Fred Baker wrote:

On Aug 24, 2009, at 9:17 AM, Luke Marrott wrote:

...

What are your thoughts on what the definition of Broadband should be going forward? I would assume this will be the standard definition for a number of years to come.

Historically, narrowband was circuit switched (ISDN etc) and broadband was packet switched. Narrowband was therefore tied to the digital signaling hierarchy and was in some way a multiple of 64 KBPS. As the term was used then, broadband delivery options of course included virtual circuits bearing packets, like Frame Relay and ATM.

of or relating to or being a communications network in which the bandwidth can be divided and shared by multiple simultaneous signals (as for voice or data or video) That's my humble opinion. Let them use a new term, like "High Speed Internet".

On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 7:30 PM, Fred Baker<fred@cisco.com> wrote:

On Aug 24, 2009, at 9:17 AM, Luke Marrott wrote:

...

What are your thoughts on what the definition of Broadband should be going forward? I would assume this will be the standard definition for a number of years to come.

Historically, narrowband was circuit switched (ISDN etc) and broadband was packet switched. Narrowband was therefore tied to the digital signaling hierarchy and was in some way a multiple of 64 KBPS. As the term was used then, broadband delivery options of course included virtual circuits bearing packets, like Frame Relay and ATM.

Fred, Historically there was no such thing as a "narrowband" Internet connection. We used "bandwidth" as slang for the speed of an Internet connection, possibly because in communications in general you can send more information in a wide frequency band than you can in a narrow frequency band and we knew that a phone line used a 4khz frequency band while a T1 used a 1.5mhz frequency band. When we started selling residential Internet connections that were significantly faster than a modem (i.e. DSL, cable modems) some marketing guru somewhere came up with the idea that if Internet speed is bandwidth then fast internet must be -broad- bandwidth. The same marketing gurus wouldn't be particularly guruish if they had then started referring to their modem products as "narrowband." So the choice was "dialup or broadband" not "narrowband or broadband." As the term caught on, it was the expanded by various marketing and salesfolk to encompass any kind of commodity Internet connection (commodity = not custom, that is not doing anything uncommon like dynamic routing or multiplexing) which was better than a dialup modem. When you start assigning CIDR blocks and what not, that's generally a business service rather than "broadband." So historically speaking, broadband is anything faster than POTS dialup. What it -should- mean for stimulus purposes is another matter... But I'd personally prefer to see the stimulus money only used for delivering rural high speed. The telcos and cable companies are in a race to deliver fast residential Internet access in any densely packed area where the governing authority isn't making it a costly PIA to install. Where they need the swift kick in the tail is in the low density areas. Really where they need the swift kick in the tail is in the product tying where you can't buy a high speed connection to J. Random ISP, you can only buy a high speed connection to monopoly provider's in-house ISP. Which means you can only get commodity service since monopoly provider isn't in the business of providing low-dollar custom solutions. But it sounds like that's outside the scope of what Congress has approved. Regards, Bill Herrin -- William D. Herrin ................ herrin@dirtside.com bill@herrin.us 3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/> Falls Church, VA 22042-3004

The background issue is whether satellite-based systems at around 200 Kb/s and high latency can be defined as "broadband." Since everyone in America - including the Alaskans - has access to satellite services, defining that level of service as broadband makes the rest of the exercise academic: everyone is "served." There's no economic argument for government subsidies to multiple firms in a market, of course. It's more interesting considering that DirecTV is about to launch a new satellite with a couple orders of magnitude more capacity than the existing ones offer. I seem to recall their claiming that the service would then improved to some respectable number of megabits/sec. Satellite ISPs locate their ground stations in IXP-friendly locations, so there aren't any worries about backhaul or fiber access costs. But to your actual question, "under-served" is of course quite subjective and cost is clearly part of it. RB Frank Bulk - iName.com wrote:

As one of the workshops discussed, does the definition of "underserved" and "unserved" include the clause "for a reasonable price"?

If the price is unreasonable, do you think its government money well-spent to subsidize bringing a competitor to a market that couldn't make it before? Or are there perhaps other ways to deal with that pricing issue?

