Let's Not Forget the Lobbyists
CircleID | Telecom
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2y ago
Common Cause recently released a report, Broadband Gatekeepers, that describes the influence that lobbyists have on broadband policies. The numbers are staggering — the ISP industry spent $234 million lobbying the 116th Congress (2019 and 2020). That number is likely understated since the rules on reporting lobbying are lax, and enforcement is almost nonexistent. That number doesn't include the huge amounts of lobbying efforts at State legislatures. The evidence of lobbying is all around us in the industry, yet we don't talk about it very much. Consider the massive push for 5G a few years ago ..read more
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Let's Get the Politics Out of Infrastructure
CircleID | Telecom
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2y ago
ASCE 2021 Report Card for America's Infrastructure I believe the infrastructure of our country, states, and counties is critically important to our future. If we can get focused on infrastructure and global warming, the future for our kids and grandkids will be bright. All it takes is vision, leadership, and investment. Unfortunately, the issues have become politicized. In the case of infrastructure, the politicians have a tough time just defining what infrastructure is. The news is all political with very little substance about the specifics. Fortunately, the facts are available, thanks to th ..read more
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Beavers Kill Fiber Route
CircleID | Telecom
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2y ago
Beavers chewing through fiber cable cause hundreds lose internet in a canadian remote community. (CircleID) An article from CBC earlier this year reported that beavers had chewed through an underground fiber and had knocked 900 customers in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia off broadband for 36 hours. The beavers had chewed through a 4.5-inch conduit that was buried three feet underground. This was an unusual fiber cut because it was due to beavers, but animals damaging fiber is a common occurrence. Squirrels are the number one source of animal damage to fiber. It's believed that rodents love to ..read more
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Satellites and Cellular Backhaul
CircleID | Telecom
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2y ago
Elon Musk recently announced that he was going to be providing cellular backhaul from the Starlink constellation of satellites. This makes a lot of sense from a financial perspective in that it avoids the costly wired fiber networks needed to reach rural cell sites. This is clearly a shot across the bow for companies that currently bring fiber connectivity to rural cell sites. There are numerous rural middle-mile networks that mostly survive by providing backhaul to cell sites. While there has been downward pressure from the cellular carriers on transport rates — it's likely that Starlink or o ..read more
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President Díaz-Canel, Cuban Internet Is More Than Facebook on Cell Phones – Don't Be Afraid of It
CircleID | Telecom
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2y ago
Ramiro Valdés Menéndez "The Internet could and should be controlled and used to serve peace and development." — Ramiro Valdés Menéndez, Cuban Minister of Informatics and Communications, 1997 As a result of Internet service interruption during the recent anti-government protests in Cuba, Florida Senator Rubio and Governor DeSantis and President Biden have called for measures to strengthen and guarantee Cuban Internet connectivity, but that won't happen until the Cuban government recognizes that doing so is in its long-run interest. I have seen several suggestions that we smuggle end-user satell ..read more
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Another Portent of the Decline and Fall of the Telco
CircleID | Telecom
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2y ago
The Swedish carrier group Telia has recently announced the sale of its international wholesale business to Polhelm Infra, an infrastructure investment manager jointly owned by a number of Swedish pension funds. Why would a telco operator sell off what was a core part of its operation to a pension fund? The Internet was originally conceived as a telephone network for computers. (I should mention that this was not a concept that was unique to the Internet at the time. Most computer networks were designed using a similar transactional model.) By that, I mean that, like the human users of a teleph ..read more
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Computing Clouds in Orbit – A Possible Roadmap
CircleID | Telecom
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2y ago
An artist's impression of the Exolaunch's Fingerspitzengefühl satellites deployment into orbit. Illustration: EXOLAUNCH Last week, I predicted that much of the Internet and most cloud datacenters would launch into space in the next ten years. Today the only part of the Internet in space is a very small amount of "bent-pipe" access: signals which go from a user to a satellite and bounce back down to a ground station which feeds them into the terrestrial internet where all processing is done and all queries answered by internet-connected servers, many of them in cloud data centers. Responses fol ..read more
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The Dumb Pipe Question
CircleID | Telecom
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2y ago
Every few years, I read something that resurrects the old question of whether ISPs should be dumb pipe providers or something more. Some ISPs have fought against the idea of being dumb pipe providers and want to believe they are far more than that. The latest event that raises this question anew is AT&T's debacle with ditching DirecTV and WarnerMedia. AT&T was clearly not content with being considered as only a dumb pipe provider. The company was lured by the perceived higher earnings of both cable companies and media companies, and AT&T went on a buying spree and purchased both D ..read more
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The Internet and the Cloud Are Going Into Space
CircleID | Telecom
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2y ago
Unlike Bezos and Branson, they're going to stay there. Today we have space-based internet access and a terrestrial internet; within ten years, we'll have a space-based internet. Internet traffic will travel more miles in space than on terrestrial fiber. By that time, the great cloud data centers of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and their competitors and successors will mostly be in orbit as well. Five years from now, this transition will be obvious, accepted, and well underway — or this will turn out to be the dumbest prediction I've ever made. Starlink is not the cause of the Internet moving to ..read more
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5G Base Stations $13,000 in China
CircleID | Telecom
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2y ago
Most carriers don't order 200,000 5G base stations, so they will pay more, but that's the actual price for the joint procurement of China Telecom and China Unicom. The 200,000-300,000 cells the two jointly are upgrading are probably more than the entire rest of the world will add. The second Chinese network, jointly built by China Mobile and China Broadcast, is growing even faster. Huawei and ZTE will probably split 90% of the order, with Ericsson, Nokia, and perhaps CICT/Datang getting the rest. Ericsson was so worried they'd lose their share — traditionally 10% — that CEO Börje Ekholm actual ..read more
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