"In relation to the problem of matching Internet Protocol addresses, my government will bring forward proposals to enable the protection of the public and the investigation of crime in Cyberspace." [on Youtube, 5:45]

As the Guardian pointed out:

The text of the Queen's speech gives the go-ahead to legislation, if needed, to deal with the limited technical problem of there being many more devices including phones and tablets in use than the number of internet protocol (IP) addresses that allow the police to identify who sent an email or made a Skype call at a given time.

What's the problem here?

The perspective of various law enforcement agencies is that the Internet is seen as a space that has been systematically abused, and too many folk are felling prey to various forms of deceit and fraud. If you add to that the undercurrent of concern that the Internet contains a wide range of vulnerabilities from the perspective of what we could generally term "cybersecurity," then it's not surprising to see law enforcement agencies now turning to legislation to assist them in undertaking their role. And part of their desired toolset in undertaking investigations and gathering intelligence is access to records from the public communications networks of exactly who is talking to whom. Such measures are used in many countries, falling under the generic title of "data retention."

In the world of telephony the term "data retention" was used to refer to the capture and storage of call detail records. Such records typically contain the telephone numbers used, time and duration of the call, and may also include ancillary information including location and subscriber details. Obviously such detailed use data is highly susceptible to data mining, and such call records can be used to identify an individual's associates and can be readily used to identify members of a group. Obviously, such data has been of enormous interest to various forms of law enforcement and security agencies over the years, even without the call conversation logs from direct wire tapping of targeted individuals. The regulatory measures designed to protect access to these records vary from country to country, but access is typically made available to agencies on the grounds of national security, law enforcement or even enforcement of taxation conformance.

So if that's what happens in telephony, what happens on the Internet?

Here the story is a continually evolving one, and these days the issues of IPv4 address exhaustion and IPv6 are starting to be very important topics in this area. To see why it is probably worth a looking at how this used to happen and what technical changes have prompted changes to the requirements related to data retention for Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

The original model of the analogous data records for the Internet was the registry of allocated addresses maintained by Internet Network Information Centre, or Internic. This registry did not record any form of packet activity, but was the reference data that shows which entity had been assigned which IP address. So if you wanted to know what entity was using a particular IP address, then you could use a very simple "whois" query tool to interrogate this database:

$ whois -h whois.apnic.net 202.12.29.211

inetnum: 202.12.28.0 - 202.12.29.255
netname: APNIC-AP
descr: Asia Pacific Network Information Centre
descr: Regional Internet Registry for the Asia-Pacific Region
descr: 6 Cordelia Street
descr: PO Box 3646
descr: South Brisbane, QLD 4101
descr: Australia

However, this model of the registry making direct allocations to end user entities stopped in the early 1990's with the advent of the ISP. The early models of ISP service were commonly based on the dial-up model, where a customer would be assigned an IP address for the duration of their call, and the IP address would return to the free pool for subsequent reassignment at the end of the call. The new registry model was that the identity of the service provider was described in the public address registry, and the assignment of individual addresses to each of their dial-up customers was information that was private to the service provider. Now if you wanted to know what entity was using a particular IP address you also had to know the time of day as well, and while a "whois" query could point you in the direction of whom to ask, you now had to ask the ISP for access to their Access, Authentication and Accounting (AAA) records, typically the radius log entries, in order to establish who was using a particular IP address at a given time. Invariably, this provider data is private data, and agencies wanting access to this data had to obtain appropriate authorization or warrants under the prevailing regulatory regime.

This model of traceback has been blurred by the deployment of edge NATs, where a single external IP address is shared across multiple local systems serviced by the NAT. This exercise can therefore trace back to the NAT device, but no further. So with access to this data you can get to understand the interactions on the network at a level of granularity of customer end points, but not at a level of individual devices or users.

We've used this model of Internet address tracking across the wave of cable and DSL deployments. The end customer presents their credentials to the service provider, and is provided with an IPv4 address as part of the session initiation sequence. The time of this transaction, the identity of the customer and the IP address is logged, and when the session is terminated the address is pulled back into the address pool and the release of the address is logged. The implication is that as long as the traceback can start with a query that includes an IP address and a time of day, its highly likely that the end user can be identified from this information.

But, as the Guardian's commentary points out, this is all changing again. IPv4 address exhaustion is prompting some of the large retail service providers to enter the Carrier Grade NAT space, and join what has already become a well established practice in the mobile data service world. The same week of the Queen's speech, BT announced a trial of Carrier Grade NAT use in its basic IP service.

At the heart of the Carrier Grade NAT approach is the concept of sharing a public IP address across multiple customers at the same time. An inevitable casualty of this approach is the concept of traceback in the internet and the associated matter of record keeping rules. It is no longer adequate to front up with an IP address and a time of day. That is just not enough information to uniquely distinguish one customer's use of the network from another's. But what is required is now going to be dependant on the particular NAT technology that is being used by the ISP. If the CGN is a simple port-multiplexing NAT then you need the external IP address and the port number. When combined with the CGN-generated records of NAT's bindings of internal to external address, this can map you back to the internal customer's IP address, and using the ISP's address allocations records, this will lead to identification of the customer.

So traceback is still possible in this context. In a story titled "Individuals can be identified despite IP address sharing, BT says" the newsletter out-law.com (produced by the law firm Pinsent Masons) reports:

BT told Out-Law.com that its CGNAT technology would not prevent the correct perpetrators of illegal online activity from being identified.

"The technology does still allow individual customers to be identified if they are sharing the same IP address, as long as the port the customer is using is also known," a BT spokesperson said in a statement. "Although the IP address is shared, the combination of IP address and port will always be unique and as such these two pieces of information, along with the time of the activity can uniquely identify traffic back to a broadband line. [...] If we subsequently receive a request to identify someone who is using IP address x, and port number y, and time z we can then determine who this is from the logs," the spokesperson said. [...] "If only the IP address and timestamp are provided for a CGNAT customer then we are unable to identify the activity back to a broadband line," they added.

