Showing posts with label Broadband Internet access. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Broadband Internet access. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Wireless Broadband's Big Appetites

spectrum
spectrum (Photo credit: Free Press Pics)
It is good news that the bad news is not all that bad. There will not be a spectrum crunch. But there is one now. The possibilities have not been realized.

The Spectrum Crunch that Never Really Was
Cisco estimates that mobile data traffic will grow by a factor of 18 by 2016, and Bell Labs predicts it will increase by a factor of 25..... when wireless networks are overloaded, the real culprit may be inefficient use of existing spectrum rather than a fundamental shortage. ..... "We don’t have a spectrum crunch so much as we have a spectrum policy crunch .... The so-called ‘spectrum crunch’ really reflects artificial spectrum scarcity" ..... “The challenge now is to extend those proven successes to enable wider-area broadband access using other underutilized portions of the spectrum.” ... such strategies could increase wireless capacity by thousands of times...... half the new demand through 2015 would be handled by small cells—Wi-Fi plus cells handling frequencies used by 3G and 4G networks ...... it might be possible to increase capacity tenfold even without spectrum sharing. ..... rigid regulations don’t allow the use of flexible new technologies like cognitive radio ...... “Right now, we have a 15- to 20-year backlog of new technologies and architectures, including sharing and small cells, which can take us a long way into the future.”
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Thursday, July 26, 2012

Gigabit Fast

Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...
Image via CrunchBase
Google Unveils Superfast Internet in Kansas City, Mo.
purchasing the gigabit Internet service for $70 a month ..... the current average household broadband speed was only slightly faster than it was 16 years ago .... Google wants to provide such high-speed Internet to flex its muscle in Washington, where policy makers have been criticized for being slow to deliver national broadband ..... “fiberhoods” ..... a free 5-megabit-per-second broadband connection .... Google believed “there’s no need for caps.” ..... “I’ve never met someone who’s said ‘My Internet connection is too fast.’” ...... if two cars left Kansas City for New York at the same time, the one traveling 100 times faster would reach New York before the other car even left Missouri
I wish Google entered the ISP space for good.

Just like Google Search is ad supported, Google Fiber should also be ad supported. Use snooping technology to serve just the right ads. And at gigabit speeds an ISP could serve ads like TV stations do.

There is so much potential.


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Friday, July 20, 2012

Bad Public Policy And Internet Speeds

Emblem of Hong Kong
Emblem of Hong Kong (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Tokyo, Seoul, and Paris get faster, cheaper broadband than US cities
The most expensive city surveyed was New York, where Verizon charges $154.98 for the cheapest fiber triple-play package...... In contrast, Riga, Seoul, and Paris all offered triple-play packages for less than $40 per month. London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Copenhagen, and Hong Kong all had triple play packages available for under $50. .... The best-performing American city was San Francisco, where Webpass offers a 200Mbps service for $37.50 per month. New Yorkers and Washingtonians can get 25Mbps service for less than $40 per month ...... way behind the world leaders. A Hong Kong service provider offers 500Mbps service for $37.34 per month. Providers in Tokyo, Riga, Seoul, Paris, Bucharest, and Berlin all offer services with 100Mbps download speeds service for less than $40 per month. ..... Residents of Chattanooga, TN, can get gigabit Internet access. Unfortunately, that service costs $317.03 per month. Verizon offers 150Mbps service in New York for $159.95 per month, and Comcast offers 105Mbps service in Washington, DC, for $105.00. ..... In Hong Kong, you can get a gigabit connection for $48.59 per month. Amsterdam offers a half gigabit for $83.33 per month. Tokyo residents can get a symmetrical 200Mbps connection for $26.85 per month. ...... incumbents in the United States don't offer ultra-fast speeds even in urban areas whose high density ought to make them cost-effective ..... broadband policy in recent years has been based on the "really flawed assumption that telephone companies and cable companies are going to compete with each other." Instead, he said, we've gotten a "negotiated truce" in which cable incumbents enjoy a de facto monopoly on high-speed broadband service, while Verizon and AT&T focus primarily on their wireless platforms ..... policymakers should re-evaluate the 2005 decision to abandon line-sharing rules. In many other countries, incumbent firms are required to lease their facilities to competitors at regulated rates. ...... more cities should consider municipal fiber projects.
The two policy prescriptions make tremendous sense. One, incumbents should be required to share their pipes with competitors. Two, cities should lay down fiber optic lines.
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Tuesday, December 14, 2010

