Habsburg Empire Redux: Slovakia achieves leadership in broadband speeds.

Fiber-fast broadband networks, advanced DSL, and the latest cable broadband technology has allowed Bohemian broadband to help kick Canada and the United States into middle place for broadband speeds and web page loading time, according to statistics released by Google.

Google crunched the data from visits to websites all over the world by site owners supporting Google Analytics. Google’s measurement of web page load times gives researchers several clues about how to assess broadband quality. The data combines the speed of the user’s broadband network, how congested that network is, the quality of the service provider’s backbone connection, and the design of the web site visited.

The findings deliver a boost to central Europe where the Czechs and Slovaks are nearly neck and neck for top honors.

Google found the world’s fastest page load times in Slovakia (formerly the eastern half of Czechoslovakia.)

From Bratislava to Košice, Slovaks wait an average of 3.3 seconds for web pages to load on their desktop computers. On mobile devices, the slightly longer wait time of 7.6 seconds still places the country in the top 10.  Americans wait 5.6 seconds for desktop connections, 9.2 seconds for wireless.

South Korea took second place.  Koreans have enjoyed the world’s fastest broadband in speed rankings for years, but Eastern Europe’s enormous investment in fiber broadband and upgrades to legacy telephone and cable networks all make a difference.

The Czech Republic won third place.  That’s not surprising, considering Spanish owned Telefónica O2 Czech Republic has been in a hurry to completely overhaul the former state-owned Český Telecom.  While Americans fight for 1-3Mbps DSL from suburban and rural phone companies, O2 provides most Czechs ADSL2+ or VDSL service in non-cable TV areas at speeds up to 25Mbps.  In larger Czech cities cable companies like UPC offer budget speeds of 2Mbps or lightning fast service up to 120Mbps for those who want it.

The lighter the color, the faster the speed.

The top scores for broadband speed were achieved in Europe or Asia.  Farther down the list are the United States and Canada.  Canada scored slightly higher than the United States.

Most of the countries stuck at the bottom are in Latin America, Africa, and poorer Asian nations.

Google refused to release the raw data, but Bloomberg News did a lot of the work identifying broadband winners and losers.

Examine the rankings below the page jump:

… Continue Reading

Maggie Wilderotter's "High Speed" Fantasies

Frontier Communications CEO Maggie Wilderotter wrote this week the company’s network improvements and expanded broadband has moved West Virginia from the bottom five states in the country to the top five.

In an Op-Ed editorial published in the Charleston Gazette Tuesday, Wilderotter likened Frontier’s broadband improvement to the 1960s moon program.  Customers in West Virginia living with Frontier broadband can relate — to the 1960s anyway.

Where did Wilderotter get her information?  Perhaps from Frontier’s own Dan Waldo, who made the same claim last summer in an interview with MetroNews Talkline.  At the time he said it, West Virginia was ranked 47th in the country for broadband access.  It now ranks even lower today — 53rd by the federal government’s national broadband map (the federal government also ranks U.S. territories and possessions.)  In fact, West Virginia is in dead last place among U.S. states.  Only Guam, American Samoa, and the U.S. Virgin Islands are worse.

This chart ranks the percentage of customers within a state receiving a minimum of 3Mbps download speeds and upload rates of at least 768kbps. (Source: National Broadband Speed Map/National Telecommunications and Information Administration and the Federal Communications Commission )

The Center for Public Integrity is slightly more generous.  It ranked West Virginia 46th in broadband subscriptions.

Even Ookla, which analyzes millions of speed tests, tanked West Virginia, noting the average download speed is among the lowest of all 50 states at just 8Mbps, and that number seems high because it includes the state’s largest cable operators — the providers that actually deliver substantial broadband speeds.

Frontier’s contribution to West Virginia’s broadband improvement effort is measurable and noteworthy, at least for rural residents who can’t get broadband service any other way.  But many customers living with Frontier sure wish they could.

The company is expanding slow speed DSL service (1-3Mbps) to an increasing number of rural homes, but it does not come cheap.  On a megabit by megabit basis, all of the state’s cable providers deliver better value — more speed for the buck, when examining the actual “out the door price” that includes taxes, modem rental fees, and surcharges.  Frontier charges all of the above.

