Jared Mauch’s Comments

It’s no shock that some networking companies are having trouble keeping up with traffic growth and customer demand. It appears the current FCC broadband plan (should hit the US Congress in about 2 weeks) has a mandate to deliver services capable of 100mb/s to each home in the USA. I think this is a reasonable thing, and can be done for cheaper than most companies have determined in the past. The Active Ethernet and PON service offerings provide the ability to dump the old copper/POTS networks and attain these speeds for the same or nominal increase in costs.

What strikes me as most interesting is there are a few different responses to these trial balloons.

1) Comcast – We can do it, DOCSIS3 can bring the speed.
2) Verizon – We can do it, our GPON (FiOS) offering can deliver these speeds either with same hardware or through simple upgrades
3) AT&T – We can do it, but it’s gonna cost us. (AT&T has been a major player in breathing life into their copper plant with their U-VERSE offering/FTTN strategy). This would require a PON or similar architecture to be delivered to subscribers.
4) Qwest – (And I quote) – “A 100 meg is just a dream,” Qwest Communications International Inc Chief Executive Edward Mueller told Reuters. “We couldn’t afford it.”

The differences in network strategies are apparent. Verizon has been pushing their fiber build plans to capture subscribers, and has one of the highest levels of customer-satisfaction. I have believed in a FTTH strategy for many years, and if the FCC mandates 100Mb/s services either directly or through congressional action, we will see significant investment before long.

There currently exist a few classes of service today, I want to briefly touch on them in regard to the above….

Dial-Up – Max Speed – 56Kb/s (very narrow band, depends on line quality)

Basic Broadband – Max speed 5Mb down, 384k upload (useful for moderate local internet access; DSL based)

Broadband – Max speed 20Mb/s, 1Mb/s upload (useful for most common home users; Usually DSL based)

High Speed – Over 20Mb/s, over 5Mb/s upload (useful for home backups/restores of small volumes of data)

We need to attain the goal of having universal High Speed internet access.  Most hotels typically have lower speed access, on the order of something below Basic Broadband speeds.  Closing this gap is important to realize the value of the internet to small businesses and enterprises.  Setting for something less in a first-class economy and country is doing us a disservice.

There are a number of different ways one can pay for building the infrastructure that we care about. The most well known model is the Municipal one. Here you have your water and sewer delivered to you at some point (usually when your home is built) and you pay utilization fees for access.

I’ve started to look at applying the same model to building fiber to every home in Washtenaw County. Let me start with my basic premises, so you have a reference of how I’m thinking before I am destroyed in any comments.
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Various news media are ramping up coverage of the federal networks “cybersecurity” policies. Personally I loathe anything starting with “Cyber”, but the review will be completed today and the report will be sent to the presidents desk.  Some other media coverage are items like:

• Should the NSA Take the Lead for US Cybersecurity?

• Private sector to be play key role in cybersecurity

There have been recent media reports of infiltration of water and power companies by attackers.  I’m not sure what the federal role would be without increased regulation.  This is likely to be met with resistance from industries that see pervasive compromises in their enterprise networks.  Government networks are just large enterprise networks, protecting their secrets the same way a company protects their secrets.

A few days late, but the CSIS released their report to the president on how to secure cyberspace. It’s a bit long but available via their website and worth a review of at least the executive summary, if not a more detailed read.

Not shocking for those of us in the industry, but cybercrime (aside from trying to arrange underage sex and child pornography cases) get very little attention.  There’s a report that was done by a few places, the report article is here with the Full PDF available for your perusal. Interesting to think about laws put on the books, but the lack of resources made available to prosecute new laws. Perhaps something like PayGo when it comes to these types of investigations. The assymetrical battle rages on. The internet brought you more than low-cost communications with family and friends, the cost is lower for the bad guys as well.

So, the long wait is coming to a close.  It is expected that next Friday there will be a ruling from the FCC that comcasts actions with regard to blocking file sharing software is outside of the scope of regular network managment tasks.  This will be interesting as we may see an increase in the peer to peer traffic on networks as the DPI p2p mitigation devices get removed from a variety of networks.  It may also mean the death of a few vendors or at least consolidation in the industry.  Article link can be found here.