Frank

-----Original Message----- From: William Herrin [mailto:herrin-nanog@dirtside.com] Sent: Wednesday, August 26, 2009 4:46 PM To: Fred Baker Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: FCCs RFC for the Definition of Broadband

<snip>

Really where they need the swift kick in the tail is in the product tying where you can't buy a high speed connection to J. Random ISP, you can only buy a high speed connection to monopoly provider's in-house ISP. Which means you can only get commodity service since monopoly provider isn't in the business of providing low-dollar custom solutions. But it sounds like that's outside the scope of what Congress has approved.

Regards, Bill Herrin

-- Richard Bennett Research Fellow Information Technology and Innovation Foundation Washington, DC

The trouble with broadband in rural America is the twisted pair loop lengths that average around 20,000 feet. To use VDSL, the loop length needs to down around 3000, so they're stuck with ADSL unless the ILEC wants to install a lot of repeaters. And VDSL is the enabler of triple play over twisted pair. And apparently a number of rural cablecos, who have a suitable copper co-ax plant, haven't seen fit to offer what they call "data service." It's ironic, since cable TV was actually invented to help the rural user. Apparently the purpose of the definition is to ensure that the subsidies don't do down the rathole of supporting easy upgrades, but as others have mentioned, one definition for "broadband" isn't very useful unless it's something like "10 times faster than what I had yesterday." I like to say first gen broadband is 10 times faster than a modem or 500 Kb/s; second gen is 5 Mb/s, and third is 50 or faster. Richard Bennett -----Original Message----- From: Eric Brunner-Williams [mailto:brunner@nic-naa.net] Sent: Wednesday, August 26, 2009 10:00 AM To: Luke Marrott Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: FCCs RFC for the Definition of Broadband In the applications I wrote earlier this month for BIP (Rural Utilities Services, USDA) and BTOP (NTIA, non-rural) infrastructure, for Maine's 2nd, I was keenly aware that broadband hasn't taken off as a pervasive, if not universal service in rural areas of the US. I don't think the speed metric is the metric that will make non-adoption in sparce clustered demographics distinguishable from adoption in denser demographics. I suspect that issues like symmetry of state signaling, latency, jitter, ... metrics that resemble what I looked for from MPI runs when benchmarking parallel systems, will characterize applications that may be distinguishable from the adoption, market penetration, renewal criteria from the applications that for reasons I can only conjecture, the standard "triple play" killer apps, which simply aren't driving broadband (whatever that is) adoption in rural areas. And no, I don't know what those better-than-triple-play-killer-apps-in-suburbia are. My meta-point is that I suspect there are two "broadbands", one where triple-play sells recurring subscriber drops, and one where it doesn't, and for the later a better definition would be more useful than a definition that reads (in fine print) "not available here". Eric Luke Marrott wrote:

I read an article on DSL Reports the other day ( http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/FCC-Please-Define-Broadband-104056) , in which the FCC has a document requesting feedback on the definition of Broadband.

What are your thoughts on what the definition of Broadband should be going forward? I would assume this will be the standard definition for a number of years to come.

Thanks.

On Wednesday 26 August 2009 23:16:17 Robert Enger - NANOG wrote:

As tedious as the downstream can be, engineering the upstream path of a cable plant is worse. A lot of older systems were never designed for upstream service. Even if the amps are retrofitted, the plant is just not tight enough. Desirably, fiber should be pushed deeper; the quantity of cascaded amps reduced, coax fittings and splitters replaced and so on.

On 8/26/2009 10:25 AM, Richard Bennett wrote:

...

The trouble with broadband in rural America is the twisted pair loop lengths that average around 20,000 feet. To use VDSL, the loop length needs to down around 3000, so they're stuck with ADSL unless the ILEC wants to install a lot of repeaters. And VDSL is the enabler of triple play over twisted pair.

