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Science-Technology Title: Broadband vs. Internet The Internet is no more capable than the infrastructures that carry it. Here in the U.S. most of those infrastructures are owned by telephone and cable companies. Those companies are not only in a position to limit use of the Internet for purposes other than their own, but to reduce the Net itself to something less, called broadband. In fact, theyve been working hard on both. Well talk about broadband below. For now lets look at the clobbering the Internet took last week when Verizon, the only large provider of fiber optic Internet connections in the U.S., put an end to expansion of FiOS, their fiber-to-the-premise telephone, Internet and cable TV system. This matters hugely, because the connections with the greatest data-carrying capacities are fiber optic ones. Cable TV and copper telephone lines cant compete. But then, they dont need to if fiber isnt there to compete with. And a fiber-less future is what most of us face, now that Verizon is backing out of that contest. In speedtestVerizon ends satellite deal, FiOS expansion as it partners with cable, Cecelia Kang reports in the Washington Post that the telco giant will stop its buildout of FiOS television and Internet services in the next couple years. FiOS is Verizons fiber-based Internet and cable TV system. Or was. Whenever a company says they plan to stop growing a business, this means they have given up on it. (Hey, what business, especially a big one, doesnt want to grow?) Its also a sign that the business is for sale, in this case probably to competitors in the cable business. Clues in that direction come from Cecelias following sentence: The moves come as Verizon Wireless forges a new partnership with cable giants to cross-market phone, video, Internet and cellular services. In that piece, she says Verizon will pay $3.6 billion to Comcast, Time Warner and Bright House Networks to use a swath of cellphone airwaves that the cable giants own but do not use. At the business +/vs. business level, heres how it sorts out (to me, at least): Verizon was never a cable TV company, and didnt do a good-enough job at that with FiOS. Straight-up, it should have beaten the crap out of all its cable competitors, just based on superior video and a much higher channel count, thanks to fibers much higher data capacity. But Comcast and the others even Dish Network and DirectTV were better at the cable game. But Verizon is king of the hill in cellular wireless, with the best coverage and service in most cities. (See the latest Consumer Reports for details.) A lot of what used to be TV is moving to wireless, both over cellular connections and wi-fi. In cellular, Verizon holds aces. Cable has no cellular wireless business, and its auction winnings for spectrum havent yet turned paid off. But it was worth money to rent out, in ways that gets cable into the cellular wireless business, so they can now sell quadruple play cable TV, landline phone, Internet (increasingly called broadband
more about that below) and cellular. Verizon (along with cable, satellite, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and everybody else) wants to be in the content distribution business, which is the future of television, publishing and every other business the Internet has both threatened and transformed. For the most popular technically demanding content video 100Mbps downstream is enough. You dont need fiber for that. Cable can do the job well enough. For DVD-quality video (such as Netflix and TV from Google and Apple) it already is. As an informal quid pro quo with the cable companies, Verizon agreed to halt FiOS expansion. Dont be surprised to see Verizons whole FiOS business leased or sold off to a cable competitor in the next few months or years. Well all be better off if it gets sold to Google or Apple, but thats unlikely to happen. The deal sucks for the rest of us, because it subordinates the rest of the Internet to the content distro business. The sum of the lost or prevented business (and social benefits as well) is incalculable. And nobody is calculating them anyway. As of today, your chance of getting fiber to your home is now zero, unless you are lucky enough to live in Lafayette, Chatanooga, Pulaski, or one of too-few other places where public and private interests align long enough for fiber service to get built out before brutal opposition by phone and cable companies prevents it mostly by lobbying up state regulations making build-out difficult or impossible for entities other than phone and cable companies. The appetite for fiber is there. We chose to rent our place here near Boston because the street is served by FiOS. (Also RCN, a weaker fiber competitor.) Many businesses see places like the towns listed above as port cities on the Internets sea of bits. The speedtest above is typical of what we get from FiOS, which offers speeds up to 150Mbps down and 50Mbps up. Fibers native capacity is actually much higher, which is why Chatanooga offers up to 1Gbps, as will Googles new project in Kansas City. If you live in one of fourteen Utah cities fibered up by Utopia, you have a choice of providers of 100Mbps symmetrical service that will cost you less than what I pay ($70/mo) for my 25Mbps from Verizon. Last I heard, the fastest cable offering in the upstream direction was 12Mbps. Cox, our cable provider in Santa Barbara, gives us about 25Mbps down, but only 4Mbps up. Last time I talked to them (in June 2009), their plan was to deliver up to 100Mbps down, but still only about 5Mbps up. Thats competitive as long as all you want is content delivery. But what about when you want to live in the cloud, and all your data is elsewhere? In the long run youll need a lot more upstream as well as downstream capacity for that. Internet service optimized for media delivery (where TV especially wants to go) wont cut it. But then, most people arent looking at that. Theyre looking at TV on their iPads over broadband, and thinking thats way cool enough. So here we are, smack up against what John Perry Barlow warned us about in Death From Above, way back in early 1995. There he wrote, The cable companies and Baby Bells have a model for developing the next phase of telecom infrastructure which, were it applied to the design of physical superhighways, would have us building them with about five thousand lanes in one direction and one lane in the other. Internet speeds over cable arent that lopsided, but they are that biased. And the name for that bias is broadband. So lets look at the difference between the Internet and broadband, because that difference matters. While the Internet is often called a network of networks, what defines the network of is a suite of protocols and standards that transcend individual networks and give the whole a single and coherent way of working. Broadband is an old telecommunications term which, as Wikipedia puts it, became popularized through the 1990s as a vague marketing term for Internet access. The Internets protocols are NEA: Nobody owns them.