure that a network gets built. It can only lose by a slow buildout or letting the capacity lie fallow. The negative to Google of not having third network is that the owners of the access duopoly may well find some way to dam and then collect tolls on Google’s revenue stream.

But there’s also a huge positive opportunity for Google and one it appears that the company is well-aware of. The opportunity, very specifically, is to resell whatever spectrum Google wins on a “shared spectrum” basis. When radio spectrum is licensed slice-by-slice to different users, most of it goes unused. In a letter to the FCC sent before the auction and before its “ultimatum letter”, Google said:

“As has been pointed out by various studies, the vast majority of viable spectrum in this country simply goes unused, or else is grossly underutilized. Our nation typically uses only about five percent of one of our most precious resources, and even that minimal use is inefficient compared to what is technically possible today…”

Google was asking the FCC to clarify that the winner of the auction would be able to resell spectrum as a wholesaler. Unofficially, the FCC did just that in remarks from the Chairman and all of the commissioners. If Google wins, they can resell as a wholesaler – the traditional carriers have dared them to bide enough to win and do just that.

For reasons I blogged about more fully here and here, spectrum to which there is open access and for which there is contention gets much better overall usage than spectrum allocated in slivers. WiFi and Bluetooth are brilliant demonstrations of the efficiency of chaos in allocating a scarce resource. Actually, so is the Internet itself. The fact that WiFi and Bluetooth frequencies are totally unlicensed has certainly helped fuel innovation in their use but nominal licensing fees without expensive usage monitoring or bookkeeping won’t break the model. Google could charge a small fee as part of the sale of consumer devices which use the frequencies and/or lease or auction rights to contend for the frequencies to providers in relatively small geographic chunks and make more money overall than a traditional carrier running a closed network. Google suggested this strategy in its letter to the FCC so is certainly considering it.

Google can compete both for traditional cellular business – at the wholesale level – and for wholesale Internet access business and suck the remaining value out of the landline voice business – all by licensing the rights to contend for “it’s” spectrum. Many small sales and very reasonable prices will yield more overall revenue than a few large sales at high prices because the overall usage of the spectrum will be enough more efficient to create more capacity to sell. Low prices will pull demand from the traditional networks. Low prices create new uses and new usage. We’ve seen that result with the wired Internet; we will see it in a radio access network.

This strategy may let Google avoid the expense of a national buildout. Radios using Google frequencies by virtue of Google licenses could go on existing towers and new towers built by others to take advantage of the new opportunity. There is no reason for all those radios to be part of a “network”; they just need the same Internet connections any ISP needs. Google may provide some of the backbone but it’s certainly not necessary for them to do that everywhere.

It will be even more profitable for Google to wholesale the spectrum coming up for auction than it would be for the cablecos and telcos to keep the spectrum safely out of competition with their existing networks. If Google can license a “network” into existence rather than build it themselves, they’re spared that expense and we get coverage everywhere faster.

Ergo, Google DOES have a good business case to outbid the other guys. And they’ve got the money. Hope it happens.

Fast Forwarding Reality

From an article in today’s New York Times:  “..more viewers [than in the past] are watching shows delayed rather than live, using TiVo and other DVRs. Research indicates those viewers are more likely to fast-forward through spots than those who watch live TV.”

Gee, that’s sort of strange.  I’d much rather fast-forward live TV than my DVR.  Fast-forwarding live TV gets you to the future.  You can fast-forward Bloomberg, for example, and know what stock prices are gonna be an hour from now.  Fast-forward ESPN to the end of the race and then call your bookie.

Lobbyists and PACs can fast-forward to November, 2008 and target their contributions only to the winners-to-be.  We can fast-forward CNN and find out what milestones the Iraqi government will meet.  We can find out which movies to see by fast-forwarding to next year’s Oscars.  We could also fast-forward some reality shows but we’d see the same stupid things then that we see now.  Same problem with fast-forwarding The Donald and most celebrities.

Back in the present, it’s pretty clear that pre-recorded programs are worth more than live ones most of the time because you can watch when you want and because you CAN fast-forward past the commercials and dull spots (full disclosure: I don’t always watch when the bad guys have the ball or are at bat.  I skip all celebrity news.).

So let’s fast-forward the technology news into the future.  Streaming (real time) video is a solution looking for a problem.  What we really want to do is download stuff fast and then view it at our own pace.  The interesting thing is that a straight forward evolution of today’s Internet gets us to faster and faster downloads while streaming is problematical. Expensive technologies like Verizon’s FiOS are designed to support the streaming we don’t really want.  Hmmm….