But port-multiplexing NATs are still relatively inefficient in terms of address utilization. A more efficient form of NAT multiplexing uses the complete 5-tuple of the connection signature, so that the NAT's binding table uses a lookup key of the protocol field and the source and destination addresses and port values. This allows the NAT to achieve far higher address sharing ratios, allowing a single external IP address to be shared across a pool of up to thousands of customers.

So what data needs to be collected by the ISP to allow for traceback in this sort of CGN environment? In this case the ISP needs to collect the complete 5-tuple of the external view of the connection, plus the start and stop times at a level of granularity to the millisecond or finer, together with the end-user identification codes. Such a session state log entry takes typically around 512 bytes as a stored data unit.

How many individual CGN bindings, or session states, does each user generate? One report I've seen points to an average of some 33,000 connections per end customer each day. If that's the case then the implication is that each customer will generate some 17Mbytes of log information every day. For a very large service provider, with, say, some 25 million customers, that equates to a daily log file of 425Tbytes. If these CGN records were produced at an unrealistically uniform rate per day, that's a constant log data flow of some 40Gbps. At a more realistic estimate of the busy period peaking at 10 times the average, the peak log data flow rate is some 400Gbps.

That's the daily load, but what about longer term data retention storage demands? The critical questions here is the prevailing data retention period. In some regimes it's 2 years, while in other regimes it's up to 7 years. Continuing with our example, holding this volume of data for 7 years of data will consume 1,085,875 Terrabytes, or 1.0 Exabytes to use the language of excessively large numbers. And that's even before you contemplate backup copies of the data! And yes, that's before you contemplate an Internet that becomes even more pervasive and therefore of course even larger and used more intensively in the coming years.

The questions such a data set can answer also requires a very precisely defined question. It's no longer an option to ask "who used this IP address on this date?" Or even "who used this IP address and this port address in this hour?" A traceback that can penetrate the CGN-generated address overuse fog requires the question to include both the source and destination IP addresses and port numbers, the transport protocol, and the precise time of day, measured in milliseconds. This last requirement, of precise coordinated time records, is a new addition to the problem, as traceback now requires that the incident being tracked be identified in time according to a highly accurate time source running in a known timezone, so that a precise match can be found in the ISP's data logs. It's unclear what it will cost to collect and maintain such massive data sets, but its by no means a low cost incidental activity for any ISP.

No wonder the UK is now contemplating legislation to enforce such record keeping requirements in the light of the forthcoming CGN deployments in large scale service provider networks in that part of the world. Without such a regulatory impost its unlikely that any service provider would, of their own volition, embark on such a massive data collection and long term storage exercise. One comment I've heard is that in some regimes it may well be cheaper not to collect this information and opt to pay the statutory fine instead — it could well be cheaper!

This is starting to look messy. The impact of CGNs on an already massive system is serious, in that it alters the granularity of rudimentary data logging from the level of a connection to the Internet to the need to log each and every individual component conversation that every consumer has. Not only is it every service you use and every site you visit, but its even at the level of every image, every ad you download, everything. Because when we start sharing addresses we now can only distinguish one customer from another at the level of these individual basic transactions. Its starting to look complicated and certainly very messy.

But, in theory in any case, we don't necessarily have to be in such a difficult place for the next decade and beyond.

The hopeful message is that if we ever complete the transitional leap over to an all-IPv6 Internet the data retention capability reverts back to a far simpler model that bears a strong similarity to the very first model of IP address registration. The lack of scarcity pressure in IPv6 addresses allows the ISP to statically assign a unique site prefix to each and every customer, so that the service providers data records can revert to a simple listing of customer identities and the assigned IPv6 prefix. In such an environment the cyber-intelligence community would find that their role could be undertaken with a lot less complexity, and the ISPs may well find that regulatory compliance, in this aspect at least, would be a lot easier and a whole lot cheaper!

Written by Geoff Huston, Author & Chief Scientist at APNIC

As opposed to the much maligned programs like CDM and other initiatives NAMA refers to a set of policies and actions that developed and developing countries undertake as part of a commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Also unlike CDM, NAMA recipients are not restricted to developing countries. The program recognizes that different countries may take different nationally appropriate action based on different capabilities and requirements. Most importantly any set of actions or policies undertaken by a nation under NAMA will be recorded in a registry along with relevant technology, finance and capacity building support and will be subject to international measurement, reporting and verification.

Already most industrialized countries have committed funding,or intend to commit funding to NAMA projects. It is expected that by 2020 over $100 billion will be committed to NAMA programs by various nation states.

As I have blogged ad nauseam, I believe Internet researcher and R&E networks can play a critical leadership role in developing zero carbon ICT and "Energy Internet" technologies and architectures. ICT is the fastest growing sector in terms of CO2 emissions and is rapidly become one of the largest GHG emission sectors on the planet. For example a recent Australian study pointed out that the demand for new wireless technologies alone will equal the CO2 emissions of 4 1/2 million cars!

Once you get past the mental block of energy efficiency solves all problems, and realize that energy consumption is not the problem, but the type of energy we use, then a whole world of research and innovation opportunities opens up. More significantly, whether you believe in climate change or not, it is expected that within a couple of years the cost of power from distributed roof top solar panels is going to be less than that from the grid. This is going to fundamentally change the dynamics of the power industry much like the Internet disrupted the old telecom world. Those countries and businesses that take advantage of these new power realities are going to have a huge advantage in the global marketplace.