While Frontier delivers an average speed of 2.41Mbps in West Virginia, Comcast delivers more than 13Mbps.  Among wired providers, Frontier remains in last place.  Ookla shows some minor improvements in broadband speed, perhaps attributable to the network upgrades Wilderotter wrote about, but every other wired provider in the state performs better than Frontier’s DSL.  Who did worse?  Sprint’s 3G/4G wireless network and Wildblue, a satellite Internet Service Provider.

Average download speed performance of ISPs within West Virginia. (Source: Ookla; Graph Period: October 2009 - April 2012)

Wilderotter:

Broadband connectivity throughout all of America can be the thread that unites us all and helps pull our nation up again. Over the past two years in West Virginia, Frontier has worked with the state to bring broadband to thousands of residents and businesses. We have invested in a fiber backbone infrastructure that connects cities, libraries, schools, hospitals and government service facilities. The network improvements and the access to broadband have moved West Virginia from the bottom five states in the country to the top five. Economic development has picked up, and entrepreneurship is alive and well. Frontier is focused on taking this model to the other rural areas we serve throughout the United States.

Frontier’s efforts to expand broadband in a state its predecessor Verizon underserved for years is admirable and the company has indeed expanded service to areas that never had access before.  But as broadband rankings illustrate, Frontier’s incremental efforts are being overshadowed by more dramatic service and technology improvements in other states — the primary reason West Virginia is actually ranking worse than ever.  Frontier is not fooling anyone promoting its institutional fiber broadband networks ordinary West Virginians cannot access from their homes or businesses.  Our own readers tell us the company has repeatedly missed deployment schedules, broken promises, reduced speeds, and suffers from a woefully oversold network that slows to an intolerable crawl during peak usage periods.

Getting West Virginia among the top-five broadband states will require:

• Major investments in fiber optics into neighborhoods and homes.  All of the highest ranked states receive fiber to the home and/or fiber to the neighborhood service in larger cities, and faster DSL than what Frontier routinely sells West Virginians;
• An upgrade of the state’s broadband backbone to better manage increasing Internet usage during peak usage periods;
• Additional penetration of competing technologies into more rural areas.  Cable and fiber broadband deliver the fastest speeds, but most rural areas are bypassed.  Frontier will need to deploy faster and better service to dramatically improve the state’s broadband ranking.

The home of Atlantic Canada’s largest hot air balloon festival is getting more than hot air from broadband providers promising better broadband in New Brunswick.  Bell Aliant announced this month it will spend $2 million to expand its FibreOp fiber to the home service to 3,000 homes and businesses in the town of Sussex.

“Access to the FibreOP network represents a tremendous growth opportunity for Sussex, and has huge potential to connect businesses and families,” said Andre LeBlanc, vice president of Residential Products for Bell Aliant. “We are excited to continue our expansion in New Brunswick, and to offer the best TV and Internet to our customers in the Sussex area.”

Bell Aliant’s FibreOp delivers broadband speeds up to 250/30Mbps and is marketed without data caps — a rarity from large providers in Canada.

The company was the first in Canada to cover an entire city with fiber-to-the-home and by the end of 2012, will have invested approximately half a billion dollars to extend it to approximately 650,000 homes and businesses in its territory. FibreOP builds are complete in Greater Saint John including Quispamsis, Rothesay, Grand Bay/Westfield, as well as Bathurst, Fredericton, Miramichi, and Moncton, including Riverview, Dieppe and Shediac. Customers in parts of Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland & Labrador also enjoy fiber to the home service.

While Bell Canada owns a controlling stake in Bell Aliant, it allows the Atlantic Canada phone company to operate under its own branding and supports their aggressive fiber upgrade project across the relatively rural eastern provinces.  Even more remarkably, while Bell is one of Canada’s strongest proponents for usage-based billing and caps on broadband usage by its customers, Bell Aliant competes with cable operators by advertising the fact it delivers unlimited, flat rate service.  Bell Aliant is aggressively expanding fiber to the home service in Atlantic Canada while Bell relies on its less-advanced fiber to the neighborhood service Fibe TV in more populated and prosperous cities in Ontario and Quebec.

