Fiber broadband – it’s duh marketing! 

By: By John M. Celentano

Fiber broadband, and its alphabet soup of flavors -- fiber-to-the-premise (FTTP), -to-the-node (FTTN), to-the-whatever (FTTx) --always catches my attention. It’s interesting, it’s the next big thing, and it’s terribly misunderstood....

Capex with a capital C 

By: By John M. Celentano, Skyline Marketing Group

Capital expenditures (capex) remain the most closely watched metric for determining the direction and level of investment that telecom carriers are making in network equipment and services. The problem is that capex is never linear in its behavior. Predicting what the carriers are likely to spend on their networks is a black art, at best...

Infrastructure matters 

By: By Ed Gubbins

The numbers don't lie 

By: By Carol Wilson

Earnings reports are a study in spin -- read a press release announcing even the most dire earnings, and you'll be hard-pressed to find the gloom and doom among the highlighted statistics...

MDU Odd Couples 

By: By Ed Gubbins

Remember the opening to the Odd Couple TV show, which asked whether two divorced men could share an apartment without driving each other crazy? Here at the Broadband Properties Summit in Dallas today, I heard a building owner basically paraphrase that line, talking about telecom providers competing for customers in the same multidwelling unit...

Shoe on the other foot 

By: By Carol Wilson

When the cable companies decided to get into VoIP, they didn’t go into the marketplace touting the new technology they’d discovered and trying to attract new customers that way. Instead, they called it “digital phone service” and focused on its low cost, a long list of features and reliability. The approach paid off...

Public/private potholes 

By: By Ed Gubbins

This has been a tough week for public/private partnerships in the telecom sector. Last night the city of Corpus Christi, Texas, voted to take its Wi-Fi network back from EarthLink, which bought the 147-square-mile network a year ago for roughly the same amount it cost the city to build ($7 million)...

The big bandwidth lie 

By: By Vince Vittore, Yankee Group

Perhaps it all started with Brian Roberts. Standing on the stage on a balmy Las Vegas morning, Roberts wowed the bleary eyed crowd by downloading a 4 gigabit collection of encyclopedias and dictionaries in just a shade under four minutes...

Power crisis looming? 

By: By John M. Celentano, Skyline Marketing Group

Telecom power is a little like Rodney Dangerfield … it gets no respect! Well, not really. But, DC power is one of the last elements to be designed into a telecom network, after the packet-this and optical-that systems are selected...

Charting the global FTTH push 

By: By Carol Wilson

Last week’s release of the new fiber-to-the-home global ranking gave everyone something to crow about. The Asia-Pacific region continues to dominate the world in FTTH deployment, but the U.S. was among the top three nations in terms of annual growth and Europe cracked the 1 million FTTH line mark in late November, making 2007 the best year yet for FTTH...

The riddle of the convergence gateway 

By: By Joe McGarvey, Current Analysis

To answer subscribers’ cravings for communications and entertainment services that will flow across any type of access network and display on any type of device, carriers need to reconstruct the edges of their networks to perform the session management acrobatics required to fulfill these end user expectations...

DSL decline 

By: By Ed Gubbins

There’s been a lot of talk lately about efforts to pump more power and speed into DSL. Whether its bonding VDSL2 pairs, bonding ADSL with cable, reallocating upstream and downstream bandwidth, reducing noise on the line or just giving the signal a little boost, everyone’s interested in squeezing more speed out of DSL...

No tough times for telecom? 

By: By Carol Wilson

It seems inevitable that the slowing U.S. economy will begin to spill over onto the sales of the voice, video, data and wireless bundles that telecom service providers are now peddling. Or it did to me. But that’s not necessarily the case, according to some of the industry analysts I polled for this column...

Consumers want it all 

By: By Carol Wilson

Consumers want faster Internet access and cheaper prices, right? Apparently not. In the U.K., where broadband service speeds are going up and prices are falling, customer satisfaction is going down...

The new digital divide 

By: By Teresa Mastrangelo

Though I applaud Verizon for making fiber to the home a cornerstone of its future -- the FiOS network has reduced operating costs significantly while giving consumers faster speeds, higher quality, and unique services and features -- in reality, it poses a problem that highlights the potential for a new type of digital divide: fiber vs. copper...

Beyond our control 

By: By Ed Gubbins

Since we reported that Houston’s Optical Entertainment Network had abruptly and mysteriously discontinued service earlier this month, many of you have contacted me wanting more information on what had happened to the company. Get in line...

SureWest East 

By: By Ed Gubbins

Two weeks ago I reported on SureWest Communications’ stated desire to scale its fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) business through acquisition. At the time, I offered the only potential candidates I could think of, under time pressure, that might appear on SureWest’s short list...

It's an upstream world 

By: By Vince Vittore

Forget what you know about network engineering because it's worthless...

Survey says: AT&T is wrong 

By: By Carol Wilson

Last week, I asked what you thought about AT&T's plans to stick with its fiber-to-the-node strategy, in the face of industry criticism, and you didn't disappoint. Most respondents agree with the critics that AT&T is being short-sighted, and they brought up some issues I didn't tackle, such as...

FTTN the favorite 

By: By Ed Gubbins

AT&T’s pronouncement today that it will lower its deployment projections and raise spending on its fiber-to-the-node (FTTN) network will no doubt get a lot of attention. What probably won’t surprise anyone, however, is that BellSouth is essentially becoming the third of four Bell carriers to adopt FTTN, leaving Verizon (the carrier with the oldest copper) the only Bell to favor FTTP instead...

Standoff at the bandwidth corral 

By: By Carol Wilson

Most of the time, when presented with two absolutely conflicting views, I can figure out which one I believe. In the life-standard debates, Republican vs. Democrat, Cubs vs. Sox, chunky vs. creamy, I have no problem picking sides. When it comes to AT&T’s broadband strategy, however, I admit to being flummoxed...

How much bandwidth to the home is enough? 

By: By Rich Karpinski

Of course, that's the million-dollar question as service providers, led by AT&T and Verizon, experiment and invest to find the right amount of fiber -- at the right price -- to deliver services to the home...

Qwest’s fiber first 

By: By Ed Gubbins

Plenty of head-scratching followed Qwest’s description today of its fiber-to-the-node strategy. The company is moving ahead with a relatively modest but not inexpensive FTTN rollout, but those plans don’t appear to include a terrestrial video service offering...

Fiber and the flood 

By: By Ed Gubbins

Last week’s Fiber-to-the-Home conference was turgid with talk of a coming deluge of traffic that threatens to choke today’s telecom infrastructure...

Broadband before its time 

By: By Peter Bernstein

Almost 20 years ago, I helped write Probe Research's landmark study, “The End of the RBOCs,” in which we argued that one of the then-seven Bell companies would sell its outside plant in exchange for regulatory freedom to offer any service. This was a novel concept, and it made perfect sense. But it was totally premature...