AT&T Hints at Fixed Residential LTE > not surprising

reply to bbeesley

Re: not surprising

The point isn't to compete with HFC though. UVerse proper can't e en do that right now. The point is to serve customers who don't have cable plant access.

By the time UVerse gets upgraded, cable will have upstream bonding turned on, and the arms race begins again.

reply to brad

reply to iansltx

reply to bbeesley

reply to brad
???

The standard cable service with no channel bonding on the upstream side is 5 Mbps up (top end) at this point. With US channel bonding (e.g. Comcast) the number goes up to around 20 Mbps.

Now if you're saying "isn't really competing on the DOWNSTREAM" side, I'd agree. However let me know when AT&T offers 100 Mbps to a sizable population on U-Verse. I predict that cable will offer 150 Mbps at that point (8 downstream channels bonded).

Last I checked, upstream on VDSL2 is VERY distance-sensitive, more so than cable. CenturyLink, who is the only large provider that offers uploads of more than 5 Mbps over DSL in the US, has 20 Mbps up (the same as Comcast), but only offers it 1500 feet or less from the VRAD. Most customers can't get that kind of speed. Heck, many customers can't even get their 5 Mbps up VDSL2 tier. Sure, bonding two 40x20 tiers would get you 80x40, however you can push 40 Mbps up on HFC via current 8x4 modems without issue, assuming the proper plant improvements have been made...and you can do it anywhere on the plant rather than a short distance from the node.

As for congestion on higher tiers, the advantage with DSL is mitigated by the fact that 'net usage is still relatively bursty by nature, particularly above 5 Mbps (you could argue 12 Mbps, with Netflix's new offerings, but it's still far below 100 Mbps). Dedicated infrastructure is cool and all, but if you have eight downstream channels available on a HFC system, you're talking about 300 Mbps of downstream capacity, and when you run the numbers, it's hard to get enough people on a 100-subscriber node pulling bandwidth at the same time to ensure that even a 150 Mbps customer won't get their full share.

Also, you're just moving the bottleneck inward on the network when you use DSL instead of HFC. Last I checked, VRADs run on gigabit uplinks. If you're serving 3x more customers from a VRAD than your competitor is serving from a cable mode, you're going to need 3x the peak capacity, all else equal (it ends up being less than this due to the fact that people still don't use their connections much, but I digress).

You may be speaking from your experience with overloaded cable networks with no upstream bonding, competing with Bell VDSL that has 7 Mbps uploads. The situation is a bit different in the US; DSL providers come up woefully short compared to cable companies when it comes to serving subscribers in a consistent manner (speed-wise).

reply to bbeesley

reply to iansltx
Shaw is already offering cable at 250 megs down, 15 megs up. They freed up enough spectrum to do this by completing their analog migration and ending analog transmission.

Of course, they may be the only major cableco in North America to have done that. It cost them $100 million to do it (it took 16 months, starting in August 2011).

To put this in perspective, Shaw has 3.4 million customers in total, and 1.8 million cable internet subscribers. I don't believe they include their 900k satellite television subscribers in this total (they list Shaw Direct separately).
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Developer: Tomato/MLPPP, Linux/MLPPP, etc »fixppp.org

$55 per customer doesn't sound too bad, when you consider that doing FTTN is a multiple of that.