Google buys a satellite company -- Skybox Imaging -- why and what next?

This acquisition is ostensibly a data play, not a connectivity play, but couldn't a constellation of low-earth orbit Skyboxes cover the globe? Teledesic 2?

A few days ago, we looked at Google's efforts to bring connectivity to developing nations and rural areas using satellites and high altitude platforms.

Now, Google has acquired Skybox Imaging for $500 million. Skybox uses very small satellites orbiting at an altitude of 600 kilometers, which means they move at over seven kilometers per second relative to the surface of the Earth. Their technology is sufficiently advanced to compensate for that speed and produce videos that clearly show the movement of vehicles -- check this video:

Skybox Imaging HD Video of Las Vegas on March 25, 2014 (1080p) from Skybox Imaging on Vimeo.

Off hand, this seems more like a data gathering move than part of a developing nation and rural connectivity strategy -- they can use these images to look at traffic (for self-driving cars?), count ships in a port or cars in parking lots, etc. For examples, check this video:



But, they plan to launch many of these low-earth orbit satellites -- couldn't they be used for global connectivity as well? Several companies were formed to do just that in the 1990s. Bill Gates, Paul Allen and a Saudi prince backed the best-known one, Teledesic, but the technology of the time was not up to the task and the company failed.

Shifting emphasis, you can see an earlier video of the Skybox entreprenurial team presenting their vision at the Stanford Busiiness School here.

While this effort is not directly tied to providing connectivity, it beefs up Google's space technology and skills. Google is becoming a player in the space game along with Internet entrepreneurs Jeff Bezos, founder of Blue Origin, Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, and Richard Brnason's Virgin Galactic. There are rumors that Google is negotiating a stake in Virgin Galactic and one can't help thinking Musk and Bezos are watching all this with interest.

Update 6/14/2014

More cool Skybox Imaging videos

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Update 2/25/2017

Google has sold Skybox Imaging to Planet Labs, an Earth imaging company. My speculation about possible satellite-based Internet service was off base.

Google and Kansas City push to narrow the digital divide

We have covered various aspects of Google's gigabit connectivity trial in Kansas City. Their plan is to install fiber first in areas of the city, "fiberhoods," with high demand for the service, as measured by the percent of households willing to pay a $10 pre-registration fee.

The deadline for pre-registration was midnight last night, but, as of last Friday, the map of fiberhoods that had met their goal reflected the digital, cultural, racial and income divide in Kansas City, Missouri.

Google and the City worked hard to bridge the divide. The threshold to qualify for fiber was higher in affluent areas than poor. For example, in the circled area on the map shown below, only 5% of the households had to register in order to qualify.

Furthermore, on August 31st, Google adjusted some of the thresholds to make it easier for poor neighborhoods to qualify.

During the last weekend of the six week registration drive, Google and the City worked overtime to close the gap. They held meeting, walked door to door, deployed an ice-cream truck refitted as mobile registration site, and more.

The map below shows that many fiberhoods east of the traditional Troost/Paseo Avenue division line met their thresholds during thd weekend push. (This map shows Kansas City Kansas as well as Missouri). Google reports that 63 fiberhoods qualified during the last week of the registration drive and that at least 180 out of 202 have qualified for service. They will announce the final tally on the registration drive and publish a fiberhood installation schedule next Thursday.

This is important for two reasons. Google will give free gigabit connectivity to all schools, hospitals, libraries and other public facilities in qualifying fiberhoods. That will mean more to a school in a poor neighborhood than an affluent neighborhood.

Furthermore, while Google will charge subscribers $70 per month for gigabit access, they offer free 5 mb/s DSL connectivity to those who wish to pay less. (Households that elect free connectivity must pay a $300 installation fee in 12 monthly $25 installments).

While 5 mb/s sounds slow compared to gigabit connectivity, the fastest DSL speed Verizon can offer me in my middle class Los Angeles neighborhood is 3 mb/s for $29.99 per month. At that rate, I could pay off a $300 installation fee in ten months.

