Why Broadband? Why Fiber Optics? Why not use existing phone lines? How about cable and satellite? Where is Cook County compared to the rest of the world when it comes to broadband?
Here is a paper written by Doug Dawson of CCG Consulting, the firm hired by Cook County Broadband Initiative to guide us through the process of providing Broadband to Cook County, that answers these and other good questions.
View Cook County Needs Better Broadband as a PDF
Cook County Needs Better Broadband
The County is underserved today with broadband. Following is some of the evidence showing why the County needs better broadband:
- Most of the area within the County does not have access to broadband today. Only Grand Marais and Grand Portage have access to any broadband.
- There is an ever increasing demand for bandwidth that has already and will continue to outstrip the ability of the current technologies;
- There are inherent limitations in the ability of the incumbent technologies to deliver the bandwidth needed by customers;
- The area is far behind the broadband available in the metropolitan areas in the State;
- FTTP as proposed by the County is a superior technology;
Most of the County is Served only by Dial-up Internet Access
The map prepared for the federal grant request shows all of the areas in the County that do not have broadband today. The homes and businesses in these areas must still rely on dial-up access or satellite to get to the Internet.
Further, the copper network in the County is old and even dial-up operates slower than in many other places.
The residential survey done by the County shows that homes without real broadband want something better. An astounding 91% of residences said they would support a County network. The County also met with many businesses who reported that lack of broadband is severely affecting their ability to operate and be profitable.
An Ever-increasing Need for Broadband
How much bandwidth does
Industry experts almost universally agree that household Internet usage within the foreseeable future will outstrip the capabilities of DSL and cable modems even should those technologies be brought to these areas.
While many households are satisfied with today’s download speeds, we are already beginning to see sophisticated users demand more bandwidth. In the near future experts all agree that households are going to demand far faster speeds than are currently being delivered. We have already seen the rapid evolution from early dial-up access increasing to 56 Kbps dial-up increasing to cable modems and DSL. There is no reason to believe that we have reached the end game in terms of the need for faster broadband. Consumers are finding more and more uses for broadband. Households are routinely swapping pictures, video files, and other large files. Gamers are using the Internet for live play across the street and around the world. We are starting to see the Internet becoming the prime mechanism for delivering videos to households. Of even more interest is where technology is going. Several manufacturers are working on 3-D video technology that will enhance the gaming and movie experience (and require gigantic data files compared to today).
Estimates by the experts have the overall size of the data on Internet growing from 50% to almost exponential growth during the next decade. We don’t know which of these experts are right, but there is almost nobody predicting a growth rate much slower than 50% in overall internet traffic per year.
Predictions by some of the experts include:
- In May 2008 the Chief Technology Officer of Charter Communications said, “ISP traffic is increasing at more than 50% every year. So it is not far-fetched to see 100 Meg products becoming the norm in 5 or 10 years, and we expect our customers will find exciting ways to use that capacity.” In the same interview, the Chief Technology Officer of Comcast agreed, “For the short term, 100 Mbps is a marketing advantage – in the longer term, who knows? People didn’t need 1 Mbps when we started delivering it.” [1]
- At 46% per year, Cisco makes a similar estimate. “Cisco VNI projections indicate that IP traffic will increase at a combined annual growth rate (CAGR) of 46 percent from 2007 to 2012, nearly doubling every two years. This will result in an annual bandwidth demand on the world's IP networks of approximately 522 exabytes, or more than half a zettabyte. In the consumer market, the advent of rich online video communications and entertainment, as well as social networking, has greatly increased the impact of online video on the network. In 2012, Internet video traffic alone will be 400 times the traffic carried by the U.S. Internet backbone in 2000. Representative of this trend, Internet video has jumped from 12 percent of the global consumer Internet traffic in 2006 to 22 percent in 2007. Video on demand, IPTV, peer-to-peer (P2P) video, and Internet video are forecast to account for nearly 90 percent of all consumer IP traffic in 2012.”[2]
- Professor Andrew Odlyzco of the
- IDC believes that by 2011, “the digital universe will be 10 times the size it was in 2006. . . Fast-growing corners of the digital universe include those related to digital TV, surveillance cameras, Internet access in emerging countries, sensor-based applications, datacenters supporting “cloud computing,” and social networks.”[4]
- Bret Swanson and George Gilder predict fast growth through 2015: “From YouTube, IPTV, and high-definition images, to “cloud computing” and ubiquitous mobile cameras—to 3D games, virtual worlds, and photorealistic telepresence—the new wave is swelling into an exaflood of Internet and IP traffic. An exabyte is 10 to the 18th. We estimate that by 2015, U.S. IP traffic could reach an annual total of one zettabyte (1021 bytes), or one million million billion bytes.”[5]
- In its most recent report to Congress on the status of deployment of advanced telecommunications networks, the FCC stated: “Providers assert that within the next several years, consumers can expect connections providing symmetrical service at 10 to 20 Mbps. Within five to ten years, these connection speeds should increase to 100 Mbps, and some providers predict that premium services may provide consumers with 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) access within a decade. Even higher-speed connections may be deployed to businesses, with some providers predicting the availability of 10 Gbps business services”. [6]
If the growth rates area as fast as predicted by this diverse group of experts, then all would agree that DSL and cable modems, as they exist today, will be unable to supply households with the bandwidth needed to fully utilize the services and benefits of the Internet. Only fiber can give households access to full web functionality within a few years from now.
