IP: BROADBAND WON'T HAPPEN BY ACCIDENT

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
>
> [Note:  Posted here with the permission of the author.  Peter used to be 
> the CTO of British Telecom (BT), so he knows what he's talking about!  DLH]
>
> BROADBAND WON'T HAPPEN BY ACCIDENT *)
> Peter Cochrane
> ConceptLabs CA
> <mailto:petercochrane () conceptlabs net>
>
> *) Published as " Life begins at 100 Mbps !" in issue 17 (October 2001) of
> Billing (www.billing.co.uk  PBI Media.UK)
>
> I can remember a time when paying for computing time by the minute and data
> storage by the KiloByte was the norm.  When downloading and printing meant
> taking a lunch break.  When batch computing meant waiting a day or a night
> to see if a program had compiled and run.   I can also remember when
> teletypes at 110 Baud were replaced by VDUs at 300, 600, 1200, and then 2400
> Baud.  When only rich people had a telephone in their home, mobile phones
> had not been invented, and all telecoms and networking was expensive.
>
> So what happened? Integrated circuits and fiber optics changed everything as
> processing power, storage and data transmission accelerated in speed and
> density whilst costs plummeted.  We have seen an exponential (doubling every
> year or so) growth in capability of everything IT with exponentially falling
> costs, and relatively speaking our technology now costs nothing.  I can now
> afford a 100Mbit/s LAN, and 11Mbit/s Wireless LAN in my home.  Every
> computer has a 1GHz clock and over 500MByte of RAM, and a 240GByte server
> takes care of all storage and back up.   And until recently my WWW access
> was a 2Mbit/s radio link into BT Laboratories. This might all seem
> extravagant, but to my youngest son it all sucks.  And he is right; it is
> too slow and wholly inadequate for a multi-media world.  Believe me, life
> begins at 100Mbit/s and up when we perceive response times to be less than a
> second.
>
> When I retired from BT so did my 2Mbit/s radio link and I returned to an
> insane world of no bandwidth.   My WWW access is now a 56Kbit/s dial up
> modem delivering a puny 48Kbit/s.  Unfortunately I live in a high-net-worth
> community on the periphery of town, which perversely means none of us can
> have ISDN, ADSL or a cable modem.  We are on the end of ancient telephone
> cables unable to support wideband access, and live in an information ghetto
> of people who would be only too pleased to pay for speedy access.  I'd feel
> happier if my situation was the exception, but it isn't, it is the rule.  No
> one in the EU has wideband, and  <10% in the USA enjoy adequate facilities.
> Across the planet the majority access the WWW through a dial up network of
> old and limited technology.  To me it is a miracle that the WWW has taken
> off and I see network limitations as a key factor in the recent demise of
> the dotcoms.
>
> What went wrong, and how are we going to get it fixed?  For sure the roll
> out of fiber into the long-lines network was, and continues to be,
> spectacular.  It has totally sidelined all satellite capacity and links
> every continent with huge amounts of bandwidth.  As I recall, in the initial
> phase there was never a business plan to totally fiber nations or the
> planet.  It was a no-brainer, the cost per bit and operational advantages
> were so great, individuals made decisions and corporations just rolled it
> out.  Suddenly a network of copper with repeaters spaced every 2Km on land
> and every 10Km under the sea seemed like the Stone Age.   Optical fiber
> progressively spanned 10, 20, 30, 40, and then >100Km.  Networks in Europe
> no longer required buried repeaters and the reliability of systems meant
> fewer craft people and huge reductions in standby plant.  So dramatic was
> this advance that Telco economics were transformed.  Instead of a near 50:50
> split of capital and operational costs between local loop and long lines,
> long lines fell well below 5%.  Optical fiber saw a 99% fall in network
> electronics, the eradication of lightening damage, and cables totally
> impervious to water ingress.  Fault and failure levels plummeted to
> previously unimagined levels, and huge economies were realised as a result.
>
> So why didn't Telcos roll fiber into the local loop?  Well, the story is a
> bit like the Gulf War (they stopped right on the border, and made the
> fundamental error of not completely vanquishing the enemy) and now we
> suffer soda straw communication pipes as a result.  Across the planet dumb
> decisions were made out of political necessity, individual and corporate
> self interest, technical ignorance and financial ineptitude.  In 1986 fiber
> direct to the home was demonstrated to be financially viable.  For the UK it
> would have cost a mere $22Bn to fiber every home, which in comparison to the
> $34Bn just wasted on 3G mobile licenses was a bargain.  For many countries
> the optical fiber story goes something like this:
>
> 1)      The managers ruling the local loop saw many of their colleagues in 
> long
> lines networks having to take early retirement, accept new assignments, and
> move companies.
