In response to TekZilla episode 57, cable systems are more anemic, and fiber better, than you’d think. Here’s the skinny of the standards and speeds:

DOCSIS 1.1 (cable companies still use this tech in most markets): 38 Mbps downstream, 10 Mbps upstream
DOCSIS 2.0 (a few companies, plus a few markets on Comcast): 38 Mbps downstream, 30 Mbps upstream
DOCSIS 3 (the “wave of the future”): DOCSIS 2.0 speeds, multiplied by the number of channels you’re using

On DOCSIS 3, current deployments on Comcast “bond” three downstream channels, but only use one DOCSIS 2 channel for uploads. Technology is being set into motion that will allow for bonding four or even eight downstream channels and multiple (I think up to four) upstream channels for better bandwidth than what Comcast offers right now: 50 Mbps down, 10 Mbps up.

Note that the speeds mentioned above can technically be monopolized by a single cable modem, but in reality have to be shared among all users on a cable “node”, meaning that actual spped will be slower. The number of people on a single node varies widely; in some cases there are as little as 60 to 100 people per node, in other cases several hundred, and in extreme cases a thousand or two. As such, you’re not going to see “full speed” on a given tech pretty much ever. For example, in my area Comcast has DOCSIS 1.1 connectivity, and I get between 18 and 32 Mbps down on speed tests (using PowerBoost, which lets you max out the connection for prety much just long enough to do a speed test) and 2.4-2.8 Mbps up…

Fiber is another story. Verizon’s FiOS system is set up using PON (Passive Optical Network) technology, and they’re using a passive splitter to deliver service to 32 customers per “node”. You *could* put 64 or 128 customers on each node, or more if an “active optical network” was used (like SureWest and a few others provide) but Verizon has 32 subscribers per node. The bandwidth available is just plain crazy when these numbers are taken into account. There are two techs Verizon uses on their network, BPON (Broadband Passive Optical Network) and the newer GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Network). The speeds are as follows:

BPON – 622 Mbps down, 155 Mbps up
GPON – 2.4 Gbps down, 1.2 Gbps up

These numbers are still shared among all subscribers, however they’re so much larger, and the “sharing factor” so much smaller, that speeds are just plain crazy fast. To give you an idea of the speeds, everyone on a node could be simultaneously using 16 Mbps on downloads and 4 Mbps on uploads, counting system overhead, and the network could handle it. And that’s BPON. GPON doesn’t have the “ATM overhead” and as such all customers could be online at one time, downloading at 75 Mbps AND uploading at 37.5 Mbps, in order to get the network at capacity. Crazy stuff.

Cable, on the other hand, can’t reach the speeds of BPON even with 8-channel DOCSIS 3, let alone GPON. 4-channel-bonded upload DOCSIS 3 can’t beat BPON either. And again, we’re talking about 250 or 500 customers per node versus 32.

So we can see why Verizon, with FiOS, has the HUGE advantage (albeit a costly one depoyment-wise) over any cable company out there who is still relying on coax for the “last mile”. On the one hand you have Comcast, who is just now able to offer a 22 Mbps down, 5 Mbps up tier on DOCSIS 3 (though Cablevision, by having a smaller “node sharing ratio”, is going faster than this on DOCSIS 2), with a very expensive 50 Mbps down, 10 Mbps up option available, all with 250 GB per month caps since, generally speaking, 250 customers or more are on each cable node. On the other you have Verizon, who started out with 52, 15/2, 15/15 and 30/15 (download/upload, megabits per second) tiers when they launched FiOS, then upped the ante to 10/2, 20/5, 20/20 and 50/20 later on, all of this before Comcast’s DOCSIS 3 rollout. Already, looking at Comcast, they can’t go much higher speed-wise before they run into network congestion issues…with their current bonding setup 50/10 is about all that they can reliably get. Even with 8/4 bonding they *might* be able to break 125/50 Mbps down/up before the system crashes. Verizon, on the other hand, can easily scale past 100 Mbps down, 50 Mbps up on their older system, and 4x that on the newer system. Verizon doesn’t want to oversubscribe (like cable systems do) so speeds may be a bit more conservative than what I just mentioned, however they’ve been testing 100 Mbps connections for employees in GPON areas for awhile now.

In conclusion, a lot of small providers (CenturyTel, Windstream, Embarq, NorthState) are running fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) on newer developments, as is AT&T in a very limited respect. Though most of the aforementioned providers don’t offer better speeds over fiber than they do with copper, some do, and in any case fiber-fed developments can easily outrun coax if the heat is turned up.