(Verizon does not offer fiber service in my neighborhood, but, where they do, they charge $89.99 a month for 75 mb/s service).

I would expect less contention for backhaul with Google DSL than Verizon since they are provisioning for gigabit service. Five mb/s customers will not add much load.

Google's free DSL service will be more important to many households on the wrong side of the digital tracks than their gigabit service. It will provide very usable speed to newly connected households.

I have said a lot about Google's effort, but, as Timothy B. Lee points out, Kansas City is an active partner. To attract Google, Kansas City taxpayers offered power, office and equipment space and more.

This is a good example of blended public-private investment. It reminds me of Stockholm where the municipal government provided "middle mile" fiber then invited private companies to compete using that infrastructure.

Lee points out that some right-wing commentators have claimed the Kansas City project shows that industry (Google in this case) can build exellent infrastructure without government guidance or subsidy. That is clearly not the case in Kansas City. Hundreds of cities applied to participate in this pilot study, and I am sure they all offered various incentives to Google.

Google and Kansas City cannot bridge the cultural, income and digital divide by themselves, but they are making laudable effort and I applaud them.

Telegeography report: International Internet capacity grows to 77 Tbps

Telegeography has published new statistics on global Internet capacity and utilization for fans of the "big picture." (Click the chart to enlarge).

Total international capacity is up to 77 Tbps, a 40% increase over last year. Average international internet traffic grew 35% in 2012, down from 39% in 2011, and peak traffic grew 33%, compared to the 57% in 2011.

The growth rate is slowing due to caching in content delivery networks and increasing saturation of broadband markets in developed nations, but broadband adoption in developing nations, the spread of Internet video and increased mobile connectivity will fuel growth for many years to come.

You can drill down for details on individual cables on this interactive map.

we've come a long way since the first undersea cable in 1858.

Google unveils Gigabit network in Kansas City -- will they disrupt the ISP and mobile access industries? (and other questions)

Google has announced three pricing plans for gigabit networking in Kansas City:

Gigabit +, $120/month: You get 1 Gbps Internet access plus TV. You also get a 2TB cloud DVR with 8 virtual tuners and a Nexus 7 tablet that you can use as your remote control.

Gigabit Internet, $70 per month: You get 1 Gbps Internet access plus "advanced" WiFi and 1TB of cloud storage on Google Drive.

Free Internet, $0 per month: You get 5 Mbps, but there is a one time, $300 construction charge that can be paid in $25 installments.

Note that they are not even bothering with a telephone/TV/Internet "triple play" -- they assume you will do IP telephony and/or have a cell phone.

Google's rollout scheduling is innovative. Instead of doing purely speculative installation in various parts of the city, they are asking people to pay $10 to pre-register. Those pre-registrations will determine the scheduling of installation in various "fiberhoods." The fiberhoods with the highest pre-registration percentage during the next six weeks will get Google fiber first.

They urge people to encourage their neighbors to pre-register and they have sweetened the pot by promising to give community buildings like schools, libraries and hospitals in the fiberhood free Gigabit Internet.

Well, there are a lot of unanswered questions. Is the Internet service symmetric? How many fiberhoods will Kansas City be divided into? Local channels are included in the television coverage, but which other channels will be included? Will there be bandwidth caps? Will the subscriptions be month-to-month? How good a job will they do integrating the Nexus 7 controller with the TV set? What will be the uptake and response to the fiberhood rollout plan? What new applications will be developed to utilize the bandwidth? Will Google "seed" the Gigabit application market?

I wonder what Google's deal with Kansas City looks like. The City is gaining valuable infrastructure and Google is getting a pilot-test network. Is Google paying anything for access to City tunnels and conduit? Is the City paying anything to Google? (Remember that many cities wanted in on the program). Is there any sort of exclusivity? Time limits?

This also reminds me of Google's 2007 WiFi rollout in Mountain Veiw, California. I've not heard much about that recently, and looking at the project Web site, it does not seem like a lot has been happening.

