Italy is preparing to leap ahead of the United States and Canada by deploying a minimum of 100Mbps broadband to 85 percent of Italy by 2020 and a guarantee that everyone else will be able to access at least 30Mbps service by that time as well.

Telecom Italia will primarily use its own financial resources to lay fiber to the home service to 40 of Italy’s biggest cities over the next two years. The government has pushed for major improvements in Italian broadband to catch up with the rest of Europe and beat the U.S. and Canada. It will spend $6.5 billion dollars to accelerate the development of a nationwide fiber network and the government has also extended a range of incentives to persuade operators to boost Internet speeds without boosting prices for Italian consumers.

Once the fiber network is complete, Telecom Italia can further increase speeds to 1Gbps or more.

Could a speed test like this be in your future?

Comcast is entering the gigabit broadband business and is guaranteeing customers willing to pay for the experience will not be subjected to a usage cap.

Comcast’s Gigabit Pro will arrive next month in select Atlanta neighborhoods located within one-third of a mile of Comcast’s fiber backbone network in the city. Promising 2,000/2,000Mbps unlimited fiber-to-the-home service (at a yet to be disclosed price), Comcast hopes to upstage Google Fiber and AT&T U-verse with GigaPower which are both working to upgrade Atlanta to 1,000Mbps service.

“We’ll first offer this service in Atlanta and roll it out in additional cities soon with the goal to have it available across the country and available to about 18 million homes by the end of the year,” said Marcien Jenckes, executive vice president of consumer services for Comcast. “Gigabit Pro is a professional-grade residential fiber-to-the-home solution that leverages our fiber network to deliver 2Gbps upload and download speeds. We’ve spent a decade building a national fiber backbone across 145,000 route miles of fiber. This new service will be available to customers that are within close proximity to our fiber network.”

Comcast says it will price Gigabit Pro below the cost of its current Extreme 505 (505/100Mbps) service, which costs $399.95 a month, not including the $250 technology activation fee, $250 installation fee, and three-year contract with up to a $1,000 early cancellation penalty. It seems unlikely Comcast’s price for 2Gbps will hover near Google and AT&T’s usual $70 fee for 1Gbps service. Comcast has to bring fiber from its nearest fiber node to a customer’s home and install commercial-grade equipment capable of handling 2Gbps. Existing Extreme 505 customers will be upgraded to 2Gbps for no additional charge.

Comcast officials have repeatedly stressed its 2Gbps tier will be exempt from usage caps, which makes it the only unlimited residential broadband offering available to Comcast customers in Atlanta. Other residential customers are now subjected to a 300GB usage cap with $10/50GB overlimit fee.

Marketing Comcast’s 2Gbps offering may prove tricky because potential customers must live close to pre-existing Comcast fiber. If you don’t qualify, Comcast won’t pay to bring fiber infrastructure your way. Those outside of the fiber service area will continue to be serviced by standard coaxial cable. Comcast will wait for DOCSIS 3.1 to be officially available before deploying more speed upgrades in 2016. It promises to boost speeds up to at least 1Gbps if demand warrants.

The sudden announcement Comcast was willing to ditch part of its HFC coax network in favor of fiber, almost unprecedented for a major cable operator, and boost speeds beyond a gigabit may also be used to boost its chances of winning approval of its merger deal with Time Warner Cable. TWC Maxx, Time Warner’s own speed upgrade effort, only raises Internet speeds to a maximum of 300Mbps. Comcast had promised to upgrade Time Warner Cable customers’ speeds as part of the merger, but TWC Maxx offered most customers better speeds than what Comcast offered most of its residential customers.

Article was updated to correct the upload speed for the 505Mbps Comcast tier. It is now evidently 100Mbps, up from 65Mbps.

Spanish telephone company Telefónica knows the days of traditional ADSL broadband are numbered, so the company is junking its copper wire network and upgrading customers to fiber broadband at no extra charge.

Telefónica president Luis Miguel Gilpérez said the upgrade is part of Spain’s march to be the most digital country in Europe. It also establishes a modern broadband platform on which Telefónica can sell its streaming video and pay TV services to the public. The company holds an 85 percent share in the fiber network.

Gilpérez likened the company’s current top-tier of 100Mbps as yesterday’s news.

“It appears that 100Mbps falls short and customers demand more speed, so the company is looking to develop these services [with] an increase in speed,” Gilpérez told El País.

Spain already has 10.3 million households connected to fiber. Telefónica hopes to reach an additional 3.6 million homes this year, but is threatening to cut its investment if it is forced to share its fiber network with competitors.

Telefónica is already required by Spanish regulators to open its copper network to competing ISPs at a regulated wholesale price. The Comisión Nacional de los Mercados y la Competencia (CNMC), the Spanish trade and competition regulator, is currently proposing to extend open access to Telefónica’s fiber network as well.

