Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Yesterday YouTube doubled the upload limit available to users in response the increasing number of high definition videos that are being sent to the site.  Now you can upload a 2G file, instead of a 1G file.   YouTube has made it easier to upload a high definition file as well. According to Liz Gannes at NewTeeVee.com, YouTube has done this because “HD videos are now becoming a significant part of the YouTube library”.

They look gorgeous, no doubt.  Check out this trailer from Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.  Click the full screen button to see the full impact.  It’s really darned impressive.

Don’t expect to see a lot of Canadian high definition content, however.   Not that there aren’t people in this country shooting high definition video, who might have a strong desire to share that video.  It’s simply a matter of bandwidth and usage caps. All broadband providers in Canada, excepting a few small outfits in Vancouver, cap usage at between 50 and 150G of transfer per month, and restrict upload speeds to under 1 megabit per second, except Shaw who have raised their upload limit to a meagre 2 megabits.  We’d be in our graves before YouTube received our videos at these speeds.

Pathetic, no? Even worse, most of the small business offerings from these providers consist of repackaged residential service, with a better service agreement and a higher price.

Does it matter if a few people can’t upload video?  Perhaps not, unless you’re a Canadian culture supporter or Heritage Minister James Moore.  But what about the other impacts of capped usage and restricted upload bandwidth – the economic and environmental impacts?  Applications like VPN, remote desktop, and VoIP are the cornerstones of telecommuting strategies.  Those applications are dependent on high speed upload as well as download.  When telecommuting is impaired, it has an economic impact to business, and an environmental impact on society.  We should all care about that!

So how about it Rogers, Bell, Telus, Shaw and Videotron?  Download speeds have increased steadily over the last decade, but we’ve had upload speeds of under 1Mbs since the dawn of broadband.  Shouldn’t we have better?

Rounding the corner behind the Hyatt Cinemas in Burlingame on my morning run, I hit a slick metal plate and took a spill.  I got up, and continued running with a nasty pavement uppercut, and bruises to my knees, hands and left shoulder.  And there, ahead of me, a brilliant rainbow lit by the early morning sun made me forget the pain I was in.

As I ran on, I thought of John Chamber’s comments published yesterday on GigaOm.  Chambers is calling for funding for broadband in the US bail-out package.  He, as many others have, compares national broadband to the interstate highway system. Positioning broadband as a national infrastructure priority, he sees it as a key ingredient in the US economic recovery.

The US economy has taken an unexpected and nasty spill, just as I did this morning.  Unlike my situation, however, it’s a little more difficult for the economy to pick itself up and run ahead toward the rainbow.  And unfortunately, there aren’t easy answers like broadband.  If I was a US congressman, I might question whether an investment in broadband might provide the same economic impetus as an investment in education or healthcare.  I might take the position that building a strong, educated and healthy workforce should be first priority.

But I’m not a US congressman.  I’m just a bruised runner, limping toward a rainbow.

It's Thanksgiving Weekend here in Canada, which means that once again we're visiting the in-laws in Kitchener, Ontario.  As I've mentioned previously, that means no internet.  This time around it also made a great excuse to try Rogers new Portable Internet product. 

Rogers Portable Internet runs over the Inukshuk WiMax network, jointly owned by Rogers and Bell Canada.  The modem is the size of a small book.  Setting it up is dead simple.  Simply plug the modem into any available power outlet, and then plug the included ethernet cable into the modem and and the PC.  It seems to take a little longer than usual to obtain an IP address, but other than that the experience is identical to any other broadband experience, and perhaps a little easier in that it doesn't require and router configuration.

The version I am using is Rogers Portable Internet High Speed.  For $49.95 per month, it offers 1.5Mb/s download speed and 256K upload.  A Rogers Portable Internet BASIC is also available for $24.95 per month that offers 256K download and 64K upload.  Both services are capped at 30MbGb total download in any month.

So what's it like?  Not bad. A quick trip to SPEEDTEST.NET showed download speeds that were roughly as advertised, but upload speeds averaging less than half the advertised 256K. In use, it's good enough for email and basic web surfing.  However, it was unable to keep up to with YouTube for streaming.  And at 100K upload speeds, uploading photographs to photo sharing sites, like Flickr, is painfully slow.  In addition, it seems as if weather affects the quality of the experience as well.  While using it, a thunderstorm rolled in, and my connection vanished. 

If you have no other broadband option, Portable Internet might just be the ticket for you.  With its lower speed and bandwidth cap, it's limited, but certainly a better experience than dial-up. 

Rob Hyndman has a pointer to Mark Cuban’s latest: Think the Internet Will Replace TV? Think Again.  Cuban’s post can be summarized as: Today’s broadband networks are too slow.  The insatiable appetite for on-demand rich media content will soon overwhelm them. Telco’s aren’t putting in upgraded networks quickly enough to meet that demand. Cuban also provides some facts and figures to back up that claim. In the comments, readers have a number of viewpoints, including the view that Mark has ignored cable, and that cable can provide the required speeds and feeds.

The problem is that cable is now grabbing share from the incumbent telecoms, and grabbing it at an alarming rate.  Their response has been to build out a video infrastructure — to take the cable companies on, head to head.  That is, as Cuban points out, a very expensive proposition.  More to the point, Cuban says "In fact, by their own best estimates, they’ll be able to reach no more than 40% or so of American households with fiber over the next seven years."  In seven years time, will this be even worth battling over?  Land line attrition in the US is running about 10,000 lines per day, right now.  In seven years, at that rate, over 25 million lines will be switched out — roughly 1/4 of all the households in the US will have given up at least one land line.  In all likelihood, those 25 million lines will be the 25 million most profitable lines too, as early adopters, young people, and consumer influencers abandon the traditional land line.

What if, instead, the incumbents focused on ways to make the customer more sticky to a broad range of services?  What if they offered cellular, land line, wifi, VoIP, and internet as a bundle, with a common user experience across all five?  What if I had one address book, one email name, one phone number for every communications technology?  

What if, instead of today’s broken networks, the incumbents focused on having the best unified communications experience possible?

We arrived yesterday in Seattle and spent most of the afternoon shopping for 8 cell phones and some data cards.  The nature of iotum’s product is that we need lots of end points to terminate calls, and Howard and I are starting to spend a lot of time in different places doing demos.  So, we needed the ability to do more than one demo.  We also have found that not every place we go to demonstrate the software has open network access, so we needed some data cards.

It was a long process.  In the end we bought four phones from Verizon, and four from Cingular.  We also bought two Kyocera data cards from Verizon, and put data plans on two of the Cingular sims. If we need GSM data, we’ll throw one of the data cards into my Nokia N90 which has a UMTS modem in it.

The Verizon data service is, frankly, unbelievable.  For $80/month you get all you can eat data anywhere within Verizon’s network.  Where there’s 1XRT service, that’s broadband speed!