interactive maps of broadband speeds
A recent UK online newspaper article includes an interactive map of UK broadband speeds. Text above the map states, “Use our interactive map to find the results for your area.” That statement presents the map as a data access tool. But the map includes color-coded markers that provide a quick visualization of the geographic distribution of broadband speeds. Unfortunately, hard-coded into this visualization are particular color-change levels:
- Large red icon: Under 4Mbps
- Small yellow icon: Between 4Mbps and 7Mbps
- Large green icon: Over 7Mbps
The article provides no explanation for the use or importance of 4Mbps and 7Mbps thresholds. Given that the interactive map doesn’t allow the user to change these thresholds, at least some explanation should have been provided to justify those choices.
With Needle, users can easily change mapping thresholds. Here’s a broadband speed map for the US, and here’s how to change the mapping threshold.
Tagged: broadband
relatively slow reduction in bandwidth prices
Quality-adjusted average U.S. residential broadband service prices have fallen no more than an estimated 10% from 2004 to 2009.[1] The consumer price index for personal computers and peripheral equipment fell 50% across that period.[2] The price-performance frontier for communications technology is advancing as fast or faster than that for personal computers and peripherals. The difference in realized price trends reflects much different structures of investments, transactions, and business competition.
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Notes:
[1] See Greenstein, Shane M. and McDevitt, Ryan C., Evidence of a Modest Price Decline in US Broadband Services. Center for the Study of Industrial Organization, Northwestern University, Working Paper #0102 (January 2010). The bandwidth figures in this paper are mistakenly labeled “bps” (bits per second). They actually are in “kbps” (kilobits per second). I found that average wholesale local bandwidth prices fell about 20% from 1990 to 1995, and remained roughly constant from 1995 to 2000. See Galbi (2000), “U.S. Bandwidth Price Trends in the 1990s,” Table P4. For related discussion, see Galbi (2000), “Growth in the ‘New Economy’: U.S. Bandwidth Use and Pricing Across the 1990s.” All these reported figures are nominal, i.e. not adjusted for general price inflation.
[2] U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index Detailed Report, Aug. 2010, Table 21.
Tagged: telcos
mapping average Internet download speeds in U.S.
Akamai’s publicly filed dataset of observed average Internet download speeds for U.S. network connections is now on Needle. Needle makes it easy to map the reported cities and states according to an average speed threshold. For example, 79 out of the 500 reported cities have average Internet download speed less 2048 kbit/s. Here’s a map of states that contain those cities. The map shows that relatively low average Internet download speeds by city are widely dispersed geographically.
To generate a map for an average speed threshold of your own choosing, click on “city” under “every” on the left of the Needle page. Then click on “>>” on the table heading, just to the right of “every city.” Then click on “keep only those where…”, and then click on “ave speed.” Ave speed jumps to the top of the list and a drop-down selection box appears. Select “is less than,” and enter a figure (kbit/s) in the box to the right. Then click on next. The screen will change slightly to reflect your choice, and a “done” button will appear. Click on the “done” button. You’ll then see a list of the relevant cites. On the upper right, change the drop-down selector from “table” to “map.” You’ll then see a map with markers for states that contain cities that satisfy your selection criterion. If you change the “group by” drop-down selector from “state” to “city,” the map will change to include markers for each city that satisfies your selection criterion. You can similarly map state average speeds by clicking on “state” rather than “city” in the first step. To change your selection criterion, you must start by clicking on “city” or “state” on the left and redo the steps above.
Related post: dispersion of Internet download speeds
Tagged: broadband
dispersion of Internet download speeds
Better Internet connectivity tends to be associated with more urban areas, areas with a greater concentration of high-tech industries and employees, and areas with wealthier, more educated populations. These factors, however, do not provide simple explanations for the actual geographic pattern of Internet download speeds from Akamai’s server network. According to Akamai’s measurements (which include residential and business customers), the U.S. state with the highest average Internet download speed in the second quarter of 2009 was New Hampshire. New Hampshire is noted for extensive forests, beautiful mountains, and ice fishing. Illinois, in contrast, includes Chicago, the third-largest U.S. city and long a major hub of trading and banking. In average Internet download speed, Illinois ranks 45 out of all 51 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. Illinois’ average Internet download speed is only 46% that of New Hampshire. While New York state is near the top of the average speed ranking and Alaska is at the bottom, unexpected relative positions, such as those of New Hampshire and Illinois, are prevalent in the ranking.
Unexpected dispersion in Internet download speeds appears in other Akamai data. Looking at the distribution of download speeds across IP addresses within states, Washington state, which includes the headquarters of Microsoft and other high-tech companies, has among the lowest shares of IP addresses downloading at faster than 768 kbits/s. That share for Washington is 77%. Nevada and Maine, in comparison, have 98% and 96%, respectively, of IP addresses downloading at faster than 768 kbits/s.[1] Looking at download speeds by cities, the city with the highest average download speed is Sandy City, Utah, and the next highest, Norman, Oklahoma.[2] Most persons have never heard of either.