At present, the telephone company faces competition from Vodafone/Ono, Jazztel and Orange, which all offer up to 200Mbps speeds. Most expect competitors will boost speeds to match or exceed Telefónica’s new speed offer.

Dunedin is New Zealand’s “Gigatown” and ISP Orcon sells residents unlimited access to gigabit speeds for $68.50US a month.

New Zealand is now the world leader in fiber optic broadband deployment, achieving an annual growth rate of 272 percent and on the way to becoming one of the top 10 nations for broadband speed.

“We are now ahead of Australia, the United States and Japan for fixed broadband, with more than 31 broadband subscriptions for every 100 New Zealanders signed up for this service,” said Amy Adams, New Zealand’s Communications Minister. “This is an impressive jump and demonstrates the impact that the government’s $2 billion investment in the Ultra-fast Broadband and Rural Broadband Initiative program is having on the telecommunications services available to New Zealanders. People are increasingly choosing fiber for its superior speeds, capacity and reliability as the build continues across New Zealand.”

Before the government intervened, broadband in New Zealand was notoriously slow and rationed with low usage allowances and speed throttling. Most of the country received ADSL service, a technology that is rapidly being discarded by most developed nations in favor of VDSL in rural areas and fiber optic broadband in urban and suburban communities. Government policy defined broadband as an essential service for the country’s current and future economic growth and implemented a nationwide broadband improvement plan designed to replace or augment outdated copper telephone lines with fiber optic infrastructure.

While countries like the United States and Canada effectively allow private corporations to define and control their digital destinies, New Zealand believes transformational ultra-fast broadband is too important to leave in the hands of industry alone.

“Fiber is very much like electricity was 100 years ago,” said Maxine Elliot, CEO of Ultra-Fast Fibre (New Zealand). “It’s the single biggest infrastructure build we have done in a long time and it will make that kind of difference in our lives. I think when they first began building out electricity, it was all about a light bulb. No one could have imagined we would have microwaves and computers. We cannot begin to imagine the change that we are about to see with fiber.”

The explosive growth of fiber broadband has helped the country leap ahead of much larger OECD members like Australia and the United States.

“Over the past ten years, we have moved up from 22nd place out of 30 OECD countries in June 2004 to being 15th out of 34 OECD countries for fixed broadband subscriptions as at June 2014,” Adams noted. “At the same time, the quality of people’s broadband packages is improving, with greater numbers of customers using VDSL or fiber, rather than the older ADSL technology.”

The fiber infrastructure has also led to other benefits not originally anticipated. Wireless companies throughout the country have tapped into the fiber connections which deliver backhaul connectivity between cell towers and the fiber broadband network, allowing greater wireless broadband speeds and more capacity. Today, New Zealand is in the top 10 in the OECD for wireless broadband.

New Zealand’s fiber network has allowed providers to cut prices, increase speeds, and offer unlimited access as an affordable option for customers who want the service. It is also expected to dramatically cut the costs of maintaining the country’s telecom network, which were growing as older copper infrastructure aged.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Ultra Fast Fibre Why ultra-fast broadband.mp4[/flv]

New Zealand believes its digital future depends on fiber optics, not on last generation DSL from the phone company. This video explains the immediate benefits of discarding century-old copper infrastructure in favor of fiber optics. (3:17)

[flv]http://phillipdampier.com/video/Ultrafast Fibre Installation process.mp4[/flv]

Ultra-Fast Fibre installation is orderly, on time, and technicians will even plant new grass seed and color-match any replacement concrete or driveway patches. This video explains the three-step process customers go through to get fiber service installed. (3:59)

Greenfield

An important Wall Street analyst has publicly written what many have thought offline for the past six months — the chances of regulators approving a merger of Comcast and Time Warner Cable are growing less and less each day that passes.

Rich Greenfield from BTIG Research has grown increasingly pessimistic about the odds of Comcast winning approval of its effort to buy Time Warner Cable.

Despite the unified view from the executive suites of both cable companies that the merger is a done-deal just waiting for pro forma paperwork to get handled by the FCC and Department of Justice, Greenfield has seen enough evidence to declare “the tide has turned against the cable monopoly in the past 12 months,” and now places the odds of a merger approval at 30 percent or less.

“Since we realized the inevitability of Title II regulation of broadband in December 2014, we have grown increasingly concerned that Comcast and Time Warner Cable will not be allowed to merge,” Greenfield wrote.

The claim from both cable companies that since Comcast and Time Warner Cable do not directly compete with each other, there in no basis on which the government could block the transaction, may become a moot point.

There are three factors that Greenfield believes will likely deliver a death-blow to the deal:

• Monopsony Power
• Broadband Market Share & Control
• Aftershocks from the Net Neutrality Debate

Monopsony power is wielded when one very large buyer of a product or service becomes so important to the seller, it can dictate its own terms and win deals that no other competitor can secure for itself.

