Surfing the Broadband Bit Stream

 

U.S. customer satisfaction with Internet service providers (ISPs) is at rock bottom. The bad news is that Americans hate their internet service providers as much as they hate airlines and subscription television services. This is the first year the independent American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) included ISPs in its annual ACSI survey, and the results are horrible. Verizon FiOS, fiber-based wired broadband service, had the highest satisfaction score of 71. The other ISP scores slide downhill until Comcast bottoms out at 62. Time Warner Cable is at 63 and ATT has a score of 65. The average aggregated score for American. ISPs is 65. A May 20 Web Pro News article puts these ratings into perspective: ISPs and only three other major U.S. industries have average customer satisfaction scores below 70. The airline, subscription telephone and social media industries round out the list. ISPs now share space at the bottom with the most joked about, complaint-generating industries in the U.S.

 

A May 20 Yahoo News article says that America's major beefs are with call center service, the variety of Internet plans offered by ISPs, and the quality of online video streaming. Customers also have a hard time finding alternatives in markets where competition between broadband companies is pitiful or nonexistent.

 

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In the United States there are 3,143 counties and county-equivalent administrative units in total, and Harrison County has been chosen as one of just more than 100 counties in the nation to receive an assessment through the Connected Community Engagement Program.

 

At a meeting at the Puskarich Library in Cadiz Tuesday afternoon, Connect Ohio announced the results of its Technology/Broadband Assessment which concluded that there was empirical evidence that there was a sufficient market to leverage "real credible last mile providers." A point that was validated by Terry Jones of Agile Communications who announced that his company will complete current development and launch their initial broadband coverage in the county next month.

 

"It is very exciting for the county," said Harrison County Broadband Project coordinator Sandi Thompson. "This is a great economic development resource and it will also provide opportunities for further developments in education and health care."

 

"We are just one of 12 counties in the state to be selected," Thompson stated. "To have Agile coming to provide broadband internet access to new communities which have had little or no existing broadband service available is just incredible."

 

"The opportunity to grow jobs, skills, and lure new businesses depends on the availability and use of high-speed Internet service," said Bart Winegar, Technical Outreach Manager, Connect Ohio. "Rural Appalachia Ohio faces a significant barrier to the opportunities that the Internet brings due to connectivity and adoption gaps."

 

"From a business standpoint, DSL is simply no longer sufficient," Winegar added. "Our assessment gives Harrison County a score of 76 out of a possible 120."

 

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Remember when the rumor mill’s favorite hobby was obsessing about an Apple TV set? It seemed like every week, some publication or other was reporting on the mythical device. Many assumed it would be the company’s next big revolution: iPod, iPhone, iPad ... iTV. Well, don’t look now, but Microsoft just unveiled a device that does most of what we expected the iTV to do, in the form of the Xbox One.

 

At its heart, the Xbox One is still a tried-and-true gaming console. But, as Microsoft made clear in its presentation, it’s also the company’s big push to own the living room. Hence the “One” branding: one device to rule your home's center of entertainment.

 

Isn’t that what many of us expected the Apple TV set to be? Think about the iTV’s supposed feature set:

 

Natural language voice control? Xbox One has that.Natural gesture control? One has that too, with Kinect much improved over the Xbox 360’s version.Seamless integration between live TV, streaming services, and gaming? Yep.

 

The Xbox One even has seamless side-by-side multitasking, so you can Skype with a buddy while watching Star Trek or tearing through rounds of ammo in Call of Duty.

 

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Acting Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn said that the agency is not slowing down when it comes to getting new spectrum on the market, even though the commission is down two members.

 

Clyburn, who made her first appearance as the interim head of the FCC at the CTIA Wireless Association's opening keynote, reassured the wireless industry that the FCC will continue to make more spectrum available, even as the agency prepares for a new full-time chairman and awaits the nomination of a Republican commissioner.

 

"The FCC wireless agenda remains focused," she said. "The national broadband plan put the issue of spectrum on the map. And the agency is doing a lot to make more spectrum available."