The most important question is -- what will be the response of the cable and telephone companies in Kansas City? Google's high speed service is a direct competitor to cable companies (and FIOS where available) and the slow, free service competes with DSL. And, just maybe Google has provisioned enough fiber to eventually provide backhaul from cell towers. Is this the beginning of the end of the "gentleman's agreement" to divide up landline and mobile Internet access among the cable and telephone companies?

Regardless, my hat is off to Google for trying and I hope they succeed!

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Google has answered the questions about their contract terms. After a year, you have paid your $300 construction fee in full. For TV customers, your first set top box (and Nexus 7) are free. You can rent ($5 per month) or buy ($120) more if you have multiple TVs.

They also adjusted some of the fiberhood thresholds to make it easier for poor neighborhoods to qualify.

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Timothy B. Lee provided answers to my questions about Google's deal with the city in a post entitled How Kansas City taxpayers support Google Fiber. Lee points out that the city offered Google many incentives and includes a link to the text of their agreement for those wishing to delve into the details. It turns out that Google is receiving power, office and equipment space and more.

FCC survey of home and mobile connectivity -- most people don't know their connection speed, but they are satisfied

An FCC study shows that 80% of US home users do not know their Internet download speed. This is nearly unchanged from the 2006 Pew Internet study on Home Broadband Adoption.

Breaking the FCC survey down, men and young people are more likely to know their home download speed than women and older people:

• 71% of men do not know their speed.
• 90% of women do not know their speed.
• 73% of those between the ages of 18 and 29 do not know their speed.
• 88% of people age 65 do not know their speed.

There were somewhat less pronounced differences among different races and income groups.

The survey also inquired as to satisfaction with both home broadband and mobile Internet speeds:

• 50% of home broadband users are very satisfied.
• 41% of home broadband users are somewhat satisfied.
• 33% of mobile users are very satisfied.
• 38% of mobile users are somewhat satisfied.

Regardless of how you slice it, most people do not know how fast their Internet connections are and most people are satisfied with their connectivity, though mobile users are less satisfied than home users.

An important caveat is that they are satisfied with respect to the applications they now use. Would an email and Web surfing user be satisfied if they started uploading videos to YouTube, watching hi-definition movies or sporting events, playing multi-player games or holding family meetings over the Internet?

Do you know your connection speed? Are you satisfied with it? Going beyond your individual need for speed, how might society benefit from higher speeds?

Wireless data coverage is uneven

We discuss evolving cellular data generations. Today's third generation equipment provides for speeds of up to 2 mbps, but, as shown in this figure, download speed varies considerably from one city or neighborhood to another. The download speed to your iPhone 3G might be as low as 400 kbps or as high as 1,600 kbps.



The plot was generated by ARCchart, a wireless market research firm, and described by Brough Turner in a blog post. ARCchart monitored over two million performance tests using iPhone, Blackberry and Android phones, then filtered them to focus on major cities. This graph is based on 648,374 downloads from major cities in 103 nations between August 2008 and June 2009.

(Gizmodo performed a more limited test of Sprint, AT&T and Verizon 3G networks in eight US cities and also found considerable variance in download speed).

Of course, in some places there is no GSM coverage. Consider the coverage by AT&T, the GSM provider supporting the Apple iPhone in the US -- there is no coverage in the light-colored regions:



This map was taken from AT&T's coverage viewer in early September 2009, and coverage has continued expanding since then.

However, AT&T states that the maps are only an approximation, not a guarantee, of their coverage, which may be effected by terrain, weather, foliage, buildings and other construction, signal strength, customer equipment and other factors. There are many anecdotal reports of inability to use an iPhone in parts of San Francisco and the bay area.

