Summer Views on Bandwidth

US to Make a 10-year, $15.5B Bet on Broadband

By the time you read this, I will have temporarily relocated my office from a suburban office park in Framingham, MA to Bayview Beach on Cape Cod. You can reach me here for the next two weeks. 

As you can see, the one obvious drawback is that the new office has no  Ethernet access. Forget wireless. But, maybe that’s the point. Unplug. Get off the grid. Recharge naturally.  

Sounds like a plan. Yet, at least once each week, I’ll make the short trek to the town library where I will sit and wave my laptop like a divining rod in the hopes of striking free wireless. If I time it right, in a minute or two The View From Inside will be on its way to our production department. If not, I’ll have to huddle there with the other escapees until the Wi-Fi gods smile on me. 

4 Mbps in 2020 … as quaint as dial-up today?

You may have read about the US government’s National Broadband Plan ) that will ensure that every American has access to broadband by 2020. On one hand, that’s a pretty ambitious goal: Today, an estimated 100 million Americans lack broadband access. The plan is to provide every citizen with actual download speeds of 4 Mbps. This will be funded by shifting up to $15.5B from the Universal Service Fund to the new NBP, and is scheduled to occur over the next decade.

I can’t help, but think that in the year 2020, 4 Mbps will look as quaint as dial-up does today. A few weeks ago, I referenced the Cisco Visual Network (VNI) Index, 2009-2014.  By 2014, Cisco anticipates that there will be 766.8 exabytes of data flying around our networks. More than 90% of the traffic will come from video transmissions. Should the goal be at least 10 Mbps, or much higher?    

In a similar vein, at the end of March, I asked What Would You Do with a 100 Megabit Network? ). At 100 Mbps, you can download a 4 gigabyte HD movie in 5.3 minutes. That would take more than 2 hours and 12 minutes at 4 Mbps.  What will media look like 10 years from now? What impact will the nascent 3-D mania have on file sizes?

Want 30 Mbps or 100 Mbps?  Move to Seoul or Tokyo

I remain surprised that the US government seems to have settled on 4 Mbps and was curious as to what other countries are doing.

Last Tuesday, the online edition of MIT Technology Review featured an intriguing article and graphic on “The Global Broadband Spectrum.” ).  As shown on the chart, many US broadband subscribers enjoy 10 Mbps access at a low cost in relation to their income. Our counterparts in Japan and South Korea also have fast access at modest costs. Many Japanese homes can connect to the 100 Mbps fiber network. South Koreans current have 30 Mbps broadband. The plan is to grow this by 10X over the next two years.

The author also points out the high cost burden of broadband access in developing countries. For example, would-be subscribers in India, Indonesia, and Egypt should expect to pay 6-16% of their income for broadband. And that’s before AT&T and Comcast get approval to wire their countries.

Each July, when I power on my laptop in Bayview, the “no signal strength” icon immediately reminds me of how we take high speed access for granted. As I have been writing this, I’ve periodically checked on the speed of my wireless connection in Framingham. It varied from 36 Mbps to 54Mbps.

But, for now, time to unplug and make my first decision of the day:  Do I start with Sebastian Junger’s “War” or Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”? 

While I wrestle with that, would you mind passing the SPF 8?  This office gets a lot of sun.

Comments

[Richard]

Your wireless connection (assuming g or n) will always vary between 36 and 54Mbps regardless of your broadband speed. They are not connected, so why are you making that connection in this article? If you aren't you should edit this, so it does not appear to be.

[Wayne Mercer]

Interesting to settle on the 4mbps. The Australian govenment have also launched a national broadband project where the connection speed is meant to be 100mbps. When they announced that I thought it was unambitious given Alcatel-Lucent have reported that they can reach speeds of 15.5 tbps with repeaters every 90 kilometres . Given this I would have thought that a fibre optic network with at least fibre to the node would have been able to get at least 1 gbps (as is being done in Hong Kong).