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Entries tagged as ‘telecom’

I love My MiFi!

15 June 2009 · 3 Comments

In an effort to establish professionalism, I do try to not pimp my employer’s products or services.  I’m an unabashed user of a product on a competitor’s network (iPhone) and try to make it clear that the content here represents my own opinions and not those of my employer.  So I hope that you will maintain a level of respect for me and give me some objectivity points when I say that I have a new love: my Verizon Wireless MiFi.  It’s a pocket-sized wifi hotspot for up to 5 devices that connects to the Verizon Wireless EV-DO 3G wireless broadband network.  The device is manufactured by Novatel Wireless and is also sold by Sprint.

My Verizon Wireless MiFi, next to standard business card for size comparison.

My Verizon Wireless MiFi, next to standard business card for size comparison.

If you’ve been reading this blog for any period of time you have no doubt concluded that I am a gadget hound and tech nerd.  Would it surprise you to learn that when I travel for business I usually travel with two laptops?  It’s a sickness, I know.  I’m a firm believer in keeping my work work on my work PC (an HP) and my personal material and projects on my MacBook Pro.  In most hotels this has resulted in a life-or-death decision of which computer will be registered for the (usually expensive and slow) hotel broadband connection.  In a few instances in the past I was able to use my Apple Airport Express to connect multiple devices to the hotel broadband.  In those instances the connection is generally very slow, and often I find myself unable to use my VPN to connect to my work e-mail and other intranet resources.  Bummer.

Even when I bite the bullet and decide that my work PC will be the sole digital link to the outside world performance is inconsistent.  In my years of travel I have found it amazing how many times my VPN did not work.  It still also amazes me how many hotels still treat broadband as an optional amenity.  It’s not– a hotel room might as well not have electricity or running water.  The net is central to how I and many others live our lives today and is non-negotiable if I am going to remain a productive employee while on the road.  It also still amazed me the rates hotels charge for Internet connectivity: $12.95/day seems to be the standard.  You don’t learn the VPN won’t function until after you’ve connected the work laptop and tried to connect.  Want to cut bait and just use the personal machine?  That’s another $12.50, please.  Don’t even THINK of connecting your iPhone or other wifi-enabled smart phone (you can generally fall back on your usable if somewhat slow 3G connection there).  Coffee shops and other hotspots also have spotty, inconsistent support for VPN connectivity.  A lot of productivity has been lost struggling to get a VPN connection only to give up and just resign myself to days of catching up on e-mail and other tasks when next I am at home or in the office.  To put it mildly, connectivity when traveling sucks.

I don’t have to worry about that anymore.  Since I bought my MiFi I’ve had one day of meetings outside of the office and one business trip.  On my day running around the Washington metro area I was able to use my down time to great productive effect   The VPN works flawlessly every time.  I can connect my PC, Macintosh and iPhone all to a blazing fast (in wireless terms) network with great coverage.  On my recent business trip I did a speed check to find that I was getting 1097 Kbps down and 652 Kbps up.  While it’s not as fast as my FiOS connection at home (I will limit myself to pimping one Verizon product in this post) it’s faster than most hotel broadband connections.

I’m not the only one who loves this devices and have made productive use of the MiFi.  Andy Abramson of VoIP Watch and Bob Gourley of CTOVision have both sung the praises of their MiFis.  Guy Kawasaki made a great post to the American Express OPEN for Small Business blog highlighting some valuable use cases for his Sprint MiFi, and some relevant to people who are not afflicted with my tech nerdery:

  • In your hotel room
  • Traveling with kids
  • MacBook Air, iPhone and iPod Touch owners
  • Smartphone users using VoIP such as Skype
  • Making a sales pitch when you need a reliable and fast Internet connection
  • Conference attendance (often wifi at a conference is either completely unavailable or an additional daily expense.  Now you can even use the MiFi’’s support for multiple connections to make friends and influence people).
  • Speaking or presenting when you need an Internet connection (a requirement I can say with experience many venues are challenged to provide reliably)
  • Alternative to tethering your computer with a mobile phone

One challenge I have had with the MiFi is maintaining a charge on the device.  On my recent business trip I learned that my MiFi as well as a few other devices that charge via USB do not like my Belkin travel surge suppressor.  This is a handy three-outlet surge suppressor that also has two USB ports to charge devices without the need for additional power adapters.  This I think is a problem more of the Belkin than the MiFi, because my iPhone also would not take a charge from this device.  So the one cautionary advice I would offer is that travelers should take the MiFi’s power adapter on the road with them just to be safe.  The MiFi can be charged via USB from your computer, and I found this to be somewhat idiosyncratic and felt that the MiFI didn’t get the full charge it does when plugged in directly to an outlet.

