broadband

Canadian broadband needs an upload overhaul.

by alec on June 27, 2009

Yesterday YouTube doubled the upload limit available to users in response the increasing number of high definition videos that are being sent to the site. Now you can upload a 2G file, instead of a 1G file. YouTube has made it easier to upload a high definition file as well. According to Liz Gannes at NewTeeVee.com, YouTube has done this because “HD videos are now becoming a significant part of the YouTube library”.

They look gorgeous, no doubt. Check out this trailer from Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. Click the full screen button to see the full impact. It’s really darned impressive.

Don’t expect to see a lot of Canadian high definition content, however. Not that there aren’t people in this country shooting high definition video, who might have a strong desire to share that video. It’s simply a matter of bandwidth and usage caps. All broadband providers in Canada, excepting a few small outfits in Vancouver, cap usage at between 50 and 150G of transfer per month, and restrict upload speeds to under 1 megabit per second, except Shaw who have raised their upload limit to a meagre 2 megabits. We’d be in our graves before YouTube received our videos at these speeds.

	Uplink Speed	Downlink Speed	Monthly Allowance	Price
Rogers “Extreme Plus”	1Mbps	16Mbs	95G	$99.99
Bell Internet “Max 16”	1Mbs	16Mbs	100G	$72.95
Telus “High Speed Turbo”	1Mbs	10 – 15Mbs	100G	$43
Shaw “High Speed Warp”	2Mbs	25Mbs	150G	$94
Videotron “Ultimate Speed Internet 50”	1Mbs	50Mbs	100G	$89.95

Pathetic, no? Even worse, most of the small business offerings from these providers consist of repackaged residential service, with a better service agreement and a higher price.

Does it matter if a few people can’t upload video? Perhaps not, unless you’re a Canadian culture supporter or Heritage Minister James Moore. But what about the other impacts of capped usage and restricted upload bandwidth – the economic and environmental impacts? Applications like VPN, remote desktop, and VoIP are the cornerstones of telecommuting strategies. Those applications are dependent on high speed upload as well as download. When telecommuting is impaired, it has an economic impact to business, and an environmental impact on society. We should all care about that!

So how about it Rogers, Bell, Telus, Shaw and Videotron? Download speeds have increased steadily over the last decade, but we’ve had upload speeds of under 1Mbs since the dawn of broadband. Shouldn’t we have better?

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Is John Chambers right about broadband?

by alec on March 4, 2009

Rounding the corner behind the Hyatt Cinemas in Burlingame on my morning run, I hit a slick metal plate and took a spill. I got up, and continued running with a nasty pavement uppercut, and bruises to my knees, hands and left shoulder. And there, ahead of me, a brilliant rainbow lit by the early morning sun made me forget the pain I was in.

As I ran on, I thought of John Chamber’s comments published yesterday on GigaOm. Chambers is calling for funding for broadband in the US bail-out package. He, as many others have, compares national broadband to the interstate highway system. Positioning broadband as a national infrastructure priority, he sees it as a key ingredient in the US economic recovery.

The US economy has taken an unexpected and nasty spill, just as I did this morning. Unlike my situation, however, it’s a little more difficult for the economy to pick itself up and run ahead toward the rainbow. And unfortunately, there aren’t easy answers like broadband. If I was a US congressman, I might question whether an investment in broadband might provide the same economic impetus as an investment in education or healthcare. I might take the position that building a strong, educated and healthy workforce should be first priority.

But I’m not a US congressman. I’m just a bruised runner, limping toward a rainbow.

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Rogers Portable Internet

October 6, 2007

It's Thanksgiving Weekend here in Canada, which means that once again we're visiting the in-laws in Kitchener, Ontario. As I've mentioned previously, that means no internet. This time around it also made a great excuse to try Rogers new Portable Internet product. Rogers Portable Internet runs over the Inukshuk WiMax network, jointly owned by Rogers [...]

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What If They Simply Made Communications Technology Better?

March 20, 2006

Rob Hyndman has a pointer to Mark Cuban’s latest: Think the Internet Will Replace TV? Think Again. Cuban’s post can be summarized as: Today’s broadband networks are too slow. The insatiable appetite for on-demand rich media content will soon overwhelm them. Telco’s aren’t putting in upgraded networks quickly enough to meet that demand. Cuban also [...]

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Buying a Data Plan and Phones

January 16, 2006

We arrived yesterday in Seattle and spent most of the afternoon shopping for 8 cell phones and some data cards. The nature of iotum’s product is that we need lots of end points to terminate calls, and Howard and I are starting to spend a lot of time in different places doing demos. So, we [...]

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Werbach on Business Model

November 1, 2005

Kevin Werbach wrote another great piece yesterday on the inversion of business models. It’s about the way in which some businesses are providing the core service for free and charging for add-on’s. "But what if the connectivity were free, the applications were free, and users paid only for the add-ons? Could that ever work?", he asks, [...]

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