The general public is unaware of Internet policy issues and their impact

Geoff Daily just wrote a blog post explaining most people do not understand broadband or bandwidth. As an example, he told about a friend who did not know how his apartment was connected to the Internet and was

pretty much totally oblivious to this language of bandwidth, bits, and bytes. And he certainly doesn't know anything about bandwidth caps or traffic shaping

His friend had invited a dozen people with laptops to his apartment for an online fantasy football draft -- would there be sufficient bandwidth? Would the extra usage exceed a cap and cause an unexpected jump in his Internet bill?

More important, most of the general public is unaware that US broadband connectivity is slow, asymmetric and falling behind that of other developed nations. As shown below, by last year the US had fallen to 11 th among OECD nations in broadband connectivity per capita, and we had very little fiber installed.



What are the implications of lagging connectivity in the US for our quality of life and economy? If all of the freeways in the US were two lane streets, would that effect the quality of your life? Would it effect the economy?

How fast is your Internet connection at home? To your cell phone? Do you have unlimited usage or does your bill increase when you exceed a cap? Does your connection bog down when more than one person in your home is online? Could two people watch a low-resolution TV show without pauses and glitches? Could you watch an HD movie?

For more on Daily's views on bandwidth and bandwidth requirements, click here.

Open networks benefit both ISPs and the public

We have spoken of the economic inefficiency of the service-oriented business model of the US telephone and cable companies. They see themselves as selling video, telephone, and Internet service -- the so-called "triple play."

We see the social cost of this business model when we compare the US with other nations, where access network operators open their networks to competing service providers. We pay a lot for inferior broadband connectivity.

It is not surprising that the telephone and cable companies are trying to increase their profit at public expense, but there is ironic evidence that this service-oriented business model may also be hurting them. In a nutshell, the argument is that the owner of an access network can make more money by opening it up to all service providers. True, they would forsake the monopoly profits of being the sole supplier of telephony, movies or television on their network, but they would make it up in wholesale and retail sales volume as many companies compete to sell these and other services.

If this is the case, open networks are a win-win proposition. Both the public and the cable and telephone companies win.

Yankee Group analyst Benoit Felten will present a one-hour webinar on this topic on June 30. The presentation will be archived, so you can listen later if you miss it.

For further discussion of this "dumb pipe paradox" see Brough Turner's blog.

Television: single service; Internet: multiple services

In a recent post, we spoke of the ISP's service-oriented business model, contrasting it with the unfettered delivery of information (bits) on the Internet.

As an example, we cited the NBA playoff games being streamed over the Internet as well as broadcast on television. We noted that the service-oriented business model maximized carrier profit at the expense of consumers and the national economy.

In addition to being economically efficient, the Internet allows us to combine the game coverage with services like the LA Times chat room shown here:

This and other services like providing expert commentary, statistics, alternative play-by-play reporting, supplementary video, etc. would add to the viewer experience and create an online community of fans.

Would you enjoy chatting with other fans while watching a sporting event? Would you rather watch a sporting event on broadcast television or your computer screen? Which would you prefer if the Internet speed increased to the point where it could match the size and resolution of your television set?

The information-service business model is costing us dearly

The incumbent Internet service providers have a service-based business model, differentiating between Internet, telephone, text-message, basic television, premium television, voicemail and other services.

This enables them to vary prices to maximize their profit and discourage competition. For example, they charge exorbitant fees for text messages and discourage Internet video by charging extreme prices when download caps are exceeded.

This differentiation between types of data or service is arbitrary. It is all bits.

For example, the NBA playoff game on Sunday was televised and streamed over the Internet. Both came over the same cable:



As we see, the television coverage, including the ads, is being delivered over the Internet with a four second delay. The Internet image quality is below that of the television signal, but that will improve when US Internet speeds catch up with the rest of the world.

The incumbent telephone and cable companies profit from their service-oriented business model, so they will resist becoming information utilities, delivering undifferentiated bits.

Can they sustain that position in the long run? Would we tolerate a water company that differentiated between drinking and washing water or a gas company that differentiated between heating and cooking gas?