An interesting question: as the population gets sparser, the average trench mileage per subscriber increases. At some point this renders fibre deployment uneconomic. Now, this point can change: 1) as we deploy fibre we'll get more efficient at it - I think VZ's cost per sub has come down quite a lot since they started the FIOS rollout. 2) the flip side of the cost to serve a subscriber is of course revenue, and if you can find other services to sell'em you can go further. may also be scope for tiered pricing 3) public sector investment Going the other way, as the population gets denser, it becomes harder to provide an acceptable broadband wireless service because of spectrum limitations. You either need more and more cells (=more and more sites and more and more backhaul), or more and more spectrum. Where's the crossover point? There are clearly places where some fibre investment (like L(3)'s proposed deployment of many more POPs) would make it possible to get good service out using radio from the end of the fibre, precisely because they are sparse. There are clearly places where fibre to the home will eventually arrive. Is there a broadband gap between the two groups, however, where it's not dense enough to ever deploy fibre and too dense to deploy good wireless? Or can we rely on FTTH for one lot and RTTR (Radio to the Ranch) for the other?

On Aug 27, 2009, at 10:04 AM, Leo Bicknell wrote:

In a message written on Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 09:58:22AM +0100, Alexander Harrowell wrote:

...

An interesting question: as the population gets sparser, the average trench mileage per subscriber increases. At some point this renders fibre deployment uneconomic. Now, this point can change:

This statement makes no sense to me.

The cost to dig a trench is cheaper in rural areas than it is in urban areas. A lot cheaper. Rather than closing a road, cutting a trench, avoiding 900 other obsticals, repaving, etc they can often trench or go aerial down the side of a road for miles with no obsticals and nothing but grass to put back.

So while mileage per subscriber increases, cost per mile dramatically increases.

I think you meant, "decreases", here. Marshall

The only advantage in an urban enviornment is that one trench may serve 200 families in a building, where as a rural trench may serve 20 familes.

But more puzzling to me is the idea that fiber becomes uneconomic. This may have once been true, but right now you can buy 10km or even 40km lasers quite cheaply. Compare with copper which for even modest speeds requires a repeater every 2-4km.

If you have to reach someone 20km from the CO, the cost of running the ditch-wich down the road in a rural area is not the dominate cost over the next 20 years. It's equipment. If the copper plant takes 4 repeaters to do the job, that's 4 bits of equipment that can fail, and will need to be upgraded at some point. Running something as simple as point to point fiber they can be provided with GigE speeds today with no intermediate equipment; the cost of a 20km GBIC is far less than the cost of installing 4 repeaters.

The problem with all of these is ROI, not cost. Somewhere along the line we've decided very short ROI's are required. Do you work at a company where an ROI of over a year is laughed at? When the original rural telephone network was pushed ROI's of 50 years were talked about. There's plenty of infrastructure built every day with ROI's of 20 years.

So it would cost $2000 per home to put in fiber. The margin on the service is $5 per month. It's a 33 year ROI. That's ok with me, it's infrastructure, like a road, or a bridge. We're still using copper in the ground put in during the 60's, 70's, and 80's.

-- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/

In a message written on Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 10:47:01AM -0400, Paul Timmins wrote:

Seems like a good idea to the technical side of me, but the business side sees a problem: that the employees like to eat in the 33 year span wherein the company isn't making a dime on its customers.

The last letter of ROI is Investment. When Ford decides to build a new car it sinks in billions of dollars over a 5 year period where it makes nothing. It then starts selling the new model, and finally reaches a point where it makes a profit, and uses that to find the next Investment. What Telecom companies have done is confused infrastructure and equipment. It would be stupid to plan on making a profit on your GSR over 30 years, after 10 it will be functionally obsolete. When it comes to equipment the idea of 1-3 year ROI's makes sense. However, when it comes to fiber or copper in the ground or on a pole it has a 20, 30, 40, or even 50 year life span. To require those assets to have a 1-3 year ROI is absurd. I remember when Cable TV was "new". I lived in a neighborhood without it, and the men with ditch wiches came through and wired the entire neighborhood. I don't think it had an ROI of a year, or even 5, but it has now, 30 years later, spawned a multi-billion dollar industry and allowed us to have things like Cable Internet, which weren't even invented at the time. Someone loaned them the money to do it, and it appears to me the investment performed well, overall. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/

JC Dill wrote:

IMHO the biggest obstacle to defining broadband is figuring out how to describe how it is used in a way that prevents an ILEC from installing it so that only the ILEC can use it. If the customer doesn't have at

Oh, that's easy. If the government pays for 90% of the plant cost, I'm sure ILECs would love to share it with everyone else. Until then, put your own plant in. As an added bonus, when you put your own plant in as a CLEC, you can just serve the profitable areas and leave the poor ILEC having to serve the barn 15 miles from the nearest neighbor. Jack

Joe Greco wrote:

We've *already* subsidized the telcos $200 billion for a next generation broadband-capable plant, that was supposed to be LEC-neutral...

