America's $100 billion broadband surge - Fiber Broadband Association's Gary Bolton

President Biden's American Jobs Plan is calling for a historic investment of $100 billion over 8 years to "bring affordable, reliable, high-speed broadband to every American", including for the more than 35 percent of rural Americans who lack access to broadband at minimally acceptable speeds. The goal is 100% coverage. If approved by Congress, the plan would set off a wave of network construction.

In this interview, Gary Bolton, President, Fiber Broadband Association, shares his insights on the proposal and how it could be carried out.

https://youtu.be/g6bdQHt9bVE

2:42 - Is the $100 billion plan justified? Is there a way to calculate if this figure is warranted?

5:06 - Is there any evidence that communities with fiber broadband get an economic boost from the investment?

8:06 - Will the funding be directed exclusively at the last mile fiber connection or will it also include other necessary upgrades to metro and regional infrastructure?

11:09 - How will the plan be administered? Via the FCC or other government agencies?

15:07 - America values the competitive marketplace. Will there be restrictions or guidelines with this funding as to whether the networks must provide open access to other broadband providers?

17:46 - What does the timeline look like from proposal to legislation to Congressional vote, to actual project funding? 

https://youtu.be/g6bdQHt9bVE

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AT&T perspective: Defining Broadband For the 21st Century

The question of how broadband should be redefined above the current 25/3 (downlink/uplink) threshold is expected to drive subsidy decisions and technology direction in the massive infrastructure bill backed by the Biden administration.

In a blog posting on March 26, Joan March, AT&T's Executive Vice President of Federal Regulatory Relations, argues that key considerations will be whether the future broadband service needs to be symmetric and whether gigabit speeds are practical or even necessary for rural users.

https://www.attpublicpolicy.com/wireless/defining-broadband-for-the-21st-century/

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5G adoption is tracking 3X as fast as LTE

 Global adoption of 5G is happening at 3X the pace as with 4G LTE, according newly released statistics from the trade organization 5G Americas.

According to data provided by Omdia, the world added 385.5 million 5G subscribers between Q4 2019 and Q4 2020 to reach 401 million 5G connections globally, shrugging off the challenges of a global pandemic and economic headwinds. 

Chris Pearson, President, 5G Americas said, “5G is in its early stages of fulfilling its full potential, as the industry has just finished the second inning of a nine-inning baseball game. In the second full year of commercially available 5G, the industry went from 15.4 million to 401 million subscribers. The uptake of 5G connections will accelerate significantly over the next few years.”

Some highlights from 5G Americas:

• Omdia projects that by the end of 2025, global 5G connections will reach 3.4 billion. Regionally, the number of connections is forecast to reach 451 million in North America and 167 million in the Caribbean and Latin America by the end of 2025.
• From a commercial availability standpoint, an additional 105 5G networks went live globally in 2020, bringing the total up to 163 5G networks. The number of commercial 5G networks is expected to reach 277 by the end of 2021, according to data from TeleGeography. The growing availability of 5G-enabled devices has also blossomed, with the Global Mobile Suppliers Association (GSA) noting there are now 628 5G devices announced, of which 404 were commercially available by the end of February 2021.
• In addition to 5G, 4G LTE connections also experienced healthy growth in 2020, surpassing year-end projections of 5.73 billion to reach a total of 6 billion connections. Of those, 499 million 4G LTE connections are from North America and 407 million from Latin America and the Caribbean.
• Broken down regionally, North America had 19.96 million 5G connections and 499 million LTE connections by the end of Q4 2020. For the region, this amounts to a 4098% annual growth in 5G, and a gain of over 19.5 million 5G connections over the year. Meanwhile, 4G LTE gained over 22 million connections in 2020, which represents 4.7% growth.
• With 5G just beginning in Latin America and the Caribbean, the region saw 6340 5G subscriptions added in the year of 2020. In contrast, LTE continued its strong growth, ending Q4 2020 with 407 million LTE subscriptions (13% YoY growth). 

According to Jose Otero, Vice President of Caribbean and Latin America for 5G Americas “"Two elements can contribute to the proliferation of new commercial 5G networks in Latin America and the Caribbean. First, the increased availability of 5G-ready devices, especially for fixed wireless services. Second, governments' efforts to accelerate the launch of 5G networks that include spectrum assignment processes, 5G incubator projects, spectrum auction announcements and incentives for 5G trials.”