I am pleased to see that Europe is at the forefront of these developments with Future Internet initiatives like FINSENY.EU that is actively working with NRENs and Internet researchers to develop the architectural principles of building an energy Internet built around distributed small scale renewable power. My only concern is that Europe may screw it up, like they did with the early Internet, when most of the research funding went to incumbent operators.

The global Internet started in the academic research community and R&E networks. It would be great to see these same organizations play a leadership role in deploying the global "Energy Internet". Universities, in many cases have the energy profile of small cities, of which 25-40% of their electrical consumption is directly attributable to ICT. Most campuses also operate large fleets of utility vehicles that could easily be converted to dynamic charging to "packetize" power and provide it where needed and when needed on campus, especially when there is no power from the solar panels.

I dream of the day when a university announces it is going zero carbon and off the grid.

Written by Bill St. Arnaud , Green IT Networking Consultant

Significant Development

Columbus Communications’ Submarine Cable Footprint (Click to Enlarge)
Source: Columbus CommunicationsThe two companies were already the most significant providers of wholesale bandwidth for the region. Barbados registered Columbus International, which operates in 27 markets in the greater Caribbean, Central American and Andean region, estimates that it currently manages 70% of the region's traffic. CWC Wholesale Solutions is a subsidiary of UK-based Cable & Wireless Communications, which manages a diverse set of telecommunications businesses in Central America and the Caribbean including the well-known LIME brand.

Their new arrangement is not a union of equals. CWC's assets, subject to the joint venture arrangement, had a gross asset value of US$108.2 million, and recorded a loss before tax of US$0.9 million in the year to 31 March 2013. In contrast, Columbus's assets, subject to the joint venture arrangement, had a gross asset value of US$304.6 million and recorded a profit before tax of US$29.3 million in the year to 31 December 2012. Their joint venture, called CNL-CWC Networks, will be managed by Columbus, whose share will be 72.5% to CWC Wholesale Solutions' 27.5%.

Columbus and CWC in a joint statement said, "The new joint venture company will serve as the sales agent of both Columbus Networks and CWC Wholesale Solutions for international wholesale capacity." It added, "Columbus Networks and CWC Wholesale Solutions will retain ownership and control of their respective existing networks in the region."

The companies expect that after completing necessary network interconnections, the joint venture will offer wholesale customers an expanded network platform that spans more than 42,000 kilometers and reaches more than 42 countries in the region.

Officials from both companies shared that they hope to offer customers greater IP traffic routing options, improved reliability and higher performance as the joint venture rolls out. However, for all their enthusiasm about the joint venture, the success of an enlarged Columbus/CWC is by no means guaranteed. Given the strong parent brands, there is the real possibility of potentially conflicting strategies from Columbus and CWC for development of the Caribbean market.

It remains to be seen how the enlarged entity will position itself in the market. For Columbus, the deal enables the supply of international wholesale capacity and IP services to markets the company does not currently reach, such as Grenada, Barbados, St Lucia, Antigua and St Vincent and the Grenadines. It also provides them with additional connectivity options for Dominican Republic and Jamaica. For Cable and Wireless, its current LIME territories will be able to benefit from enhanced bandwidth capacity, enabled by access to Columbus Networks sub-sea capacity.

However, both companies must await further regulatory approvals in Panama, Columbia, Cayman Islands, The Bahamas, Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, The British Virgin Islands, Montserrat and St Kitts and Nevis before they can begin rolling out services on behalf of the joint venture in those countries. It is anyone's guess as to how long this approval process will take.

Unanswered Questions

The promise of an expanded network that can offer greater resilience, redundancy and routing options for Caribbean and Latin American traffic is certainly laudable. So too is the possibility of improving the region's access to international capacity to better meet the increasing demand.

However, the benefits of this joint venture must be weighed against the possibility that this new entity can negatively influence pricing, competition and downstream market growth. Unhealthy collusion or price-fixing in this significant sector of the telecommunications market could deal a serious blow to already fragile economies in the region. This must not be allowed to happen.

But who is to be tasked with the responsibility of ensuring that things proceed in the interest of health market growth and economic development?

There is no official body with the means or mandate for providing oversight of the region's telecommunications sector. The small markets of the Caribbean are marked by under-resourced national regulators, more practiced in responding to local telecom wrangling than to strategically analyzing the international wheeling and dealing of trans-national players.

So the questions now are, who is going to act as watchdog to safeguard regional, national and public interests? And, who is going to ensure that the promised efficiencies and capacity increase, actually benefit the region? Hopefully, it will not be too long before the answers emerge.

Written by Bevil Wooding, Internet Strategist at Packet Clearing House

This however, turned out not to be the case. The telcos were late moving into broadband, while the cablecos embraced these new opportunities and rapidly obtained a 50%+ share in the broadband market. For a long time the market anticipated that the telcos would fight back and regain their share: this never happened and the cablecos were able to extend their lead further. With 90% cable penetration in the country they had a captive market.

Cablecos have also made considerable investments in network upgrades since 1996, including the rebuilding of around 1.6 million kilometres of cable plant. The vast majority of this infrastructure uses DOCSIS3.0 technology, which is far superior to the DSL products which telcos offer. The latest cable upgrade to DOCSIS3.1 promises a significant enhancement, which should be a great concern to telcos which, having failed to invest in FttH networks, are unable to compete with the technical ability of cable networks. Last year the telcos declared defeat and indicated that they would start closing down parts of the PSTN.

Interestingly, these developments align with the discussions I had over the last few years with the newly nominated FCC chairman Tom Wheeler. He is also on the public record on this issue, believing that the PSTN would end its life around 2018 and that the cable companies would become the key broadband providers. Of course, with his extensive background in the mobile industry he also sees a golden future for mobile communications, since these players would start taking over large parts of the PSTN, especially for telephony services.