>
> 2)      Managers and craft people could see fiber technology being rolled 
> out by
> PhD's from laboratories, and they could not get an inside line, they 
> couldn't, or didn't want to, get in on the act.  They began to feel 
> insecure and at
> great risk.
>
> 3)      The financial people didn't care!  But they couldn't get consistent
> numbers for their models.  Where was the advantage of fiber going to come
> from?  They would argue that the advantage in long lines was now obvious,
> but there are no repeaters in the local loop.  Worse, I suspect that the
> waters were muddied by (1& 2), not in a conspiratorial way, more because
> they didn't know.  But as a group there was not the imagination or courage
> to create models that encompassed all the potential gains, which included a
> reduction from thousands to tens of Central Office sites.
>
> 4)      And finally, there was the technical community who I feel have to
> shoulder at least 50% of the responsibility.  On the fiber side the
> researchers bulldozed ahead creating more and more technology and more and
> more competing options for the local loop.  No one stopped to make it really
> practical.  Worse, those researchers who had devoted their lives to copper,
> and had failed to make the transition to fiber, failed to grasp the
> magnitude of the possibilities.  They continued their expeditions into
> copper and digital signal processing with wild claims that DSL could deliver
> 2, 6, 12, and perhaps 50Mbit/s using the existing copper cables.  What a
> dream!  The bean counters could hardly believe it, milk past investments in
> copper by attaching a modem on each end of a customers lime.  Game over!
>
> So DSL became the end game, and fiber was pushed aside.   At a time when a
> PC had a 6Mbit/s clock why would you need more speed in the local loop?  And
> anyway, all this Moore's Law stuff will most like not happen anyway etc.  I
> would have thought that they all have to be feeling pretty dumb now!  DSL is
> a universal and monumental failure with far less reach, and far fewer bit/s
> delivered than promised.  And of cable modems?  Well they have done a bit
> better, but the penetration is poor, the service limited, with installation
> and operation proving very expensive.
>
> A long past UK Prime Minister, Harold McMillan, was famous for using the
> expression: "well gentlemen, here we are".  He always looked at the
> situation as was and disregarded prior events.  Bringing this up to date in
> a PC world I think we have to say: "well folks, here we are".  We cannot go
> back to correct the mistakes of the past, but we should use them as valuable
> lessons in our forward thinking.  Just how are we going to get wideband out
> to folks who are willing to pay, and have a dire need to communicate and
> work at speed?
>
> Let me first dismiss all forms of satellite technology, including
> geo-stationary, low-earth-orbit, balloon and aircraft platforms as being an
> insignificant prospect.  Yes they will provide a valuable asset in the
> provision of service to far-flung, hard-to-access, geographically remote
> locations, and mobile and clustered platforms.  But in the grand scheme of a
> global wide-band future they really are going to be a very small %.
> Satellites never amounted to more than 25% of all international
> communications capacity, and today they are less than 1% and falling.  In
> contrast, future generations of mobile phone networks, do I suspect have a
> much bigger role to play and cannot be dismissed.   So I am going to
> concentrate on the kernel problem, the local loop.  Here are some key
> factors we now need on the table.
>
> 1)      Telcos will never deliver wide-band communications.  It is not in 
> their
> interests to do so; it isn't in their business minds or models.  They are
> into call minutes and billing systems.  They are old, gray and don't get it,
> and they don't intend getting it.
>
> 2)      The cable companies are slightly better, but have a broadcast mindset,
> where wide-band is an add-on, a kluge, and not a primary business or
> technology.
>
> 3)      Both (1) and (2) have missed their opportunity, wasted time and 
> money on
> a vast scale, and are now going bust.  Five years ago they could have rolled
> fiber into the local loop, they had the money and the people back then - now
> they have neither.
>
> 4)      The sheer numbers of people required to undertake the total 
> provisioning
> of a wholly fiber local loop are no longer available.  They have moved out
> of the Telco and Cableco arenas, and into other areas of IT and retirement.
>
> 5)      There is technological confusion with the old world of IP over an oft
> concatenation of PSTN, ISDN, Frame Relay, ATM, Sonet/SDH, and WDM systems,
> up against a new Metro-LAN world of IP over DWDM.
>
> So how are we going to advance?  I think we have been here before.   Back in
> the 1940s USA TV companies couldn't find an economic means of providing
> signals to outlying communities.  So people clubbed together to build towers
> and antenna systems, and wired their houses to realize Community Antenna TV.
> This was so successful that the expanded systems became the Cable systems of
> today.
