telecompetitor

The recent Aereo Supreme Court case, while not exactly positive for Aereo, may help drive cloud DVR adoption, according to Parks Associates’ Research Analyst Glenn Hower.

And with growing interest in the application, video service providers “…can experiment with these cloud services as strategies to build subscriber loyalty and increase revenues.”

Recent Parks’ research reveals that 45% of US pay-TV subscribers find cloud DVR technology very appealing. Subscribers have particular interest in unlimited storage space and two-week catch-up services for video, according to the research findings.

With so many gigabit announcements, it almost feels like a ‘land grab,’ particularly with AT&T.

In a matter of months, AT&T is positioning itself as a major fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) gigabit broadband provider, at least in the context of the number of press releases they have issued. Time will tell whether those press releases actually translate into large numbers of AT&T FTTH subscribers.

A startup company known as Rural Broadband Services Corporation has big plans for rural Tahlequah, Oklahoma -- plans that RBSC CEO Roy Choates hopes he will be able to repeat in other rural communities that lack high-speed broadband connectivity.

“We have a philosophy called ‘shared infrastructure,’” said Choates. “In rural America you don’t need two or three different companies building a fiber network.”

For example, he said he expects to supply connectivity to support utility company smart grid deployments, eliminating the need for the utility to deploy its own fiber. He also believes broadband will be key to important rural initiatives such as telemedicine, distance learning and the ConnectED program that aims to bring high-speed Internet to the nation’s schools.

Comcast on July 22 announced that its broadband network is fully deployed to support IPv6 dual stack connectivity. Comcast has surpassed 30 percent IPv6 deployment overall, according to July 2014 launch measurements by the Internet Society.

AT&T has crossed the 20 percent mark and Time Warner Cable the 10 percent IPv6 deployment level. Verizon Wireless’s IPv6 deployment, the Internet Society reported, reached 53.55 percent. Comcast expects its IPv6 penetration to reach nearly 50 percent by the end of 2014.

Time Warner Cable issued touted the gigabit network it proposes to deploy in the city of Los Angeles. The company’s proposal came in the form of a response to a request for information (RFI) issued last year by the City of Los Angeles a network operator to build a gigabit network throughout the city at the operator’s own expense.

TWC’s response includes:

• Detailed information on TWC network upgrades that are already underway that will deliver up to 300 Mbps to all of the company’s customers by the end of 2014
• Details about the company’s transformation to an all-digital network in LA
• A catalog of TWC’s current fiber-based broadband and Ethernet solutions that already serve businesses and anchor institutions in the community with multi-gigabit connections
• Details on TWC’s continuing deployment of public Wi-Fi hotspots that are free to the majority of TWC broadband customers

Verizon said that it successfully tested a 100 Gbps switched Ethernet access link using a network interface device from Canoga Perkins.

Previously the carrier had done “extensive testing in a lab,” but “it was important to validate [this] in the field,” said Vin Alesi, Verizon director of regional Ethernet product technology. Deployments of 100 Gbps Ethernet are becoming increasingly common in carrier backbone networks and even in some metro networks, but 100 Gbps speeds haven’t been widely available as switched access links, if at all.

The Federal Communications Commission wants rate-of-return (ROR) telecommunications companies to transition to model-based support as the current voice-focused high-cost Universal Service Fund (USF) is phased out and converted to a broadband-focused Connect America Fund program.

Small rural ROR companies now receive USF support based on how their actual costs compare to nationwide averages, but critics argue that today’s system does not provide an incentive for telecommunications companies to deploy network infrastructure in the most efficient manner. The CAF program for larger price cap carriers is already slated to use a cost model to calculate support levels.

C Spire plans to offer home automation, security and monitoring to customers who purchase the gigabit service that the company is in the process of deploying in parts of Mississippi.

The offering, called C Spire Home, will use Lynx equipment from Honeywell and will be installed by licensed security technicians that C Spire will be hiring, a C Spire spokesman said. Monitoring will be handled by a third-party central station, the spokesman said.

Customers purchasing C Spire Home will have the ability to check in on and control their home system remotely using a smartphone. That capability has had a major impact in the home control and security market, making such systems more attractive to end users and significantly increasing demand.

And that trend has caught the attention of telecommunications and cable companies, many of whom have launched home control and security offerings in recent years.

It appears that the rural-rural broadband gap applies to schools as well as the broader Internet marketplace. That seems the best explanation for two substantially different measurements of average school bandwidth in surveys conducted by NTCA -- The Rural Broadband Association and EducationSuperHighway, an advocacy organization focused on bringing better broadband to the nation’s schools.

The NTCA released the results from a survey of its rural telecom service provider members which found that schools served by those companies, on average, purchase broadband connections delivering 65 Mbps downstream and 13 Mbps upstream. But EducationSuperHighway, which surveyed schools nationwide, found a median bandwidth of 33 Mbps.

These results might seem surprising, considering that broadband is generally available more broadly and at higher speeds in metro areas than in rural areas because it is less costly to deploy broadband in metro areas. That phenomenon is known as the rural-urban gap. But FCC researchers also have noted a rural-rural gap: Rural areas served by small independent telcos generally have better broadband availability and higher speeds than rural areas where the incumbent local carrier is one of the nation’s larger carriers such as AT&T or Verizon.

The research and development arm of Alcatel-Lucent, Bell Labs, announced a new speed record for the transmission of data over copper lines of 10 Gbps (10,000 Mbps).

The experiment was in a lab setting, using prototype technology called XG-FAST, which is a prototype extension of G.Fast, the next generation copper broadband technology.

G.Fast is being finalized as an ITU standard, and should start becoming commercially available sometime in 2015. The 10 Gbps over copper experiment used two bonded copper pairs with an expanded frequency range of 500 MHz. The transmission was over a very short distance of 30 meters (approx 100 feet).