Inherent Limitations of Copper Technologies
While some of the proposed area is covered today by DSL or cable modems, these technologies have inherent limitations on the amount of bandwidth that can be delivered. Following is a discussion on the limitations of telephone and cable company technologies.
Limitations of Cable Networks
Mediacom in Grand Marais does not currently offer broadband. We have to suppose this is due to bandwidth limitations within the system, meaning that most of the system bandwidth is needed to deliver cable channels. However, Mediacom could upgrade the network to provide broadband service using cable modem technology. Even should they do this, there are some inherent limitations on cable broadband.
Cable systems were originally designed to deliver through sealed coaxial cable lines the same radio-frequency signals that residents with good reception could obtain from television broadcast towers over the air. Over the years, cable operators have upgraded their networks to Hybrid Fiber Coaxial (HFC) systems by replacing some of their coaxial cables and associated facilities with fiber optic lines and electronics. They have also increased the bandwidth capacities of their systems and today suburban systems range between 750 MHz to 1 GHz in system bandwidth.
Cable systems that provide cable modem service use multiple cable television channel (6MHz) for downstream signals and one channel for upstream signals. At the cable company headend, a cable modem termination system (CMTS) uses these channels to create a virtual local area network with cable modems attached to computers at subscriber residences. Depending on the transmission technology used, cable operators can theoretically send up to 36 Mbps per channel downstream from the cable headend, and users can send up to 10 Mbps per channel upstream. This upstream and downstream bandwidth must, however, be shared by all active users connected to a network segment called a “node.” The number of customers sharing bandwidth in a node has a significant effect on the performance and if nodes are too large then bandwidth in cable systems drops during peak usage times. The typical cable node is around 500 homes today, so at best the 500 homes can share about 36 Mbps downstream. If congestion occurs because of high usage, the cable operator’s solution is to reduce the size of the node. This involves building additional fiber and rerouting coaxial cable to feed smaller groups of homes.
Cable systems are capable of delivering significant amounts of bandwidth to customers. However, there is a tradeoff in every cable system between programming channels and data bandwidth. Cable systems today are under tremendous pressure to offer more high definition (HD) programming. HD channels require about three times as much bandwidth as normal cable channels and cable providers have to work very hard to make room for additional HD channels. Cable systems could offer faster data speeds, but only at the sacrifice of channels.
Another issue for cable providers to provide faster data services is the availability of affordable cable modems. The cable TV providers have all banded together nationwide and created a firm that they all use to do research and product development – called Cable Labs. Cable Labs develops the specifications for cable modems and all of the cable providers have agreed to only use products that are Cable Labs compliant. Through this process the cable providers have been able to really get low prices for such things as cable modems and settop boxes. Today most of the cable companies in the country offer cable modem speeds slower than 10 Mbps. Thus, the cable modems for those kinds of speeds are inexpensive due to mass production. Only a few markets offer faster speeds and with faster speeds come more expensive cable modem boxes.
Another issue to consider with cable modem service is that it is often not available for businesses. This is in large part a historical phenomenon – cable operators typically did not build their systems out to commercial areas because few, if any, businesses subscribed to cable television service. Most cable companies are now willing to extend their systems to commercial establishments if they could solve an even more significant problem – most cable systems do not currently have the bandwidth to support widespread business usage of their systems. The shared nature of providing data to large nodes means that a cable company can’t handle a few customers with large data needs without sacrificing data speeds for other customers on the same node. Because of this, even when businesses can get cable modem service they cannot perform routine functions such as web hosting or other services needing dedicated constant bandwidth. This may change over time, but it is not likely to change in the near future.