Dispersion in Internet download speeds suggests that idiosyncratic organizational factors greatly affect Internet connectivity.[3] Technology for providing relatively high-speed Internet access is well understood and widely available. But Internet connectivity impinges on a vast array of organizational activities and interests. That’s a real Internet congestion problem.
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Data: Internet download speeds across U.S. states and cities, as measured by Akamai (Excel version)
Notes:
[1] For the U.S. as a whole, the FCC’s OBI Technical Paper No. 4, Broadband Performance, shows that 88% of U.S. Internet users have actual download speeds greater than 1 Mbps. See Exhibit 18, which is based on comScore data for the first half of 2009. Few comScore data are publicly available and little is know about the specifics of comScore’s measurements. See Steve Bauer, David Clark, and William Lehr, “Understanding Broadband Speed Measurements,” pp. 16-7. In the UK in May, 2010, about 92% of residential broadband connections had actual average download speeds greater than 4 Mbps. See UK Broadband Speeds 2010. Estimate based on Figures 4.2 and 4.5.
[2] The set of cities considered are the top-ten cities by IP address density in each state. See Akamai, “Observed Average Internet Speeds for U.S. Network Connections,” p. 2.
[3] This dispersion does not particularly characterize the U.S. Considering mobile broadband world-wide in 1Q 2010, Akamai observed:
we see that there is an extremely wide range in average connection speeds – oddly enough, the highest (7175 Kbps) and the lowest (105 Kbps) were both seen on providers in Slovakia.
See Akamai, State of the Internet, 1st Quarter, 2010 Report, p. 25.
Tagged: broadband
online database of DS1 and DS3 special access rates
The DS1 and DS3 rates that the Ad Hoc Telecommunications Users filed publicly at the FCC are now accessible as an online, highly capable Needle domain (database). Needle is a data system that makes it easy to look at the data in different ways and to sort and filter it, all from within a web browser.
The original filings (here, here, and here) provide the data as pdf pages displaying tables with highly complex row and column structures. A human can read and page through the data as if it were text. That data format serves neither the reading capabilities of humans nor the data-processing capabilities of computers.
To make the Ad Hoc DS1/DS3 rate data more accessible, I extracted it from the pdf files and re-organized it into one, regular, comma-separated-value (CSV) file with 3698 data rows. I also put together some relevant data documentation. Analyzing the CSV file with a spreadsheet is possible but cumbersome. Since the CSV file has a simple tabular data form, it’s easy to analyze with a database program, if you have one. You would download the data, import it into the database program, and then set up and run a query that generated the data view that you seek.
Needle makes many different views of the data easily accessible to a web browser. Within Needle, a dataset is a graph of data nodes, where each data node is a single piece of data of a particular type. The Needle Ad Hoc DS1/DS3 domain shows (on the left under “Every:”) a linked list of every node type in that dataset. If you click on any of these node types, a table will appear that has as its leftmost column a list of all the data nodes of the clicked type. So, for example, if you click on “bandwidth,” you will see the nodes DS1 and DS3 in the left column of the table. The table also shows the number of attribute sets and the average circuit10 rate (a composite rate) across the DS1 and DS3 nodes, respectively. You can look at the circuit10 rates by clicking on the circuit10 link (node type) on the left. The resulting table shows all the circuit10 rates, in descending order, in the left column. Other columns of the table show other attributes associated with each circuit10 rate.
For any table that you see, you can filter, sort, and group the data. For example, to limit the table of circuit10 rates to DS1 rates, left click on the “bandwidth” column heading, select “filter by this column” in the pop-up menu, type DS1 into the box next to “show”, and then click on “do” just to the right of that box. The table will then contract to show just the DS1 circuit10 rates. A similar procedure produces filters for company, year, state, reg type, term, and zone. If you want to see the elements of each of these data types, click on that type on the left. Options on the pop-up menu also provide for sorting and grouping. Under “Index” on the top left, the “rates” and “rates subset” links show examples of tables made from grouping, filtering, and sorting the cn (attribute set) nodes. The “compare 2009 to 2006″ and “compare 2009 to 2005″ links under the index heading show tables that include circuit10 price ratios across the relevant years. You can sort and filter these tables like any other table.
Any subset of data can be extracted easily from Needle. At the bottom of each table are links “See this data as: Plain List · CSV · JSV · JSONa”. Just click on CSV to download a CSV file of the data. If the table has groups, you need to flatten the table (switch grouping to a regular data column) before exporting. Needle also offers API functionality that allows Needle to serve as a data repository for high-powered statistical analysis packages such as R or S.