The number of networks using 4G and 5G wireless technologies are summarized here, as of March 2021:

Global

• 5G:  163
• LTE Advanced: 340
• LTE: 678

North America 

• 5G: 10
• LTE Advanced: 11
• LTE: 20

Latin America & Caribbean

5G: 13

• LTE Advanced: 48
• LTE: 124

*Source: TeleGeography and 5G Americas

https://www.5gamericas.org/5g-achieves-mass-market-appeal/

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DC BLOX begins data center construction in South Carolina

 DC BLOX initiated construction of its Greenville-Spartanburg, South Carolina data center. The data center, designed to Uptime Institute’s Tier III standards, will be the first-of-its-kind multi-tenant data center in South Carolina. The facility will be capable of protecting Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI), providing enterprises and government entities throughout South Carolina access to a highly efficient, secure and interconnected data center.

DC BLOX’s Greenville data center is set upon an 8.5-acre campus in the Global Business Park off of Interstate 85. Upon full build-out, the facility will feature six distinct data halls with 54,000 square feet of data center space with a full critical load capable of supporting 18MW of power. The data center will also feature approximately 7,000 square feet of secure storage and shared and dedicated office space.

“With the first Tier III-designed data center now under construction in South Carolina, businesses adopting digital transformation strategies are set to have access to the most reliable and interconnected facility in the State,” comments Mark Masi, Chief Operating Officer of DC BLOX. “Whether it’s a prime location, cloud storage, disaster recovery, or an expanded data center footprint, we are proud to bring this state-of-the-art data center campus to South Carolina. Now, even more companies can leverage reliable and efficient data center services and private, high-speed, low latency network access to cloud providers and applications at scale.”

http://www.dcblox.com

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Yugabyte raises $48 million for database-as-a-service

 Yugabyte, a start-up based in Sunnyvale, California, secured $48 million in venture funding for its open source distributed SQL databases for Internet-scale operations.

The funding will also be used to further accelerate enterprise adoption of Yugabyte’s commercial products. Yugabyte Platform, a self-managed private database-as-a-service offering available on any public, private, or hybrid cloud or Kubernetes infrastructure and Yugabyte Cloud, a fully-managed database service currently available on AWS and Google Cloud, have seen broad adoption in the past 12 months. Yugabyte also recently announced YugabyteDB 2.4, a major update including hardened enterprise-grade security features, enhanced multi-region deployment capabilities and significant performance improvements.

The funding round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with additional participation by Greenspring Associates, Dell Technologies Capital, Wipro Ventures and 8VC. 

“Today’s business environment demands flexibility and elasticity from database solutions, and distributed SQL is now critical for any organization where developer productivity and application uptime are top priorities. YugabyteDB makes something as fundamental and feature rich as PostgreSQL truly cloud native, resilient, elastic, and distributed,” said Kannan Muthukkaruppan, Co-Founder and President, Yugabyte. “With companies of all kinds accelerating their digital transformation initiatives, technologies that help them accelerate, like YugabyteDB, are in high demand. This new round of funding will position Yugabyte to meet this increased enterprise demand and power our global expansion into key markets.”

http://www.yugabyte.com

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BridgeComm pushes Free Space Optical to 100 Gbps

BridgeComm will demonstrated its point-to-point free space optical solution operating at speeds beyond 100 Gbps at the Hampton Inn in Sneads Ferry, NC, in conjunction with a global conference April 6-15. The demo is enabled by BridgeComm's extensive work in free space optical technology and Nokia's network equipment and services backed by Nokia Bell Labs.

"We are excited to bring our point-to-point (P2P) technology out of the lab and in front of customers," said Barry Matsumori, BridgeComm CEO. "By incorporating our optical wireless communications with Nokia's industry-leading infrastructure telecommunication tools, we can support the diverse demands for data, speed and security end-users require beyond the reach of fiber and without the compromises of radio communications."

BridgeComm and Nokia will leverage existing commercial technology to design, construct and operate a private wireless network. The largely virtualized network will be based on standardized 3GPP architectures and allow for a cost-efficient yet highly scalable network testbed that will enable rapid experimentation of applications. Each connected private wireless location will 

http://bridgecomminc.com/demo_p2p.html

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