Overall this is a device I strongly recommend.  The retail price is competitive with standard 3G adapters for laptops (that only support connectivity for that single device).  You barely have to travel more than once a month to make the $60 monthly price (5 Gigabytes cap) more cost-effective than paying for daily connectivity at hotels, in airports or coffee shops.  The MiFi has already paid for itself this month and kept me happier and more productive in the bargain.

Categories: Consumerism · Technology
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TelecomHUB

27 February 2009 · Leave a Comment

Today I attended the TelecomHUB lunch event Telecom Outlook for 2009: Local to Global Perspectives.  It was an interesting panel discussion.  While some longer blog entries may come out of this in the future I wanted to point interested parties to my tweets from the event, using the #telecomhub hashtag.

 

My Tweets from the February 27, 2009 TelecomHUB Event

My Tweets from the February 27, 2009 TelecomHUB Event

Categories: Technology
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God Bless Tim Wu: Has AT&T Lost its Mind?

17 January 2008 · Leave a Comment

When Tim Wu writes something, I almost always enjoy reading it.  In yesterday’s Slate Wu wrote a piece that addresses a recent baffling development.

Last week AT&T executives announced that they were busy looking for ways to filter for copyrighted content at the network level.  In other words, peak at every packet that crosses the AT&T Internet backbone to see if the data contains stolen intellectual property.

Wu’s Slate piece dissects why this claim would actually be bad for AT&T, and he’s absolutely spot on.  Since the earliest days of the phone network the industry has relied on the notion of common carriage: network providers are protected from liability for any information transiting the network in exchange for an agreement to transmit data without selection or modification of that information that moves across that network.

Wu’s claim that AT&T’s filter violates common carriage, however, is spot on.  If AT&T were to pursue this strategy it would completely eliminate any claim it has to common carrier status.  All of a sudden AT&T is liable for every piece of malice, untruthful information, child pornography or pirated intellectual property that traversed any part of the AT&T network.  This would be so ill-advised for AT&T, and Wu’s analogy says it best:

An Internet provider voluntarily giving up copyright immunity is like an astronaut on the moon taking off his space suit. As the world’s largest gatekeeper, AT&T would immediately become the world’s largest target for copyright infringement lawsuits.

My nickel’s worth of free advice to AT&T would be to very publicly make it very clear that the company has no intention of filtering Internet content.  ISPs have been trying to get away with a lot recently, but this takes things to a whole new level and runs the risk of violating one of the most central tenants of American political and social culture, that of free speech.

Finally, the Internet is already seeing the challenge from carrying a growing proportion of multimedia traffic.  If AT&T stops to take the time to inspect every packet their network performance will fall off the edge of the Earth.

AT&T’s announcement that they might filter content for copyright violation is just such a bad idea on so many levels.  Kudos to Tim Wu for describing it thusly in an accessible and colorful piece.

Categories: Technology
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Gilder’s 10 Laws of the Telocosm

11 January 2007 · Leave a Comment

I really enjoyed reading this piece from George Gilder on Forbes.com talking about the Ten Laws of the Telecosm. I was particularly enamored of the notion that dumb networks with smart edges prevail over smart networks with dumb edges. From the article:


Dumb networks will prevail over smart networks. The future is all-fiber networks that do nothing but transmit bits. Intelligence belongs at the edges and endpoints.

This is our “life after television” paradigm. It separates content from conduit. If you have the best conduit, you will want everyone’s content on it. You won’t want to restrict it to your own content. On the other hand, if you have the best content, you will want it on everyone’s conduit. You won’t want to keep it on your own network. Players that try to combine content and conduit will eventually split apart and often bleed financially in the process (e.g., AOL-Time Warner).

Based on this observation with which I agree, I have to question AT&T and Verizon’s strategies for television services. Cable and satellite television companies have been in this space so long the best thing the new entrants can do is give more power to the end user to choose their own content. More on demand content on non-exclusive basis. No channel packages, and I want my freakin’ NFL Sunday Ticket over whatever platform I choose to have as the pipe into my house!