Needle can do much more than what it is doing for the Ad Hoc DS1/DS3 dataset. Needle’s strengths include data acquisition, merging, and cleansing. In addition, Needle’s graph-based data organization can easily handle complex data structures that create nightmares in traditional relational databases, which require tabular data forms. Needle, for example, can easily handle variable-length lists of items. None of these strengths are applied to present the Ad Hoc DS1/DS3 dataset. Needle here merely makes the Ad Hoc DS1/DS3 data much more easily accessible, especially compared to data published as pages of tables in a pdf document.
Tagged: telcos
DS1 & DS3 rate dispersion across U.S. states
Based on data filed by the Ad Hoc Telecommunications Users Committee, tariff rates in 2009 for DS1 and DS3 special-access circuit elements across U.S. states have a spread equal to about plus and minus a third of the average. Rates differ across bandwidth (DS1 or DS3), regulatory type (price cap or pricing flexibility), purchasing term commitment (in months from 1 to 60), and geographic zone (typically three zones). Differences across states within these rate structures reflect other factors that affect tariff rates.
Rate differences across states are not highly correlated with state characteristics. Qwest, for example, has the same DS1 and DS3 rates across its 14-state service territory. AT&T and Verizon, in contrast, have tariffs that differ across state groups in ways that relate to the service territories of historic telephone operating companies.
Consider the highest and lowest DS1, price-cap, month-to-month, zone 1 rates as measured by the composite 10-mile circuit rate. The highest such rate is $1023 in Indiana and Wisconsin (AT&T). The lowest such rate is $395 across the whole 14-state Qwest service territory, which includes Minnesota and Iowa. Differences in regulation, competition, service cost, or unmeasured differences in tariff structures could explain this dispersion. What specifically explains the actual difference isn’t obvious.
Differences between price-cap and pricing-flexibility rates also show considerable ambiguity. Telephone companies are granted petitions for pricing flexibility based on criteria that the FCC established to measure the development of competition.[*] The rate data indicate that pricing flexibility rates are consistently higher than price-cap rates. Higher prices typically aren’t associated with greater competition. However, for most service attribute types, pricing flexibility rates have less dispersion across states than do price-cap rates. That is consistent with more competition in circumstances in which unpriced differences across states matter little.
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Data: DS1 and DS3 rate statistics based on Ad Hoc Rate Dataset (Excel version); Ad Hoc DS1 and DS3 Rate Dataset
Note:
[*] An FCC order, adopted on Aug. 5, 1999, set out a procedure (“pricing flexibility” petitions) for removing rate elements from existing price-cap regulation. BellSouth provides an example of the regulatory procedure. On Dec. 15, 2000, the FCC’s Common Carrier Bureau granted a BellSouth petition for pricing flexibility. The order granting that petition apparently isn’t online, but an affirming review of that order, which includes a list of the metropolitican statistical areas (MSAs) to which it applies, is online. Here’s a better formated version of the MSA list. On Nov. 22, 2002, the Bureau adopted an order granting another BellSouth petition for pricing flexibility. On May 16,2008, the Bureau granted a third BellSouth petition for pricing flexibility.
Tagged: telcos
underestimating intelligence at network edges
Considering the merits of using automatic switches rather than human telephone operators to connect telephone calls, a Bell System technical expert in 1891 declared:
experience and observation have united to show us that an operation as complex as that of uniting two telephone subscribers’ lines [connecting a telephone call] . . . can never efficiently or satisfactorily be performed by automatic apparatus, dependent on the volition and intelligent action of the subscriber.[*]
In short, telephone subscribers lack the discipline and skill needed to dial correctly telephone calls. A human telephone operator is needed to connect telephone calls for them.
With the benefit of history, you know better than this telephone system expert. He under-estimated the intelligence of most persons at the edges of telephone networks. Most persons have proven to be quite capable of dialing telephone calls.
More generally, shifting service implementations (intelligence) to network edges has made the Internet a more powerful, general-purpose communication technology.
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[*] Bell System engineer Thomas Lockwood, quoted in Lipartito, Kenneth (1994) “Component Innovation: The Case of Automatic Telephone Switching, 1891–1920,” Industrial and Corporate Change, v. 3, n. 2, p. 329, from AT&T Archive, Box 1286, Stowger Aut0matic Exchange Switching, Lockwood-Hudson letter, Nov. 4, 1891.
Tagged: telephones
cloud services circa 1987
From a New York Telephone advertisement in 1987:
Intellipath II Digital Centrex Service is the latest step in the continuing evolution of Centrex. It’s the first fully digital telecommunications system that requires no major switching equipment on your premises: it’s in New York Telephone’s central office.
Intellipath II offers 100 features: full-featured voice, full data transmission at up to 56 kbps with data call protection and a Centrex LAN option. So you can have all the features of advanced on-premises systems without the headaches.