One more thing: if FiOS isn’t in your area, don’t expect DOCSIS 3 from your cable company any time soon. In most cases, DOCSIS 1.1 provides enough bandwidth that, with network managment, cable companies can sell 20-megabit-per-second down, 2-meg-per-second up connections (but usually less) with minimal complaints about overselling, and they can beat out the phone company if said phone company is using older DSL technology.

In short, competition is very, very good, but when it comes down to it, fiber trumps all.

Looks like I got enough initiative to start a new personal site\blog. Look around…I ported the main body of my previous posts here. Gotta go now, but I *might* post later. Probably will…it’s about tech,

http://iansltx.multiply.com/journal
http://yann.tumblr.com
http://iansl.blogspot.com
http://isl-a.blogspot.com/

Yes, it’s late and I’m irate about the whole Canadian ISP thing with Bell.ca throttling their last mile connections, no matter who’s upstream of that, on e pretense that “it’s not fair otherwise”.

Their claim: 5% of users use over 30% of bandwidth, to the tune of 33%, at peak times. Leaving the other 95% with the remaining two-thirds. What this translates into is one in twenty users using nearly 10x the bandwidth of the average user. So you have one user in the twenty responsible for the same amount of traffic as ten “average” others combined. Or maybe just nine.

But let’s think for a minute. Who do they say the “average” user is? Maybe it’s unbiased an all, but if the “average” user puts through 5GB of traffic per month (normalizing for various usage patterns between high-average and low-average, that’s about 167 MB per day, plenty for web surfing and e-mail and the occasional YouTube video and such other traffic) then the “bandwidth thieves” are only putting through 50 GB per month. That could be surfing, downloading *legal* music and movies, watching video, listening to podcasts, backing up their computers to the internet…$20 spent on AmazonMP3 music means probably 100 MB downloaded, my weekly podcast bunch is probably to the tune of 200 MB, you have movies weighing in at 700-1500 MB apiece…

Then, on the off change that you want to upload a trip movie to Google Video, plus some photos to Flickr, you might use several hundred megs per day on just that. Backing up your system might take several gigs per month…so basically using the internet for all it’s worth…all legally…may put you in the “abuser” bracket. Forget long talks on VoIP…a voice conversation is a megabyte per minute so if you talked a half-hour per day you’re talking about nearly a gigabyte per month right there. A five-minute video call to whoever would cost 30 MB of data at minimum, probably more like 50. Not to mention websites being rather unwieldy these days. A download of Microsoft Office weighs in at a few gigabytes, and every month a few hundred megabytes of patches come in from the operating system vendor of your choice. Did I mention streaming video from decent-quality sites like Revision3 or Hulu?

In short, just because you’re actually using the internet like it’s 2008 doesn’t mean that you should be throttled like the backbone is from 1998. If the DSL equipment feels that old, it needs to be expanded and replaced; throttling should not be passed onto the customer or whatever ISP you’re renting your lines out to just because you don’t feel like doing the work needed to add capacity.

In closing, my computer has been active for nearly eight hours. In this time I’ve transferred around 3.3 GB of information to and from the network. I’ll have to change by computer’s habits on checking e-mail, backing up information and probably surfing the web when I go home for the summer; the ISP there limits users to 25 GB of transfer per month. Then again, the connection is slow enough that I may or may not be able to max that out anyway…

Moral of the story: the internet needs competition in the ISP space, not penalties for progress. Bring on the fully open, ten-megabit links to whoever wants them…though thirty or fifty is perferable 🙂

Amid Europe’s supposed 3G awesomeness the gauntlet is thrown down that their 3G (UMTS, HSDPA, basically the upgrade path for the GSM tech they have over there) is the best 3G out there, and that we stupid (North) Americans have no idea what we’re doing with this non-GSM technology…I beg to differ…especially when you’re actually in the U.S…

First off, if Kevin Rose can’t get a decent Qik video out over his Nokia phone using WiFi, I gotta wonder how good the cell networks are over in Europe, data-speed-wise. Maybe better than I think, but then again if you take an iPhone over there you may not be able to get even EDGE data. On the other hand the networks seem to have skipped EDGE in favor of UMTS data, so things go both ways…

But as I was saying, EvDO…

Well, done right, it’s awesome.