150 Mbps Wireless Broadband

Telstra mobile phone Base station - Wireless H...Image via Wikipedia150 megabits per second download speed: that's pretty amazing.
iTWire: 149.4Mbps over wireless broadband: Telstra and Huawei are testing LTE mobile broadband using 1800MHz spectrum ..... this was more than three times the peak speeds achieved with current mobile technology. .... "As mobile customers move away from 2G services and onto 3G and LTE, 1800MHz spectrum will increasingly become available to be re-farmed by operators. The overwhelming success of these trials shows that 1800MHz can be an attractive option for deploying LTE where access to other spectrum bands is constrained" ..... Earlier this year, Huawei set a record LTE-Advanced download speed of 1.2Gbps at the CTIA Wireless 2010 event held in Las Vegas.
1 gigabits per second is even more impressive.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

I Share Mark Cuban's Passion On The FCC Broadband Plan

WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA - NOVEMBER 29:  (FILE PHOTO...Image by Getty Images via Daylife
The FCC Needs to Set Its Sights Higher.. Much Higher (Mark Cuban)

The recent FCC broadband plan has been the talk of the town in the tech blogosphere. (Broader Broadband) There seems to be broad agreement in liking what the FCC has come up with. Some key people have come out saying it is not enough. But nobody seems to be saying what I said in one of Fred Wilson's comments sections: The American people need to revolt like they revolted against the British.

Well, here comes along Mark Cuban saying what the FCC is proposing is not entirely enough. And he is saying it with some passion. Yeah, why stop at 100 megabits per second? That might look a lot now, but not long back 5 megabits per second looked like a lot.

A parallel story is Gmail. Gmail storage looked like a lot when it came out. But soon people started running out of space, at least the power users did.

High speed internet to Cuban is less about video and more about Internet 2. Ride on.

Google has its sights on 1 gigabits per second. And although Mark Cuban is on record wanting to upend the Google search business, here he seems to be in agreement with Google's bandwidth goals.

Mark Cuban is worried about applications that might not show up even when speeds go up. I am not. I think it is inevitable that new applications will show up when super high speed is everywhere.

Cuban, passionate plenty, still does not match my talk. Revolt. Free up the spectrum for the people. There Cuban and I seem to have some disagreements. He is more cautious than I'd like.

Free Is The Future: Picking A Fight With Mark Cuban

Mark Cuban: A Quick Thought on the Viacom/Youtube Lawsuit Disclosures
Don’t Waste the Internet on TV – Protect the Future of the Internet
Should the FCC Reclaim Broadcast Spectrum
 

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Sunday, March 14, 2010

Broad Broadband

Walter Mossberg and Kara Swisher interview Ste...Image via Wikipedia
New York Times: Vast FCC Plan Would Bring Net To More In US establishing high-speed Internet as the country’s dominant communication network..... Already, the broadcast television industry is resisting a proposal to give back spectrum the government wants to use for future mobile service........ broadband Internet is becoming the common medium of the United States, gradually displacing the telephone and broadcast television industries..... the plan should pay for itself through the spectrum auctions....... a third of Americans have no access to high-speed Internet...... remote locations where private companies have little incentive to build networks....... the F.C.C. is hoping to free up roughly 500 megahertz of spectrum, much of which would come from television broadcasters ...... 100 Squared — equipping 100 million households with high-speed Internet gushing through their pipes at 100 megabits a second by the end of this decade
High speed, universal internet is fundamental to America becoming a post-industrial, information age society. It is the very backbone. It is the foundation.