Cable companies are currently making big hay out of a shift to Docsis 3.0. What Docsis 3.0 does in a nutshell is to allow them to more easily bond channels together to make one big data pipe to neighborhoods rather than a series of small ones. This gives them some efficiency of scale, but it does not increase overall system bandwidth an iota. DOCSIS 3.0 does not solve the inherent trade-off between programming channels and data channels. It makes the data channels a little more efficient but does not increase the amount of data available to a customer node
Furthermore, DOCSIS 3.0 does not fix the upstream problem inherent in cable systems. At best a cable system can allocate only 10 Mbps for all upstream from an entire node. This is a limitation imposed by the HFC standards. In real life this equates customer upload speeds of 500 to 700 Kbps at peak performance and slower during peak times. With the channel bonding from DOCSIS 3.0 cable companies will get improved upstream efficiency at the system level, but they cannot overcome the overall problem that HFC allocates a tiny sliver of bandwidth to the upstream.
The large cable companies are currently engaged in a public relations campaign touting the advantages of DOCSIS 3.0 and they would have you think this makes them competitive with fiber. This is more marketing by rhetoric than marketing reality because DOCSIS 3.0 will have marginal impact on the average cable modem customer. In fact, it could decrease the performance for the average customer. Expect cable companies to market 100 Mbps modems to a handful of customers. As they give faster bandwidth to the customers willing to pay for it, the speeds achieved by the other customers on the same node will decrease. And all customers on the node will continue to see slow upload speeds.
Limitations of DSL
DSL (Digital Subscriber Lines) is the technology used by Qwest in Grand Marais and by Century in the Grand Portage area to deliver broadband.
DSL is a technology that allows the delivery of data at high-speed over existing copper telephone wires. It is a proven technology that has been in use for approximately ten years. Where available, DSL is typically offered in a number of different bandwidths, which allows users to select the bandwidth that it needs and can afford. DSL service generally uses only a portion of a copper line’s capacity and thus permits users to make telephone calls at the same time that they are working on the Internet.
DSL is not readily available everywhere for a number of reasons. First, DSL is subject to distance limitations. DSL can reasonably be served up to 18,000 feet from a central office switch in the most favorable conditions, but poor copper wiring in most exchanges realistically makes this limit closer to 10,000 to 12,000 feet, depending on the brand of equipment. This distance limitation is further shortened in reality, since it is measured in cable feet rather than “as the crow flies” in a straight line. The copper wiring coming out of a central office often wanders up and down streets and rarely runs in a straight line to reach areas away from the switch. Realistically, in many exchanges, this 10,000 to 12,000 foot distance limitation creates a potential delivery circle of only about a mile-and-one-half around the DSL hub.
There are two solutions to DSL’s distance limitations. First, as newer generations of DSLAMs are developed to deliver higher bandwidths, the DSL delivery range will increase. DSL bandwidth delivery over copper is not linear, meaning that the amount of bandwidth that can be delivered drops off quickly with distance from the transmission point. A 1-Meg modem today might fall off to a 128k signal at 10,000 feet; a 5-Meg modem might be able to deliver 1 Meg at that same distance. Over time, the distance issue might be overcome to some degree through improved technology.
The second solution to DSL distance limitations results from what are referred to as “remote” or “mini” DSLAMs. This technology allows DSLAMs, or DSL hubs, to be moved into more remote locations in the network – e.g., to the cable junction in front of a housing development or a business park. From this remote DSL origination point, the DSL signal could still be delivered for the same distance, but this distance is now measured from the new field-installed hardware and not from the central office.
The second problem with DSL delivery is the existing copper network. Copper plant was not originally built with DSL in mind, and there are many places in current networks where DSL will not work, regardless of the distance from the central office. In some cases, the copper is too small in gauge or thickness, since the thicker the copper the better that DSL will work. In other cases, there are signal leaks into the system or there are other reasons why some copper pairs will not readily accept DSL signals. There is very little that can be done to fix stray “noise” problems, other than to replace the portions of the network that has such problems. Replacement is an expensive solution that often means re-wiring an entire neighborhood.
Third, DSL is a copper-only technology. This means that if any path to a customer includes even one foot of non-copper cable, such as fiber, then DSL will not function. For many years, Verizon and other telephone companies have been building new feeder cables using fiber. Feeder cables are large capacity cables that carry signals from the central office to large neighborhood clusters of homes and businesses. Fiber is cheaper and more reliable for this use, and almost all new subdivisions and business parks built in the last ten years are fed with fiber feeder cables. Additionally, phone companies have been replacing older copper feeder cables with fiber cables as they do routine upgrades. This has led to the strange phenomenon that the newer the neighborhood, the less likely that DSL will be available. Older neighborhoods that are built throughout with copper may be good candidates for DSL, whereas in newer areas with fiber feeds, DSL will not work without field deployment of the DSLAMs, a more costly way to provide service. This phenomenon is not favorable to rapidly growing communities in which a large percentage of homes and businesses have been built in the last ten years.