Yeah, not every telco participated, though the RBOCs sure did.

So, we've *already* paid the plant cost, and we've gotten nothing much in return.

Looking at just Oklahoma, I'm not sure AT&T could get even 200kb to every household for $200b. More interesting, I'd be curious to see how well NSP's could handle the increase in traffic if every house support 45mb of Internet (not local video/voice). I'd love to see some good data on how the average throughput changes as the rates go up, especially with the continued increase of higher bandwidth video. Jack

Leo Bicknell wrote:

In most locations every home has electrical service. What's the cost per household?

$20/mo electric bill. That would so rock.

Most houses have a statem maintained road in front of them, what is the cost per household?

Paid for by City/County or more commonly by the land owner. New development in Lone Grove, for example requires the developer to put the road in, and then it's wrapped into the house cost. The city will not take over the roads otherwise. Lots of gravel roads here.

Many (although a lower number) of "city" water and sewer, what is the cost per household?

Way lower number. I'd be surprised if the "city" water and sewer here covers 25% of the city. Most water is cover by a rural water company.

For a number of reasons I would expect Broadband to be cheaper than any of those, per household; but should definately not exceed any of them in cost.

A friend has a well and there is a water pipe running just outside their property. They were quoted $20k to "hook on" to the water and they would still have to run the line themselves. A lot of residential services are paid for by the home owners by virtue of the developer. It is easier and more cost efficient to build out during new construction of homes than to retrofit plant after the fact. Jack

On Fri, 28 Aug 2009, Leo Bicknell wrote:

In most areas of the country you can't get a permit to build a house without electrical service (something solar and other off the grid people are fighting). Since it is so much more cost effective to install with new construction, why don't we have codes requring Cat5 drops in every room, and fiber to the home for all new construction?

And where does that fiber go to? Home runs from a central point in the development, so any provider can hook up to any house at the street? Deregulation means those lines should be accessible to any company for a fee. How do you give House A Verizon and House B Cox, especially if Cox doesn't support fiber? Granted, I don't do residential broadband deployments, maybe all of those issues are trivial, but something that needs to be considered. Just because there is only one player in a certain market now doesn't mean we shouldn't plan now for 10 players 10 years from now in the same market. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Peter Beckman Internet Guy beckman@angryox.com http://www.angryox.com/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

On Fri, 28 Aug 2009, Joe Abley wrote:

On 28-Aug-2009, at 08:14, Peter Beckman wrote:

...

And where does that fiber go to? Home runs from a central point in the development, so any provider can hook up to any house at the street? Deregulation means those lines should be accessible to any company for a fee. How do you give House A Verizon and House B Cox, especially if Cox doesn't support fiber?

His general idea was that the homeowner owns conduit and fibre from the house to a shared neighbourhood colo facility, and has rights to some space in that facility. The facility then acts as a junction point between houses in the neighbourhood (if the neighbours want to connect) or as a place where a service provider could build to in order to deliver service to the homeowner.

I like that idea, except for the problem that I don't want my neighbors to have access to the colo, or at least my feed, but I want access to my feed to I can reboot whatever device is connected there. There would have to be individual locked cages of some standard size so I could access and reboot or change my router out, but could not disconnect or modify my neighbors connection. It would really suck if my router locked up and it was locked in the colo room and I had to wait for someone to let me in to powercycle it. It would also really suck if my neighbor hated me and simply loosened my connection when they felt like it. I'm sure there are solutions to that problem, but moving the demarc line outside the home does bring up new and interesting challenges. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Peter Beckman Internet Guy beckman@angryox.com http://www.angryox.com/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Once upon a time, Peter Beckman <beckman@angryox.com> said:

And where does that fiber go to? Home runs from a central point in the development, so any provider can hook up to any house at the street? Deregulation means those lines should be accessible to any company for a fee. How do you give House A Verizon and House B Cox, especially if Cox doesn't support fiber?