The Obama FDR Parallels



Heartthrob’s Barbed Blog Challenges ChinaWith more than 300 million hits to his blog, he may be the most popular living writer in the world..... The Internet, he says, will eventually prod China toward greater openness. No army of censors can completely constrain free expression. “I think the government really regrets the Internet,” he said, pausing for effect. “Originally, they thought it would be like the newspaper or the television — just another way to get their view out to the people. What they didn’t realize is that people can type and talk back. This is giving them a really big headache.”
Apple’s Spat With Google Is Getting Personalthe clash between Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Jobs offers an unusually vivid display of enmity and ambition..... cellphones that physically, technologically and spiritually resembled the iPhone .....“We did not enter the search business. They entered the phone business” ...“Make no mistake: Google wants to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them.” ........“You might want to tell me the difference between a large phone and a tablet.” ....Mr. Page and Mr. Brin, considered Mr. Jobs a mentor and, according to a former Apple executive, were regular visitors to Mr. Jobs’s office in Cupertino, Calif., during Google’s early days. ..........Mr. Brin was also known to take long walks with Mr. Jobs near his house in Palo Alto, and in the nearby foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. ......... Schmidt... relished his position on Apple’s board and the proximity it gave him to one of the most famous figures in American business.......Google continued to push ahead with Android and its vision of a more open mobile phone ecosystem. ......Android’s features were based on longstanding ideas already circulating in the industry and that some Android prototypes predated the iPhone. ........“Google is not a company that is particularly afraid of anyone, including Apple.” ........“Everything iDon’t ... Droid Does.” ........with Android and plans for a computer operating system, Google was “unfortunately” entering more of Apple’s “core business.” .........a wrestling match began on the acquisition front. .......Google, which counts Microsoft, FacebookYahoo on an ever-expanding list of rivals .......Bill Campbell .....had a hand in smoothing over the initially turbulent relationship between Mr. Schmidt and Google’s founders..............Apple, where he is co-chairman of the board .........the old dynamics between Apple and Microsoft being recycled, with Apple still trying to control every aspect of the user experience, and Google, like Microsoft before it, working with multiple partners to flood the market with a large number of devices. ............an unlikely sight: Steve Jobs and Apple, running from the arms of Eric Schmidt and Google, into the embrace of Steve Ballmer and Microsoft.
You're the Boss: The Secret to Having Happy EmployeesI fired the unhappy people.
Findings on Lehman Take Even Experts by SurpriseExecutives at other Wall Street banks professed surprise at Lehman’s accounting maneuvers.Goldman SachsBarclaysCapital and other banks said on Friday they did not use repos to hide liabilities on their balance sheets.
Report Details How Lehman Hid Its WoesThe bank’s bankruptcy, the largest in American history, shook the financial world. ......Lehman reverse engineered the firm’s net leverage ratio for public consumption ........Repo 105 involved transactions that secretly moved billions of dollars off Lehman’s books at a time when the bank was under heavy scrutiny. ......firms essentially lend assets to other firms in exchange for money for short periods of time, sometimes overnight. ......Lehman managed to “shed” about $39 billion from its balance sheet at the end of the fourth quarter of 2007, $49 billion in the first quarter of 2008 and $50 billion in the second quarter.
Honey, Don’t Bother Mommy. I’m Too Busy With My Blog and Building My Brand.the Secret Is in the Sauce, a community of 5,000 female bloggers....... blog, about her life as a mother of three, typically draws about 36,000 page views a month. .......BlogHer, iVillage and Compass Partners .....a modern-day kaffeeklatsch, a vital outlet for conversing and commiserating about day-to-day travails.......“Through Twitter and blogging, I found a whole community of women going through the same thing as I am at the same time.” ......Just as television viewers have a seemingly insatiable hunger for reality shows, mothers often prefer the warts-and-all experiences of other moms online — and the ability to discuss them interactively — to the dry, inflexible pronouncements spouted by experts in books and parenting magazines. ......“The blogosphere is where authentic conversation is happening” .......advertising on blogs will top $746 million by 2012, more than twice the figure for 2007........some defend the growing alliance between bloggers and corporate America as empowering rather than exploitative, giving women a voice in shaping the brands they consume.
One on One: Andrey Ternovskiy, Creator of Chatroulette
One on One: Esther Dyson, Health Tech Investor and Space Tourist the newsletter Release 1.0, which I ran for 25 years......FlickrDel.icio.us....And I made a lot of money from Google through another investment. .........if you want to run a business, you need to monitor costs and revenues. In the same manner, if you want to run your body, you need to monitor intake and returns ......I don’t actually want to be the guy — I want to foster the guys........Partly this whole start-up phenomenon has been very male .........I have a short attention span. I couldn’t stay doing the same thing for 30 years......I often like to quote what the math professors say: The remainder of the proof is an exercise left to the reader.
One Analysis of the Google Buzz Mess “Nothing that the Buzz team did was technologically wrong,” Ms. Boyd said. “Yet the service resulted in complete disaster.” “Neither privacy nor publicity is dead, but technology will continue to make a mess of both”
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Wednesday, February 10, 2010

