Google Fiber

By Jessica Guynn

January 22, 2013, 2:55 p.m.

Google Fiber, the Internet search giant's super-fast Internet experiment in Kansas City, Mo., that operates at a speed 100 times faster than a typical broadband connection, could be coming to a city near you.
During Google's fourth-quarter earnings call, Google Chief Executive Larry Page and Chief Financial Officer Patrick Pichette made it clear Google Fiber is not a "hobby" for the company.
"It's been great to see the success there with the initial roll-out," Page said.
He cautioned: "We are still in the very early stages of it." But he emphasized: "We are excited about the possibilities there."
Pichette said Google Fiber installations are growing each week. "People just love the product," he said.
"It’s not a hobby," he added. "We really think we should be making a good business with this opportunity." "We are going to continue to look at the possibility of expanding."
For the time being, Pichette said Google is "debugging" the product and the experience for users.
But, he said, such super-fast Internet is "what people are dying to get everywhere."
Last month Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said Google was delivering 760 megabits per second to the customer, and taking 720 megabits a second from customers. He made the remarks during the New York Times Dealbook conference in New York.
Schmidt said Google is thinking about rolling out the service to other cities but did not specify which ones.

Sprint confident of Clearwire bid, no need to best Dish -sources

By Nadia Damouni
Jan 9 (Reuters) - Sprint Nextel Corp is under no pressure to raise its $2 billion offer for Clearwire Corp to beat a higher bid by Dish Network Corp as it holds several trump cards it can play to thwart its rival, three sources close to the matter said.
Clearwire, which owns valuable mobile spectrum that Dish, Sprint and Sprint's Japanese buyer Softbank Corp want badly, is duty-bound to consider Dish's $3.30 per share proposal that tops an agreed-upon $2.97 offer from Sprint.
Satellite TV company Dish's offer for the wireless company has invited speculation of a bidding war or at least a small sweetener from Sprint, with Clearwire shares closing up 7.2 percent on Wednesday at $3.13.
But Sprint, the No. 3 U.S. wireless operator and Clearwire's biggest shareholder owning just over 50 percent of the company, thinks it won't come to that, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the discussions are not public.
Dish's bid is subject to numerous conditions, not least of which is approval by Sprint.
Sprint has no intent of "agreeing to, waiving or permitting" any of the conditions laid out as part of Dish's proposal, one of the sources close to the matter said, affirming the carrier's public stance.
Amending a number of the agreements Sprint already has in place with Clearwire -- such as agreeing to nominate designated Dish directors to Clearwire's board -- would require material changes to Clearwire's corporate structure under Delaware Law, where the company is incorporated, a second source said.
With Sprint holding steadfast, those amendments would not get voted in, the source added.
"We believe our agreement to acquire Clearwire is superior to the highly conditional Dish proposal" Sprint spokesman Bill White said.
Softbank, which is awaiting regulatory approval for its $20 billion deal to buy a 70 percent stake in Sprint, has declined to comment on Dish's bid.
Also, under the terms of their agreement, Sprint can force a shareholder vote at a meeting in June even if Clearwire's special committee were to recommend Dish's offer and feels it would have the upper hand by dint of its large shareholding, the sources said.
To be sure, Sprint is carefully watching the outcome of Clearwire's current discussions with Dish, one of the sources said. Sprint has not opened discussions with Dish, they said.
Some analysts see Dish's bid -- as merely a power play, or payback for Sprint, with which it has locked horns in the past over regulatory approvals for spectrum acquisitions.
Others saw it as confirmation that Dish's Chairman Charlie Ergen, the billionaire media mogul who in 2011 swooped in to take over failed videostore chain Blockbuster, is serious about becoming a wireless provider.
Dish may have the support of Clearwire's second-biggest shareholder, Crest Financial Ltd, which owns an 8 percent stake and has said Sprint's offer for the roughly 50 percent of Clearwire it does not currently own, "grossly undervalues" the company.
The investor said it was looking forward to learning the detailed terms of Dish's offer.
Crest has sued Clearwire to block the Sprint deal in the Court of Chancery in Delaware and proceedings will begin on Thursday. (Additional reporting by Liana Baker, Sinead Carew and Rob Cyran; Editing by Edwina Gibbs and Alden Bentley)

