Category Archives: News

The FCC is expected to hand down some new rules on Wednesday to ban exclusive provider contracts in apartments, condos and other multi-unit dwellings. This is a reaction to cable rates that have jumped 93% in the last decade. FCC Chair Kevin Martin noted that cable rates often drop 30% or more when a second provider enters a market, proof positive that monopolies are bad for consumers.

Not only is this great news for those residents, it's also great news for UTOPIA. Part of their problems with expansion have been centered around complexes locked into these contracts who are unwilling to allow installation while the contracts are still in effect. With a ban on such arrangements, UTOPIA would be free to expand at a much faster rate.

The rumor mill at DSL Reports says that UTOPIA residential connections will be beefed up to 50Mbps in both directions. That means downloads at least 7 times faster than cable or DSL and uploads over 60 times faster. The price? Still $40 a month as always. Even though the speeds are being upped, you still have a 100GB per month cap on transfer. Obviously no ISP is going to stay in business if they give you a truly all-you-can-eat experience with bandwidth greater than a DS3. There's no word on where commercial connections are going, but I'm expecting somewhere in the 100Mbps range.

So where's the bottleneck now? Probably in the crappy router sitting on your desktop. Most home products from Linksys, D-Link, Netgear and other manufacturers only have a 10Mbps port for the WAN connection. Most of the ones with a 100Mbps WAN can barely muster 14-15Mbps through the port. Your options are to either upgrade to a high-end router (models with a 1Gbps port sustaining 250Mbps can run $200 or more) or build your own Linux-based router. I'll write up some more later so you'll have some idea where to go when your hardware fails to keep up with your connection.

After what seems like an eternity of telcos and cablecos not understanding that we like to send as well as receive data at blazing speeds, Verizon decided to launch a 20Mbps symmetrical connection for home users. The real shocker? The price tag, a paltry $65 a month, shockingly low for an incumbent offering these speeds. But hold up there, cowboy; only select residents in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut will be able to get the service right now.

Analysts are predicting that this move might put pressure on cable companies to start competing on the upload side of things as well. Most DSL and cable modem connections download about 10-20 times faster than they'll upload, a big gap that forced the FCC to make "broadband" 200K in both directions and "high-speed" 200K in one direction only. I'm hoping that maybe Comcast or Qwest will give us a bit more than the lousy 768K we currently have to suffer with lest Verizon decide to "outgrow" its current territory.

There's all kinds of good news on the municipal fiber front. First up is the fiber optic system built in Burlington, Vermont. The system currently serves about 2,000 of the city's 39,000 residents and is expected to provide up to 20% of the city's general fund when the bond debt is retired in 15 years. So what's their secret sauce? They built out the network for use by city government first, then expanded the service to residents living near the initial backbone. The project is projected to have positive cash flow by 2009.

Ashland, Oregon had to learn things the hard way. After piling up a solid $4M in debt from their retail service, the city converted the network into a UTOPIA-style wholesale network that has netted the city about $350K in profits. It's not enough to pay down all of the previous losses, but it's certainly going to cover the payments on the debt and has introduced a lot of new telecommunications providers to the city. Because of Ashland's success, Edmonds, Washington is looking at building their own wholesale fiber optic network to serve the Seattle suburb.

Meanwhile, most muni WiFi continues to perform poorly and bleed money like a compulsive gambler at Harrah's. According to Slate, the problem is a mixture of bad technology and unrealistic expectations by cities. St. Cloud, Florida is one of the few exceptions because the small town treats it not like a revenue source but as a public infrastructure. They have a 77% participation rate from residents. Of course, part of this could be solved with municipal WiMax deployments, especially if big players like Sprint reverse course and leave that particular market.