Related posts:

Who Needs Streaming Video?

Television and the Internet

Wideband via Cable

If broadband is good, wideband must be better; right? Well, maybe.  Yesterday an AP story carried on Forbes.com reported that Comcast CEO Brian Roberts demoed a cable modem providing downloads at the blazing speed on 150 megabits per second. Comcast’s standard offer around here offers only 6 megabits today so this is a big deal when delivered (depending on price, of course).  Only a new modem is required; not recabling of your home or Comcast infrastructure.

Om Malik is skeptical.  He posts:

“… from my personal consumer perspective, I don’t care if Roberts showed off this ultra-fast broadband technology. They still have to prove that it can actually deliver 6 megabits per second speeds it touts on a consistent basis. (Which it can’t; try using the service late at night in San Francisco, when the geeks on the late shift are logged in.)”

Om also points out that four channels of content will have to be displaced in order to make room to deliver web data at this speed.  The technology works by splicing multiple channels together. 

I’m more sanguine than Om on this latter point; the content is going to move to the web and off channels faster than most people think. Because of the impending collapse of the channel model, Comcast is smart to begin preselling the idea of using the capacity they have from the curb to the house for general web access.  A quote from Brian Roberts seems to indicates that he understands this reality much better than most other phoneco and cableco execs.

“It's an exponential step forward and we're very excited," Roberts said. "What consumers actually do with all this speed is up to the imagination of the entrepreneurs of tomorrow.”  He knows he’s selling bandwidth and not content!

Unfortunately, there is nothing in the announcement about upload speeds. I suspect that higher upload speeds will be much harder to achieve because of the design of the cable networks built for a time when rich content was centrally provided.

Moreover, the congestion Om cites may well get worse as more web access bandwidth is provided to each home. The cable network is essentially a party line with not much more capacity on its trunk lines than on the lines running into the individual houses.  Remember, it was designed to bring the same content to everybody at the same time with only a tiny sliver of Internet access, interactive video, and video on demand.  If many people start using 150 megabits of download capacity or anything near it at peak times, there’ll be traffic jams (but they’re curable with reasonable investment; the Internet grows from one prediction of catastrophic traffic jams to another).

Related posts:

Television and the Internet

Television on The Internet – How much Bandwidth is Needed? Where?

Daddy, What’s a Channel?

Good News from the FCC

Yesterday the Federal Communication Commission announced some proposed rules and a comment period for the very important upcoming auction of 700MHz frequencies which television broadcasters are scheduled to vacate in February 2009. The news is about as good as it could possibly be for using these frequencies to greatly enhance the quality and availability of broadband access in the United States – although it could have been a lot better if Congress had permitted this spectrum to be opened up like WiFi frequencies instead of auctioned off. 

According to CNET: “Since Congress decided in 1997 to re-auction the 700MHz spectrum used to transmit analog TV signals, communication policy makers have viewed this sliver of the airwaves as a panacea to all the nation's broadband-access problems.”  Just as a reminder, this spectrum is ideal for access use since it goes through walls and leaves and travels about far times further than the frequencies usually used for wireless Internet access today.

The critical question is what the rules of the auction will be. Will the rules, for example, permit existing megacarriers and cable companies to buy up all the available bandwidth and perhaps prevent it from being used to compete with their DSL and cable broadband offerings? Will huge national blocks be auctioned off and then, perhaps, lie fallow in rural areas?  Will there be requirements that winners of the auction actually offer services over the “airwaves” they buy? Will there be any net neutrality requirements placed on incumbents?  The FCC didn’t actually decide any of these issues but they did give them prominence in the list of what they are asking for comment on.

Equal in importance to the questions the commission asked are the statements of the commissioners, particularly Chairman Martin who has not been known as an advocate of competition for established telcos:

“One important factor spurring both increased broadband availability and reduced prices is competition among broadband platforms. 

“In much of the country, however, consumers have a choice of only two broadband services: cable or DSL.  And in some parts of the country, consumers don’t even have that choice.  The most important step we can take to provide affordable broadband to all Americans is to facilitate the deployment of a third ‘pipe’ into the home.  We need a real third broadband competitor.  And we need a technology that is cost-effective to deploy not just in the big cities, but in the rural areas, as well.  All Americans should enjoy the benefits of broadband competition – availability, high speeds, and low prices.

“The upcoming auction presents the single most important opportunity for us to achieve this goal.  Depending on how we structure the upcoming auction, we will either enable the emergence of a third broadband pipe – one that would be available to rural as well as urban American – or we will miss our biggest opportunity…”

He’s right that we need more broadband competition and that this auction is key to making sure we have it.  He’s wrong, I think, to assume that the answer is a single third competitor as he seems to imply; it may be establishing a way for many companies to compete.  But, even if we got just a third competitor, we’d be much better off than we are today with an effective duopoly in urban areas and no service in many rural areas.