 

She said the FCC is on target to move forward with several efforts that will bring additional licensed and unlicensed airwaves into the market, including the upcoming incentive spectrum auction.

 

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"We don't focus on megabits, we don't focus on gigabits, we focus on activities," Frontier CEO Maggie Wilderotter stated at an investor conference last week, clearly trying to counter some of the buzz around Google Fiber. "We go to the activity set to get a sense of what customers are actually doing and the majority of our customers fit into that 6 Mbps or less category."

 

Granted many Frontier customers in our forums will tell you they're lucky if their copper and loop length supports anything more than 3 Mbps, and those who can get faster speeds may not be able to justify paying Frontier's steep price premiums. Frontier's massive deal to acquire Verizon's unwanted DSL networks also left them in a financial position where "focusing on gigabits" is somewhat of a pipe dream anyway.

Many telcos (like CenturyLink) are suddenly having to explain why companies presumably focused on offering broadband services are incapable of offering the kind of speeds now being offered by a search engine company. Granted a big reason these companies aren't offering anything faster or cheaper is because they face no real competitive pressure to do so, something Google Fiber is helping to painfully highlight in some markets.

Frontier is currently using a talking Buffalo to pitch a 6 Mbps DSL line for $20 a month -- if users tack on costly landline voice service and sign a three year contract.

 

 

Will blinking blue lights of servers soon fill the aisles that previously offered the Blue Light Special? Sears Holdings has formed a new unit to market space from former Sears and Kmart retail stores as a home for data centers, disaster recovery space and wireless towers.

 

With the creation of Ubiquity Critical Environments, Sears hopes to convert the retail icons of the 20th century into the Internet infrastructure to power the 21st century digital economy. Sears Holdings has one of the largest real estate portfolios in the country, with 3,200 properties spanning 25 million square feet of space. That includes dozens of Sears and Kmart stores that have been closed over the years.

 

“It’s an amazing real estate portfolio,” said Sean Farney, the Chief Operating Officer of Ubiquity. “The goal is not to sell off properties. It’s to reposition the assets of this iconic brand. The big idea is that you have a technology platform laid atop a retail footprint, creating the possibility for a product with a very different look to it.”

 

Farney is an industry veteran who previously managed Microsoft’s huge Chicago data center, and then ran a network of low-latency services for the financial services firm Interactive Data. He sees an opportunity to build three lines of businesses atop the Sears portfolio: data centers, disaster recovery sites and “communications colocation” in which Ubiquity leases rooftop space to wireless providers.

 

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Few electric power utilities are complying with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's voluntary measures to protect against the Stuxnet virus, according to a survey commissioned by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA). The survey found that the grid is the target of daily cyber attacks. In fact, one utility revealed that it is struck 10,000 times per month.

 

From our reports store: "Smart Grid Business 2012 to 2017," published by Memoori, analyzes the smart grid market's size, technologies, finance and needed investments, demand forecasts and more.

 

Yet less than 50% of munis and coops have followed through with FERC's recommendations. And fewer than 25% of investor-owned utilities have complied.

 

Waxman and Markey are pointing to the survey results as proof that legislation is needed. “The failure of utilities to heed the advice of their own industry-controlled reliability organization raises serious questions about whether the grid will be adequately protected by a voluntary approach to cybersecurity,” said Waxman.

Not surprisingly, many utilities disagree.

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Google is destined to remain a small player in the broadband service market, unable to dislodge cable companies such as AT&T Inc. and Comcast Corp., according to analyst Dexter Thillien of IHS iSuppli.

 

Outside of a few select metro areas, the costs and risks get too high for Google Fiber's 1Gbit/s broadband service, Thillien writes in a report issued Tuesday.

 

"While the deployment of Google Fiber to the cities may capture attention, the company's plans are minuscule compared to what its competitors undertake in the overall market," Thillien said in IHS's press release. "AT&T and Verizon have spent many billions of dollars establishing fiber networks in larger population centers, something Google is unlikely to be able to match."

