The people of Malta will soon have a choice between a cable broadband provider offering 250/20Mbps service or a fiber to the home network now under construction that will be capable of delivering gigabit broadband across the island — all without usage limits or speed throttles.

Starting this month, for €96 per month ($128), customers of Melita can buy a triple play package of phone, broadband, and cable television that includes a free upgrade to 250/20Mbps.

“The FibrePower 250 product leverages the investments Melita has made in the past years and further strengthens the company’s position as Malta’s fastest service provider,” said Michael Darmanin, director of marketing and corporate services at Melita. “We are seeing an exponential growth in demand for higher speeds and capacity. This is driven by more people connected in the same household or business, more devices and more consumption of video over the Internet.”

Darmanin added the Maltese people want fast and unlimited broadband service, and they will deliver it, starting at Tigne Point (Midi) and Fort Cambridge in Sliema. The service will then gradually be rolled out in other Maltese communities.

Malta, in the Mediterranean Sea, has a population of around 450,000. The country has two major telecom companies: Melita which delivers cable service and GO, which delivers DSL service over the telephone network. Vodafone used to offer a now-discontinued WiMAX service across the island, which never had a significant market share.

The Maltese government made broadband expansion a national priority and set regulatory policies that would increase competition. But the government also insisted that telecom market improvements also benefit customers, and the country laid the foundation of its broadband policy on encouraging the development of a nationwide fiber to the home network.

The tradeoff: the government would deregulate the broadband marketplace and remove regulatory obstacles and unnecessary red tape governing pole usage and underground trenching, but in return providers must meet government objectives towards enhancing broadband speeds and price competition.

As a result, Melita has aggressively invested in cable broadband upgrades that have delivered broadband speeds faster than what most Americans and Canadians can buy from their cable providers. The cable operator plans to be among the earliest adopters of DOCSIS 3.1 which will support up to 10/1Gbps broadband speeds.

Not to be outdone, GO is rolling out its own fiber to the home network supporting interactive IPTV and faster broadband speeds. It will then be able to retire its DSL service, which now provides respectable Internet speeds up to 35Mbps.

Israel has decided its broadband future can no longer lie in the hands of one phone and one cable company, so the country is commissioning a nationwide fiber to the home broadband network that will be run as a public-private partnership, eventually reaching every home and business in the country.

This week, a quasi-governmental committee chose Sweden’s Viaeuropa to build the fiber network beginning as early as six months from now.

The network will support speeds up to 1Gbps and will be owned by the public utility Israel Electric Corporation and a consortium of private entities including Viaeuropa.

“All citizens of Israel will enjoy very fast Internet speeds, which could be a significant growth engine for Israel’s economy,” Roni Friedman, acting director of the Government Companies Authority in the Finance Ministry said in a statement.

The new broadband service will deploy at least 25,000km of fiber, 70 percent purposely wired above-ground to reduce construction costs. By 2020, at least two-thirds of Israel will have access to the service. Israel’s electric utility will also contribute its 3,000km of previously deployed fiber cable to the venture.

Current consumer broadband speeds in Israel top out at around 100Mbps, but at a price. Broadband is still costly in Israel and most customers choose packages comparable to what Americans receive — 10-15Mbps service.

The Israeli government is concerned that a duopoly is suppressing Israel’s broadband standing, a condition considered intolerable as the country moves towards the 21st century digital economy.

Bezeq, the former state-owned phone company, has a 61 percent market share. It offers a fiber to the neighborhood service similar to AT&T U-verse, with broadband speeds in some homes up to 100Mbps. Cable company HOT has most of the rest of the market — 39 percent, and also offers up to 100Mbps service. Upstream speeds are much slower — 1-1.5Mbps maximum.

The new fiber network is capable of gigabit broadband speeds in both directions. The government hopes the competition will force both the phone and cable company to deliver improved services at lower prices. Bezeq has already begun fiber to the home service trials.

At least 88 percent of Dutch consumers are getting 50Mbps from their broadband provider, with the remaining 12 percent expected to get similar speed increases within two years.

A Telecompaper survey found nearly one-third of those consumers consider 50Mbps speeds necessary and almost the same number believe they will need 200Mbps service at some point in the future.

The Netherlands has benefited from a series of provider speed upgrades which have lifted connection speeds to 50Mbps or more.

Only 12% of Dutch consumers do not already receive 50Mbps broadband service. They will have it within two years according to Dutch telecom observers.

This year, enhanced competition from fiber broadband providers have forced cable companies to boost speeds. Some providers now offer tiers as fast as 100-200Mbps, mostly over fiber networks. Two-thirds of Dutch consumers believe fiber networks are necessary to get the best speed increases.

At the end of 2012 there were 1,450,000 households connected to fiber to the home service, 440,000 more than one year before. This is reflected in the growing number of consumers reporting they have fiber broadband, which has halted the growth in cable broadband’s market share.