>
> In a similar manner, youngsters now frustrated by the lack of bandwidth are
> linking homes with CAT5 LAN wiring strewn across gardens.  Schools are
> buying 802.11 wireless-LAN cards to create their own networks at a much
> lower cost than building wiring schemes.  There is a message here for the
> network companies, and a huge opportunity.  If they don't provide the
> bandwidth demanded by rapidly advancing terminal technologies, people will
> just set to and provide their own.  Hotels, schools, coffee shops and places
> of work are starting to look like the phone boxes of the 21st Century.
> People are gathering there to satisfy their craving for wide-bandwidth,
> which isn't a 56Kbit/s or 2Mbit/s dribble, but orders of magnitude more.
>
> In some countries >80% of the population is within 1Km of an optical fiber,
> but they cannot gain access.  So here is a hybrid solution pulling together
> multiple opportunities spanning fixed and mobile networks. Telecoms is on a
> back foot with numerous operators in serious trouble.  After being
> corporately raped of over $100Bn for 3G mobile licenses across the EU,
> operators and markets suddenly realized that a further $100Bn of
> infrastructure investment is needed, and $100Bn in technology and service
> developments plus marketing and sales.  This dictates a minimum $1000 spend
> by every EU handset owner assuming they all instantaneously abandon GSM and
> convert to 3G overnight. The operators can't see a payback within 10 years,
> and are finding it difficult to come up with business models that makes 3G
> pay in.  In the UK, operators paid $34Bn for licenses in a market of around
> 45M users where 30,000 new base stations will be needed at a time when the
> public is objecting to these eyesores.  So what can be done?  I see very few
> options to save the current situation, but here is a possible subset;
>
> 1)      Mobile operators could move to subsidize 3G by increasing the 
> price of 2G handsets, call charges, whilst simultaneously reducing their 
> Quality of
> Service, and the number of services, ie we all get to pay much more for much
> less.
>
> 2)      Governments could see the error of their ways and repay the 3G license
> monies they raped from the industry; highly improbable!
>
> 3)      Operators could merge to share a single infrastructure build and
> operation. My guess is that Europe can only afford 4 operators in total!
>
> 4)      A partnership between fixed and mobile operators plus 
> manufacturers could be incredibly beneficial.
>
> 5)      Most lucrative of all would be the eradication of the local 
> loop.  At a
> rough estimate an average Telco could displace 50% of operating costs and
> 60% of employees if it replaced all its wire-line plant by 3G handsets.  3G
> offers wire-line voice quality, and higher aggregate data rates than
> wire-line modems over a wider geographical area than DSL. Over 50% of all
> Telco faults are in the local loop, with about half inflicted by their own
> craft people, and the rest are more or less evenly split between water
> ingress into cables and damage by other utilities. 3G would get rid of a
> huge raft of problems and place the onus for local loop operations on the
> customer.  Moreover, the majority of the existing line plant is optical
> fiber out to locations ideal for 3G mini-base stations.
>
>  So far this is the only scenario where everybody wins!
>
> At this point the Telcos could mine the copper and lead blocking duct
> tracts, recover money on the sale, and then lease the empty space to new
> companies moving into the MetroLAN space.
>
> The reality is that there is not a single technology that can do telephones,
> CATV and data.  It will be some time before that prospect becomes a reality
> and this solution gives natural stepping-stones.  On entry into the last
> mile the new companies have the choice of installing fiber direct into home
> and office, or much more attractive, erecting wireless access points in the
> street.  Communities of 802.11 WirelessLAN users already abound across
> Europe, and they are building fast in the USA. As a solution it is almost
> perfect!  Think about it, the customer purchases, installs and maintains
> all their own equipment.  A very large chunk of the cost base is moved out
> of the operators hands and is gratefully received by the end customer.
> Will it work?  Will it be acceptable?  Ask the many who do this already in
> hotels, airports and Costa Coffee houses across the planet. As far as I can
> see it is a done deal.
>
> As there is no new money available and customers are highly unlikely to
> throw more at the 3G for nothing, an increased cash flow can only come from
> displacing existing market.  So to a vital question; who has all the money
> and how can they be displaced?  Well how about the music, movie and computer
> game industries?  Looking around most homes there is ample evidence that
> families spend substantial amounts in these sectors.  They are a natural for
> the non-physical distribution of bits - which can be written direct to disc
> of any form or location: home, office, car, handbag, pocket or belt.  So it
> is somewhat ironic to see the American music industry hell bent on the
> destruction of Napster and its variants at a time when CD sales increased by
> 15% last year.  This type of service, and derivatives, is probably the only
> one big enough to support a community of 3G users.  With all the digital TV
> network news and programs dying on their feet, plus our apparent dislike of
> the small screen, there are not a lot of options open to service providers
> for advertising supported services.