Broadband in these Areas Lags the Surrounding Communities
The County has been already left behind and is a broadband ‘have-not’. There is a huge broadband gap between the data speeds available in the County today and the broadband available in much of the rest of
Residential
Qwest 1.5 Mbps Download / 896 Kbps Upload $ 34.99[7]
Qwest 7 Mbps Download / 896 Kbps Upload $ 41.99
Qwest 12 Mbps Download / 896 Kbps Upload $ 51.99
Qwest 20 Mbps Download / 896 Kbps Upload $ 64.99
Comcast 1 Mbps Download / 384 Kbps Upload $ 24.95
Comcast 15 Mbps Download / 3 Mbps Upload $ 42.95
Comcast 20 Mbps Download / 4 Mbps Upload $ 52.95
Comcast 30 Mbps Download / 7 Mbps Upload $ 62.95
Comcast 50 Mbps Download / 10 Mbps Upload $ 99.95
In Grand Marais only the first two Qwest products on the list above are offered. These are first generation DSL products and Grant Marais has not been upgraded by Qwest to offer the faster speeds. Mediacom offers no cable modem service in Grand Marais.
For people outside of the DSL area, the only broadband product available is satellite service. There are several satellite providers, but the most common one in the County is Wild Blue. One can see from the following prices that satellite service costs more and delivers far less bandwidth.
Wild Blue Satellite Service
512 Kbps Download, 128 Kbps Upload $54.95
1 Mbps Download, 200 Kbps Upload $69.95
1.5 Mbps Download, 256 Kbps Upload $89.95
These products require a two year contract, and also come with very low caps on the total amount of download or upload that can be used during a month.
Fiber is a
It is interesting to see executives at cable and telephone companies talking about 100 Mbps and 1 Gbps connectivity during the next decade, since their current technologies have no hope of ever delivering those kinds of speeds. The following table has been prepared by CCG Consulting, the County’s broadband consultant, and shows CCG’s best estimate at the commercial bandwidth products that are available today and into the future with the various technologies. It is clear that fiber is today, and will remain for the foreseeable future as the most robust technology.
Data Download Delivery Speeds
|
|
Today |
10-years |
25-years |
|
|
|
|
|
|
FTTP (Fiber) |
2,400 Mbps |
10,000 Mbps |
25,000 Mbps |
|
|
|
|
|
|
DSL[8] |
Up to 25 Mbps |
Up to 50 Mbps |
Up to 100 Mbps |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Cable Modem |
Up to 50 Mbps |
Up to 100 Mbps |
Up to 200 Mbps |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Wi-Max[9] |
20 Mbps |
70 Mbps |
200 Mbps |
|
|
|
|
|
|
BPL |
3 Mbps |
50 Mbps |
100 Mbps |
As the above chart shows, fiber already is vastly superior to the other technologies and also has room for gigantic growth in the size of the data pipe being delivered to customers. The same is not true for the other technologies. Fiber delivers far more bandwidth than the other technologies today and promises to be far better moving into the future.
[1] Brian Santo, “It’s the End of Cable as We Know It (And We Feel Fine),” CED (May 1, 2008), http://www.cedmagazine.com/Article-End-of-Cable-As-We-Know-It.aspx.
[2] Cisco, “Global IP Traffic Forecast and Methodology, 2007-2012,” http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2008/prod_061608b.html.
[3] Andrew Odlyzco, Minnesota Internet Traffic Studies Home Page. http://www.dtc.umn.edu/mints/home.php.
[4] IDC, “White Paper: The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe” (March 2008) http://www.emc.com/collateral/analyst-reports/diverse-exploding-digital-universe.pdf.
[5] Bret Swanson and George Gilder, “Estimating the Exaflood: The Impact of Video and Rich Media on the Internet: A zettabyte by 2015?” Discovery Institute at 2 (January 2008). http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?command=download&id=1475.
[6] FCC, Fourth Report to Congress on the Availability of Advanced Telecommunications Capabilities in the
[7] Qwest rate are $5 per month higher than shown if a customer doesn’t take telephone service.
[8] DSL requires bonded pairs, that is, using more than one copper pair to achieve the speeds listed in the table. The problem in the real network is that very few neighborhoods have been built with the extra copper pairs needed to provide this service to more than a few customers.
[9] Wi-Max can deliver very large bandwidth to a small number of locations. The speeds cited in this table represent the kind of speeds that can be delivered universally to all customers in a large area.