I have two cable TV providers available at my house. They each have their own cable plant in my neighborhood; there are two runs in each easment, two sets of pylons for access (although they mostly alternate yards, so they aren't digging at the same place when burying new wires). If you switch from one to the other, the new one runs a new wire from their nearest tap and sends somebody else around in a few weeks to "bury" (under maybe 2" of dirt) the wire. On my block, the cable lines are at the back edge of the yard, running between the houses (down the middle of the block), while the phone company wires run along the easment at the front edge of the yard with the utility (power/water/sewer) lines. Not sure why it was done that way, except maybe to keep the cable guys from digging up important stuff on a regular basis (since people switch cable a lot). However, I've seen pictures of the old power lines in New York City and such, when there were a dozen or more power companies. I sure wouldn't want to see anything like that again. IMHO, we'd be better off with a public utility that manages nothing but the cable plant, running one set of wires (a few copper pairs, a coax or two, and a couple of fiber pairs) to each house, and then selling equal access to all takers (ILEC, CLEC, cable TV, direct to ISPs, etc.). The utility would be banned from selling any kind of service themselves, and would be a non-profit; they'd charge everybody the same fees for access to the same type of cable and they'd maintain the plant and colo facilities. -- Chris Adams <cmadams@hiwaay.net> Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.

Oh, that's easy. If the government pays for 90% of the plant cost

There have been countless times where a local government wanted to install the fiber *themselves*, only to have the ILEC file a lawsuit and/or petition (bribe) the State Legislature to prevent installation. Cheers, Michael Holstein Cleveland State University

Jc: Remember, some rural and high-cost areas can't support multiple wireline providers. May not even a wireless and wireline provider (though satellite is a given). So yes, pricing in these near-monopoly areas might be higher than in an area with real competition, but does that pricing mean the provider is earning an exorbitant rate of return? In the worst case, the price go as high, but no higher, than what would sustain a competitor to enter the market. Other than price regulation, I'm not sure what can be done to get around this potential problem. The areas that are unserved/underserved are the ones that have been least attractive to provide broadband, otherwise someone would have done it. The requirement to provide open access to competitors has obviously been a disincentive for the ILECs to apply. Frank -----Original Message----- From: JC Dill [mailto:jcdill.lists@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, August 27, 2009 11:51 PM To: NANOG list Subject: Re: FCCs RFC for the Definition of Broadband Leo Bicknell wrote:

What Telecom companies have done is confused infrastructure and equipment. It would be stupid to plan on making a profit on your GSR over 30 years, after 10 it will be functionally obsolete. When it comes to equipment the idea of 1-3 year ROI's makes sense. However, when it comes to fiber or copper in the ground or on a pole it has a 20, 30, 40, or even 50 year life span. To require those assets to have a 1-3 year ROI is absurd.

What happens if we have improvements in data transmission systems such that whatever we put in now is obsolete in 15 years? What happens if we put in billions of dollars of fiber, only to have fiber (and copper) obsolete as we roll out faster and faster wireless solutions? IMHO the biggest obstacle to defining broadband is figuring out how to describe how it is used in a way that prevents an ILEC from installing it so that only the ILEC can use it. If the customer doesn't have at least 3 broadband choices, there's no real choice, and pricing will be artificially high and service options will be stagnant and few. Look at what happened to long distance rates and telephone services once Ma Bell was broken up and businesses started competing for customers. I remember when we paid more than $35 a month for long distance fees alone (and about that much more for our basic service, including phone "rental") when I was a teenager in the 1970s. Without competition, with inflation, that same long distance bill would easily be over $100/month today. Yest today, more than 30 years later you can get a cell phone with unlimited minutes, unlimited domestic long distance, for $35/month (e.g Metro PCS). Let's not make this mistake again and let the ILECs use TARP funds to build "broadband" to the curb/home that only they get to use to provide internet services to the customers. jc

----- Original Message ----- From: "Chris Adams" <cmadams@hiwaay.net> To: <nanog@nanog.org> Sent: Thursday, August 27, 2009 4:52 PM Subject: Re: FCCs RFC for the Definition of Broadband

Once upon a time, Leo Bicknell <bicknell@ufp.org> said:

...