Gilder goes on to pick some winners and losers in this paradigm. He favors Corning, Finisair and PMC-Sierra/Passave for their role in providing optical network components. As the edge devices such as TVs, PCs, mobile phones and countless interim and hybrid devices get smarter and thirstier we are going to demand bigger and bigger pipes.

Law of Abundance. Far-seeing entrepreneurs waste what is abundant in order to save what is scarce. Today, processing power is abundant. Bandwidth is becoming abundant. Electrical power, on the other hand, is becoming scarce. So invest in chips and computer architectures designed to save on power.

How true this is! Electricity is allegedly Google’s most significant expense, and I’ve been reading a lot about the power demands of large web hosting centers. Power conservation technologies are going to be big, as are green energy production technologies (duh). A big question we’ll need to answer as a society is whether or not we’re going to consider expanding our nuclear generation capability to fill in the gap until we all get our Mr. Fusion.

I am particularly fond of this train of thought at the end of the article:

This is the final entropy law from the fertile mind and mathematics of Claude Shannon of MIT and Bell Labs, who defined information as unexpected bits. (Predictable bits convey no information content, no entropy.) Information entropy is measured by its surprisal.

My summation of this law is: “High entropy messages (full of surprise) require a low entropy (no-surprises) carrier.” Only if the carrier itself is predictable can the information be distinguished from the noise at the other end. Thus the key insight of the telecosm is that in an information age information and value will migrate to the perfect sine waves of the electromagnetic spectrum.

I believe that this is a more general law than Shannon perceived. The heart of capitalism is creativity. Creativity, as Albert Hirshmann of Princeton once wrote, always comes as a surprise to us. If it didn’t we would not need it. Socialism would work. But the upside surprises of creativity require a low entropy environment of predictable property rights, taxes and other business laws ultimately based on trust in a moral order. All these conditions are essential to an entrepreneurial economy.

Technorati Tags: Gilder, Telecommunications

Categories: Politics · Technology
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USF Debate Rages

9 August 2006 · Leave a Comment

There’s a very interesting piece in Forbes about one of the other raging debates surrounding the telecommunications bill currently pending in the Senate. For once network neutrality is not the topic of focus, but rather the battle over the Universal Service Fund (USF).

According to the article, the size of the fund intended to deliver telecommunications services to rural areas has doubled since 2000 to $3.8 billion. The USF in total has ballooned to around $7 billion last year according to Thomas Hazlett (follow this link for a PDF of Hazlett’s in-depth review of USF). Part of this growth, the Forbes article claims, is from wireless companies claiming USF for the build-out of rural wireless coverage.

It seems no one in the Senate or House is seriously considering the elimination or even a restructuring of the taxes that are the basis of the fund. The lines appear to be drawn on the question of capping USF between the rural telcos and wireless companies.

Rural carriers, represented by the Independent Telephone and Telecommunications Alliance, are resisting a cap in total spending and suggest instead that costs can be controlled by changing wireless carrier subsidies to reflect their real, lower costs to build wireless networks. They also want wireless carriers to be subject to the same requirements they have in building a network, such as providing backup power to continue service in blackouts. They figure such changes will reduce the number of cell companies lining up for USF dollars.

Wireless carriers, on the other hand, aren’t opposed to an overall cap and argue the subsidy rates should be based on their own cheaper networks–thus reducing payments per line for the landline phone companies too. “We’re open to carriers receiving less support,” says Paul Garnett of the Wireless Association. “The problem with the fund is that it leans toward wireline networks. The more they spend, the more they get.”

I don’t support the notion of restructuring the USF to create disincentives for some class of telecommunications service provider to apply for the fees if they are delivering services in rural areas covered by the fund. This would only serve to retard the introduction of faster wireless services and technologies such as WiMax in rural areas. These technologies have the potential to deliver connectivity at much lower costs than fixed-line infrastructure, and the rural telcos stance on this looks like an effort to protect monopoly markets. Also, dare I say that cable companies delivering broadband to rural communities should also be eligible to receive USF monies?

The article doesn’t go into any detail about plans to apply USF taxes to all manner of Voice over IP services which have the technical ability to terminate calls to telephones. This, to me, still seems like an anachronism and the ability to track this will present a real challenge. If we must have a USF, in and of itself a debatable question, it should be applied to the delivery of infrastructure which enables telecommunications services, including wireless and broadband.

