UK Digital Britain Report

The UK government has published its Digital Britain report along with an Impact Statement. These are extensive reports. The Executive Summary by itself makes 83 separate points. There are a couple of significant things that I saw:

• It wants to increase the households that can access broadband at 2 Mbps from under 90 percent to 100 percent. It expects that wireless will be important in accomplishing this. It expects to make 200 million pounds available to support this goal. It also encourages the allocation of new spectrum for this purpose.
• It encourages the deployment next generation fixed broadband, which it defines at 50 Mbps by example.

This is not an ambitious set of goals. A number of other European countries have much more aggressive programs, including France, Switzerland, and the Scandinavian countries. It does not come close to matching what is going on in Asia, especially Japan, Korea, and China.

Following this plan will keep the UK at the back of the pack. At least it will be in good company along with those of us in the U.S.

Cisco IPTV Traffic Forecast

Cisco has released its latest IPTV traffic forecast that covers 2008 to 2013. It finds that video traffic will be of increasing importance and will account for 80 percent of consumer Internet traffic by 2013. It states that Internet traffic and consumer IP traffic will account for more than 70 percent of total traffic by 2013. This means that more than half the traffic on the network will be video traffic at that time.

This reports shows IP traffic growing at a compound annual growth rate of 40 percent per year over this period. This is a bit below the 50 percent per year that I have been assuming. My assumptions are that video on demand to the TV will grow faster than Cisco's forecast. I have seen very high rates of video on demand utilization where network PVR services are available.

It is clear that IP traffic will continue to grow at a high rate and that video will come to dominate these networks. This will require the architecture of these networks to change to optimize the transport of video traffic.

Broadband Providers "Not So Fair Use" Violates Net Neutrality

A couple of articles have been published recently describing how broadband providers are managing their traffic to their advantage and to the detriment of specific services. The BBC has published an article describing how BT throttles the bandwidth on its broadband service and degrades the quality of the BBC iPlayer at certain times of the day. The second is a Light Reading article describing the results of femto cell testing by Epitiro that shows that traffic management by broadand providers will negatively affect the performance of femto cells during peak traffic periods.

The BBC has identified a clause in BT's fair use policy that permits it to reduce the bandwidth on its broadband service to below 1 Mbps, which degrades the quality of the BBC iPlayer over the top IPTV service. The article cites an example of a user who has been affected by this policy.

The traffic analysis performed by Epitiro shows that some broadband providers are throttling IPSEC traffic so that it provides worse performance that best efforts Internet traffic at the same time.

These are the kind of situations that those promoting the Net Neutrality agenda are concerned about. In both cases the broadband providers are throttling the traffic of competitors. The BBC iPlayer competes with BT's BT Vision IPTV service. Femto cells will compete with the broadband provider's VoIP and POTS services. The broadband providers are building the case for Net Neutrality when they do this and will produce a regulatory reaction that they will not like at all.

Spain to Approach 50% FTTH by 2023

Spain's telecom regulator, Comisión del Mercado de las Telecomunicaciones (CMT), has published a study that states that 43 to 46 percent of Spain's households would have access to FTTH services by 2023. Competitive telcos would be able to use Telefonica's fiber ducts and trenches.

CMT also estimates that Spain will have about 3 million IPTV subscribers by 2023, with Telefónica atb70 percent of that market, or 2.1 million subscribers. At those levels, IPTV would represent about 36 percent of Spain's digital pay TV market.

This is an aggressive prediction but one that points to where major telcos globally need to be at that time. There does not seem to be any plan for financing this project, which would probably cost about $10 billion.

LTE Issues

Light Reading published an article based on discussions from the LTE World Summit. Carriers there identified a number of issues that need to be resolved before they deploy LTE, including:

• Support for voice and SMS services including circuit switching as well as packet switching.
• Building enough back haul capacity into the network to realize LTE's performance promises.
• Intellectual property rights.
• Spectrum

Much of this discussion revolved around lessons learned from 3G. It does point out the real problems carriers will have rationalizing both their 3G and 4G strategies. I think that they will either stay with 3G or replace their 3G networks with 4G networks. I think that trying to provide both will be a real mess.

Green Telecom

Light Reading has published a long article discussing the issues around green telecom. It describes why this is an important issue and different ways to approach it. Another interesting approach to this is contained in The Climate Group's Smart 2o20 report that takes a quantitative approach to this subject.

This is an important subject that is being addressed by the entire ICT industry including service providers and manufacturers. It will be important to push this agenda future.

Wireleine Woes

The New York Times published and article discussing if the U.S. wireline telcos will need a bailout to rescue its copper based access business. It pointed out that AT&T lost 12 percent of its access lines in 2008 and Verizon lost 10 percent. The article paints a pictures that the wireline business in the U.S. is headed toward bankruptcy.

I have been tracking U.S. switched access lines at my website from 1991 through 2007. The FCC has stopped tracking switched access lines, so that one of its most interesting pieces of data will no longer be updated.

It is clear that copper is being replaced by the cable companies coax, by wireless technologies, and by the telco's own fiber services. The more aggressively that they deploy fiber, the better off they will be in the long run.