One of the most serious problems that the telcos are facing is the escalating cost of maintaining copper plant — this is estimated to increase from $2.72 per line in 2007 to $17.50 by 2018. This rapid rise is a combination of real cost increases, because of the aging nature of the network, as also because telcos are actively reducing the number of users and so the cost has to be shared among fewer customers. Another reason for the rapid increase is that for decades past maintenance as been deferred.

Clearly the telcos are not closing down all of the PSTN willy-nilly. They do have good quality infrastructure that can deliver quality DSL services, and they will milk that infrastructure for as long as possible. This will specifically be targeted in areas where it is relatively cheaper to maintain the copper network. The main casualty here will be areas of rural America, where maintenance costs are higher and where there are relatively few competing cablecos operating. As a result, many of these telcos' customers will only have mobile networks to access both voice and data services.

Another, perhaps even more serious issue — and one that the new FCC chair will have to face — is the rapid monopolization of the fixed broadband sector, with one cableco being the sole provider. These companies operate within franchises, so there is no competition between them. Currently there are no policies in place that regulate this situation, and with the American plutocracy in full force it will be interesting to see if any action will (or can) be taken by the FCC to rein in this emerging monopoly.

In the meantime the telcos are also under attack from companies such as Google: Google alone has refigured the landscape, having invested in FttH networks with great success. These companies' high take-up rate is worrying both the telcos and the cable companies, who all charge exorbitantly high prices for services similar to the ones that Google now offers at close to half the price. They are increasingly working with municipalities around the country, many of whom either operate FttH networks or would like to do so but are blocked by court rulings forced upon them through the lobbying of vested telco and cable interests. Based on the strong American conviction that government (including local government) should not be involved in telecoms infrastructure, they get away with it. Increasingly however, citizens are asking why local councils can be involved in electricity infrastructure but not in telecoms infrastructure. There is a growing political groundswell that is providing municipalities with greater freedom to be involved in such infrastructure developments.

This could become a turning point in the American telecoms industry. Potentially it could also see the telcos returning to the market rather than retreating from it, this time starting from scratch by building new fibre infrastructure.

Written by Paul Budde, Managing Director of Paul Budde Communication

Read full story: BBC

The presentation is an interesting dive down into the technical weeds of what exactly is causing this bufferbloat problem and how it could be fixed with a combination of factors, most noticeably the CoDel (Controlled Delay) active queue management technique. I found it a useful explanation of many facets of the problem and solution and would encourage folks interested in this topic to give it a look. I'll also note as I did in my earlier post that more info about the bufferbloat problem in general can be found at www.bufferbloat.net.

Written by Dan York, Author and Speaker on Internet technologies

Here's a thought exercise… Imagine no Internet: no data on phones, no ethernet or wi-fi connections at home — or anywhere. No email, no Google, no Facebook, no Amazon, no Skype.

That's what we would have if designing the Internet had been left up to phone and cable companies, and not to geeks whose names most people don't know. What those geeks came up with was something no business or government would ever contemplate: a base infrastructure of protocols that nobody owns, everybody can use and anybody can improve. For all three of those reasons the Internet supports positive economic externalities beyond calculation.

The only reason we have the carriers in the Net's picture is that we needed their wires. They got into the Internet service business only because demand for Internet access was huge, and they couldn't avoid it. Yet, because we still rely on their wires, and we get billed for their services every month, we think and talk inside their conceptual boxes.

Remember that the telco and cableco business models are based on routing everything through billable checkpoints. Is this what we want for the rest of the Net's future?

We have to remember that the Internet isn't just a service. It's the platform for everything we connect. And the number of things we will connect over the next few years will rise to the trillions.

To understand how the Internet ought to grow, try this: cities are networks, and networks are cities.^† Every business, every person, every government agency and employee, every institution, is a node in a network whose value increases as a high multiple of all the opportunities there are for those nodes to connect — and to do anything. This is why every city should care about pure connectivity, and not just about billable phone and cable company services.

We should be building a network infrastructure that is as neutral to purpose as water, electricity, roads and sewage treatment — and that anybody, including ordinary citizens, can improve. We can't do that if we're wearing blinders supplied by AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner and Verizon.

† I came to the realization that networks are cities, and vice versa, via Geoffrey West — first in Jonah Lehrer's "A Physicist Solves The City," in the New York Times, and then in West's TED talk, "The Surprising Math of Cities and Corporations." West is the physicist in Lehrer's piece. Both are highly recommended.

Written by Doc Searls, Author

This investment is helping smart grids to become the norm across the country. A side benefit is that utilities are also developing their smart grids for telecoms over and above that used by meters to send data to network controllers.

As an example, earlier this year the utility serving Santa Clara began using its smart grid technology and infrastructure to deliver free citywide outdoor WiFi. While meters send data via an existing wireless network, a separate channel is used to provide outdoor internet access. The WiFi network is growing in scope and reach as more premises are equipped with smart meters.

The potential for expanding WiFi coverage is huge. There are about 120 municipalities with citywide WiFi networks accessible to the general public. In addition, there are about 60 cities with citywide or near citywide coverage though these networks are now limited to government applications, such as public safety. There are also about 80 or more cities with large outdoor WiFi areas, mostly located in parks and downtown zones.

A hindrance to cities aiming to develop comprehensive WiFi networks has come from the powerful telecoms industry, which employs its lobbying clout to push for laws blocking or preventing municipalities from offering WiFi or fixed broadband services.

The use of smart meters to provide WiFi using existing (and expanding) infrastructure presents a separate challenge, since the telcos would have to battle utilities rather than municipal governments.

