DSL Prime News Briefs

This week, the briefs cover two new topic areas, one at the start and the other at the end of the list.

by Dave Burstein of DSL Prime and Future of TV [September 7, 2006]

Coming news and events

DC, any day now. The spectrum auction will conclude with the incumbent wireless carriers spending heavily to keep out competition. Comcast/Sprint is taking a position as well. The $15 billion seems like a windfall to taxpayers, but the $50 per person payment is probably less than the savings would be from more wireless competition.

Paris and New Jersey 9/7. Alcatel and Lucent will vote to merge Thursday, even though a negative vote would raise Alcatel's stock by billions. AT&T's purchase of BellSouth is also $5 billion to $15 billion more than the company's value.

Amsterdam 9/8-9/12. HD video encoded to 6 Mbps in realtime MPEG 4 AVC. Promised by Harmonic and Tandberg at IBC. Metalink will demo pre-802.11n with FEC moving HD streams wirelessly. I'll be skeptical until proven in the field, of course. Zhone, Tut, and Amino will be demonstrating production HD MPEG4, now shipping. AT&T HD coming soon.

Boston: 9/11-9/14. Bram Cohen, seldom-seen genius inventor of Bit Torent, is at the video side of VON. Robert Pepper leads an ultimate wonkfest on Monday, bringing in Jeff Carlisle, Julius Genachowski, Chris Libertelli, and Tom Power.

Vancouver, 9/11- 9/14. IEC Broadband World Forum Americas 2006. If I could go, I'd listen to Verizon's Mark Wegleitner and Telus' Ibrahim Gideon on GPON, Marco Antonio Galván Jiménez from little reported Telmex, and Ghassem Koleyni of the ITU IPTV standards group.

E-mail

• "I am retiring. I have had good use of the information in the past, but please take my address off your list." I always appreciate knowing why I lose a reader, but this was particularly flattering because it was from a policymaker in Scandinavia I have never met. Nothing flatters this reporter more than hearing my work has an impact.
  
  
• From a reader at Alcatel, "I will be out of the office starting 12/08/2006 and will not return until 04/09/2006." A dozen similar responses came in when my last issue hit a Belgian mail server. The European four week vacation is almost surely a better way to live. Even measured in dollars, individual income is higher despite the more sensible pace of life.

Briefs

• AT&T's California and Illinois price increases are moving hundreds of millions of dollars to the bottom line. Running the numbers on the AT&T Missoula plan is shocking—it moves as much as $1 billion to their annual bottom line.
  
  
• Sources in India confirm that AT&T is moving even more software jobs abroad.
  
  
• U.S. political conflicts with Venezuela led state-owned CVG Telecom to turn to China for a $200 million fiber optic network. The suppliers include Huawei, ZTE, and Alcatel Shanghai Bell. U.S. Intelligence Director John Negroponte just appointed J. Patrick Maher the manager of a new office dedicated to "ensuring the implementation of strategies" for Venezuela and Cuba. No word on how this will affect the Alcatel-Lucent deal, which separately has found a last minute enemy at the Wall Street Journal. Given antitrust approval of the deal, it's hard for me to see what could block it now.

Press

• John Packowski at the Merc's Silicon Valley.com has some of the funniest headlines in the business, reason enough to commend his nomination for an Online Journalism Award.
  
  
• "Here's how to tell if U-verse is coming to your 'hood,'" Phil Harvey provides a little text and a long screen of pictures of the actual gear. Note the big ugly cabinets for the remote DSLAMs, angering suburban mayors. In Germany, towns are complaining about the noise of the cooling system as well as the aesthetics. Not every town has a Keith Haring to decorate the boxes, either. What policymakers really need is an actual map of planned deployments, to know where action is necessary to create an alternative.
  
  
• "Here's how to tell if FIOS is coming to your 'hood," DSLR could title their remarkable FIOS mashup with Google Maps. Zoom in to most clusters, and you easily confirm the current builds are overwhelmingly well to do suburbs, although Verizon swears the redlining will diminish in the next stage. Three state capitals are among the first to be served, Albany, Harrisberg, Richmond, as well as the D.C. suburbs where most regulators live.
  
  
• The interesting Telco 2.0 blog reports from a skeptical insider extreme doubts about European wireless growth. "He retains a healthy skepticism about the performance and future prospects of operators, believing them to continue to chase mirages of revenue growth (3G, HSDPA, MMS, Mobile Content etc. etc.), rather than accept that the market has peaked and that the future holds near-term cost-cutting ("slash 'n' burn") followed by long-term operational efficiency ("yield management") with, at best, 2 percent per year earnings growth." Wireless prices in Europe are still supported by cartels, and margins would drop precipitously if they broke. I'm the broadband guy, not a wireless analyst, but contribute to this debate the notion that any new wireless network, supported by data or video, can offer VoIP at half the current mobile prices.

Wall Street

• The Kaufman Brothers Conference is always a well run event with interesting mid-sized companies. Coming to the W Hotel in New York September 6 & 7 will be ADTRAN, Arris, Covad, DirecTV, ECI, Harmonic, Telio, and Westell.
  
  
• PMC-Sierra is closing their Ottawa design center and laying off several dozen employees. The company says the cutbacks will not affect their announced VDSL chips.
  
  
• AT&T market cap is $20 billion higher than the more profitable Verizon, not right on the fundamentals.

People

• Phil Anschutz of Qwest is caught in a an influence buying scandal as he tries to obtain a license for a super-casino in the London Millennium Dome
  
  
• For job ads, visit the DSL Prime website.

Politics (a new heading, deliberately put at the end)

• In three months recently, SBC California reported $17,977,977.38 in lobbying. That's enough for 85,000 ports of remote DSLAMs installed at $200, or 250,000 homes at SBC's 30 percent take rate, which would raise their DSL availability from 84 percent (last June figure) to 86 percent. That was a heavy quarter, when they went after a state video franchise. Given that most spending on political support is not reported, SBC may be spending $100 million this year in California alone. Taking a higher cost of $300 for the DSLAMs (smaller territories, some needing fiber backhaul) suggests $100 million would support 330,000 ports, or just over a million homes, raising SBC's availability over 90 percent in a year and 95 percent in two and produce over $100 million in income with high gross margins.

Copyright 2006 Dave Burstein.
The DSL Prime Newsletter is reprinted with permission.

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