DSL Prime: Verizon Without Spin

Verizon is really, really going to roll out all the nifty services that DSL is capable of, with massive pipes delivering video to the home.

by Dave Burstein DSL Prime [July 7, 2004]

Verizon says go, SBC says no
Verizon is dead serious about the million homes passed with fiber this year, and two million more next. Keiko Harvey made that clear in an extraordinary press conference in Chicago, flanked by Mark Wegleitner, her senior technical peer, Tom Tauke, their VP for policy, and her network lead. There's no fudge in the numbers, either. They are only counting homes with everything in place except the terminal and actual drop to the house. Verizon's current gear has 860 megahertz for video, and 19 meg for data, but they have active plans to raise that to the 100 meg symmetric of a true fiber build. (See Anton Wahlman's latest report.)

SBC will not be running fiber, except to a very limited number of new developments. Instead, they are betting ADSL2+ (15/2) will, per Chris Rice "'future-proof' our network and meet customers bandwidth needs for decades to come." Whitacre believes, "In short, our network will be faster and more capable than any other," (quoted by Telephony's Donny Jackson.)

Essentially, SBC is betting that Comcast will not deliver for a decade a fraction of the capabilities Brian Roberts is promising, or that consumers won't care about higher speeds. 30 Mbps cable modems are working well in Japan, and Roberts projects 70 percent video on demand/unicast/timeshift. DOCSIS 2.0, going into service already, outclasses SBC's future network, DOCSIS 3.0 is 200 Mbps down, 100 Mbps up. Cisco has sold cable equipment with that speed for delivery in 2005 to Korea and probably a trial in Comcast.

Verizon instead is meeting the cable challenge with $billions of fiber to the home. Wegleitner explains, "I respect the people making other decisions, but I don't think the ADSL2+ video will be competitive with cable. It just doesn't have enough margin."

Video Compression for 15 Mbps Service
Since HDTV is nominally 19 Mbps, compression is crucial. 40 to 60 percent of American homes will have HD-TV in a few years, including the most profitable customers. SBC's release claims "The Microsoft TV IPTV platform would make it possible to deliver standard-and high-definition TV programming to multiple TV sets in the home over an FTTN network while leaving ample bandwidth available for super high-speed broadband and Voice over IP (VoIP) services."

That's making some very aggressive assumptions, including HDTV at 5 or 6 Mbps and SDTV at well under 2 Mbps. However, today's state of the art MPEG4 .264 or Windows Media Player requires 8 to 10 Mbps for full HDTV, live. That means you can't get two, much less three or four, signals across. I spoke directly with the folks designing industry-leading encoders, and they are far from their eventual goal of 6 meg with only a small sacrifice in quality. I've also looked at 6 Mbps WMP pre-encoded. To my uneducated eye, it looks great—but not nearly as good as the full HDTV NHK was showing a few feet away. I don't know whether someone watching a football championship will care about the difference between "very good" and "even better," but I'd hate to be competing selling video whose quality doesn't match.

Only six million have HD-TV today, but the forecasts of forty to sixty million before SBC finishes the 5,000 foot build are likely correct. Costs are plummeting, and programming becoming common. Intel and TI are happy to project how their chips will drive prices lower, fast. Not many will have two or three HD sets initially, however, and Microsoft and Scientific Atlanta are working on some multiplexing tricks that may help at the 15 Mbps level. That said, if the bandwidth is reserved for video QoS for SBC's chosen content, other programming won't be able to get through. That's definitely not "super high-speed broadband"—and a direct attack on Powell's Four Freedoms and the End to End Principle that has built the Internet. Think of the political impact if Vonage suddenly stopped working on SBC DSL lines. Nobody's talking, but that's a side effect of some of the current means to squeeze through selected video channels.

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

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