Tag Archives: cable

Georgia Broadband Deployment Initiative 2019-04-26

Good about the Georgia Broadband Deployment Inititative (GBDI): wired and wireless, and they are actively doing something, including mapping.

[Map Phase 1]
Map Phase 1
See also interactive Phase 1 map.

Dubious: stakeholders are only “private telecom and cable providers, local government, and electricity cooperatives”.

Where are universities, technical colleges, doctors and hospitals, local businesses, nonprofits, and the people? Supposedly “Community partnership will be a central component”, but where is the community in GBDI’s plans? Where are the other stakeholders? Where are the public hearings?

Maybe that’s farther along in their timeline: Continue reading →

I don’t want to say we don’t have broadband —Andrea Schruijer @ VLCIA 2013-02-19

Unfortunately, Andrea Schruijer made clear that much of what had just been said at the the Industrial Authority 19 February 2013 hadn’t been heard.

It’s not that we’re saying we don’t have broadband. We have connectivity; that’s not the issue. We have great partners that help us with that.

Well, local “leaders” need to learn to say it: “we don’t have broadband!” Many of the people of Lowndes County and even more in the surrounding counties can’t afford Internet access at all, as Idelle Dear told the Lowndes County Commission. And the “great partners” Ms. Schruijer bragged about will never provide it for us without a lot of prodding, because AT&T and Verizon and Sprint and Comcast and Mediacom don’t think anything outside the Atlanta beltway has enough population density to bother with, and even in Atlanta all people get is U.S.-style low-speed low-reliability Internet connectivity that would never even be on sale in Japan or France or Korea or Finland or even Estonia.

Tom Call illustrated my point when he talked about a residential project where a provider installed cable and claimed they were providing voice, TV, and Internet access, but then didn’t actually have the capacity for Internet when people started using it.

Continue reading →

Japan’s Softbank buys Sprint because CEO Son says U.S. networks too slow

U.S. car manufacturers decades ago milked profits out of poor technology and got outcompeted by Japan on both quality and price. The same thing is happening right now with fast Internet service. We may not have to wait for Verizon and AT&T to get around to offering affordable fast 4G LTE Internet service: Sprint may do it first, now that Japan’s Softbank is stepping in.

Roger Chang wrote for CNET News 15 October 2012, Japan’s Softbank poised to supercharge Sprint network: Softbank CEO complains that U.S. networks are too slow, and with his $20 billion bid for Sprint, he aims to do something about that.

Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son isn’t impressed with the high-speed wireless networks in the United States.

“Everytime I come to the U.S., I say ‘Oh my God, the mobile phone network is so slow,'” Son said during a conference call with analysts today.

Now, Son is in a position to change things to his liking after Softbank and Sprint Nextel agreed on a deal in which Softbank would take a 70 percent stake in the U.S. carrier.

Sprint, which has struggled as a distant No. 3 carrier behind AT&T and Verizon Wireless, could get a boost from the deal, in which Softbank spends $12.1 billion to buy the controlling stake and another $8 billion in investment into the company.

What’s he aiming at improving?

Continue reading →

4G LTE Internet services costs too much, can come down

More people would buy 4G LTE if the price was lower, which we know is possible because it is 2 to 10 times lower in Europe. And then a lot more people around here would have fast Internet service.

Kevin J. O’Brien wrote for the NYTimes 15 October 2012, Americans Paying More for LTE Service

Vodafone LTE A comparison by Wireless Intelligence, a unit of the GSM Association, suggests that being in the biggest LTE market has not brought low prices to U.S. consumers.

According to the study, Verizon Wireless, which is a joint venture of Verizon and Vodafone, charges $7.50 for each gigabyte of data downloaded over its LTE network. That is three times the European average of $2.50 and more than 10 times what consumers pay in Sweden, where a gigabyte costs as little as 63 cents.

