Hot on the trail of yesterday’s post on the Ofcom decision to waive regulations on the roll out of fibre to homes in the UK Cisco CEO John Chambers has written a guest post on Om Malik’s blog on a similar subject.
I had thought that the Obama stimulus package, which contains a substantial sum of money targeted at broadband roll out, was aimed at standard broadband speeds but it looks as if this is not correct.
It does make you wonder whether the government here in the UK will now look to subsidising the £29Bn it is estimated it will cost to get universal fibre coverage in this country.
I note that the economic recovery package proposed in the USA includes between $6bn and $9bn to assist with the implementation of broadband in rural areas (The Register today). In the UK the Government is also talking about making the provision of universal access to broadband compulsory though I’m not sure whether they are going ot subsidise it.
What is worth noting is that the real debate in the UK is around how the country rolls out Next Generation Access which is fibre to the home and an order of magnitude up from broadband in terms of speed. This has been costed at £29bn.
There is a scenario where the UK could leave the USA behind in the internet infrastructure game. I imagine that the cost of implementing a NGA network in the USA will be an order of magnitude up again on the UK, just because of the sheer size of the country.
Unfortunatley (depending on your perspective) the USA is far better placed for the stimulus of innovation than the UK when it comes the applications to run over this infrastructure.
Internet usage has skyrocketed with people watching the Inauguration of new US President Barack Obama online. At first glance it looks like even more people are watching this than went online to watch the Beijing Olympics.
The picture below shows a snapshot of traffic over the London Access Point (LONAP) exchange.
It looks to me from the right hand peak as if traffic has risen almost 50% over the same time yesterday. This compares with around 24% increase seen by Timico during the Olympics (see post). Fortunately Timico has the capacity to cope.
If you want to follow realtime traffic across LONAP you can check it out here.
In the news is the fact that US President-elect Barack Obama wants to keep his Blackberry when he becomes president. This must be worth a fortune in advertising to Blackberry manufacturer RIM and indeed their share price seems to have risen quite healthily this week.
The secret service is of course concerned about the Presidential email security and I will happily leave it to both parties to argue it out. What is of interest is why the Blackberry? Why not an alternative email device such as a PDA or Nokia Smartphone.
I used to have a Blackberry but moved onto Nokia, primarily because the Nokia E-Series had a SIP Stack that would allow me to play with VoIP on mobiles. The Nokia’s were more of a phone as well rather than a clunky data device.
The Blackberry has moved on since then and a quick survey of the Tech Support team suggests that it now has the edge in terms of features and ease of use. There is now even a Facebook plug-in for blackberry.
Certainly from a commercial perspective the mobile operators are doing a very good job at incentivising service providers to sell Blackberry as opposed to alternative mobile email solutions.
What is really exciting is the pace of development in the mobile handset world. Competition is really working here driving features up and pricing down.
RIM 5 day stock performance courtesy of Yahoo Finance