>
> On the upside I don't think anyone or any industry will be able to stop the
> Napster variants and the public downloading of music, it may even become
> commercialized in due course, with a natural progression to high quality
> pics, and movies.  But all of this is fundamentally dependent on freely
> available bandwidth anytime, anywhere - a natural fit for 3G.  The other
> essential feature is that music is now a mobile phenomenon; people wear it,
> ride it, have it everywhere.
>
> Trying to be objective in IT markets is extremely difficult given the rate
> of progress.  For sure, we can accurately predict the availabilities and
> capabilities of new technologies, but we have no chance of predicting what
> people will buy when.  It doesn't take a lot to switch off the public, but
> it is also easy to identify and address their frustrations. Everywhere I
> travel I see increasing numbers of people engaging in Peer-to-Peer
> networking. People are using Infra-Red Ports, Wire-LAN, and Wireless-LAN
> connections to create instantaneous networks PDA, Lap-Top-to-Lap-Top,.  What
> has prompted this new activity?  I think the motivators are principally
> twofold.  First, all of our devices have totally outgrown network
> connectivity.  Compared to a 30Gbyte Hard Drive and a 1000MHz clock, a
> 56Kbit/s modem looks decidedly sick and is totally useless for the
> downloading and swapping of even modest size files.
>
> A cursory sweep of my own laptop revealed that 25% of all files are >0.5MB,
> 15% >1MB, 5% >10MB and 2% >100MByte. Most music and movie files are over
> 3Mbyte, whilst digital camera images are generally above 250KB. So what use
> a 56Kbit/s modem, and who has the time to wait 20 minutes for a single
> download?  Just 10 years ago none of this was true, the world was a bigger
> and less rich place.  Today far more is available, and being created, with
> no limits to the applications and need for more and more bandwidth.
>
> So, how long before the network companies wake up and meet this obviously
> growing demand?  I don't think they will. They are focused on exploiting
> what they have installed already, and are happy to see >90% of net
> connections via dial up modems.  And worse, their mounting debt's probably
> means they can't even do it if they wanted too.  The only solution I can see
> on the horizon is a combination of Peer-to-Peer and Ad-Hoc wireless
> networking.
>
> Despite all our advances with optical fibre and radio, the cheapest bit
> transport solution still remains FrizbeeNet - the CD in an envelope.
>
> In my future world I will be able to use a mobile phone/device to access
> terminals and large screen displays I encounter.  It will double as an
> electronic wallet, security device, and medical records repository.  I'll be
> happy to use this as a mobile banking device and pay by the minute,
> transaction or whatever.  But for wideband access I want to pay a single fee
> for wideband access anywhere on the planet, static and or mobile.
>
> Finally, there is one further mind set change required, network oerators
> have to start wasting bandwidth, they have to look at dense coverage using
> pico, micro and macro-cells.  A new phenomenon now sees a natural and
> growing state of chaos.  When people cluster their actions become
> co-ordinated.  The coffee break at a major international conference sees 300
> mobile phone calls initiated within two minutes.  A freeway accident results
> in 1000 calls initiated in 10 minutes.  Train and plane cancellations have a
> similar impact.  The old fixed line telephone network had a peak to mean
> traffic loading of 3 or 4.  Our mobile networks are now closer to 50, whilst
> the Internet can exceed 1000.   With new generations of mobile device it is
> likely to get far worse as the size of file gets bigger and transfer time
> grow.  And a further aggravation will be the introduction of more things on
> line than people.
>
> There is no certainty in the world of networks and to satisfy a chaotic
> future we will have to vastly over provide bandwidth.  The old ways of
> grooming traffic to increase efficiency will only lead to more unusual,
> unpredictable, and probably spectacular network failures.  No one would
> choose to drive a Formula 1 racing car to work, it would be far too
> unreliable because it is so optimised.  In contrast a Mercedes will go for
> years without incident by virtue of its lack of optimisation.
>
> In the same way SMS has become the dominant mobile mode in Europe, we can
> anticipate even more surprises in networks of the future.  So network
> designers and operators have no choice, we are going to need wideband ports
> to the conference room, floor, building, and street.  The link to and
> between our devices will increasingly be wireless, and our access seamless,
> with optic fibre being the primary access conduit into the global network.
> Of course there will be occasions when optical line of sight will find a
> role, as will point to point wireless, but make no mistake, ubiquitous fibre
> reaching out to individual nodes and users has to be the dominant mode if we
> are go universally wideband.

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