DSL Prime: Unreliable Speeds Hit AOL UK

While AOL delivers much less than advertised, Britian (for the best of reasons) and China are censoring the Web. Companies and nations need to do more to deliver the real broadband Internet.

by Dave Burstein DSL Prime [June 8, 2004]

"Thou shalt not lie" Even advertising

Forget UNE-P. Imagine what could happen with dramatically superior sound quality at a lower price. Jay Rolls of Cox Cable is considering voice over cable calls with better than BellSouth's or any other telco's sound quality. Better codecs at higher bit rates make that easy, doubling the frequency range the call carries. Global IP Sound wowed everyone at VON with. Broadcom's BroadVoice is Cox's probable technology. Better Phone Calls: The Next Pin Drop in the next DSL Prime, will nail down more of the details of how any IP carrier in the world with 32 to 128 Kbps available can scare the heck out of the local phone company.

AT&T's Survival Plan is also in the works. Dave Dorman has been sharing the general outline with wall street. "What will you do if D.C. shuts down UNE-P?" everyone has been asking. "It won't be such a grave problem, actually. Raw lines (UNE-L) will still be available, and we just need an inexpensive 'facility' in the CO. Not to worry—it won't be very expensive." It's more complicated than that, of course, because many of the 25,000 COs can only be reached with telco fiber at impractical cost.

Randall Stevenson of SBC also tells Wall Street that the UNE-P debate is unimportant. "Our bundling strategy is beating back UNE-P, and stemming the line loss problem." None of which affects the billions of dollars at stake in D.C., as these titans call out the heavy artillery to beg for government favor.

Ayn Rand would have shrugged—no one has ever more vividly painted a picture of capitalist giants abusing using the state for their shield.

Look for me, a round fellow with a beard, at SUPERCOMM. Apologies to the folks in Chicago, although the IEEE-ICC in Paris is the event of choice that week. The second fastest city in Europe (after Milan's FastWeb) will feature five sessions on MIMO, pointing the way to doubling speeds. John Cioffi's chairing Broadband Access: When Do We Get 100 Mbps? Liberty Cable is on the panel (Darth Vader is planning ahead, and Brian Roberts gets it also) and the wireless contingent just might get the bandwidth to match. Alcatel's Paul Spruyt will have to match their roadmaps. Apologies to those I declined invitations from before I changed my travel plans.

Newsbreak: As I go to press, Primus announced a $19.95 (Canadian) unlimited local and long distance service, including the U.S., Canada, and Western Europe. Voice mail and all features included, first three months free as a signon offer. Primus is a substantial international phone service capable of delivering on this. Vonage is just the tip of the iceberg.

D.C. folk: please note the BellSouth/Fiber loophole article at the end. This is at the FCC this week, and getting it right is worth what is required.

AOL: Not Delivering What's Advertised
Advertising Standards catch them in UK
False advertising leads to a Gresham's Law of Broadband: bad service drives out good. If Comcast can advertise "5 Megabits" but sometimes really only deliver 300 Kbps, that kills the incentive to have a reliable 3 or 5 Mbps service in competition. Reporters can help, refusing to bite at the "up to" unless that's a realistic promise, and now the British Authority is clamping down. AOL resells BT service, with a "sync rate" that often is false. Dow Jones reports, "The claims of speed have been based on theoretical data rates for information being pumped into the user's home from the local telephone exchange. However, true data speeds are often been much lower due to bottlenecks elsewhere in the system."

These "technical details" are becoming crucial as some carriers are deliberately degrading network performance to block Vonage or video competitive with their own offering.

BT Censors Pictures of Children (that kind)
Fearful stuff, but dangerous precedent
The sites blocked by BT in cooperation with the government's "Cleanfeed" initiative are presumably vile and despicable, so it's easy to understand why Bland agreed to block them. Martin Bright in the Observer warns, however, this is "the first mass censorship of the web attempted in a Western democracy." Lauren Weinstein of (Co-Founder of People For Internet Responsibility) adds, "Ironically, such moves are likely to have the effect of making such materials—which we all abhor—even harder for authorities to detect. Rather than operating via relatively easy to find websites, the participants in such communications will accelerate their moves toward more heavily cloaked and obscured distributed environments, that can very quickly morph and evolve." Will this stay truly limited, or will, for example, the Brits block IRA supporting sites in the U.S. and France the sellers of Nazi memorabilia? No easy answers, as the next story suggests.

China's Net Slows Down
China's Internet ran slower this week, apparently to accommodate censorship around the anniversary of Tiananmen Square. "The Internet filters of its censors are working at full speed. China has the technology to filter incoming and outgoing traffic. ... Here in Shanghai, the effects varied, but more websites were blocked, downloading my daily load of spam messages proved to be impossible and I had to delete them on the server, and for some time even my RSS reader did not work," Fons Tuinstra of Poynter reports.

Meanwhile, China continues rapid growth in DSL, although I don't have Q1 numbers yet. William Bao Bean reports ZTE had IP broadband sales of $250 million, much in DSLAMs for China, representing millions of ports. The results were a third higher than expected, showing strong market growth and possible share gains from Alcatel and UTStarcom.

Copyright 2004 Dave Burstein.
The DSL Prime Newsletter is reprinted with permission.

"The power of the printing press belongs solely to those who own the presses"
—A.J. Leibling

The Internet is the cheapest printing press ever invented.