The cost of high-speed international connections -- Africa loses

Telegeography, a market research firm, compiles a database of wholesale Internet prices -- the prices a global organization or an ISP would pay. This chart shows a few price examples:

The price differences are dramatic -- a 2 Mbps link between London and Johannesburg costs roughly the same as a 10 Gbps link between London and New York.

A recent New York Times article points out that the cost of serving Web content over slow, unreliable links in developing nations is high and the income from advertising is low. This has led some companies to block developing nations from their sites or to offer degraded content by, for example, compressing video or serving "light" versions of pages.

What are some of the causes of high international link prices in developing nations? What other factors contribute to the Internet being relatively slow and expensive in developing nations?

Would you like to own and install fiber to your home?

There are many examples of municipal ownership of access networks, but ownership and control could also be pushed out to home and building owners.

Wu and Slater discuss this alternative in a recent paper and a test is underway in downtown Ottawa, Canada, where fiber has been deployed to serve a 400–home neighborhood, but a service provider has not yet signed on.

The Norwegian telecommunication company Lyse Tele reports that 80% of their 130,000 customers have agreed to dig their own trenches and bury their own fiber in exchange for a discount on installation. This has been good for business -- only .2% of customers who have installed their own fiber switch to another service provider.

While this sounds good, there are questions. Who owns the fiber, Lyse Tele or the home owner? Who controls the fiber -- can their customers reach competing services or are they locked in to Lyse Tele?

I have seen estimates that it costs Verizon about $1,000 to connect a home. I would gladly pay that if it meant I owned and controlled the fiber and could get connectivity from competing ISPs over it. I would consider it an investment -- increasing the value of my house -- not an expense.

I own my own sewer, water and gas lines and call a plumber when there is a problem. I would be happy to own my fiber.

Four excellent videos on municipal fiber networking

We have discussed infrastructure ownership options, and Benoit Felten has posted four excellent videos on municipal fiber networking. Three are interviews of people who gave talks at the recent Freedom to Connect Conference: Terry Huval, Tim Nulty and Bill St Arnaud. The fourth is a presentation given by Felten in New Zealand last month.

1. Terry Huval, Director of the Lafayette, Louisiana Utility Service fiber to the home project.

Huval discusses the motivation and business model that gave rise to the project, their legal battles (3 years of fighting until the State Supreme Court ruled unanimously in their favor), the services they offer, and the applications they will be offering in the future.

2. Tim Nulty, Project Director, East Central Vermont Community Fiber Network (ECFiber).

ECFiber plans to build rural fiber connectivity to 21,866 households in and around 22 Vermont towns. (So far 21% of those households have pre-registered). Nulty presents data on costs and revenue, and concludes that the network is a viable business. They will offer both retail and wholesale Internet service over the network, and he explains why a pure wholesale network like that in Stockholm makes sense in Europe, but would be defeated by the incumbents in the US.

3. Bill St Arnaud, Chief Research Officer at CANARIE, Canada's research network with a mandate to develop next generation networks, applications and services.

St Arnaud describes the "G-commerce" model, which combines connectivity with energy savings and pollution reduction. Installation of fiber to the home will be financed by a 1-2 cent per kilowatt hour increase in electric bills and energy-cap savings from reduced power consumption as high speed communication substitutes for transportation.

4. Benoit Felten, Senior Analyst, Yankee Group.

Felten gives examples from France and the Netherlands showing that network sharing is profitable even for incumbent ISPs. Take-up rate is more important than average revenue per customer, and the fastest way to convert 100% of the population to fiber is sharing it among service providers. He outlines and presents examples of several business models ranging from passive sharing of access and rights of way to offering retail service.

Why is connectivty in Stockholm so much faster and cheaper than in US cities?

We've been discussing US broadband policy and the stimulus package, and this table shows the cost of fiber-based, residential Internet service in several cities (Brough Turner provided the European and Asian data):

Where?	Monthly cost	Uplink (Mbps)	Downlink (Mbps)
Stockholm	$11	100	100
Seoul	$24	100	100
Hong Kong	$35	100	100
Tokyo	$61	100	100
Amsterdam	$127	100	100
Lafayette, LA, Municipal	$58	50	50
Lafayette, LA, Cox Cable	$140	5	50
US, where available, Verizon	$145	20	50

Can we explain the large speed and cost differences?