Like all Centrex telecommunications systems, Intellipath II frees you from the worries of maintenance and obsolescence. New York Telephone monitors your system at its central office around the clock. And we continually incorporate new technologies into our network as they are developed, and offer them to you — to keep your system at the leading edge.
Best of all, you won’t have to make a major capital investment. With Intellipath II you pay for service as you use it. You get a customized system at a competitive price. [in Network World, July 20, 1987, p. 33]
That’s the promise of cloud services more than two decades ago. Telephone companies have grown mainly on the basis of selling connectivity (lines and minutes), not services to connected customers. Changing from selling connectivity to selling services to connected customers is a difficult business change.
Tagged: services
fancy telephone services for small businesses
Telephone services for small businesses is a significant segment of the communications industry. SOHO (small office/home office) is a widely recognized customer segment. The SOHO segment is large and growing relatively rapidly. In the U.S. in 2002, non-farm businesses with fewer than ten employees and with more than $10,000 in annual receipts numbered about 14 million and had $2.7 trillion in business receipts (about 12% of total U.S. non-farm business receipts). Small businesses that rent office space might also be able to contract with the facilities manager/owner for telephone services. However, home-based small businesses don’t have that contracting opportunity. In the U.S. in 2002, non-farm, home-based firms with fewer than ten employees and with more than $10,000 in annual receipts numbered about 6.8 million and had about $700 billion in business receipts. These home-based, small businesses are predominately in construction, retail trade, and professional, scientific, technical and other services.[1]
Small businesses value fancy voice telephone services. Persons running small businesses have to manage communications with suppliers, customers, and contractors. With respect to voice telephone communication, they benefit from services such as programmed greetings (attendant menus), flexible, programmed call routing across multiple devices and locations, call line hunt groups (if Jasmine’s line is busy, automatically route the call to Sasha’s line), and voice mail. They also benefit from being able to manage these services personally from a variety of devices. Large businesses have acquired such capabilities through private-branch exchanges (PBX) and Centrex systems. Capital costs, skill requirements, and maintenance requirements probably favor a hosted PBX or Centrex-type system for small businesses. U.S. businesses with less than 9 Centrex lines purchased about 2.8 million Centrex lines in 2002. Those customers, who averaged 4.3 Centrex lines each, accounted for about 16% of total Centrex line purchases.[2] Small businesses have long been significant customers of manageable voice telephone services.
Competition for providing communications services to small businesses is producing cheap, highly capable services. For example, Junction Network’s OnSIP provides hosted PBX service for small businesses. Its $40 per month SOHO package offers unlimited short-number extensions, free, unlimited intra-extension calling, five voice mailboxes, three attendant menus, three hunt or simultaneous-ring groups, dial-by-name directories, business-hour routing of incoming calls, and a browser-based call management interface. OnSIP describes itself as “a complete business VoIP service for 5 to 100 users.” The disadvantages of OnSIP for businesses with only a few persons appears to be cost and complexity. Google Voice (an app pre-installed on the Nexus One) is a free service, designed for individual use, that has some capabilities similar to OnSIP. VoxOx is another free service designed for individual use. VoxOx offers a powerful virtual personal assistant as well as a dead-end feature that’s probably even more valuable than industry-standard sorry-gotta-go scripting technologies. BT’s Ribbit provides a platform on which a wide variety of cost-effective, manageable voice telephone services can be developed.
Competition in providing manageable voice telephone services for individuals, non-employer businesses, and employer businesses with only a few employees is likely to reconnect the telephone business to the local advertising business. AT&T introduced “Where to Buy It” telephone directories in 1928. In 2007, U.S. Yellow Pages directories had about $14 billion in advertising revenue. Moreover, about $71 billion of newspaper, radio, and television advertising is local advertising.[3] Print yellow pages, newspapers, radio, and television are moving to networked digital devices. Providing small business telephone services is likely to provide an important advantage in providing small-business advertising and local information search. That’s the historical story of the Yellow Pages. That’s a story that now seems ready to be re-enacted, but perhaps with different main characters.
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Data: U.S small businesses and Centrex services workbook (Excel version); coded Bell Atlantic / Verizon Centrex rate elements, 1998-2009, compiled from the full rate-detail dataset
Notes:
[1] The figures for home-based businesses are my estimates. For the source, detailed data, and estimation formulas, see the small business worksheet in the Excel version of the small business/Centrex workbook.
[2] For data details, see the Centrex worksheet.
[3] Radio, television, and newspaper advertising, separated into local and national, is available in the full Coen Advertising dataset. Those figures show local radio advertising, local television (cable and broadcast) advertising, and local newspaper advertising to be 53% of total advertising. The Coen over-all local/national advertising figures for 2007 show local advertising to be 34% of total advertising. However, the Coen over-all local/national ad figures include all direct mail advertising and almost all miscellaneous advertising as national advertising.
Tagged: telcos