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Begin forwarded message:

From: "Robert J. Berger" <rberger@xxxxxxx>
Date: June 8, 2006 1:57:12 PM EDT
To: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, David Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>

From Dave Burstein's DSL Prime newsletter of June 8, 2006:
http://www.dslprime.com

ADSL is so last century. Today, it's fiber home or fiber + VDSL at 50 meg or more. Japan is the first country to see a major drop in DSL as 5 million switch to fiber home, and Germany, France, Holland, Verizon and (new) the city of Seattle all are moving to upload speeds of 10 meg or more and downloads of 50 meg or more. Cable knows this, which is why Brian Roberts of Comcast tells me they’ll be rolling out 50 meg down, 15 meg up “pre-DOCSIS 3.0” in 2007 in selected markets.

Meanwhile, Australia, Canada, and more than half of the U.S. are likely to spend the next decade with a second-rate Internet, 60% to 90% slower than leading countries. Anywhere people have a choice at a plausible price, they are buying faster speeds than the 6 meg down, 600K meg up of ADSL available since 1999, or even the 20 meg down, 1 meg up of the new generation. Wall Street is asking whether laggards like AT&T will be clobbered. (Answer: the only thing that might prevent a disaster is if cable also moves slowly. Two competitors often collude.) On the other hand, Japan is replacing ADSL with fiber, over 4 million already connected. So is Germany, France, Holland, Verizon and (news) the city of Seattle.

The fix is set in D.C. for the House to pass a national video franchise for the telcos, probably on Friday. The main impact of the bill will be to reduce, not expand, the telco TV rollouts, but expect some uninformed reporters not to catch that. The telcos think they are dead if they don't have TV to challenge cables, and Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg has been consistently clear he will build whatever the regs. SBC's CTO told reporters the same thing. That makes any claim of "increased competition" simply stupidity, especially for the 10-20 million Americans the bill allows denying service to. The biggest payoff for the Bells is getting out of local requirements for near-universal service and consumer protection. Real Net Neutrality rules won't be included, although Verizon's Tom Tauke is looking for a "feel good" compromise that won't mean anything.


––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Robert J. Berger - Internet Bandwidth Development, LLC.
Voice: 408-882-4755 eFax: +1-408-490-2868
http://www.ibd.com




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