C&amp;W Has $150M Broadband Plan
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Cable &amp; Wireless plc (NYSE: CWP - message board) is significantly ramping up its investment in local loop unbundling (LLU) in the UK, and it plans to spend up to Â£85 million ($152.
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An ambitious plan to equip Silicon Valley with wireless public broadband services is proceeding with great hopes but many challenges.The Wireless Silicon Valley project was the subject of a presentation at the MuniWireless conference in Santa Clara, Calif. on Tuesday afternoon. Expected to cost $100 million to $150 million, Wireless Silicon Valley involves developing an architecture covering 1,500 square miles. It would be used by around 40 cities in Silicon Valley, each of which has contributed $2,500 to seed the effort. While there are no officially defined boundaries, Silicon Valley is generally considered to be a span of California cities in the San Francisco Bay Area, including San Jose.The project's vision involves connecting anyone, anywhere, involving any device, said Seth Fearey, project lead for Wireless Silicon Valley and vice president of Joint Venture, Silicon Valley Network."We're going to move beyond the model of laptops connecting the Internet doing e-mail and the Web. We want to connect devices and things," Fearey said.The network would only function outdoors and provide capabilities ranging from citizen access to the Internet to provision of public services. Users would be able to maintain a connection if they linked up in Daly City, just south of San Francisco, and traveled to Gilroy 71 miles from San Francisco.Economic development is the top priority of Wireless Silicon Valley, with the idea being to connect small businesses, attract businesses, and make Silicon Valley an exciting place to be."People coming here for conventions would spend more money if they knew where to go," such as being able to find movie theaters via wireless access, said Fearey."We can use this network to help give them that information," he said.Benefits of the plan are to make a network that is much more useful and leverages economies of scale, one that deploys multiple technologies together, provides more revenue opportunities, and accommodates government staff.Challenges, however, include finding an owner/operator and operating on an unproven business model. Also, the network has a high cost to build and the needs of low-revenue areas must be balanced with those of high-revenue areas. The network also takes time to deploy."We're breaking new ground here," said Fearey. Investors want to see how the network will work and are struggling to determine how they will make moneyThe cities participating in the program are quite small, except for San Jose, Fearey said. "This is a big, big challenge," financially, he said.A request for proposal was issued, resulting in companies such as IBM and Cisco offering to provide equipment and Azulstar to operate the network. These vendors comprise the Metro Connect team that intends to provide the network infrastructure, own and operate it, and sell services. Azulstar, however, was not able to raise money to get the project moving. Now, additional operators are being sought.?The goal with the network is create lots of opportunities for the operator of the network to make money not just from consumer subscriptions and adverting but also from other services such as provision of point-to-point advertising.A variety of applications has been suggested, ranging from wireless reading of water meters to irrigation control and wireless parking meters that could have fluctuating prices based on the time of day.During an earlier panel session at the conference Tuesday, Joanne Hovis, president of Columbia Telecommunications, said that if Google acquires the 700-MHz frequencies to be auctioned off by the FCC, that could change the wireless market.Hovis noted there is much speculation about Google's plans. One audience member speculated Google could open up a wireless network for everybody.?"My personal opinion is I'm not sure Google is serious about bidding on that spectrum," Hovis said. It also would be a few years before Google could build its network, Hovis said.
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High-capacity fiber network for voice, data, and video will cut Lloyds bandwidth costs and let it offer new high-bandwidth apps. By Steven Marlin.
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DirecTV and EchoStar make a deal to sell wireless broadband. Will it be enough?
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NEW YORK -- AT&amp;T Inc. is offering its broadband DSL subscribers a new service where they can watch live cable TV channels on any computer connected to the Internet at home or on the road for an extra $20 per month.
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Wireless equipment maker LM Ericsson said Monday it has received a contract worth about $150 million US (122.4 million euros ) from Shandong Mobile Communication Co.
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By Jenni Laidman, The Blade, Toledo, Ohio  May 31--Toledo taxpayers could pay up to $2.16 million over five years if City Council approves a license agreement with a California Wi-Fi company.   Legislation approving the contract is expected to be submitted to City Council by June 12.
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SBC Communications will offer a high-speed Internet connection for $19.95 per month to new customers who buy a premium calling plan and sign a one-year contract, the company said on Wednesday.
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BCE Inc , Canada's largest telecommunications group, has agreed to a C$51.7 billion ($48.5 billion) offer from a group including the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan, in what the purchasers said was the largest buyout in Canadian corporate history.
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Time Warner Cable will try selling consumers broadband service based on how much bandwidth they use, a move that could turn the home broadband pricing model in the U.S. on its head.In a trial planned for later this year in Beaumont, Texas, the service provider will offer four tiers of service at different prices. Customers who used more bandwidth would pay more.The details of the tiered pricing plan haven&#39;t yet been set, according to Time Warner spokesman Alex Dudley. The offer will only go out to new customers, he said.Some service providers charge different rates based on the speed of a service, but in the U.S. they typically allow each customer to send and download as many bits as they like in a month. Under that model, some subscribers who exchanged large files through peer-to-peer services reportedly have been cut off. Comcast, the biggest U.S. cable operator, has said it&#160;sometimes slows peer-to-peer traffic&#160;during peak demand periods.In some other countries, Internet users have long endured bandwidth caps. And Web hosting companies typically charge site owners based on how much data they exchange with visitors.Tiered pricing could help settle the ongoing argument over the fairness of certain subscribers and online content providers using up more network capacity than others, according to Ovum analyst Mark Seery. In fact, he thinks the whole industry will go down this path eventually.&quot;It&#39;s difficult to charge, appropriately, different customers if they have such widely divergent uses of bandwidth,&quot; Seery said. And trying to target one type of application, such as illegal peer-to-peer file sharing, raises political issues, he added.&quot;There&#39;s no justification for blocking legitimate uses of peer-to-peer,&quot; Seery said. &quot;The right focus is on who&#39;s using what [bandwidth] and what they should be charged for it.&quot;Many other transport industries, such as shipping, rail and courier services, charge different rates based on how much the customer uses, Seery said. Some have shifted to that system over time. For example, toll bridge operators once charged trucks based on the value of what they wanted to carry over, and U.S. railroads could arbitrarily carry goods from one customer and not from another, according to Seery. Neither model lasted.Time Warner operates in 33 states but is a relative underdog in the U.S. broadband industry, with 7.4 million high-speed data customers. Comcast has 12.9 million.&#160;
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A proposed climate act would require mandatory emissions caps, but reviews are mixed.            Presented By     From DellÃ¢ÂÂ¢ Home!      &nbsp;&nbsp;The new DellÃ¢ÂÂ¢ InspironÃ¢ÂÂ¢ 1520 notebook with hi-def widescreen and long-range wireless for only $799. Add mobile broadband for $150. Limited time offer. Click here. www.dell.com    Ads by Pheedo
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A strong performance from the heavyweight banking sector helped the FTSE 100 rise 150 points.
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South Korea's Fair Trade Commission has approved Â with conditions Â the proposal by wireless operator SK Telecom Co. to buy a large stake in the country's second-largest broadband service provider for $1.15 billion.
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A study by the American Hotel &amp; Lodging Association says half of US hotel rooms now offer broadband Internet access. By Eric Chabrow.
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Good news for broadband customers Eircom has confirmed it is to invest â¬60m over the next three years on upgrading its central telecommunications network.â¦
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Beginning next month, AT&T Inc. will raise the price of its most common broadband Internet services in many of the states where it operates, a company spokesman said Monday.
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Business & money: Broadband companies promise giveaway to anyone prepared to sign a two-year contract.