The Cox Cable offering in Lafayette, Louisiana seems to be the worst deal. It is the slowest and only five dollars a month less than the Verizon network. The municipal network in the same city is faster and cheaper. The Cox network reaches more neighborhoods than the municipal network, and they are forced to compete with temporary sale prices.

Stockholm is at the other extreme. They have a municipal network that reaches every block in the city. Unlike Lafayette, they do not offer consumer service over their fiber, but lease network access to anyone who would like to offer service. The Internet service providers, including incumbent telephone and cable companies, compete on an equal footing.

As a result, there are many competing service providers in Stockholm, and, as Turner points out, the city owns the expensive, long-life assets like fiber, rights of way, conduit, and tunnels, and the service providers own the electronic equipment that is relatively cheap and is upgraded frequently as technology improves.

Many factors determine the cost of Internet connectivity, but the ownership model is significant, and it seems the Stockholm model is superior to those in the US.

Note that analysts at the OECD also endorse the Stockholm ownership model, writing that:

Municipal networks can play an important role in enhancing competition in fibre networks. If these develop, governments should encourage them to be open networks, that is providing dark fibre to service providers rather than becoming themselves service providers. Nor should the existence of a municipal network providing dark fibre mean that investment in other fibre networks in that municipality should be prevented.

Should some of our broadband stimulus funds be used for Stockholm-style municipal networks?

Click here for a paper with more on this topic.

Click here for a PowerPoint presentation on this topic.

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Update 11/10/2014

Stockholm reports 19 years of financial and user success. The Stokab report should be required reading for all local government officials.

Let's slow down on broadband stimulus in order to consider ownership alternatives

The economic stimulus package is moving through congress. Republicans are fighting it on the grounds that more tax cuts are needed and we need more time to make sensible investments. I agree that we need to slow down on broadband stimulus to consider ownership alternatives. Here is the "elevator ride" pitch:

• The current strategy of privatization with hope for competition under independent regulation has failed in many developed and developing nations. In the US, regulators have been unable to create competition and our infrastructure has suffered.
  
• The large broadband incumbents have benefited from public subsidy, have failed to live up to commitments, and have used their power to defeat attempts to create competition
  
• The US has little fiber in the access network today, but will have fiber to all urban and many rural homes and buildings in the long run. The question is not whether we are going to deploy new infrastructure; the question is “who will own it?”
  
• We should take the time to evaluate decentralized alternatives to near-total ownership by the incumbents. Local governments, cooperatives, small ISPs, and home and building owners might own parts of our next generation infrastructure.
  
• This evaluation can be fast and cheap. The work of the National Science Foundation in designing and creating NSFNet and connecting universities, colleges and foreign networks provides an excellent example of a small government staff calling on experts from academia and industry to design a network and a strategy for deploying it, followed by procurement via competitive bid.
  
• We need immediate economic stimulus, but that can come from tax cuts and investment in many sectors as well as broadband.
  
• Nobel economist Paul Krugman acknowledges the need for rapid stimulus, but in this article he says we should downplay the “jump start” metaphor and focus on job creation through infrastructure investment over the next four plus years.
  
• We will be living with the fiber and high-speed wireless infrastructure we build today for many decades. We will also be living with its owners.

Click here for a paper with details on the above.

Click here for a PowerPoint presentation on the above.

Broadband policy -- how can we catch up?

The US government funded the development of the Internet, but our infrastructure has fallen well behind many other developed nations. We have little fiber in our access networks, and have failed to establish competitive Internet-service markets.

President Obama has stated “As we renew our schools and highways, we'll also renew our information super highway,” and set a goal of deploying next-generation broadband:

(To) work towards true broadband in every community in America through a combination of reform of the Universal Service Fund, better use of the nation's wireless spectrum, promotion of next-generation facilities, technologies and applications, and new tax and loan incentives. America should lead the world in broadband penetration and Internet access.