Tag: Universal Service Fund

Categories: Politics · Technology
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Total Telecom Asks What Users Want

7 July 2006 · Leave a Comment

Following up on a post from earlier this week, Total Telecom did a quick, unscientific survey of what mobile services would be interested in paying for above and beyond their line rental. The unscientific survey was of some small subset of mobile users in the UK with some ties to the telecommunications industry, so theres a high likelihood of early adoptership among those surveyed as well as perhaps a bit too much inside baseball in the respondents feedback on what services would and would not be welcome.

Since TT is a pay site I am not going to provide a link, but rather lift what I thought was the meat of the article:

Interestingly, of the mobile content services that many see as the likely winners in future, few seemed to appeal to our select group of users. Mobile email was one service cited as potentially useful, but on the whole music downloads, TV and sports updates met with an almost complete lack of interest, although football video clips and access to new music downloads as well as Internet Radio were highlighted as possible areas of interest.

What did emerge was that if services were seen as directly relevant to a user’s life, they would be far more willing to pay for them. In addition, users clearly don’t want to pay for services they already get elsewhere, such as news and sports updates.

One respondent, a mature student with no budget to spend on any extra services, commented that they might be interested in practical services such as links to bus-running times, or banking services. The respondent added that service providers could also encourage loyalty amongst students by offering them discounted account deals and after all today’s students are tomorrow’s high earners.

The study was by no means scientific or widespread, but one key message to emerge is that “one size fits all” will probably not work and service providers need to spend a great deal more time on finding out who their customers are and what they really want.

I like the transport schedules service. On a somewhat related note I would be willing to pay to receive updates and announcements of traffic times and incidents for routes that important to me. If I could receive an update on travel times between Sterling and Tysons Corner either on Route 7 or the Dulles Toll Road that would be pretty sweet. If I could receive alerts of traffic incidents on my commuter routes that would be great, too. My willingness to continue to pay for this service is how correctly the service enables me to estimate how long my commute will take each morning.

I currently get e-mail on my Treo and do find my ability to check mail on the go to be very useful, so I would definitely continue to pay for that.

I have a tough time thinking of any content sufficiently compelling to make me want to buy. I dont like the concept of a premium for content I can get elsewhere for free or low cost, and integration of exclusive content deals is a continuation of the cursed walled garden approach to mobile data and content. I probably would be interested in seeing short mobisodes of the shows Im really in to like 24 or Battlestar Gallactica, but theres no way Im going to switch carriers for such a frivolous offering.

Social networking and user-generated content suited for mobile consumption have some appeal as well. If mobile carriers were willing to bring down the walls of their gardens I think there are a number of business models that could catch on in this space and generate data revenue for carriers.

So, what would you be willing to pay extra to get on your mobile?

Tags: Wireless

Categories: Technology
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Rural Telcos Block Cable VoIP

25 April 2006 · Leave a Comment

This is a very interesting situation being described in this article in USA Today. It seems that rural incumbent telephone companies are seeking relief from state public utility commissions to prevent local cable companies from offering voice-over-Internet services as a component of their cable service package in their overlapping service areas.

The rural telcos are withholding the leasing of local telephone exchanges and interconnection to prevent cable VoIP providers from being able to offer a service which would be of use for local calling within the local community. I can speak from real experience of 15 years living in a very small rural town that the difference between a local and a long-distance call can make a big difference in your ability to remain connected to your family and neighbors. In such an environment even the likes of Vonage, Skype or GizmoProject would be challenged to succeed with voice services (except second-line offerings) resulting from the inability to have local numbers provisioned. This is also a class of carrier which is largely excused from requirements for local number portability, so the monopoly on local telephone numbers has a substantial stifling affect on these rural markets.

The parallels between this issue and the issue of providing franchises to incumbent telcos attempting to offer cable television services should not be lost on anyone. In both instances it is incumbents and amicable local and state officials that are actually acting as the roadblock to competition in both the voice and television service market the very customer and constituent bases they are supposed to serve.

Its also worth noting how this issue runs head-long into the issue of the Universal Service Fund. In my past reviews of the various drafts of the new telecom bill, Ive expressed my disappointment that there has been no re-examination of the USF. These same local telcos which are fighting the deployment of cable VoIP are the recipients of USF subsidies.