 

Google's push so far, into four relatively small metro markets -- Austin, Texas; Provo, Utah; and the twin Kansas Cities -- has, in some ways, been opportunistic, enabled largely by the availability of dark fiber that it could buy up on the cheap. The company also has encouraged local governments to compete with each other in providing Google with incentives.

 

IHS is not the first to warn against expecting Google to light up fiber across the nation. Last month, analysts at Alliance Bernstein said in a report that they remained "skeptical that Google will find a scalable and economically feasible model to extend its build out to a large portion of the U.S., as costs would be substantial, regulatory and competitive barriers material, and in the end the effort would have limited impact on the global trajectory of the business."

 

A nationwide rollout would cost Google a good $11 billion over 5 years, the analysts concluded.

 

Still, IHS points out, Google is evidently determined to test the market and learn more about what consumers will do with gigabit service as a way to design new services and ad-placement strategies. In addition, it's safe to say that Google is out to pressure incumbents into generally improving their broadband offerings.

 

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Last week, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Wireless Bureau issued what should have been a fairly routine and highly technical Public Notice about possible alternative band plans for the 600 MHz Auction aka the Incentive Auction aka “that incredibly crazy, complicated deal Congress came up with last year where broadcasters sell back licenses to the FCC so the FCC can sell them to wireless companies.” Since public comment makes it clear that the various proposals present a lot of challenges (see my incredibly long and wonky explanation here), it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the Wireless Bureau asked for further comment after holding a band plan workshop a few weeks ago.

 

But Commissioner Pai issued a separate statement blasting the Wireless Bureau. In particular, Pai berated the Bureau for departing from what he called the “consensus framework” for one particular band plan – the band plan favored by AT&T, Verizon, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) and the largest equipment manufacturers. Pai ignored objections to the AT&/VZ/NAB plan and support from consumer groups (including Public Knowledge), competitors such as Sprint, or tech companies such as Microsoft. Over and over in his statement, Pai cited to the comments of AT&T, Verizon and NAB as proof of a “broad consensus” as if none of these objections existed.

 

As someone fairly active in this proceeding, who actually participated in the Band Plan Workshop, I am more than a little peeved. Yoo hoo! Commissioner Paaaaiiiiii!!! What am I, chopped liver? I am also more than a little irked at the allegations that the Bureau somehow behaved improperly in issuing the Public Notice. Pai’s accusation that the PN violates the Bureau’s delegated authority by soliciting comment on alternatives to the AT&T/VZ/NAB “consensus plan” appears designed to bully the Bureau into submission.

 

Setting my personal pique aside, as I keep trying to explain, letting the broadcasters and the largest wireless incumbents write the rules for the auction spells absolute disaster. If Pai genuinely wants to see a successful Incentive Auction, that means looking past industry “consensus” and getting into the very nasty and complicated details to figure out the right set of tradeoffs that will (a) get the broadcasters and wireless guys to the auction, but (b) not let them short the U.S. Treasury out of the cash it expects to collect in the process.

 

I vent and take one more shot at explaining this below . . . .

 

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Emergency rescue beacons from SPOT have been slowly but surely moving toward a satellite device that provides seamless real-time communication around the world – in other words, a satellite phone. The company has moved from pre-written messaging to custom type-and-send messaging, and with the new SPOT Global Phone, it now adds capabilities for real-time voice. The phone keeps you connected with friends, family and rescue agents even when you're standing in the middle of a roadless, fly-in wilderness in Alaska.

 

One of the last updates from SPOT, the SPOT Connect, partnered with a smartphone to provide text messaging and email sending for general and emergency use. It essentially added satellite text/email-sending capabilities to a cellular phone, vastly increasing the effective coverage area.

 

That solution was a little clunky, requiring two separate devices to realize its full potential. Those that considered purchasing one might have thought, "Why not just buy a satellite phone?"

 

Well, it would appear that SPOT was thinking that way, too. The manufacturer, whose owner Globalstar has satellite phones of its own, is answering the question with the Global Phone. The Global Phone works in places where the bars on your cell phone wither and vanish. Using Globalstar's satellite network, the phone delivers communications even in remote, isolated areas where the nearest cell tower is hundreds of miles away.

 

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