Obama intends to involve the government more heavily in planning, subsidizing and procuring Internet infrastructure.

If our only concern were rapid economic stimulus, we could subsidize today's telephone and cable companies, but they have not served us well. We need to consider long run technology and the structure of the industry as well as quick stimulus. The infrastructure we install today will be with us for decades.

For more on this topic see this article or this PowerPoint presentation.

Fiber now connects 3.76 million US homes

We discuss home connectivity. Today, DSL and cable are the most commonly used home connectivity technologies, but we expect that, in the long run, we will have fiber links to our homes. Today, that is far from the case. A recent market research report estimates that fiber now passes 13.8 million U. S. homes and 3.76 million are broadband subscribers.

What percent of US homes is 3.76 million? Providing fiber links requires investment in equipment and trenches and installation -- which neighborhoods will operators focus on first? Will all neighborhoods eventually be served?

Why US connectivity is lagging

We have discussed the decline of the US in terms of connectivity. A recent article in the Economist asks why some developed nations are doing better than others, concluding that "The best explanation, in fact, is that broadband thrives on a mix of competition and active regulation, to ensure an open contest".

In South Korea, where half the population lives in large apartment buildings, each owns its own internal cabling and allows rival operators to install equipment in the basement. Tenants choose which to use. In Japan, politicians pressured the dominant operator, NTT, to connect people's homes by high-speed fiber lines. The Communications Ministry has indicated that it will make NTT open those lines to rivals.

In theory, France, Canada and the US also passed laws requiring incumbent telephone companies to allow competitors access to their local lines. Those laws have succeeded in generating competition in France and Canada, but not in the US where regulatory and court decisions have enabled the telephone companies to keep competitors out.

Average advertised download speed in Japan is 95 megabits per second. How does that compare to the speed in your home? What sorts of applications would such high speed make possible? In Denmark, the Netherlands and Switzerland, over 30% of inhabitants have broadband. In the US it is around 22%. How might that impact the economy?

WiMax deployment begins

We have seen that DSL and Cable are the two most common technologies for home connectivity, but there are alternatives. WiMax wireless is beginning to roll out.

TDS Telecom has just announced the availability of fixed WiMax service to 55,000 households and 10,000 businesses in Madison Wisconsin. Residential service is $45/month for 2 Mbps, $50 for 4 Mbps, and $55 for 6 Mbps.

Note that this is connectivity to a fixed location, an alternative to DSL or cable. Mobile WiMax, which will compete with cellular service, has not yet been deployed.

TDS also offers DSL connectivity in Madison. The rates are $30 for 768 Kbps, $40 for 1.5 Mbps, and $50 for 4 Mbps. At these rates, which would you prefer? Are both available throughout the Madison area?

Will open WiMax disrupt the closed cellular networks?

As we have seen, WiFi and 3rd generation cellular networks are the primary options for mobile and portable connectivity today. But, WiFi covers only limited areas (though there are millions of them), and cell networks are closed to innovation and focused on a business model of selling voice and other expensive services rather than pure Internet connectivity.

One day, Google and others may force the cellular networks to open up, but it will be a struggle. Another possibility is that a new standard, WiMax, will provide viable wireless Internet access.

We have spoken of WiMax earlier, and the WiMax leader at this time seems to be Clearwire Communication led by industry veteran Craig McCaw. You can read of McCaw, Clearwire, and their possibly foundering negotiations to combine WiMax networks with Sprint in this Wall Street Journal article.

If WiMax sounds promising, you can follow standards and industry progress in blogs written by Glenn Fleishman and Steve Stroh both of whom know a lot about wireless technology and business. Fleishman has just written a positive review of Clearwire's test deployment of pre-standard mobile WiMax in its home city of Seattle.

Do you plan to subscribe to either Stroh's or Fleishman's blog? What industry blogs do you subscribe to?