When the original rural telephone network was pushed ROI's of 50 years were talked about. There's plenty of infrastructure built every day with ROI's of 20 years.

How much of that was built in the last 15 years though (where now it needs to be replaced before it has been paid for)? In the 1990s, BellSouth pushed hard here, rolled out fiber to the neighborhoods, and deployed ISDN-capable equipment everywhere. ISDN was available at every single address in town by around 1995 (allegedly we were one of if not the first moderate-sized city with ISDN everywhere).

Then it turned out ISDN was a flop, and DSL came along, which wouldn't run over that nice big fiber plant. They had to start rolling out remote DSLAMs all over town. Shortly after they had most of the city covered, ADSL2 came along, and they had to start upgrading again.

I don't think ISDN was a flop. In the middle of the 90 years. The most KMU and bigger Companies have ISDN. At home it was at 1997 a trend two with Internet. Ok in Europe we haven't till begin of the 2000 no Clip Informations on a analoge line. This will be come to begin of the 2000. With ADSL and Clipinformations has the most people at home chanched back to an analog Line. For the companies is ISDN allready a must. You must see. At the End of the last century the most people has a phone, has a fax, has a Modem... The best way was ISDN. Now The childern are skypeing... or take an other IP Fon. Fax doesn't exist at home. The people has E-Mail. And Internet we have on ADSL or VDSL. with many speed. For phoneing 2/3 of the people take the handy (celuar phone) or IP fon. I think this is the bigest part in the last 10 years. Greetings Xaver

In a message written on Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 09:57:56AM -0500, Jack Bates wrote:

oversimplified, in reality, many of the FTTH comments in this thread imply bringing all customers back to the CO to keep active equipment out of the plant. This will tend to imply large fiber bundles leaving the CO and breaking down smaller and smaller as you get further from the CO. A large fiber cut may mean 128+ splices to restore service at 1 splice per customer.

The interesting technology here of course is split optical networks. A single fiber from the CO to a remote splice box, split to 10-100 customers. I'm not really up on this technology, but my understanding is that development is rapid in this space.

Hope they have disaster insurance. A good tornado or wildfire (or backhoe) can do some serious damage. I had both this year in Lone Grove. Fun. Fun. Fiber rings to remote field equipment still gives the best redundancy and maintenance cost (as there is less to splice over the longhaul to the remote system).

I hate to say it, but this was an advantage to "Ma Bell". Insurance is about spreading risk out over many participants. An alternative strategy is to pool everything into one company! :) My perception is that the rural telecom market is fragmented by many smaller players, which amplifies this problem. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/

On Thursday 27 August 2009 15:04:59 Leo Bicknell wrote:

In a message written on Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 09:58:22AM +0100, Alexander Harrowell wrote:

...

An interesting question: as the population gets sparser, the average trench mileage per subscriber increases. At some point this renders fibre deployment uneconomic. Now, this point can change:

This statement makes no sense to me.

The cost to dig a trench is cheaper in rural areas than it is in urban areas. A lot cheaper. Rather than closing a road, cutting a trench, avoiding 900 other obsticals, repaving, etc they can often trench or go aerial down the side of a road for miles with no obsticals and nothing but grass to put back.

So while mileage per subscriber increases, cost per mile dramatically increases. The only advantage in an urban enviornment is that one trench may serve 200 families in a building, where as a rural trench may serve 20 familes.

But more puzzling to me is the idea that fiber becomes uneconomic. This may have once been true, but right now you can buy 10km or even 40km lasers quite cheaply. Compare with copper which for even modest speeds requires a repeater every 2-4km.

True. But there is - there has to be - a limit, when the 70% or so civil works cost eats everything else. The limit may be more or less restrictive, but limit there is.