This news comes to us from The 2012 Telecommunications Industry Review: An Anthology of Market Facts and Forecasts.

Just as the costs and availability of other utilities, like water and electricity have shaped our perceptions and behaviors, communications will continue to play an even more prominent role in our lives. The growing Asian market has a great requirements for communication technology both wire-based and wireless. Though overall growth is expected in both categories, the biggest demand will be for wireless 3 and 4G networks.

As the need increases more jobs will be created, more online services will be created, and so will other services built around them. Manufacturing, shipping, data management, and countless other things that go along with the trend.

While the economy may be dragging at the present, the technological golden age will continue to drive growth. The five year projections highlighted in the report suggest a 5.3 % growth rate overall. Total wireless revenues are expected to rise 64% above the current. All this suggests good things are happening both domestically and globally.

Powerline Broadband Hits 400Mbps

Ham radio operators have opposed broadband over powerlines (BPL) for a few years, as they cite interference from BPL with their hobby. Compared to the deep-pocketed cable and telecom industries, the hams are a small ripple in a multi-billion dollar pond.

Rather than celebrating the advances made in BPL, most recently demonstrated by the firm DS2, those who could benefit from the service will have to watch from the sidelines as the impact of lobbying against state governments has frozen deployment of the service.

An Ars Technica story on DS2′s latest demonstration of its BPL chipset that BPL can hit speeds of 400Mbps. Once other factors have been applied, their chipset can support hardware delivering 200Mbps, double that of 100-BaseT.

This useful commodity could be delivering true broadband service not only to underserved rural markets, but urban areas where rewiring a skyscraper for fiber would be a monumental expense. Big buildings and bucolic farmhouses have something in common: existing electrical wiring.

Since this would be a municipal operation, prices would be far less for service than existing competitors who won’t close the last mile to customers to provide service in the first place. That has the telecom industry lobbying against municipal BPL in several states, successfully in many cases.

It’s not just the telecoms who have reason to fear BPL finally fulfilling years of promise. Cable television can be delivered to a peering point and pushed over BPL; it’s just ones and zeroes like other data, but again, at a potentially much lower price than the local cable monopoly charges.

Interference with FCC-approved ham radios has been the major point of contention. The well-intentioned delays caused by the hams have allowed cable and telcos time to head off promising BPL initiatives long before they can be considered.

People shouldn’t put up with broadband service that underperforms alternatives, especially when considering just how much they pay for it. BPL needs a solid standard, which the IEEE has started to explore; that standard needs to consider how to protect ham radio frequencies.

Compared to the political problems and the money the entrenched interests can throw at politicians, we hope such a standard emerges quickly.

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I have decided to place a "hold" on the latest FISA bill that would have included amnesty for telecommunications companies that enabled the President’s assault on the Constitution by illegally providing personal information on their customers without judicial authorization.

I said that I would do everything I could to stop this bill from passing, and I have. 
 
It’s about delivering results — and as I’ve said before, the FIRST thing I will do after being sworn into office is restore the Constitution.  But we shouldn’t have to wait until then to prevent the further erosion of our country’s most treasured document.  That’s why I am stopping this bill today.

 Senator Dodd then invited comments about the move below his post, indicating that the two-way New Media is taking hold even in politics.

This isn’t an endorsement (of candidates), but it is comforting to know there are Congressmen willing to stand up to Constitutional violations, and that the public has a new way to communicate with politicians directly. 

Hong Kong’s Broadband Is How Fast?

Gizmodo was quick to point out that Verizon will deliver 5 Mbps to customers for $40 per month, and up to 30 Mbps for $180 per month.

But in Hong Kong, according to a City Telecom press release, 5 Mbps isn’t even an option. Or even 10, because they’ve just discontinued their 10 Mbps offering, making the 25 Mbps the entry (basic) package.

How much is that? The release doesn’t say, but if you’d like to try the 100 Mbps service (boy would we!), it’ll about $48.50. Not fast enough? (Huh? Couldn’t fathom that kind of speed.) CTEL can upgrade you to 200 Mbps for $88.