In the U.S. you have quite a few carriers with networks supporting this 3G technology. Sprint, Verizon and Alltel are the biggest ones, covering probably over 250 million, if not more, people with the high-speed network. I think at least 240 million of those have access to the highest-speed version currently out there, Revision A, which allows for faster uploads, slightly faster downloads and a generally better internet experience, though regardless it’s great. You also have smaller carriers like CricKet adding the tech to their networks. Though they may or may not contribute to the whole population-covered figure of EvDO coverage, it’s really neat to see three carriers covering the same area with high-speed data over the air. That’s more competition that you usually get on the wireline side of things (read: cable + DSL). If you go up north into Canada, two of the three big networks up there (Telus and Bell…the other is Rogers) have this data system rolled out as well. Mexico has a carrier that’ll allow you to use any of their (small…see my post about it) network, prepaid, to access high-speed data.

Contrast this to the current state of affairs on UMTS-based 3G in the Americas. There are exactly three carriers who, to my knowledge, operate such networks, with a fourth one coming (T-Mobile in the U.S.) These three are AT&T (US), Rogers (Canada) and Telcel (Mexico). The thing is, though a large proportion of each carrier’s phones are capable of 3G data, the places you can actually get such service is small. Probably combined the data area would be smaller on UMTS than the network of just one big CDMA carrier, EvDO-wide (Alltel, Sprint, Verizon). It probably doesn’t help matters that UMTS is actually a TOALLY different tech than the GSM it sits alongside, as far as deployment goes to the various networks that have taken that route.

Also, UMTS is a bit slow…

Though it boasts theoretical speeds (1.8, 3.6 or even 7.2 megabits per second) that surpass that CDMA (2.4 or 3.1 megabits) can deliver, from everyone’s experience (or it seems that way) CDMA looks to win out in everyday use as “the fastest gun”. Not only does it have more coverage in the Americas, it actually comes closer to its theoretical limits on download speed than HSDPA (the upgrade of UMTS that’s the fast stuff) does. I’ve on several occasions connected my EvDO-powered smartphone (the Mogul on Sprint) to my computer and surfed the web with it, wherever I happened to be. The speeds were a little slower on the uptake than your common DSL connection, but once you start downloading information the speeds are highly comparable. This is from a wireless system, available in tons of places and on probably 90% of new phones that use the CDMA network at all. Contrast this with AT&T’s offering: I walk into an AT&T store (which is of course full bars on their service) and test out the laptop that was showcasing their HSDPA data service. Keep in mind this isn’t going through the bottleneck of a slow phone. The speeds I was feeling seemed comparable to satellite internet, and that’s not a compliment.

Yes, you can use EvDO as your only internet provider, as long as you don’t mind things not being mach-speed fast. In fact, hopefully I’ll be switching my parents onto such a system sooner than later. Though you’ll want Sprint or Alltel, who don’t cap off your data transfer at five gigabytes per month, as opposed to Verizon or CricKet, who do. Unless you’re just doing very light web surfing or something similarly non-content-heavy. Anyhow, you just grab a data card and either plug it into your computer or set it up somehow to be shared via your home network if you have such a thing. The easiest (albeit rather expensive) way to do this is vy grabbing a router for the task from the likes of Cradlepoint via www.3gstore.com. Or grab a WiFi-equipped smartphone (like the Mogul), get an app called WMWiFiRouter on it and share your internet that way.

I must say that I’m very happy with what I’ve seen of EvDO, from using it on various vacations to just having a fast connection on my cell phone with which I can get information when and where I need it. My school campus’ WiFi is for my iPhone; my Mogul runs EvDO 24/7 and it’s just grrrreat.

I have been meaning to write about this for a bit over a week now but have finally gotten around to it. Let’s sit back and compare Mexico’s cellular system to our own, and see how good ours is in comparison…

The country has around 110 million people, as opposed to a bit over 300 million here in the US. Land area is disproportionately smaller vs. the population. As to cell service, the top ten carriers alone in the US probably have 250 million subscribers, but then again you’ve got lots of small U.S. phone services that may make up for another several million people with cell service. This is actually an amazingly high ratio compared with Mexico, where a mere 65-ish million customers. Looks like four carriers dominate the space, with one being a near-monopolistic leader…

The Numero Uno, as it were, for Mexican cellular, is Telcel, with a staggering 74% of ALL cellular customers in its grip. Think AT&T back when they were renting you your phone. Okay, not that bad but still, Telcel is in a similar position to AT&T, complete with GSM technology and the number one spot in the Mexican cellular industry. Granted, it’s smaller than the top three carriers in the nation above it, but still…

Anyway, you can get their phones, both prepaid and postpaid, practically everywhere and, due to licenses in both 800 and 1900 MHz GSM, coverage is good too. Though the coverage map sort of looks like T-Mobile in the U.S. to tell you the truth. In other news, just recently (about a month and a half ago) Telcel launched 3G service in some of Mexico’s larger cities. Generally sounds like AT&T, except a few years later. It also seems like they have 55% of their employees dedicated to customer service…wonder what the figure is like in other carriers.

