Saturday, March 21, 2009

Driving For Better Broadband

The Alcatel Broadband For All survey had interviewed 2,850 people cable speed test cybercafs and early kuching tourism users broadband combo phone across Brazil, Russia, Egypt, Kenya, India, China and in major towns in Malaysia. A total of 300 people in cybercafs were surveyed face-to-face plus 100 online surveys of new broadband users in the city.

Of those questioned in cybercafs, 35% said they were very interested in broadband, another 35% were quite interested, 13% were not very interested and 14% were not interested.

Driving broadband adoption requires proper public initiatives, adequate and relevant content, user awareness and expertise, service affordability and accessibility. Telecommunication policy makers, content webmail tmnet streamyx the public education system and network service providers all have roles. For instance, the Jordanian government streamyx email server Jordan Telecom to connect all schools.

Service providers in broadband high-growth economies can leapfrog to the latest IP-based technologies like WiMAX and even go further by moving beyond the mobile/fixed divide to fixed-mobile convergence.

Innovative public services, like community-centered services for schools, hospitals, town halls, cooperatives and internet tmnet streamyx malaysia shops could help increase broadband access, while the other is shared costs of mobile broadband development.

Operators need to expand the broadband footprint for mass-market access and combine different broadband access technologies. Technologies like ADSL2+ and VDSL 2 can be used in urban areas. ADSL2+ is an International Telecommunication prepaid isp (ITU) standard which doubles data malaysia package of traditional ADSL to 24Mbps download, 1Mbps upload.

VDSL2 (Very-high-bit-rate Digital Subscriber Line 2, a.k.a. ITU-T G.993.2) is the newest and most advanced DSL broadband standard designed to support wide deployment of triple play services like voice, video, data, high definition television (HDTV) and kuala lampur malasia gaming, at speeds up to 200Mbps, though speeds drop rapidly to 100Mbps at 500 meters and 50Mbps at 1km and from 1.6km onwards, its speed is comparable to ADSL 2+.

Because of these relatively short ranges, FTTN (Fiber to the Node) can be used with these technologies to serve sub-urban areas by running fiber up to a node in the locality and continuing over copper pairs into homes.

3G without HSDPA, can be used to serve urban and sub-urban areas at low data rates, 2G for urban and remote areas with low data rates and WiMAX can serve sub-urban and remote areas with high data rates.

For service providers, improve broadband speed means lots of transformation but in emerging countries with little or no legacy networks, they can jump straight to these technologies.

For instance, China Netcom has the biggest next-generation network in the world, while Telecom Slovakia threw out its legacy electro-mechanical crossbar switches and replaced them with an IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) - ready network, needed for fixed-mobile convergence, video conferencing and interoperability between mobile communications and the internet.

Alcatel's strategic is to partner with operators to provide broadband services in 120 countries and it can help provide them with hosting and managed applications.

For instance, Alcatel provides several operators in Dakar with managed applications like ring-back tones and a shared platform on a pay-per-use business model, in Nigeria it manages balance checking and funds transfer from mobile phones, while in the Middles East and Africa, it provides Dallah Telecom with soccer content from FIFA.

Michael Russell Your Independent guide to Broadband

It is not clear as to the scale involved, but it seems part of Manchester looks set to get full fibre broadband.