One Gig Per Sec: This Is What I Am Talking About

Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...Image via CrunchBase
This Google talk of an experimental broadband by Google of one gigabit per second is more exciting than all the buzz around Google Buzz (Buzz Takes Gmail To A New Level) and all the buzz around the Apple iPad. (iPad) Innovation is a basic property of the human mind. There will always be innovation. But some territories are more fertile grounds for innovation than others. And between hardware - example: iPad - software - example: Buzz - and connectivity - example: a one gig per second broadband - I have to argue there is much more room for innovation in the connectivity sector. Universal high speed internet is a lofty goal. I don't know what universal means to you, but for me that means global.


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Thursday, January 14, 2010

Presenting At The Dot Com Hatchery



Sun MicrosystemsImage via Wikipedia
Image via Wikipedia
JyotiConnect: Executive Summary

So last night I presented at the Dot Com Hatchery for five minutes, took questions for five, and then listened to comments from the panelists for a few more minutes. Overall it was a wonderful, wonderful experience.

Sun Microsystems
101 Park Avenue
4th floor, Gramercy Park Room
New York, NY 10017



I was hoping to put out a series of posts at this blog leading to the day of the presentation, but I did not do. That was a mistake.
  1. How many people are online today? What has been the history? What are the projections?
  2. A survey of the global mobile market. 
  3. A long, definitive post about Wimax. Where is it coming from? Where is it going?
  4. A history of the ISP business. AOL, Juno etc.


    Image representing AOL as depicted in CrunchBaseImage via CrunchBase

  5. ISPs today, in the US, in the world. 
  6. A definitive post about Netbooks. 
  7. A definitive post about the Chrome OS.
  8. A definitive post about PC market share. Which are the top companies? What have been their trajectories?
  9. One Laptop Per Child: what happened?
  10. A survey of the ad industry in India, China, South Africa, Brazil.
I did not rehearse once before. How did Yao find out? She said as much during one of her comments. I did not rehearse once before my social media talk at the Science House MeetUp, and that went really well. (My Talk On Social Media At The Science House MeetUp) I guess there I had no time limit. Here it was five minutes by the clock. You needed to have rehearsed every single word, every single phrase. Not doing so was a big mistake. You have to deliver your lines like you are in a movie. There are not that many words you can pack into five minutes, especially if you want to deliver well.

What would my 30 second pitch be?
My tech startup wants to figure out ways to bring hundreds of millions of new people online. You do that by bringing the costs down for internet access. You do that by serving ads. Down the line we might also go into hardware if necessary for what I call the IC, the Internet Computer. For our core business we want to polish up the business model through a pilot project and grow it globally through the franchise concept.
What would be the five minute version?
Hi. My name is Paramendra. That is my name on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Gmail and you can google my name up.

The idea that I am trying to present can be caputured in two letters: IC, as in Internet Computer. Back in the 70s we were in the era of the mainframes, those big, ugly computers only big universities and companies could afford. For the past 30 years and more we have been in the era of PCs. I feel we are at the cusp of a new era, the IC era.

I also have to introduce the Web 3.0 concept as I define it. Web 1.0 was when websites were pretty posters. Web 2.0 has been when the websites have been populated.  The semantic web is not Web 3.0, that would be Web 2.1. Getting a ton of new people online would be Web 3.0.

A little about me. There is a concrete mathematical theory called the butterfly effect. A butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon could be the reason a cyclone hit Bangladesh. During April 2006 over a period of 19 days, over 8 million out of Nepal's 27 million people thronged the streets to shut the country down completely to oust a king dictator. I was the butterfly flapping my wings in New York City. I am extremely good with vision and group dynamics.

How many of you have been to the first KFC restaurant in Kentucky? I have. I will tie that KFC mention later in the presentation.