Comcast is already the nation’s largest cable operator. Time Warner Cable is second largest. One would have to combine most of the rest of the nation’s cable companies to create a force equally important to cable programming networks.

As Stop the Cap! testified last summer before the Public Service Commission in New York, allowing a merger of Comcast and Time Warner Cable would secure the combined cable company volume discounts on cable programming that no other competitor could negotiate for itself. That would deter competition by preventing start-ups from entering the cable television marketplace because they would be at a severe disadvantage with higher wholesale programming expenses that would probably make their retail prices uncompetitive.

Even worse, large national cable programming distributors could dictate terms on what kinds of programming was available.

The FCC recognized the danger of monopsony market power and in the 1990s set a 30% maximum market share limit on the number of video customers one company could control nationally. That number was set slightly above the national market share held by the largest cable company at the time — first known as TCI, then AT&T Broadband, and today Comcast. Comcast sued the FCC claiming the cap was unconstitutional and won twice – first in 2001 when a federal court dismissed the rule as arbitrary and again in 2009 when it threw out the FCC’s revised effort.

Comcast itself recognized the 30% cap as an important bellwether for regulators watching the concentration of market power through mergers and acquisitions. When it agreed to buy Time Warner Cable, it volunteered to spin-off enough customers of the combined company to stay under the 30% (now voluntary) cap.

Greenfield argues the importance of concentration in the video programming marketplace has been overtaken by concerns about broadband.

“While Comcast tried to steer the government to evaluate the Time Warner deal on the old paradigm of video subscriber share, it is increasingly clear that DOJ and FCC approval/denial will come down to how they view the competitive landscape of broadband and whether greater broadband market share serves the public interest,” Greenfield wrote.

If the Comcast merger deal ultimately fails, the company may have only itself to blame.

Last year Comcast faced intense scrutiny over its interconnection agreements with companies that handle traffic for large content producers like Netflix. Comcast customers faced a deterioration in Netflix streaming quality after Comcast refused to upgrade certain connections to keep up with growing demand. Netflix was eventually forced to establish a direct paid connection agreement with the cable operator, despite the fact Netflix offers cable operators free equipment and connections for just that purpose.

That event poured gasoline on the smoldering debate over Net Neutrality and helped fuel support for a strong Open Internet policy that would give the FCC authority to check connection agreements and ban paid online fast lanes.

Seeing how Comcast affected broadband service for millions of subscribers across dozens of states could shift the debate away from any local impacts of the merger and refocus it on how many broadband customers across the country a single company should manage.

Comcast will control 50% or more of the national broadband market when applying the FCC’s newly defined definition of broadband: 25/3Mbps.

That rings antitrust and anticompetitive alarm bells for any regulator.

Greenfield notes that changing the definition of broadband will dramatically reshape market share. It will nearly eliminate DSL as a suitable competitor and leave Americans with a choice between cable broadband and Verizon FiOS, community owned fiber networks, Google, and a small part of AT&T’s U-verse footprint. If those competitors don’t exist in your community, you will have no choice at all.

Even Comcast admits cable broadband enjoys a near-monopoly at 25/3Mbps speeds. controlling 89.7% of the market as of December 2013.

“If regulators take the ‘national’ approach to evaluating broadband competition, the FCC’s redefinition would appear to put the deal in even greater jeopardy,” Greenfield writes. “Beyond the market share of existing subscribers, the larger issue is availability.  Whether or not a current subscriber takes 25/3Mbps or better, the far more relevant question is if a consumer wanted that level of speed do they have a choice beyond their local cable operator?  As of year-end 2013, Comcast’s own filing illustrates that in 63% of their footprint post-Time Warner Cable, they were the only consumer choice for 25 Mbps broadband (we suspect even higher now).”

“With Comcast’s scale both before and especially after the Time Warner Cable transaction, they become ‘the only way’ for a majority of Americans to receive content/programming that requires a robust broadband connection,” Greenfield warned.

Even worse, to protect its video business, a super-sized Comcast will be tempted to introduce usage caps that will deliver a built-in advantage to its own services.

“Over time, the fear is that Comcast will favor its own IP-delivered video services versus third parties, similar to how it is able to offer Comcast IP-based video services as a ‘managed’ service that does not count against bandwidth caps, while third-party video services that look similar count against bandwidth caps,” he wrote. “The natural inclination will be for [Comcast] to protect their business (think usage based caps that only apply to outsiders, peering/interconnection fees, etc.)”

“With the overlay of the populist uprising driving government policy, it is hard to imagine how regulators could approve the Comcast Time Warner Cable transaction at this point,” Greenfield concludes. “Comcast continues to try to get the government to look to the past to get its deal approved.  But the framework is about not only what is current, but what the future will look like – especially in a rapidly changing broadband world.”