Written by Henry Lancaster, Senior Analysts at Paul Budde Communication

Most discussions regarding the need for fibre optic infrastructure take place from the wrong perspective — based on how fast people need the internet to be when they download their emails, web information, games and movies. Fibre optic technology has very little to do with this — ultimately all of that 'residential' traffic will account for less than 50% of all the traffic that will eventually flow over fibre optic networks.

The real reason this type of network is needed relates to the social and economic needs of our societies, and there are many clear examples that indicate that we are running out of steam trying to solve some of our fundamental problems in traditional ways.

For instance, at this moment discussions are taking place in every single developed country in the world about the fact that the cost of healthcare is unsustainable. These costs will grow — over the next 20 years — to 40%-50% of total government budgets — clearly impossible. So we face a dilemma. Do we lower the standard of healthcare services, at the same time making them more costly for the end-user?

If we want to maintain our current lifestyle the only solution is to make the healthcare system more effective, efficient and productive. And this can only be done with the help of ICT. To make it more productive, health needs to be brought to the people rather than the other way around, as is the case at present. Similar examples apply to the education system, the energy systems and the management of cities and countries in general. We need to create smart cities, smart businesses and smart countries, with high-speed infrastructure, smart grids, intelligent buildings, etc.

In order to manage our societies and economies better we need to have much better information about what is happening within all of the individual ecosystems, and in particular information about how these different systems interact. Currently they all operate within silos and there is little or no cooperation or coordination between them. ICT can be the bridge to bring them together; to collect data from them and process it in real time. Information can then be fed back to those who are managing the systems, and those who operate within them, such as doctors, teachers, business people, bureaucrats, politicians — and, of course, to you and me.

Some of these data interactions are already happening around smartphones, social media, traffic and crowd control and weather information. This is only the start of what is known as the Internet of Things (IoT) or machine-to-machine communication (M2M).

ICT cannot solve world hunger, but without ICT world hunger cannot be solved, and this applies to all the important social and economic problems that societies around the world are now facing.

None of this can be done overnight; it requires massive transformations of industries and sectors. There is no instant business model available that will supply an immediate return on the investment that is needed to create these smart systems. All of these investments need to be looked at over a period of 10, 20 years and even longer. No private business will take such a business risk. To make it happen government leadership and government policies are needed.

This is also the message from the UN Broadband Commission for Digital Development, and it applies to countries all over the world. More than 120 countries worldwide have now developed broadband policies, recognising that such infrastructure is critical to their development. The challenge now is to put these policies into practice/implement these policies, and at a time when government leadership around the world as at an all-time low.

Ultimately all of these developments will require national fibre optic networks. There simply is no other technology that can handle the capacity of data and applications that will be needed to run the cities and countries from today onwards. This infrastructure needs to be robust. It has to have enormous capacity. It needs to be secure and to be able to protect privacy. There is simply no other infrastructure technology that is up to that job.

So those business and government leaders who are in charge of looking towards the future do have an obligation to ask themselves, based on the above, whether we can afford not to have a fibre optic network.

Written by Paul Budde, Managing Director of Paul Budde Communication

First of all, this is not an 'us or them' issue between fixed and mobile broadband. As a matter of fact, the companies that are rolling out LTE are increasingly dependent on deep fibre rollouts as they need to handle massive amounts of data, to which the mobile infrastructure technology is not well-suited. So the quicker they can offload their mobile traffic onto a fixed network the better. As I've said before, one of the key drivers of fibre deployment will be the growth in mobile broadband.

A similar situation will occur in the home. More and more, people are using their mobile devices rather than PCs and laptops; and more people within the home are using more and different mobile devices, so this will significantly increase the need for capacity within the home. The reality of mobile broadband is that 60%-80% of capacity usage of smartphone and tablet use is in the home, and these devices are all connected to the fixed network through the WiFi modem. People are becoming accustomed to the quality of the LTE network, so they will want a similar quality of service over the fixed network; and over the next 3-5 years the current network will start to run out of steam. And, with at least one-third of all fixed broadband connections being of such an inferior quality, these households are already facing these quality problems now.

So, while access to the internet and broadband is moving quickly towards smartphones and tablets as the preferred access devices, at the same time the majority of broadband capacity required through these devices will still need to be provided by the fixed network.

While the capacity of the mobile network is greatly improved by LTE — as well as by the upcoming extra capacity through new spectrum allocation — the physics of mobile technology is such that it will be impossible to handle all the traffic of these mobile devices over the mobile network.

Obviously the mobile operators are not sitting still. They are improving their network infrastructure in order to capture as much of the traffic as possible, and increasingly they are looking at WiFi technologies as another alternative to off-load traffic and/or add extra access points for users in high traffic areas such as shopping centres, entertainment venues, transport stations, etc. But again these WiFi access points need to be connected to the fixed network, and in the case of WiFi access points you virtually need fibre-to-the premise/business to be of any use.

So, while LTE will greatly increase the use of broadband and broadband applications, this will at the same time put increased pressure on the fixed network.

On the end-user side of the fixed broadband market — we don't have the same dynamics as in the mobile market. Few, if any, fixed network devices capture the users' attention in the way the new smartphones do. Also, there is a clear lack of exciting fixed broadband applications. Entertainment is largely captured by content providers who want to protect their existing business models, and applications in healthcare, education, energy, etc are going to take a long time to reach maturity and mass market penetration levels. So all attention is clearly on mobile and this is creating a skewed perspective on what is needed overall to ensure that these mobile developments can be used to their full potential.