This is my startup's relaunch. I am trying to raise 100K for my round one right now. I was done doing that, and then in February 09, reacting to the worst economy in 70 years most of my investors walked away. I took time off, focused on social media, accumulated almost as many followers on Twitter as Donald Trump, experimented with pro blogging, and now I am back in the game.

My former business partner Adam Carson was a Morgan Stanley banker, now at Tuck Business School. My primary engineer was Khushboo Vaish, still in Mumbai, an IIT, IIM graduate, one of the finest Indian engineers of her generation. I still have all the contacts to reassemble my engineering team. Khushboo went to the same business school as the Pepsi CEO.

My round one goal is to raise 100K. My round two goal would be to raise between one to five million. During round three I hope to splash out the franchise concept to grow fast. The first person who put in 100K into Google, that money is now north of a billion. I don't expect to do that well. But even if I can do one third as good in twice as much time, that will still be very good. If you have 5K, 10K or 20K that you are in a position to invest, and you have absolutely no chances of ever becoming a millionaire, I am very interested in your money.

Of the 100K, 20-30K will go towards the pilot project, 20-30K towards a global team, and 50K towards one full timer in NYC.

We in the New York tech community envy Boston and Silicon Valley. If the center of gravity in tech is going to shift from California to New York it will not be because we came up with the next big dot com. Like Steve Jobs said a few years back, the PC wars are over, Microsoft won, let's move on. And he gave us the iPod and the iPhone. Web 3.0 is what will put New York City on the technology map, this capital city of the world where people not from just every country, but every town in every country live. My company would like to take the lead.

Steve Ballmer said in a speech recently that by 2035 we will have four billion people online. That will be too little too late. We have to get there much faster.



These were the four panelists.

Scott Gingold - Director, Strategy at Hatchery
James Jorasch - Founder, Science House
Ken Kharbanda - Director, Strategy at Hatchery
Tereza Nemessanyi - Director, Strategy at Hatchery

James started by throwing me an easy question. After you raise the 100K, what are you going to do? I guess I did not emphasize the pilot project part enough. I said you can set up a pilot project for about 15-20K in my hometown in Nepal. You can start by charging people $25 a month, which is the going rate now, but you also end up with a small pool of users. The idea would be to bring the cost down by serving ads, to move from 25 to 15 to 5 to end up with a much larger pool of users.

That gave Ken an opening. He asked me why I did not mention those figures in any of my slides. I said I agree with you. The slides would have been better if those figures had been mentioned.

Scott said he knew a few people for whom my startup might be a good fit. I made a point to get his card later. Then he said, what's in it for me? I said you are already online, this is more for people who are not online yet. But this would be a great investment opportunity for someone like you. On the other hand there are a lot of people in the outer boroughs who go to the public library to check their email.

The Hatchery folks are religious about their 11 points.

1. Your team
2. What your product/service does
3. What issue/pain is it looking to solve/address
4. What is the solution
5. What is the addressable market
6. What is the competitive landscape
7. Any current customer/client/pilot pipeline
8. What is the revenue stream/source
9. What are your financial projections
10. How much are you looking for in investment
11. What will you do with the money, how will it be spent

Yao was very frank on the topic. She said my presentation did not cover "any" of the 11 points. Holy Moses.

It was curious to me that a guy who presented the idea of a print magazine - many say a dying art form - scored the highest, whereas I was not even scored and here I am saying I want to help shift the center of gravity in tech from California to New York. But I truly appreciated the frank feedback. And I do value the 11 points. I would do much better the next time I have a chance to present for five minutes.

My friends Ed, Alex and I went for drinks later. Ed kept saying I was Rocky, I will keep coming back.

The Sun guy, the all Indian Angelo Rajadurai, approached me on the floor later. Some of the feedback was "harsh," he said. "You might have done well if you had said there are 1.2 billion Indians, only 10 million of them are online today." I grabbed his card as well.

Everybody but everybody goes to the movie theater on the Indian subcontinent. That was true when I was a kid growing up. And they serve a ton of ads on those big screens. Of course the ad market exists and is vibrant out there. The ad market - local and global - will have to be tapped. Imagine Google charging us two cents per search. You can't.

 The best part of the evening was the four panelists talked for about 15 minutes each towards the end about four broad topics in business. James talked about the idea, the product, the business. Ken talked about finance. Scott talked about market research. Tereza focused on business to business.





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