Still too slow?

I know, your mind’s melting, right?

How about 1 Gbps for $215?

So, how do you feel about paying $180 per month for that blistering 30 Mbps now? Yeah, kinda figured. Maybe we should ask for our $200 billion back, eh? 

 Damn, I love my Canon 5D camera (thank you Maryam!). Imagine how good my images will be after I learn how to use it. Thomas Hawk or Scott Beale don’t need to worry about losing their status as best Web 2.0 photographers anytime soon. Hah.

I got a demo of Mint and it lives up to the hype someone gave it in my comment section this morning. Nice way to look at and manage your personal finances. Cubic Telecom did live up to the hype, too. I gotta get some of those phones for Maryam’s family in Iran. She pays so much for her mom to call back home.

There’s plenty of chatter over on TechMeme — I’m not going to try to live blog conferences anymore, it’s a thankless task and one that’s best left to people who actually like sitting in the halls. Me? I’m a hallway rat. CenterNetworks’ Allen Stern has a good wrapup and links to a few of the best posts..

Oh, anyone want to be on the ScobleShow? I’ll be hanging out in Half Moon Bay and have a few extra hours this week to do some interviews. Family is here, so it’s good to get out of the house.

Finally, in that picture above is Renee Blodget, holding the camera. If you can identify all the other people in the picture you’ll be ready for some hallway networking at tech conferences in the future. Hint: a famous journalist/blogger, a wife of one of TechCrunch 40’s co-founders, and a famous lawblogger is there.

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Cringely Details Why Your Broadband Stinks

Tech pundit Robert X. Cringely took a deeper look at something we’ve noted previously. Thanks to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, telecoms profited handsomely from a broadband future that looks like a pipe dream today.

Cringely noted the efforts to deliver faster broadband services were meant to create a National Information Infrastructure at the federal and state levels. Federal deployment amounted to a mixed bag of success (schools and libraries) and failures (healthcare and public safety).

The state level represents where Americans were taken to the cleaners by an assortment of telecom interests. Per Cringely:

All 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia contracted with their local telecommunication utilities for the build-out of fiber and hybrid fiber-coax networks intended to bring bidirectional digital video service to millions of homes by the year 2000. The Telecom Act set the mandate but, as it works with phone companies, the details were left to the states. Fifty-one plans were laid and 51 plans failed.

Failure is not foreign to the information technology business. Big development projects fail all the time and I have written several times about this and how those failures come to be and how they can be avoided. But I find it hard to remember any company or industry segment ever going zero for 51. This is a failure rate so amazing that any statistician would question the motives of those even entering such an endeavor.

Between higher phone rates and tax breaks, the telecom industry pocketed some $200 billion over a ten-year period, 1994-2004. America lags behind much of Europe, not to mention high-speed front runners like Japan and South Korea, in terms of what people pay versus what they get in broadband access.

There’s a word for what America got in this confidence game. Filtering software doesn’t permit me to print it here.

“Free” and “premium services” don’t usually go together (in reality, even if press releases promise the world), but in this case, Yahoo and Telecom NZ might deliver.  Users of Bubble will receive “a personalised home page with best of breed email storage, online photo storage and sharing with Flickr Pro, a 1GB online briefcase, and to launch shortly an all-in-one free security suite featuring Norton AntiVirus,” according to a release.

As for why Telecom and Yahoo are being so friendly . . . this appears to be a simple (read: not nefarious) plan to draw in fresh users and make the current ones happy.  “We expect strong uptake from both existing and new customers,” explained Adrian Littlewood on behalf of Telecom.  “The service will act as a compelling differentiator and a great reason for customers to be with Telecom.”

From way over in America, I’d tend to agree.  Potential users who are much closer seem to think so, as well; Linka (“for new zealanders by new zealanders”) made note of both the impending release and its “awesome features.”

Hat tip to Geekzone, and a questioning look to whoever came up with Yahoo!Xtra Bubble’s name.

