telecompetitor

C Spire plans to offer home automation, security and monitoring to customers who purchase the gigabit service that the company is in the process of deploying in parts of Mississippi.

The offering, called C Spire Home, will use Lynx equipment from Honeywell and will be installed by licensed security technicians that C Spire will be hiring, a C Spire spokesman said. Monitoring will be handled by a third-party central station, the spokesman said.

Customers purchasing C Spire Home will have the ability to check in on and control their home system remotely using a smartphone. That capability has had a major impact in the home control and security market, making such systems more attractive to end users and significantly increasing demand.

And that trend has caught the attention of telecommunications and cable companies, many of whom have launched home control and security offerings in recent years.

It appears that the rural-rural broadband gap applies to schools as well as the broader Internet marketplace. That seems the best explanation for two substantially different measurements of average school bandwidth in surveys conducted by NTCA -- The Rural Broadband Association and EducationSuperHighway, an advocacy organization focused on bringing better broadband to the nation’s schools.

The NTCA released the results from a survey of its rural telecom service provider members which found that schools served by those companies, on average, purchase broadband connections delivering 65 Mbps downstream and 13 Mbps upstream. But EducationSuperHighway, which surveyed schools nationwide, found a median bandwidth of 33 Mbps.

These results might seem surprising, considering that broadband is generally available more broadly and at higher speeds in metro areas than in rural areas because it is less costly to deploy broadband in metro areas. That phenomenon is known as the rural-urban gap. But FCC researchers also have noted a rural-rural gap: Rural areas served by small independent telcos generally have better broadband availability and higher speeds than rural areas where the incumbent local carrier is one of the nation’s larger carriers such as AT&T or Verizon.

The research and development arm of Alcatel-Lucent, Bell Labs, announced a new speed record for the transmission of data over copper lines of 10 Gbps (10,000 Mbps).

The experiment was in a lab setting, using prototype technology called XG-FAST, which is a prototype extension of G.Fast, the next generation copper broadband technology.

G.Fast is being finalized as an ITU standard, and should start becoming commercially available sometime in 2015. The 10 Gbps over copper experiment used two bonded copper pairs with an expanded frequency range of 500 MHz. The transmission was over a very short distance of 30 meters (approx 100 feet).

Level3 Communications wants the Federal Communications Commission to impose interconnection requirements on Internet service providers -- a move the company said is necessary to “fully protect the free and open Internet.”

The company recommends three specific ISP interconnection requirements. Mooney said Level3 already has similar arrangements with several ISPs and “the solution is good for everyone.”

Level3’s proposed ISP interconnection requirements include:

1. If a content provider or a network operator providing connectivity for the content provider delivers content into the ISP’s local market closest to the location of the ISP’s customer requesting the content, the ISP should be required to deliver the traffic to its customer without charging an interconnection fee -- provided that the content provider delivers a certain amount of traffic in the aggregate to the ISP.
2. The ISP would be able to select the interconnection location but selections would have to be “reasonable.” For example, each location would have to serve a minimum number of the ISP’s customers and the location would have to be served by several different metro transport service providers to ensure that the ISP has competitive choices.
3. If interconnection capacity becomes congested at any interconnection location, it would have to be promptly augmented.

The latest network operator with a gigabit network announcement is Paxio, which has launched gigabit residential service in Emeryville (CA), based on fiber-to-the-home technology.

Paxio’s business model is to partner with municipalities, property owners and the like -- sometimes overbuilding incumbent carrier networks. According to the Paxio website, the company is part of a public/private partnership known as EmeryConnect, which is “committed to delivering and maintaining a state-of-the-art fiber optic network for businesses and residential users in Emeryville.”

Several other network operators -- including Cogent, Hurrican Network, Level3 and Unwired -- also are part of EmeryConnect. Paxio did not immediately respond to an inquiry from Telecompetitor asking for more information.

But according to the company’s website, the company’s Emeryville fiber network is open access, meaning that other network operators also can use it. The company also sells dark fiber and other services -- including 10 Gbps connectivity for businesses based on fiber-to-the-premises.

The number of fixed and mobile US broadband connections with downstream speeds of at least 10 Mbps increased 118% between June 2012 and June 2013 to reach 103 million, according to Federal Communications Commission data.

The data is contained in the FCC’s latest “Internet Access Services” report, which is based on information collected from broadband providers.

Mobile broadband saw a particularly steep increase in the number of users connecting at higher data rates. More than 52 million mobile Internet users connected at speeds above 6 Mbps downstream and 1.5 Mbps upstream as of June 2013, up from 18.7 million in June 2012 -- an increase of 279%.

Smartphones and tablets combined to account for 60 percent of the total time Americans spent using digital media in May, up from 50 percent in 2013, and one of several “huge milestones which underscored just how impressive the medium’s ascendance has been in the past few years,” according to the latest from comScore.

Mobile apps accounted for just over half (51 percent) of total digital media time spent in May. The shift toward mobile access and delivery is taking place at different speeds across different categories of content. A couple of content categories “have shifted almost exclusively to mobile.” Among the supporting statistics are:

• Total mobile engagement on social has grown 55%;
• Social networking on mobile has accounted for 31% of all growth in total Internet engagement;
• Social is the home of the #1 mobile property, Facebook, which accounts for 24% of all mobile time spent. The primary Facebook app accounts for 18% on its own.

How soon will AT&T and Verizon, whose revenues once were driven by voice products, find they both generate more fixed network revenue from video and high speed access than from voice?

Answer: AT&T will likely get there sooner than Verizon.

In fact, AT&T might find that voice is just the third most important revenue source, in the consumer fixed network segment, just as soon as it acquires DirecTV. Should AT&T succeed in its bid for DirecTV, video entertainment would possibly reach $37.1 billion, eclipsing even data services -- at about $28.3 billion in annual revenue -- as drivers of AT&T fixed network segment revenues.

After a DirecTV acquisition, voice would be only the trailing third most important revenue source for the fixed network segment. Of $89.7 billion in total revenues, voice would represent 22 percent of fixed segment revenues. Video would represent 41 percent of total fixed network revenues. Internet access and other data services would represent 32 percent of total fixed network revenues.

Rural communications service provider Plateau Telecommunications said that it has reached an agreement to sell its wireless operations in eastern New Mexico and West Texas to AT&T, making Plateau the latest in a long line of small carriers that have moved away from the wireless market.

The operations that are being sold are comprised of partnerships between Plateau, Yucca Telecom, Five Area Telephone Cooperative, South Plains Telephone Cooperative, Mid-Plains Rural Telephone Cooperative and West Texas Rural Telephone.

The US Government Accountability Office has asked the Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Rural Utilities Service, to provide more detailed information about the impact of the broadband stimulus program in annual reports.

“RUS has not shown how the approximately $3 billion in funds awarded [for broadband infrastructure] BIP projects [has] affected broadband availability,” wrote the GAO in a 25-plus page report sent to members of Congress.

The authors also note that “without this information future efforts to expand broadband may lack important information on the types of projects that were most effective at meeting subscribership goals, thereby limiting the ability to apply federal resources to programs with the best likelihood of success.”

According to the report authors, the USDA has said it will institute procedures to comply with the GAO’s reporting recommendations.