Network management

Dramatic increases in provisioned broadband speeds are continuing to shift the broadband landscape, including a continued increase in gigabit tier adoption, as well as migration of subscribers to speeds of 200 Mbps or higher. About 15% of subscribers were on gigabit tier plans in 3Q22, an increase of 35% over the 11.4% figure in 3Q21, and the percentage of subscribers on plans between 200-400 Mbps doubled to 54.8% from 27.4% in 3Q21.

I’m taken aback when I see fiber-based broadband providers offering what can best be described as stingy speeds. The other day, I ran across a broadband provider that offers a range of speeds between 25/3 Mbps and 100/20 Mbps on fiber. Earlier I ran across a provider that has fiber products as tiny as symmetrical 10 Mbps. This frankly mystifies me, and I always wonder why somebody with fiber would offer broadband products that are similar to their competitors. I figure that part of the reason is what I would call old thinking.

SpaceX quietly revealed the plan to cap residential Starlink service by publishing a “Fair Use Policy” for the popular satellite internet service. The document says residential Starlink subscribers in the US will receive 1TB worth of “Priority Access” per month.

Comcast is introducing a new product in the Northeast that offers faster upload speeds – for a price. The company knows that its biggest weakness is upload speeds. The current upload speeds for products with download speeds up to 300 are only at 10 Mbps.

BT networking division Openreach is looking to reduce its broadband prices to attract new customers and lock in big wholesale clients like Vodafone, TalkTalk, and Sky as rivals lay full-fiber cables across the UK. The incumbent network operator, part of BT Group, has met some of its biggest corporate customers to suggest a number of changes to its pricing structure that would make its offer more attractive and help them move customers from copper to full fiber. Openreach makes money by wholesaling its broadband to internet service providers, including its parent group BT.

Many telecommunications companies are reviving the idea of having content companies pay for last-mile network connections because of the profit it would generate. South Korea serves as a useful predictor of how the bad consequences of this idea play out in real-time. Back in 2016, South Korea adopted a new interconnection rule based on a long-standing telco compensation rule called “sending party network pays” (SPNP).

From the start, Google Fiber was designed to bring you Internet - fiber optic Internet.

Orange Group CEO Christel Heydemann and Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr, called on technology giants to contribute a “fair” share to broadband infrastructure costs, arguing such companies are driving a need for continued upgrades and have disproportionately benefitted from telecommunications investments to date. Regulators in the US, EU, and South Korea are weighing rule changes that would force the likes of Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Netflix to pay telecom companies for the large amounts of traffic they generate.

Comcast recently announced it is introducing a 2-gigabit download broadband product. Along with faster download speeds, Comcast is claiming new upload speeds of as much as 200 Mbps – at least for the 2 Gbps plan. The company made it sound like all upload speeds would be increased by five to ten times the existing speeds. Interestingly, the same announcement said that Comcast would be introducing DOCSIS 4.0 in 2023, at least for some business customers. That’s an announcement that has me scratching my head. Comcast just announced a successful test for DOCSIS 4.0 in January of 2022.

Big Tech companies shouldn't have to pay for Internet service providers' network-upgrade costs, a Google executive said amid a push in Europe to have tech companies pay for broadband expansions and improvements. In November 2021, the CEOs of 13 large European telecommunications companies called on tech giants to pay for a portion of the Internet service providers' network upgrade costs.