Standard business practice: sell a new service for as much as the market will bear, and come down in price over time. Except in the U.S. there isn’t much of a market, with only 2 or 3 wireless carriers offering 4G LTE, as the article notes:

Continue reading →

VZ 4G vs. AT&T DSL, Lowndes County, Georgia, 2012-09-08

It turns out you can’t yet buy Verizon’s HomeFusion Broadband 4G wireless Internet service

in Georgia. (You can buy it in Tennessee.) However, in Georgia, you can buy one of several 4G LTE devices that have most of the same capabilities. For example, I have here a Verizon Jetpack™ 4G LTE Mobile Hotspot MiFi©, which is about the size of a pack of cards. A few minutes ago I compared its speeds directly with AT&T 3Mbps DSL. Here are the results.

The MiFi I’ve got is a slightly older model of the one pictured above, because for years

AT&T DSL: 2.66Mbps down 0.31Mbps up
AT&T DSL
VZ 4G: 10.88Mbps down 7.14Mbps up
Verizon 4G
I’ve been using it and its predecessors on road trips, for Skype, web browsing, blog posting, etc. It’s also come in very handy as a plan B home Internet access method on the many occassions when AT&T’s DSL has flaked out. Mostly I did not use it for uploading videos or watching them much, because until recently it was relatively slow, using EVDO technology at about 1Mbps down and 0.7Mbps up. Suddenly, the MiFi has gotten much much faster, ten times faster, because Verizon has turned on their 4G LTE service in Lowndes County, at least for mobile access.

The tables show results using SpeakEasy Speedtest a few minutes ago.

Megabytes/secMegabits/sec
downup downup
AT&T DSL 2.66Mbps 0.31Mbps 322KB/sec 38KB/sec
Verizon 4G 10.88Mbps 7.14Mbps 1360KB/sec 893KB/sec

Verizon’s 4G LTE is way faster, as in Continue reading →

4G data caps and prices

It may be fast, but there are some drawbacks to 4G wireless Internet access, namely data limits and significant prices. Here’s Verizon’s table for their HomeFusion Broadband.

Monthly Data Allowance Monthly Access
10GB $60
20GB $90
30GB $120

I would bet the other companies’ caps and prices are pretty much the same. For web browsing, you’ll probably never run over that lowest 10GB/month limit. So if you want to tweet or facebook or tumblr or email with your friends, 4G probably will work fine for you.

If you do a lot of Skype or listening to music over the net, you might run over. If you watch a lot of videos, or you want to do video conferencing, you can definitely run over. Here’s Verizon’s table of estimates, and they have a calculator along with that:

Email (Text Only) = 10 KB
Typical Web Page Lookup* = 1MB
Audio Streaming = 51 MB/hr
Video Streaming (Standard Def) = 500MB/hr
Video Streaming (HIgh Def) = 1.6GB/hr
Digital Photo Download/Upload (Hi-Res) = 5 MB
4G VoIP = 67MB/hr
4G VoIP with Video = 254MB/hr

1 MB = 1,024KB
1 GB = 1,024MB

Videos of a single VLCIA meeting can run 2 gigabytes, and there are lots of other meetings going on around here. Not every local elected or appointed board has 5 minute meetings like the Lowndes County Commission. Many run for an hour or more.

Even though I’m a pretty intensive Internet user, I’m considering getting 4G home service. Someday AT&T may get around to running fiber for their uverse service out here in my sparsely populated area of the county, and then we might be able to get 3-24Mbps down (and unknown speeds up) for $38 to $63/month. Some year. Or never, if wireless speeds continue to leapfrog even fiber speeds. OK, real fiber speeds such as in Finland, Japan, France, Korea, or dozens of other countries are 100Mbps or up, but U.S. telcos and cablecos are not going to offer speeds like that until they’ve milked every penny they can get out of slower speeds first. Not to mention what the U.S. carriers are really selling with fiber is TV, which is a dying broadcast medium, fast being left in the dust by the participatory social Internet. Who do you know under 30 who gets their news from TV anymore?

Anyway, I don’t know whether 4G Internet service would work for you, but at least it’s another option.

-jsq