Qatar

The kingdom of Qatar announced broadband is of urgent importance, and has unveiled plans to deliver fiber-to-the-home broadband, phone and television service to 95 percent of the country by the end of 2015.

Under the auspices of a newly formed public-private venture, the Qatar National Broadband Network Company will construct the near-universal fiber network, extending it to every business and home it can reach.  On that network, private providers, including Qtel and Vodafone, will market their products and services to government, business, and consumers.

“The Qatar National Broadband Network represents a bold step forward in Qatar’s drive to be a leading knowledge economy. Ubiquitous access to a high-speed network is essential to business development, economic growth, innovation and enhanced government services for our citizens. This network will do more than connect Qatar to the world; it will truly help enrich the lives of those who live here,” said Dr. Hessa Al-Jaber, who leads broadband development matters inside the kingdom.

The project is specifically designed to address Qatar’s current broadband marketplace — slow and expensive.  Qtel markets its landline customers up to 8Mbps DSL at prices that can exceed $100 a month, but few customers actually achieve 8Mbps results.  The project would largely replace the kingdom’s copper-based phone network.

“A lot of Qatari citizens don’t use fixed line DSL and prefer the country’s mobile broadband networks which can be cheaper and even faster than DSL,” Abdul Al-Attiyah, who lives in Doha, tells Stop the Cap! “This fiber network will bring 100Mbps service to just about everyone at prices a fraction of what we pay for DSL today.”

Al-Attiyah recently had the opportunity to communicate with the kingdom’s telecommunications ministry on the issue of bandwidth caps.

“I asked them if there were any plans to allow providers to limit how much broadband service Qataris could use, because we have caps on mobile broadband today, and I was assured there was never any point to limit use on a limitless capacity fiber network,” Al-Attiyah says.

“Fiber is also a far better solution than wireless broadband because of congestion issues,” he adds.

Qatar is a small country — about the size of the state of Connecticut, and is located on a peninsula adjacent to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.  Thanks to significant oil and gas revenues, the kingdom enjoys the highest G.D.P. in the world, and will soon be one of the leaders in broadband as well.

In an upstate New York match-up, the Rochester/Finger Lakes region scored dead last in broadband speed and value, according to data from Broadband.com.

Why are broadband speeds so much lower in the Flower City?  Blame Frontier Communications, which continues to pitch its decade-old DSL product, delivering an average speed of 4.45Mbps, while other upstate cities enjoy access and competition from Verizon’s fiber to the home network FiOS.  Frontier DSL actually often costs more, after taxes and fees, than Time Warner Cable’s much-faster cable broadband product, Road Runner, which rates an average download speed of 12.77Mbps in Rochester.  Frontier does manage to pull one win — higher upload speed DSL providers can often achieve in cities where cable operators keep upstream speeds as low as possible.

Time Warner Cable has dragged its feet upgrading broadband service in the area to its DOCSIS 3 platform other upstate cities have had since last year.  DOCSIS 3 should arrive within the next 4-8 weeks, which should boost broadband speeds, but may not deliver lower broadband prices because of Frontier’s uncompetitiveness in the area.

(Source: Broadband.com)

The top city in upstate New York for download speed is the state capital, Albany.  But Buffalo wins the contest for upload speed thanks to aggressive competition for Time Warner from Verizon in the Queen City.  Buffalo also pays the least for service — nearly $5 less per month than residents in Rochester pay on average.  Syracuse scores in the middle — but closer in terms of speed and value to other Verizon-served cities.

Slow and expensive broadband service can hamper economic development and costs consumers more.  Unfortunately, there are no signs Frontier Communications has plans to do anything differently in its largest service area — a classic driver of the accelerating number of customers calling to pull the plug on their landline service.

Time Warner Cable's Road Runner vs. Frontier Communications' DSL (Speeds are downstream/upstream; Source: Broadband.com)

Each tiny light represents a single strand of optical fiber.

Verizon has achieved speeds of more than 1.5Tbps as part of a joint field trial with NEC Corporation of America.

The two companies conducted the trial across 2,212 miles of fiber in the Dallas area, successfully demonstrating three separate channels of data streams co-existing on just on a single strand of fiber.

“As we look to a future when data rates go beyond 100G, it’s important to begin examining how these technologies perform,” said Glenn Wellbrock, director of optical transport network architecture and design at Verizon. “This trial gives us a good first step toward analyzing the capabilities of future technologies.”

Verizon’s test placed three different high bit-rate data streams on a single strand of fiber.  Each respective “superchannel” ran at different speeds — 100Gbps, 450Gbps, and 1000Gbps — at the same time, with no significant degradation.

To put that in context, Google’s Fiber to the Home project in Kansas City, Kansas will operate at 1Gbps.  It would take more than 1,500 users fully saturating their Google Fiber connection to utilize the same amount of bandwidth Verizon demonstrated on just one fiber strand.  With most fiber projects bundling many strands of fiber into a single cable, near limitless capacity can bring a broadband experience untroubled by high traffic, high bandwidth multimedia applications.

Previously, Verizon had proven its fiber technology for high bit rate applications in a lab environment.  This was the first “in the field” trial over a functioning fiber network concurrently serving customers in Dallas.