* Everybody can use them, and Anybody can improve them. Like the periodic table, the Nets protocols occur in nature in this case a human one which is why the Nets founding capacities can be limitless in size and scope. For business this means the Net and the Web (which is an application on the Net) are building materials with leverage as boundless as those of hydrogen, copper, oxygen, iron and other real-world elements, but without the scarcity. This is why the Nets open protocols and standards support $trillions in business without making a dime for themselves, and without promoting the wealth-inducing facts of the matter. We call these kinds of leverage because effects: you make money because of them, rather than with them. But, since the Internet is not out to make money for itself, it is easily dismissed either as passé, or as having little or no business value. This is what George Colony of Forrester Research did in his recent speech at LeWeb, where he spoke about the death of the Web, and why I followed up with Be careful what you call dead. Although Im sure he didnt mean it that way, Georges speech was a win for the forces out to subordinate the Internet and the Web to their own parochial businesses and business models. Right now most of us are unaware that this is going on, and fail to see the risk it presents for everybody who depends on a capacious Internet for future growth and prosperity. The phone and cable operators are not working alone to limit the Nets because effects. At this point their allies include lawmakers, regulators, and professional organizations like the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). A subtle and pernicious part of that campaign has been an effort to shift the nobody-owns-it Internet conversation to one about broadband, which is something the operators own and rent out. Governments are enlisted in this campaign, and now so are the rest of us. (Ive used the term broadband plenty myself, for example, here.) I began to get hip to this trick in the Summer of 2010, at a conference where a spokesman for the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) gave a talk about the goodness of broadband without once uttering the word Internet. Recently the ITU has been further sanitizing this rhetorical body-snatch by talking up broadband as a basic human right. Bob Frankston (co-father of spreadsheet software and much more) has been on this case at least since 2009, when he wrote The Broadband Internet? One sample: Today we are used to the broadband Internet in which we achieve connectivity despite the services and twisting passages our connections travel. Bobs preference is that we look to maximize connectivity, rather than to increase our dependency on carriers with more interest in maintaining telephony and cable TV service and billing models than in maximizing all the other businesses and business models the Nets founding protocols were built to support. The division is between what communications wonks crudely characterize as net-heads and bell-heads. Think of conflict as one betwee any and only. Net-heads want the Net to support anything. Bell-heads want communications systems optimized only for the businesses they prefer namely, their own and to avoid even talking about the Internet. (Bell-heads have never been comfortable with the Net, because it was not made to bill. TV and telephony are easy to bill, and so is content in general. Thanks to Apples and Googles pioneering work mostly in league with the operators so now are apps.) To see how sharp this distinction is, read The New Digital Divide, by Susan Crawford, an alpha net-head, in The New York Times. Nowhere in the piece does she use the word broadband. She does, however, use the word Internet twenty-six times. In his letter to the editor responding to Susans piece, Verizon CEO and alpha bell-head Ivan B. Seidenberg uses the term broadband six times and Internet just once, and only because he cant say The 2011 World Economic Forum global survey ranks the United States first in Internet competition without it. (One wonders if the U.S. will continue to rank first, now that Verizon has given up on FiOS build-out.) At this point the only entities still trying to bring fiber to your home are Google in Kansas City, brave small operators such as Vermonts ECFiber.net and some scattered municipalities. Helping where fiber cant make it (and, in many cases, where broadband cant either) are Wireless Internet Service Providers, or WISPs. Heres hoping that these net-headed entities can prove that a wide open and supportive infrastructure for the Internet will do more for business and society than broadband alone can provide. Here are Zemantas related links: Post Its $3.6 Billion Cable Deal, Verizon Puts Brakes On FiOS Expansion paidcontent.org) Verizons spectrum deal with cable is the end of broadband competition gigaom.com) Verizon Wireless Allies With Cable in $3.6 Billion Deal San Francisco Chronicle sfgate.com) Verizon cutting wireline, DirecTV ties as it shacks up with cable gigaom.com) Lame: Verizon is abandoning its FiOS TV & internet service to pursue wireless partnerships venturebeat.com) Is Cable the Right Complement to Verizons FiOS Network? fool.com) Verizon to challenge Netflix, Hulu. Winner take all? csmonitor.com) Why Verizon wants to go over-the-top [GigaOM] gigaom.com) * Technically, nobody restricts use based on ownership. The Ethernet protocol, for example, succeeded where IBMs Token Ring and other purely proprietary alternaties failed, because Intel, Digital and Xerox, which owned Ethernets patents, chose to to make Ethernet open. There were no restrictions on how hardware manufacturers (who deployed Ethernet) could implement it.
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