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Categories: Politics · Technology
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IPTV = Cable, requires franchise? AT&T says “No,” Cable Trade Group Says “Yes”

26 January 2006 · Leave a Comment

As I continue to make my way through the latest draft of the new telecom law, one of the principle items of concern for the next round of the telecommunications revolution is going to be the issue of requirements for local franchises.

The bill creates a class of services called Broadband Video Services. Within the text of the latest draft, these services and those who provide them are defined as:

BROADBAND VIDEO SERVICE.The term broadband video service means a two-way service that

(A) is offered, with or without a fee, to the public or to such classes of users as to be effectively available to the public, regardless of the facilities used;

(B) is offered in a manner that enables subscribers to integrate

(i) a video programming package, with

(ii) customizable, interactive voice and data features, functions, or capabilities, which may include caller identification, call management, and the ability to access information derived from the Internet; and may be included or offered with, but shall not be treated as subsumed in or subsuming, VOIP service or BITS.
BROADBAND VIDEO SERVICE PROVIDER. The term broadband video service provider means any person who provides, or offers to provide, directly or through an affiliate, a broadband video service that is delivered directly to subscribers over facilities the service provider or its affiliate owns or controls.

 

The definitions do not address the question of protocols or facilities with respect to two-way transmission of the broadband video, nor any other place in the bill. In fact, the only real details to hang your hat on are the specifications that the service be two-way and include a video programming component. For our purposes we will assume that IPTV falls into the category of a Broadband Video Service. Would it be possible for Comcast to argue that their video services are “two way” based on the ability to access on demand programming?

The section of the bill devoted specifically to the question of franchise does not indicate that Broadband Video Service providers will be required to register with local franchise authorities. My assumption is that since they don’t specify this requirement it does not exist. Likewise, the bill does not indicate that traditional cable companies will be freed from the requirement to seek local franchise arrangements. How about as the cable companies make legal arguments that their services are actually TV How about when cable companies introduce services delivered through new mechanisms that clearly are IPTV

I acknowledge that this post is asking a lot more questions than it answers, but these are some good questions that are going to define the future of both broadband and video programming. Some battle lines are already being drawn.

In California, a cable trade group has claimed that AT&T’s plans to roll out IPTV in San Ramon is illegal because AT&T haven’t received a franchise from the local franchise authority. Comcast is the incumbent multi-service cable operator in San Ramon. The trade group claims that AT&T’s IPTV service is an equivalent offering to cable television, and therefor is required to have a franchise agreement.

The arguments on each side are:

Jeffrey Sinsheimer, vice president for law and public policy for the California Cable and Telecommunications Association, insisted to the council that Project Lightspeed is a cable system, which would require a franchise agreement under federal law.
Shiyama Clunie, an AT&T manager, responded that Project Lightspeed is not a cable service as defined under the municipal code or state or federal law. It would deliver video programming over a switched, two-way interactive IP-based network, which is different than a cable system, Clunie told council members.

 

I have to come down on the side of AT&T on this one. The whole franchise requirement is a joke that has helped ensures that cable video services in the vast, vast majority of the country are monopolies and helps contribute to the fact that broadband in the United States is basically a duopoly.

Now, unfortunately the new telecom bill gives franchise authority over rights of way and easement, including enforce use of easements and rights of way as well as defining allowable time, place and manner for installation and maintenance of infrastructure in rights of way. My suspicion is that local franchise authorities will use these powers to put the screws to competing video and broadband providers.

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Categories: Politics · Technology
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Telcos Face Pension and Healthcare Problems

4 October 2005 · Leave a Comment

Forbes has a very interesting piece on the costs traditional telecommunications providers will have to pay for health care and pension.

This comes at a time when many of these companies are facing a large number of staff retirements, and the more established telecommunications companies generally offered generous voluntary early retirement packages rather than layoffs to many in their work force during economic downturns and elimination of redundancies following mergers. Watch this space once the AT&T and SBC merger is completed, both former Bell system companies with long-serving companies. There will likely be some generous early retirement package offers for both AT&T and SBC employees determined to be redundant.

Verizon have it somewhat easier, because they are buying MCI’s business more than their people. Any redundancies are likely to result in a layoff on the MCI side of the fence the vast majority of the time. Lucky for Verizon the MCI approach to laid off employees has always been a minimal severance and a hearty farewell of “Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out!” Expectations will be much lower among those MCI employees made redundant.