Okay, so enough about the 45-million-pound gorilla of cellular service in Mexico. There is another GSM provider, which seems to be the functional equivalent of T-Mobile in the U.S. Its name: Movistar. Part of the Telefonica international empire, Movistar is bigger in size, ratio-wise, than the next-biggest carrier the same way Telcel is bigger than Movistar. They have 11-ish million subscribers and their coverage seems to have gotten better recently, now reaching nearly as far as Telcel’s. There are even some areas where Movistar has coverage and telcel doesn’t. At any rate, the carrier’s rates seem a bit better than Telcel’s but otherwise you’re just dealing with another GSM carrier that cells a huge variety of phones, including some brands (likely made in China) that I’ve never heard of before, or that I’ve never heard of hawked by U.S. carriers before. Okay, I take that back; the company now known as CellularOne (formerly Chinook Wireless in Montana, formerly Blackfoot Wireless and 3 Rivers Wireless) sells an Alcatel phone or two.

Next up, we’ve got Iusacell. Looks like their network (on which 4 million people have service, the vast majority of them prepaid…even with data service) is fully 3G. That’s right, this company (whose website looks dated in my opinion…but I can say that of all the Mexican cellular operators) has full EvDO data (probably Rev. 0 though…I’d be surprised if they had Rev. A) network-wide, for as low as 599 pesos per month! This translates into a little under $57 per month at the moment. Not bad, until you find out that their network coverage, at least with the map I have, puts CricKet to shame in terms of spotty coverage. They probably cover all the population centers in the country, but outside of that you may need a TelCel or Movistar prepaid phone. But hey, they’ve got real, fast (I’m supposing) 3G! Too bad they’re the only CDMA carrier in the country, so roaming coverage is nonexistent…

Last and least, at least in terms of subscriber count (but not in coverage!) is Nextel Mexico. Unlike the U.S. version of the company, these guys seem perfectly happy keeping the iDEN technology alive. I’m betting this is because nobody has put up a serious 3G network to which data customers would go, added to their spectrum’s being separate from the fight over 800/1900 that CDMA and GSM must face. They also have a business niche, with the best walkie-talkie service in the land (sound familiar? Iusacell and Telcel both have PTT but they’re the same lame jobs that haunted AT&T and pre-merger Sprint). as a warning, there are some places where Nextel doesn’t have coverage where Movistar and Telcel do, but the coverage is probably an order of magnitude better than Iusacell’s mainly soutn-Mexico chickenscratch. The 800MHz MIRS channels on which iDEN runs probably helps with that coverage. On the less bright side of things, with only two million customers the Mexican government (!?!) had to tell the other three carriers to hook their lines to Nextel’s. So that means that before then some Nextel phones (at least) weren’t able to call out to normal landlines and cellular phones out-of-network? This is MADNESS! But hey, they offer an unlimited plan for a similar price to what you’d get in the U.S.

So there you have it. The wireless landscape of mexico has been bared, showing that there are a mere four carriers serving the nation, with many areas where no cell phone of a normal sort may tread. There, CDMA is almost gone, iDEN is small but powerful and GSM (complete with calling-part-pays service) rules the roost without a doubt, with over 90% of the market. That’s why I like being in America (okay, that’s not the only reason), where I can have high-speed internet access on a huge nationwide network, with roaming onto other carriers as needed, where if I wanted to I could pick up four prepaid phones off of different carriers and all of them be using different towers. A place where not four but SIX or SEVEN cell phone carriers have service…a place where the largest carrier is by no means a near-monopoly, and the smallest carrier sticks around because nobody else offers service where it does. A place where I can get unlimited service from all seven of the carriers offering service to my single spot, where I can have my high-speed data and high-speed push-to-talk. A place where I don’t pay or everything in pesos and where “no hablamos Español” is cool. 🙂