Uncategorized

Details of Google's Provo FTTH purchase emerging

22 April 2013 by Steve Blum
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Did you really expect it would be free as in beer?

Provo residents will be paying at least $5.35 a month via their City utility bills for their otherwise free Google Internet service for the next seven years, according to the Associated Press. Documents released by the City of Provo back up that report and provide further details on the purchase, although some questions still remain.

Under the terms of the deal that the Provo City Council considers Tuesday, Google buys the FTTH system for a token amount (like, a couple of bucks), and agrees to build out the system to more or less every residence.… More

CEA report good news for connected homes, even with a grain of salt

21 April 2013 by Steve Blum
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Structured wiring is not necessarily Ethernet.

Broadband cabling is fast becoming a standard feature in new homes built in the U.S., with 92% being pre-wired to one degree or another. Many include sophisticated video and/or data distribution networks. That’s the conclusion of a report just released by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA).

The CEA’s eleventh annual State of the Builder study found that “structured wiring” is installed in 70% of new homes. That doesn’t necessarily mean all of those homes are completely wired for Internet.… More

Smart City technology doesn't always look like a smart move for cities


Don’t violate a parking meter while this guy is watching.

Cities have a hard time defining what return on investment means. That was one of the themes at a Smart Cities forum organized by the Telecom Council of Silicon Valley on Thursday.

Executives from several start up companies talked about the challenge of selling municipalities on a new way of doing business. One company, Streetline, aims to “solve parking blindness,” according to general manager Kurt Beucheler.… More

Fiber cuts not as disruptive on California's central coast

19 April 2013 by Steve Blum
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Lightning fast and always lands on its feet. The cat too.

Four years ago, someone chopped into an AT&T fiber optic cable south of San Jose in California. Big chunks of Santa Cruz, San Benito and Santa Clara Counties fell off the Internet for the better part of a day. Mobile and landline phone service was disrupted.

Earlier this week, a similar cut was made in more or less the same place. The same thing happened to a lot of people.… More

CPUC releases app to crowdsource mobile broadband speeds

18 April 2013 by Steve Blum
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Ground truth isn’t as pretty as advertised.

Mobile phone subscribers can find out what kind of service their carrier actually delivers, and pass that ground truth on to California policy makers. The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) has put its CalSpeed app on the Google Play store. Anyone can download it for free and use it to test mobile broadband speeds delivered by AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint.

The app is billed as a “professional-level testing tool”.… More

Taking on Provo failure proves Google is serious about FTTH

17 April 2013 by Steve Blum
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You risk your mojo, you risk everything baby.

The troubled municipal fiber to the home system in Provo, Utah will soon be Google’s problem, assuming the city council signs off next week. The terms of the deal haven’t been released yet, but Google’s selling proposition is that it will connect all the homes along the existing fiber route and provide them free 5 Mbps Internet service for at least seven years. The only cost would be a $30 connection fee.… More

Meeting the challenge, like Bostonians

16 April 2013 by Steve Blum
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One moment calm and routine. The next, anything but.

It is an unfortunate fact of life that it takes a tragedy to show people at their best. Yesterday’s bomb attacks at the Boston Marathon did just that. The community responded instantly, selflessly and flawlessly. As a distance runner who has always wanted to do Boston, the sorrow of the day hit hard. But I was proud of the people in my sport and even prouder of the people who support it.… More

Smart watch might give Windows a boost in the mobile market

15 April 2013 by Steve Blum
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It’s not a smart watch unless it looks smart.

Microsoft is the latest company to get into the smart watch business, or so the latest rumors say. It could be a way to give Windows a competitive boost in the mobile OS market, if Microsoft can integrate it into the ecosystem in an interesting way.

The hot smart watch at CES in January was the Pebble. It links to a smart phone via Bluetooth, allowing users see messages and alerts or control phone functions.… More

More competition means lower FTTH prices according to Swedish study


Sweden breeds competitors.

Competition drives prices down on open access municipal fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) systems. That’s the conclusion of a study completed by a graduate researcher in Sweden. Ziyi Xiong, a masters candidate at the KTH Institute of Technology in Stockholm, examined data from 290 Swedish municipalities – with and without FTTH service – and found that the cost of a 10 Mbps subscription dropped by about a dollar a month for every service provider on a given fiber network.… More

New M2M radio specs could challenge mobile networks

13 April 2013 by Steve Blum
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Wide area of possibilities.

Two new low power standards for wireless machine-to-machine (M2M) communications have been released in the past couple of weeks. The Zigbee Alliance and the Weightless special interest group have published specifications for wide area networking standards that address the low power, low bit rate needs of many M2M applications. Both are initially targeting the smart grid sector, which is growing rapidly as electricity providers deploy tools to intelligently manage power distribution systems in real time.… More