Emphasis on “may.”  The Yonhap News Agency, which is based in Korea, writes, “SK Telecom mulls offering Google’s mobile-search ads this year.”

Yonhap also carries a quote from Yang Yoon-seon, head of the search department at SK Telecom, who said, “We are considering beginning Google’s mobile-search ads on our wireless Internet network during the second half of this year.”

If the deal goes through, expect Google to do the corporate equivalent of a backflip.  The search engine company has employed kind words, a cartoonish interface, and even some limited censorship in order to win fans in South Korea.

But a deal with SK Telecom would amount to more than a moral victory – Yonhap reports that the Korean company has “more than 20 million mobile phone subscribers” who would be exposed to Google’s ads.  “South Korea is one of the world’s most mobile-phone-savvy nations with more than 40 million out of its 48 million population having a mobile phone,” the article continues.

There’s no word on when confirmation of the arrangement might come, but in the meantime, I’m betting that a lot of gift baskets are making the journey from Mountain View to South Korea.

US Broadband Penetration Just Stinks

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development released its broadband penetration report for December 2006. This look at 30 countries and their number of broadband subscribers looks good for parts of Europe.

For the United States, it just stinks. The US growth rate for broadband penetration now rates 20th out of the 30 countries. In per capita broadband use, the US is very average, rating in 15th place.

The paltry speeds US providers deliver to customers come at a dear price. An article by Free Press noted an advance look at another OECD report; June’s "The Communications Outlook 2007" says the world’s broadband leaders pay less than $1 per Mbps of service.

Here, our telcos and other ISPs get away with rates of around $10 per Mbps.

"We are failing to bring the benefits of broadband to all our citizens, and the consequences will resonate for generations," said Ben Scott, policy of director of Free Press. "There is no justification for America’s declining status as a global Internet leader."

The Free Press analysis of the OECD report included this nugget:

If broadband penetration were 50 percent of all U.S. homes, economists estimate that consumers would realize a $38 billion annual surplus. If household broadband penetration were at 95 percent, the consumer surplus would be $350 billion.

Let’s go back to around this time last year, where telecom analyst Bruce Kushnick assessed the 1996 Telecom Act and found that its ten year timetable called for 45 Mbps to 86 million US households as of last year. Telecoms enjoyed over $200 billion in tax breaks and other benefits from the Telecom Act.

Now there are calls for fiber to the home by 2015. Om Malik cited a call from the Fiber to the Home Council for Congress and the President to push for 100Mbps connections to the home in eight years.

Considering the influence the telecom industry has with Congress, and President Bush’s lame-duck status, we are not optimistic about seeing 100Mbps to the home by 2015, or even 3015. Telcos make a tidy profit on minuscule bandwidth, and without a revolutionary way to deliver bandwidth that bypasses them, they have no real motivation to change the status quo.

Wikipedia calls traffic shaping “an attempt to control computer network traffic in order to optimize or guarantee performance, low latency, and/or bandwidth.” 

And now that you know that, know this: a major British telecom does not favor traffic shaping.

BT Wholesale’s chief technical officer, Matt Beal, said in an interview with ZDNet UK that he found traffic shaping to be “quite Big Brother-ish.” 

Never mind this penalize-the-user stuff, he said – “It is up to us at the core of the network to make sure there is enough bandwidth for [our services and those of our competitors].”

This statement implies that BT is not trying to pass the figurative buck; equally important is the idea that it is not trying to monopolize anything, and Beal addressed that issue, as well.

“Beal said he did not care who owned the frequencies,” wrote ZDNet UK’s David Meyer. 

And while that was in reference to “the upcoming spectrum auctions,” rather than some existing technology, it’s still a good sign.

In fact, assuming that no one else from BT “clarifies” Beal’s statements within the next few days (that’s corporate-talk for denying something and/or applying damage control), net neutrality in the UK appears to have taken a relatively big step forward.

If BT would care to share its views with its American telecom relatives, we’d be much obliged.