Redundancies aside, this comes at a very bad time for the telecommunications industry. At the same time that new market entrants are coming into their space with a minimal capital expense and smaller workforces with less generous benefit packages. Meanwhile the incumbents carry their retirees on their backs, complete with pensions and healthcare. At the same time they have all the capital expenses associated with maintaining facilities. We should probably expect the Bell companies to raise the volume of their objections to municipal Wi-Fi and objections to network neutrality at the application layer. I hope Google, eBay, Yahoo and Earthlink have good representation in Washington.

Categories: CI
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Google Buying Up Dark Fiber?

15 August 2005 · Leave a Comment

Om Malik has a story at Business 2.0 speculating on some of the reasons Google have been alleged to be buying high capacity dark fiber capacity from wholesale telecommunications providers. This comes several months after CNet published a speculative story about why Google were advertising for someone with experience negotiating with telecommunications companies. The complete list of job qualifications for said listing are as follows:

  • Negotiations for collocation space in conventional data centers; for racks, power circuits, cross connects, and remote hands services in conventional data centers; and for wholesale transactions with conventional data centers in North America, Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
  • Negotiation and purchasing of IP transit services in North America, Europe, Asia, and/or Latin America; negotiation of partnerships with Internet exchanges, regional peering providers, and paid peering arrangements with major carriers.
  • Identification, selection, and negotiation of dark fiber contracts both in metropolitan areas and over long distances as part of development of a global backbone network; contracts and negotiation for managed metropolitan services and long haul wavelength services to fulfill capacity and redundancy requirements in North America, Latin America, Asia, and Europe.
  • Identification and negotiation of contracts related to leases or purchases of data centers facilities and/or properties capable of conversion to data center purposes; experience with evaluating and assessing potential data center facilities for acquisition; experience negotiating startup, service, and maintenance contracts for data centers; experience obtaining data center infrastructure hardware including chillers, generators, UPS systems, transformers, power distribution units, etc.

My own telecom experience didn’t lead me to think too, too much of this at the time. The original job posting looks pretty standard for a company with heavy data hosting requirements that is going to need lots of hosting space and bandwidth capacity to support a data-intensive platform such as Google. Considering the volumes of information they’re dealing with, dark fiber seems like a perfectly cost-effective path to take. The per-unit cost of dark fiber is significantly less than leased capacity, but only the highest-volume customers can make it cost effective. Likewise, Google put so much information onto the Internet backbone, that they must pay a lot in interconnect charges. As Google begin to offer more and more high-bandwidth content such as audio and video, it would become a significant expense to their bottom line. Using dark fiber and effectively building their own Internet backbone would help them better control these costs.

Om speculates that one possibility is that Goolgle could build out a nationwide Wi-Fi network. This is the bit of his article which is likely to get the most attention. The business model would be a mix of subscription access and location-based advertising. I’m not sure dark fiber purchases lend themselves to this end, because there would be an awful lot of local access connectivity to individual Wi-Fi locations which would be required. However, Om may have better insider information than I: Business 2.0 has learned from telecom insiders that Google is already building such a network, though ostensibly for many reasons.

The Wi-Fi thing doesnt make sense to me. Wi-Max maybe. But I doubt Google would want to deal with all of the local access issues involved in a major Wi-Fi build out (dark fiber wont help you here) nor the negotiations with owners of the venues in which Wi-Fi would be made available.

A reason which makes much more sense to me, and that Om outlays in his article as well, is that taking a dark fiber approach helps Google eliminate the expense of putting large amounts of information onto ISP networks. Om writes:

An even more compelling reason for Google to build its own network is that it could save the company millions of dollars a month. Here’s why: Every time a user performs a search on Google, the data is transmitted over a network owned by an ISP — say, Comcast (CMCSK) — which links up with Google’s servers via a wholesaler like AboveNet. When AboveNet bridges that gap between Google and Comcast, Google has to pay as much as $60 per megabit in IP transit fees. As Google adds bandwidth-intensive services, those costs will increase. Big networks owned by the likes of AT&T (T) get around transit fees by striking “peering” arrangements, in which the networks swap traffic and no money is exchanged. By cutting out middlemen like AboveNet, Google could share traffic directly with ISPs to avoid fees.

This makes much more sense to me, and fits in better with Google’s current content-oriented strategy.

Categories: CI · Technology
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