A coalition of Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Union, Free Press, Media Access Project, New America Foundation and Public Knowledge has asked the FCC to auction half the available bandwidth with the restriction that the winner must agree to provide “open access”.  They are claiming preliminary victory (justifiably) since the FCC has included this proposal in the request for comments.

Open access means that winner agrees not to block or discriminate against any types of traffic (basically net neutrality) and allow free connection of devices in its spectrum with just a requirement that the devices not interfere with network access by others. Moreover, open access in the coalition definition also means that the winner must make at least half of its capacity available at wholesale on a non-discriminatory terms. If implemented (which is difficult) and enforced (hasn’t always happened) , these provisions would turn this new spectrum into a platform for competition from many parties.

Harold Feld, senior vice president of Media Access Project, a nonprofit law firm representing the coalition before the FCC, is quoted in the CNET article: “Pretty much everyone agrees this is the last big piece of spectrum to be auctioned off for the foreseeable future. And if you don't get the rules right, the existing players could control the auction and then nothing in our wireless broadband future will change. But if they do get them right, there is great potential for some dynamic innovation.”

Related posts:

Spectrum Serendipity

Internet 2.0 is Open Spectrum

Spectrum Serendipity

The facts:

1. In rural areas we don’t have very many over the air television stations;
2. in rural areas we don’t have enough choices (if any) for broadband Internet access.

The happy conclusion: fact #1 can lead to the a solution to the problem posed by fact #2. The radio frequencies (spectrum) not being used by the television stations which aren’t here are ideal for use to provide very high quality Internet access at a reasonable price.

Over-the-air UHF television operates today in a frequency band from 470 to 806MHz not counting 608-614MHz which are used for radio astronomy. After February 7, 2009, which is the deadline for switching to digital TV, over-the-air broadcasters will no longer be allowed to use the frequencies over 698Mhz and new frequencies have been assigned to existing licensees.  The freed-up spectrum will be allocated to a number of new uses including public safety and “new wireless services”.  There is a fierce fight going on over how this auction should be conducted.  These frequencies are justifiably referred to as “beachfront property” since signals on them travel long distances and penetrate not only leaves but also walls.  That’s why they were used for TV to begin with.

Rural areas will have to fight hard to make sure that the auction does not result in frequencies being bought nationally and built out only in urban areas.  If past experience is any guide, that is exactly what is likely to happen.  But that is not the subject of this post.

The FCC has announced its reallocation of frequencies 470-698MHz (Channels 14-51) for over-the-air TV use post 2/7/09. Each over-the-air channel uses 6MHz of bandwidth.  These channels occupy frequencies which are even better for Internet access than the higher frequencies the FCC is getting set to auction off. Much more importantly, most of these channels are not used and not needed for broadcast TV in rural areas.  For example, only eight channels are allocated to stations based in Vermont because that’s all the channels there were claimants for.  By contrast, there are seven channels allocated to stations physically located in New York City. Bad for over-the-air TV watching here in Vermont; potentially great for wireless Internet access.

But – hold your hat – there is no current plan to make these channels which are “reserved” for TV use available for any other use.  Presumably this is because someday someone may show up and want to start another over-the-air channel here. This dog in the manger approach is terrible public policy.  The channels which aren’t in use here and in other rural areas could be a huge part of the solution to our lack of good Internet access. To repeat, many of these channels are idle today; even more will be idle in 2009.  They ought to be used.

Allowing for the fact that channels in use in contiguous parts of New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Quebec restrict the use of some frequencies in some parts of Vermont and even allowing for the unlikelihood that some new over-the-air TV stations will be started here despite the existence of cable, satellite, fiber-to-the-home, and the Internet, there is probably more unneeded frequency in this band available for immediate use in Vermont than in the whole slice of spectrum the FCC is getting ready to auction off.

FCC action is required to make that spectrum available. Microsoft, Google and others have suggested one technical solution for accommodating the fact that different frequencies are available in different locations. Broadcasters have predictably been critical of this proposal; they think it is “their” spectrum even if they aren’t using it or paying rent for it. Big telcos and cable companies aren’t eager for this spectrum to be put to uses which would challenge their effective duopoly control of Internet access.

To much of America, what happens with the unused frequencies could be and should be much more important than who manages to grab off the relatively small amount of frequency that will go in the planned auction.