Such technology demonstrates that as broadband traffic grows, so does the technology to support it.

Party time in Kansas City, Kansas

Kansas City, Kansas is creating some jealousy across the river in the much larger Kansas City, Missouri in reaction to Google’s announcement yesterday that it was bringing its 1 gigabit per second fiber to the home network to KCK.

Local bloggers called Google’s announcement “a game changer” for the city’s software developers and health care providers, who represent a large part of the city’s high tech economy. The announcement also thrilled local schools and universities, who will be able to deliver broadband service that rivals world leader South Korea in as little as one year from today.

Speculation about why Google chose the Kansas-based suburb of Kansas City has been rampant.  Among the biggest theories is that the local utilities, with whom Google must negotiate for space to accommodate its fiber cables, are owned by the local municipality, not private corporations.  With local government officials eager to cut red tape and avoid political or economic minefields which could delay the project, having public utilities as a partner may have made a decisive difference in the final decision.

The 'Kansas City' in the smaller type represents the Kansas suburb of the much larger Kansas City, Mo.

Demographics experts suggest Google might have chosen KCK because it represents classic middle-America with a growing digital economy — a perfect laboratory to watch what comes from ultra high speed Internet access.

The presentation by Google rivaled a glowing Hollywood production, one TV news team remarked.  Live-streamed on the web to a global audience, company officials vaguely promised the choice of KCK was the beginning of a potentially broader fiber network not just limited to a single Kansas city, although company officials seemed to restrain themselves out in the parking after the event, suggesting the network could be expanded regionally, saying nothing about other cities further afield.

Local newscasts told the Google story to Kansas City viewers in varying degrees of intensity, often relegated to pointless outdoor live stand up shots scattered around the city.  There isn’t much to show for a network that exists only in the form of a website.

A Silicon Valley expert echoed the sentiment that faster broadband can bring dramatic development to the communities that have it, sometimes in surprising ways.  It’s less about what one can do with 1Gbps service today and more about the possibilities for tomorrow.  But CNBC’s Jon Fortt added some applications may have only limited national appeal if the rest of the country lives with slower broadband service than cannot support the latest online innovations.

Still, excitement is easy to find among the journalists, local politicians, and other community members across the range of local news coverage.

It brings to mind just how ironic it is that a city like KCK will soon have some of the fastest broadband connections in the country while states like North Carolina are on the cusp of enacting legislation that will guarantee they will never be a part of the transformative broadband revolution — at least those who don’t live in Wilson or Salisbury.  Every member of the legislature in that state should watch and learn.

[flv width=”480″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KSHB Kansas City Google to KCK 3-30-11.flv[/flv]

KSHB-TV Kansas City’s NBC station devoted the most time to Google’s arrival, including a special interview by satellite with CNBC reporter Jon Fortt, discussing the implications of 1Gbps broadband for KCK.  (11 minutes)

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KCTV Kansas City Google to KCK 3-30-11.flv[/flv]

KCTV-TV Kansas City’s CBS affiliate spent more than five minutes in their newscast covering Google’s gigabit network, including interviews with a local blogger and health care expert.  (7 minutes)

[flv width=”512″ height=”308″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WDAF Kansas City Google to KCK 3-30-11.flv[/flv]

WDAF-TV, the Fox station for Kansas City, emphasized what Google will do for area students in bringing faster, more reliable broadband to the region.  (7 minutes)

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KMBC Kansas City Google to KCK 3-30-11.flv[/flv]

KMBC-TV, Kansas City’s ABC station, tries to explain what 1Gbps broadband represents with a water faucet.  The station’s coverage continues with the impact fiber broadband will have on local health care.  (4 minutes)

Google announced this morning it has chosen Kansas City, Kansas as the site of the search giant’s experimental 1Gbps fiber to the home service.

The announcement came at 12 Noon ET on Google’s blog:

After a careful review, today we’re very happy to announce that we will build our ultra high-speed network in Kansas City, Kansas. We’ve signed a development agreement with the city, and we’ll be working closely with local organizations, businesses and universities to bring a next-generation web experience to the community.

Later this morning we’ll join Mayor Reardon at Wyandotte High School in Kansas City, Kansas, for an event we’ll carry live on the Google YouTube channel—be sure to tune in at 10am PDT to watch.

In selecting a city, our goal was to find a location where we could build efficiently, make an impact on the community and develop relationships with local government and community organizations.

Google’s video talked a lot about bandwidth and the need for more of it.  While Google is striving to bring one gigabit access to ordinary consumers, other providers like AT&T are seeking to limit it.  The competition between cities looking for super high speed access was fierce, demonstrating Americans are hungry for better, faster, and unlimited broadband service.  Unfortunately, some of the country’s largest providers want to deliver the least amount of service possible for the highest price.

Google’s project is likely to call out more than a few providers, but until companies like Google can deliver real competition to America’s phone and cable broadband duopoly, only a handful of communities like Kansas City will exist as an oasis in the broadband desert AT&T wants to create across its middle-America service area.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Google and Bandwidth.flv[/flv]

Google released this video showcasing what its 1Gbps network will do for the people of Kansas City, Kansas.  (3 minutes)