The report ‘Dutch Consumer Connected 2013’ is based on the Telecompaper Consumer Panel, an online survey conducted between March and May 2013 among almost 15,000 consumers aged 12-80. The report also presents the results for 2010, 2011 and 2012.

Werner

Cable operators are getting ready for competition from Google and other fiber providers with an upgrade to the cable broadband standard DOCSIS that will support up to 10/1Gbps service.

Comcast chief technology officer Tony Werner told attendees at the Washington, D.C. Cable Show that DOCSIS 3.1 will deliver about a 50% improvement in spectrum efficiency.

The new standard relies on orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), a standard already used by the wireless industry to get tighter performance from existing wireless spectrum.

The cable industry’s weakness remains its broadband upstream capacity. Standards originally developed for cable broadband assume users will download far more content than upload, so the focus has always been on download speeds. Upload speeds have been anemic in comparison. Until recently, cable technicians worried they would have to dedicate considerably more bandwidth for faster upstream speeds, but with improved standards, that may no longer be true.

Time Warner Cable’s chief technology officer Mike LaJoie is convinced his company will not have to widen upstream bandwidth. Time Warner has been among the stingiest providers of broadband speed upgrades,  still offering residential customers in most service areas a maximum of 50/5Mbps service, even as Comcast has upgraded to 305Mbps in certain markets, mostly in the northeast. This week Comcast demonstrated 3Gbps broadband, primarily to prove the cable broadband platform will be able to compete with fiber technology.

LaJoie

The first trials of the new broadband standard are anticipated in 2014, with modems for sale later that year or early 2015. Comcast is expected to begin buying and deploying DOCSIS 3.1-capable modems “when it makes financial sense.”

Major speed increases will require cable companies to accelerate the transition to all-digital video platforms to free up available cable spectrum. The faster the offered speeds, the more channels must be dedicated to providing broadband. Operators don’t see a space crunch anytime soon, especially if they move towards an all-IP platform that would support all services through a giant broadband pipe.

Cox Cable, for example, is planning to move more of its analog channels to digital to free up capacity for faster broadband speeds.

But exactly when consumers will be able to use the faster speeds possible from DOCSIS 3.1 is up to your provider.

Time Warner Cable is not convinced customers even need or want 100Mbps speed, so expect some cable companies to not even attempt gigabit broadband for years to come.

LaJoie dismissed triple digit megabit speeds as a novelty that is not “very deeply penetrated” in the marketplace — marketspeak for “not attracting many customers.”

“There has not been a demonstrated appetite for it,” LaJoie said.

More than a year ago, Comcast temporarily suspended its nationwide 250GB usage cap to study its impact and consider what to do about increasing broadband traffic.

For the majority of Comcast customers, this means the provider has ditched its usage cap altogether, allowing customers to use their broadband service without limits.

“This is the way it should have been all along, especially considering how much I spend every month for Comcast broadband,” says Comcast customer Geoff Cox. “I think usage caps at these prices are unacceptable. If Comcast stops antagonizing me, I will reward them with more of my business.”

For Cox, that meant one week after the cap was lifted, he upgraded his service from Performance to Blast. His usage did not immediately increase that much and Comcast now gets more of his money.

“We do about 280GB a month today between me, my wife and our four kids,” Cox tells Stop the Cap! “When the third one becomes a teenager, we will probably upgrade again to Extreme because of all the streamed media being used in this house.”

But if Comcast brings back the cap, Cox will downgrade his service back to where he started.

“AT&T U-verse isn’t much competition for Comcast broadband because U-verse is slower and their 250GB cap I can see getting enforced when AT&T smells money,” Cox tells us. “As I have told my family, usage caps are not acceptable and we have to take a stand somewhere and let them know caps will cost them business, not earn them more money.”

Whether Comcast will listen remains unknown. The company has said little about its usage cap program since suspending it May 17, 2012. At that time, Comcast did say they had not given up on usage caps in principle — they just wanted a more flexible approach while managing those caps.

Last May, the company announced two trials to test which direction Comcast would take with respect to limiting broadband usage.

In Nashville, Comcast increased the usage allowance for all tiers to 300GB per month and planned to sell additional gigabytes in increments of $10 per 50GB;

In Tucson, Comcast adopted variable usage allowances depending on the type of service a customer selected:

• Economy 300GB
• Economy Plus 300GB
• Internet Essentials 300GB
• Performance Starter 300GB
• Performance 300GB
• Blast 350GB
• Extreme 50 450GB
• Extreme 105 600GB

The rest of Comcast customers get to test unlimited service, at least until the company determines whether it actually needs caps at all. Cox does not think the company does.

“Cable broadband upgrades have really made neighborhood congestion a non-issue and while the company keeps raising the price of broadband service, their costs keep dropping.”