That is counter-intuitive to other providers who eschew fiber upgrades in rural communities, suggesting the cost to wire smaller towns is too high for the proportionately lower number of potential customers.  That does not seem to bother Bell Aliant, who considers fiber to the home its best weapon to confront landline cord-cutters.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/What is FibreOP.flv[/flv]

Bell Aliant introduces Atlantic Canada to its FibreOp fiber to the home service, delivering unlimited fiber-fast broadband.  No Internet Overcharging schemes here.  (2 minutes)

Comcast’s national low-income Internet service, Internet Essentials, is getting an upgrade.

Out of more than 14 million Comcast broadband customers, fewer than 50,000 families managed to qualify and successfully obtain the $9.95/mo low-speed Internet service. On Tuesday, Comcast announced it was relaxing some of the program’s requirements to include more families and has also doubled the service’s speeds to 3Mbps for downloads and 768kbps for uploads.

Susan Jin Davis, vice president of Comcast’s Strategic Services explained the changes on the company’s blog:

[…] When we first started out, Internet Essentials was offered to families with children eligible to receive “free” school lunches under the National School Lunch Program (NSLP). Today, we have officially extended the program to include families with children eligible to receive “reduced” price lunches too. This change adds about 300,000 households in our service area who can now apply for the program — bringing our estimated total to about 2.3 million eligible families.

[…] Second, we doubled the speed of the broadband connection provided with Internet Essentials. It now comes with up to 3 Mbps downstream and up to 768 Kbps upstream, which makes the online experience even better than it was before. The increase is available now and we notified customers by email that the only thing they need to do is reboot their modems in order to immediately get the new speeds.

Third, as we announced in January, we have streamlined the application process by providing an instant approval process for all students attending schools with the highest percentage of NSLP participation, including Provision 2 schools.

Comcast’s Internet Essentials program was launched as part of an agreement with the Federal Communications Commission to win approval of the cable operator’s merger with NBC-Universal.  Comcast also committed to an expansion of its broadband service in rural areas.  The company says it expanded its service area by 199,876 additional homes in 33 rural communities.

Schuyler County

The fastest thing in Schuyler County, N.Y., isn’t broadband — it’s the Watkins Glen International speedway.

County officials hope to change that, voting unanimously this month to approve an agreement with the Southern Tier Network to bring a regional fiber optic system into the county.

The not-for-profit local development corporation established to build and manage the regional fiber network doesn’t sit well with some county residents, however, including one retired Verizon employee who dismissed the project.

Odessa resident Karen Radenberg called fiber optics technology “old school” and said no private company will connect to the fiber network to expand broadband service.

Radenberg urged the county to consider that communications companies have now moved on to using 4G wireless technology instead of fiber.

“That’s ridiculous,” countered Legislature Chairman Dennis Fagan (R-Tyrone).

Fagan

Fagan pointed to nearby Ontario County’s fiber middle-mile and institutional network which has signed companies, including Verizon, as customers.  Verizon reportedly uses the Ontario County network to deliver backhaul connectivity to its cell tower network in the area.  Ontario County is served by several different landline companies including Frontier Communications, Verizon, and Windstream.  Time Warner Cable is the dominant cable provider, but large sections of the county are deemed too rural for cable television service.

Fagan said the new fiber network will improve the chances private companies will expand broadband across the county, but also help deliver an important upgrade to the region’s emergency responder communications system.  The extremely hilly terrain across much of the southern tier creates problems because of signal gaps.  The new fiber network will allow the county to build radio repeaters into areas where the existing network of microwave communications towers cannot reach.

Schuyler County currently has no plans to sell Internet connectivity to the public, but hopes existing private cable and phone companies — including Time Warner Cable and Verizon Communications — will consider utilizing the network to expand service.  Neither company has shown much interest expanding service to new areas recently, most likely because expansion costs will not be recouped fast enough.

If the county network reduces the cost to expand service, more homes and businesses may now fall within a “Return on Investment” formula that could mean the difference between broadband and dial-up.