The developments in mobile and LTE will generally stimulate the need for better fixed networks, but at the same time there will be a significant group of users who — at this point in time — do not have high capacity requirements, and for whom a $30 or $40 monthly mobile connection will cater for all their comms needs. This group will actually lead to stagnation, and even a decline, in fixed broadband connections. We already see this happening in the Hong Kong market. The situation will only be exacerbated if LTE becomes available in areas that have very poor fixed broadband coverage. BuddeComm estimates that up to 25% of users could simply abandon their unsatisfactory fixed broadband connection in favour of LTE. Most will eventually re-connect in 3-5 years' time, but only when important applications are becoming available over the fixed network.

These short-term developments could be interpreted by some who don't have a good understanding of the total picture as an indication that fixed broadband is not needed, and this could potentially undermine the build-out of the fixed broadband networks that are so desperately needed for the longer-term social and economic developments in the country.

If we look at the very latest smartphone devices (e.g. GalaxyS4) we see an increase in what is called machine-to-machine (M2M) or Internet of Things (IoT) applications, often linked to location-based services (LBS). What happens behind the scenes of these applications is that they gather data often from a variety of sources and process that information in real time, giving users interesting services in relation to healthcare, sport achievement, calorie intake, weather transport and traffic information and so on.

It is these M2M and IoT applications that are finally going to stimulate the sort of killer apps that are needed to drag some of the lagging sectors into the digital age — such as healthcare, education, utilities, government and business, who are at present trying to limit the impact of the digital economy, rather than embracing it. This, in turn, will start stimulating the sort of applications that require the capacity, robustness and security that can only be delivered by fibre optic networks.

All of this will come together in 5 to 10 years' time when the requirements from the mobile-based developments, the rapid growth of M2M applications, and the somewhat slower growth from the requirements following the industry and sector transformations, combined, make the need for a fibre-based infrastructure essential for the economic development and social wellbeing of any developed economy.

What is required from business leaders and politicians is that they recognise this need and start planning for it from the earliest possible opportunity. Doing this on the run is not the ideal way to make infrastructure investments that will have to last for 25-50 years.

Written by Paul Budde, Managing Director of Paul Budde Communication

Yet Vodafone is one of the key players in Spain's surging fibre market, where investment in networks is a precondition of customer growth and financial reward. In common with development elsewhere (not least in the mobile sector), Vodafone is not going it alone, but is sharing the cost with other parties. In Spain, it has partnered with Orange. Unlike many other European markets, where operators have tended to concentrate on high-density towns (Paris, Milan, Amsterdam), in Spain FttH is more widely available in smaller towns and rural areas, often guided by the policies of regional governments. In this market there is plenty of room for smaller players to co-exist with the incumbent.

Orange launched an FttH pilot in Madrid as early as 2010, and earlier this year teamed up with Vodafone to invest up to €1 billion on a joint fibre network covering 50 of the largest cities. With complementary footprints, the fibre is owned independently though the companies share technical specifications to ensure compatibility as a single network. Each operator provides access to its own footprint, making the entire network available to each other. Orange recently switched on its fibre for commercial services, initially in Madrid, and planned to have some 800,000 premises connected to the network by March 2014, rising to three million by September 2015 and six million by 2017. In Madrid alone, up to 40,000 homes could be connected to the network.

The Orange/Vodafone joint network is open to co-investing third parties to share, which could dramatically extend the availability of fibre to Catalonia and Asturias where there are already extensive deployments through existing projects.

These developments are encouraging, and show that telcos operating through long-term economic doldrums are reassured that sensible investment strategies will provide dividends down the track.

Written by Henry Lancaster, Senior Analysts at Paul Budde Communication

A number of states have legislated against community broadband networks, often resulting from the lobbying efforts of the main telcos affected. State Legislatures commonly pass bills revoking local decision-making authorities from communities, effectively making them dependent on the dominant cableco and DSL provider. The National Institute on State Politics has made a clear connection between industry contributions to politicians and hamstrung bills restricting competition to these telcos.

Following the success of Google's FttH offering in Kansas City, the FCC has promoted the so-called 'Gigabit City Challenge', aimed at encouraging broadband providers and state and municipal officials to provide communities in each state with a 1Gb/s service by 2015.Yet alternatives to the major telcos is gaining ground. Following the success of Google's FttH offering in Kansas City, the FCC has promoted the so-called 'Gigabit City Challenge', aimed at encouraging broadband providers and state and municipal officials to provide communities in each state with a 1Gb/s service by 2015. These would serve as hubs for innovation, and act as regional drivers for economic growth. Thus far there are more than 40 gigabit communities in 14 states. As part of its support, the FCC is holding workshops on best practices to lower costs and develop greater efficiencies in building the networks. In tandem with municipal efforts, the GigU initiative has helped develop gigabit networks in a number of university campuses.

The prospect for increased municipal involvement has improved with Google's expansion of its 1Gb/s service to Austin, Texas and Provo, Utah, where (in a change from its other deployments) Google acquired an existing municipal fibre-optic system (iProvo, set up several years ago, palmed off to a series of investors and largely hobbled by difficulties which included restrictions imposed by the local telco). The network is currently connected to less than a third of premises, but the job will be completed by Google, which will also upgrade the network to be on a par with those in Kansas City and Austin. It is expected that the same subscriber offer will prevail: a 1Gb/s broadband service for $70 per month, with the option of TV for an additional fee, and with a Google Nexus 7 tablet thrown in. Free broadband at a scaled-down speed may also be provided if subscribers pay an installation fee.

Google has looked at partnering with other municipalities that would reach hundreds of thousands of people across the country.

Many of these municipalities, as well as rural communities, are either developing new schemes of looking anew at earlier schemes. New schemes include United Services' 'United Fiber' FttH network in rural Missouri, while Palo Alto is looking to rekindle its longstanding effort to build a citywide fiber network. In its earlier incarnation, the fiber project was hobbled by the economic crash which led to the withdrawal of a partnered consortium and the nervousness of the city fathers to subsidise the scheme. Yet the city by the end of 2013 is expected to have accumulated $17 million in its project fund. The mood has become far more favourable, partly due to the encouragement from developments elsewhere. If other cities can work on delivering FttP as a community service and economic driver, and as a side benefit provide free WiFi, then why can't we?

Despite the obstructionism of the main telcos in realising municipal and rural broadband schemes, the can-do attitude which the US is known for is encouraged by developments thus far, and the snowball effect will be harder for telcos to stop.

Written by Henry Lancaster, Senior Analysts at Paul Budde Communication

"The Internet's unique value is openness. The experimentation by certain European access providers with blocking, filtering and throttling of services creates borders in an online world whose key value is the absence of borders." explains Joe McNamee, Executive Director of EDRi. "This reckless experimentation will continue unless the European Commission puts a stop to it."

I suspect at the end of the day the US government will approve the pipeline as GDP growth and potential job losses will always trump concerns over the environment.

However, the US government has been putting on a lot pressure on Alberta to improve its environmental standards as a quid pro quo for approving the pipeline. In response Alberta is exploring expanding their current CO2 emissions program to a $40/tonne carbon levy. In the past, all of the funds raised by Alberta's carbon emissions program was returned to industry to invest in dubious energy efficiency programs. But Alberta could really have a much more meaningful impact in terms of reducing CO2 emissions, that would more than compensate the emissions from the oil carried in the Keystone XL pipeline, if it invested some of this money into its local universities and R&E network — Cybera.

Although on the production side the tar sands are one of the biggest sources of CO2 emissions, the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) industry, globally is the fastest growing and soon will be the largest source of CO2 emissions on the consumption side of the equation. ICT emissions are produced indirectly from the coal generated electricity that is used to power all of our devices. Currently it is estimated that ICT consumes around 10% all electrical power growing at about 6-10% per year. According to the OECD and other studies ICT equipment in our home now consumes more energy than traditional appliances.

New studies suggest that the growth in wireless networks could be the single largest component of that growth in CO2 emissions from the ICT sector. In a recent report by the Centre for Energy-Efficient Communications, at the University of Melbourne-based research centre claimed that by 2015, the energy used to run data centres will be a "drop in the ocean", compared to the wireless networks used to access cloud services. The report predicts that by 2015 energy consumption associated with 'wireless cloud' will reach 43 terawatt-hours, compared to 9.2 terawatt-hours in 2012. This is an increase in carbon footprint from 6 megatonnes of CO2 in 2012, up to 30 megatonnes of CO2 in 2015, which is the equivalent of an additional 4.9 million cars on the road, the report states.

More worrisome is another report from Sweden KTH that predicts will need to increase the density of wireless base stations by 1000 times to meet the insatiable demand for the "wireless cloud". If this came to fruition, it would be incredibly huge jump in the demand of electricity by the ICT sector.

The wireless industry in particular is an ideal sector to be powered by local renewable energy sources such as solar panels and windmills. Already many wireless towers in the developing world are powered by renewable energy (but unfortunately often with diesel backup). Because of it is inherently distributed, lower power architecture the wireless industry is ideally suited to be powered by local renewable energy.

I have long advocated that universities and R&E networks are the ideal environment for deploying wireless networks that are powered solely by local renewable power sources. By integrating WIfI and 4G networks with multiple over lapping cells it would be possible to provide seamless service zero carbon wireless services.

For more details see:

High Level Architecture for Building Zero Carbon Internet Networks , ICT products and services

Alberta could be a world leader in deploying such zero carbon networks starting first at universities in partnership with Cybera. The global CO2 impact of developing such technology in terms of removing additional 4.9 million cars from the road would be much greater than expected emissions from the oil to be carried in the proposed Keystone XL pipeline

Additional pointers:

Cloud's real ecological timebomb: Wireless, not data centres

Thousand times greater density of base stations
J. Zander, P. Mähönen, "Riding the Data Tsunami in the Cloud – Myths and Challenges in Future Wireless Access", IEEE Communications Magazine, Vol 51, Issue: 3 (March 2013), pages 145-151 http://theunwiredpeople.com/author/jenz/

Solar powered WiFi allows control of bugs instead of using pesticides

ICT industry on track to be largest sector for CO 2 emissions

Solar Powered DIY Portable HotSpot

More on revenue opportunities for R&E and open access networks – building next generation "5G" wireless network

Written by Bill St. Arnaud , Green IT Networking Consultant

The 7th meeting of the UN Broadband Commission in Mexico City was again a good combination of announcements about new plans, results of previously undertaken activities, and views on the future of broadband. Very noticeable was the enthusiasm and acknowledgement of the impact of ICT, and of broadband in particular.

In September 2012 the Commission launched its working group on gender equality. Research undertaken by the various members of the workgroup provided somewhat similar results:

• Globally there is a 21% gender gap in relation to access to mobile phones, although in South-East Asia this gap is 37%.
• 40% of women in developing economies find a job due to ownership of a mobile phone.
• The global gap for internet access is 25%, while in the sub-Saharan countries this is 45%.
• There are most likely thousands of gender equality pilots. Of these pilots, those that are now delivering results need to move on to the implementation stage.
• Only 29% of the 119 national broadband plans around the world include policies for gender equality.
• Empowering young people to adopt ICT will give them the ability to teach their parents, and the reverse of this will also apply.
• A full half-day of the two-day meeting of the Commission was dedicated to gender equality in broadband. The following day the full Commission endorsed the goal set by the working group calling for global equality in broadband access by 2020. Women are key in household and community development, and gender equality will add between US$13 and US$18 billion to economic GDP (Intel. 2013).

7th Broadband Commission for Digital Development Meeting – Mexico City, Mexico, 16-17 March 2013.
Photo: ITU (Click to Enlarge)The Commission also specifically mentioned that gender equality should not be, or become, a separate single issue. It is not another 'ism'. It should automatically be included in all aspects of ICT, broadband and policies in general. At the moment, technology is not gender-neutral.

An unexpected good news story came from Iraq. In 2011 only 20% of women in that country had access to a mobile phone. Thanks to a new mobile package specifically designed for women by mobile operator Asiacell (part of the Qtel Group) 40% of Asiacell's subscriber base are now women, and an additional 1.8 million of them will have access to a mobile phone by the end of 2014. The package specifically addresses the cultural aspects of womanhood in an Arab country — for example, female sales assistants, access to an all-female call centre, blocking of calls and SMS from certain people — and the way women use mobile — e.g., reduced tariffs for longer calls. It is to be hoped that the ideas and success of this initiative will spread.

The issue of violence against women was highlighted. Worldwide there are most likely hundreds of millions of women who suffer abuse, and this was highlighted with shocking examples from the Syrian refugee camps in Jordan, where girls as young as 12 years will be forced to sell themselves in order to survive. Radio and TV programs are used by the Jordanian government to try and empower these girls, but ICT, and mobile phones in particular, can be used to break through this cycle of abuse.

One million ICT-empowered community workers

In January 2013 the One Million Community Workers program, aimed at providing one million smartphones to community workers — predominantly in the sub-Saharan countries, which has the largest group of least developed countries in the world — was officially launched and adopted by the African Union. Nine countries have already signed up to the program, with another six in the pipeline and more to follow. Both the smartphone vendor community and the mobile operators — MTN in particular — have given their support to this program. This is critical as rural mobile coverage will have to be extended in these countries and low-cost smartphones need to be made available (Huawei announced that by the end of the year there will be a US$50 smartphone).

In relation to healthcare, the UN Foundation (UNF) mentioned that there is huge shift in providing healthcare rather than bringing people to it. Through m-health, healthcare will increasingly be delivered to the people. The UNF recently also launched a report on standards and interoperability in e-health.

New projects of the Commission

New projects that received support from the Commission included:

A commitment to promote digital accessibility for the one billion people with disabilities worldwide, similar to the gender equality goal stimulating the development of policies that will lead to equality in relation to ICT access. Between 30%-50% of people with disabilities do not have access to the internet. In all developing economies, people with disabilities, together with older-aged people, form by far the largest unconnected segment.

Youssou N'Dour – New AfricaCommissioner Youssou N'Dour, the famous African musician and Minister of Tourism of Senegal, received support for his project 'New Africa 2014'. I would like to recommend this very moving video clip to you. His aim is to encourage the use of ICT and broadband by the youth of Africa, through his music. Several Commissioners will attend and speak at his concert in Dakar, Nigeria.

The Commission also launched a new Task Force on the post-2015 development agenda and the future Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) — or as some prefer to call them Continuous Development Goals. The initiative aims to leverage the huge installed base of mobile handsets to bring new services to communities globally, particularly in the world's poorest countries. ITU's m-Powering Initiative, seeks to act as a catalyst to achieve sustainability, harnessing the power of state-of-the-art ICTs and smart solutions to meet new Sustainable Development Goals.

The Commission's working group on Youth will lead a Global Youth Summit on technology issues, to be held in Costa Rica in November at the invitation of President Laura Chinchilla. Interesting research presented at the meeting by Alcatel-Lucent indicated that in countries with high youth unemployment (Spain, Bangladesh, India, Ghana) 30% of young people indicated a willingness to become an entrepreneur by using their mobile phone and ICT skills.

As young people are quickly becoming tech-savvy it is critical to launch 'train-the-trainer' projects — train community workers, etc. The recently announced educational reforms in Mexico are a good example of a positive direction, as they include a much larger role for ICT in education.

The future of broadband

Last but not least, the future…

While promoting the development of national broadband access and affordability policies continues to be the key goal for the Commission, the focus is starting to shift towards 'broadband as a catalyst for social and economic transformation'. According to Ericsson, 6.5 billion people will be connected to the internet by 2018, and by that time 95% of the global population will have access to mobile technology, with the majority having access to a smartphone.

Several Commissioners were very pleased that access is well and truly underway in many developing countries, and noted that policy development now needs to encompass the demand side (services and applications). While progress has been made in bridging the digital divide, there is now a growing policy gap. This exists particularly in relation to government policies towards the development of e-health, e-education, e-government and e-commerce. There is increased awareness among governments and politicians that their citizens have a right to information, but the problem is that most of that information is not yet available. There is an urgent need to ensure that the supply side in relation to the broadband revolution is addressed as well.

This was demonstrated by an example from India, where the government is presented with one million questions per day. A reply often takes 90 days or more, and, depending upon who answers it, the same question can supply different answers. Imagine the costs that can be taken out of the economy if e-government was widely available.

To illustrate the transformative impact of broadband, Ericsson reports that villages in the Amazon that have a mobile base station saw their GDP increase by 300%. This is done through a completely private project known as Amazon Connect.

On the other hand, the American government has calculated that not being connected to the internet creates an extra cost to the economy of $70,000 per year per family. Internet access allows families and the government to remove costs from their social and economic expenditure.

Another interesting observation is that there has been much faster growth in technology than there has been in the generation of government policies. Governments need to be made aware of the rapidly increasing gap between technology and policy. While this is an international problem — western governments are also struggling with such policies — the gap is growing most quickly in the least developed economies, and the Commission is committed to placing its full network of Commissioners behind the notion of assisting these countries in policy development. The key here is to lower the costs and give these countries complete solutions.

Written by Paul Budde, Managing Director of Paul Budde Communication