Verizon Looks to LTE Completion, Gigabit FiOS

IDG News Service (San Francisco Bureau) — After announcing its 4G LTE mobile network at CES two years ago and its FiOS fiber-based home broadband offering here in 2004, Verizon used a keynote address on Tuesday to pitch its progress on those and other projects.
Verizon Wireless will finish building out its LTE network by the middle of this year, six months ahead of schedule, said Lowell McAdam, a former chief of the wireless subsidiary who is now chairman and CEO of parent company Verizon Communications. Today, that network reaches more than 273 million U.S. residents -- 89 percent of the population, he said.
Meanwhile, the company has a platform in place to increase the speed of FiOS to 1G bps to homes, McAdam said. The company has more than 5 million FiOS customers now. A version of the service with 300M bps speed came out last year. Not to leave out enterprises, McAdam said Verizon would offer 100G bps speeds, which already connect most major U.S. cities, in its metro Ethernet networks to boost the speed companies can get.
McAdam highlighted notable uses of Verizon's networks and its cloud infrastructure, such as cellular connectivity for Golden-i, a headset that firefighters can use for augmented reality. Among other things, Golden-i can let them see through smoke with an infrared camera and view floor plans as they walk through a burning building, according to a video shown during the keynote.
But Golden-i was demonstrated at last year's CES. McAdam made it clear Verizon is looking for new ideas: He announced the Powerful Answers Award program, which will give a total of US$10 million in awards to whoever develops the best innovations for taking advantage of the company's mobile, video and cloud technologies.
The contest is intended to come up with promising new developments in health care, education and sustainability, which Verizon will help the winners bring to fruition, McAdam said. The top award will be $1 million and Verizon will start accepting submissions later this year.
Stephen Lawson covers mobile, storage and networking technologies for The IDG News Service. Follow Stephen on Twitter at @sdlawsonmedia. Stephen's e-mail address is stephen_lawson@idg.com

Wi-Fi: Taking the Strain for Cellular

 http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=228161

Three companies long involved in the Wi-Fi business are here to tell us why 802.11 can still take the strain for cellular even in an age of 4G.
Blazin' Wi-Fi
Towerstream Corp., which traditionally offers a WiMax-based last-mile service to business customers, wants to build up its carrier business, leasing Passpoint-ready Wi-Fi nodes to operators. CEO Jeff Thompson won't name the company's carrier customers thus far for Wi-Fi, but the company has two contracts with "national" carriers and a trial under way with a third.
For some time now, Towerstream executives have been of the belief that Wi-Fi and 3G and cellular would be deployed side-by-side. This was confirmed when they heard operator presentations at the WBA Wi-Fi Global Congress in November. "It's interesting now to see Wi-Fi in five-year business models when they're doing network planning," Thompson says.
Certainly for the major carriers, entire network architectures are going through a fundamental shift. Engineers at Sprint, for example, are getting surgical about small cells, using them to pump up data capacity to preserve scarce spectrum.
Wi-Fi has a crucial role to play in all of this change, according to Towerstream. "We're at the point now where Wi-Fi is not going away," Thompson says. The majority of a consumer's smartphone data usage is done via Wi-Fi and it's the one common technology on handsets that transcends HSPA+, LTE and other flavors of wireless, he notes.
In Thompson's eyes, Wi-Fi offload is not that different from what carriers have been doing for years. For a long time, they wanted to own the towers and rooftops but discovered it was more economical to let the tower companies do that. Granted, operators still need to do some of their own site acquisitions, but more often, they're looking at getting these types of services from someone else.
"The cheapest way to grow your revenue is to lower churn," Thompson notes, adding that the cheapest way to acquire spectrum is to use offload.
Alternative for roaming
In addition to making the most of licensed spectrum, Wi-Fi is one of the more economical ways to deliver international roaming, especially as the industry moves to LTE and needs to figure out how to make all those disparate frequencies talk to one another.
Boingo Wireless Inc., which manages more than 600,000 hot spots worldwide, has an agreement to supply global roaming for an unnamed U.S.-based Tier 1 carrier. Boingo expects to see the results of that deal reflected in its bottom line toward the end of 2013 and into 2014. It’s still in the early stages, but President and CEO David Hagan is hopeful that, along with Boingo’s agreement with the Competitive Carriers Association (CCA), it will lead to more carrier deals in the future.
The purpose of the CCA agreement is two-fold, said Christian Gunning, vice president of corporate communications at Boingo. First, the carriers in CCA tend to be more spectrum constrained and therefore they can use the offload capabilities of the Wi-Fi network. Second, because their footprints are smaller than the Big 4 U.S. carriers, they’re spending a lot on roaming. Offloading onto Wi-Fi gives them an economical alternative.
Boingo’s relationship with operators goes beyond Wi-Fi, however, and that’s another reason company executives think they have a leg up. Boingo considers itself the second-largest distributed antenna systems (DAS) operator in the U.S., second only to Crown Castle International Corp.. Hagan has stated that he believes carrier Wi-Fi will be much more like the DAS business, where traffic moves back and forth without the consumer’s intervention.
Different strokes
In the same general category as Boingo is another company, iPass. But where Boingo’s offerings include a service direct to consumers, iPass has been focused on the enterprise and doesn’t target consumers, explains Steve Livingston, iPass's senior vice president of carrier development. It also doesn’t position its carrier services as something to use for Wi-Fi offload. Instead, the company sells a solution for operators to offer international roaming to their customers under a white-label arrangement.
The selling point of iPass for businesses is its ability to work out all the variations between networks, like authentication, and present a connection as a single seamless entity to its customers.
iPass expects to finish this year with between 15 and 20 roaming deals. None of them so far involves a U.S. carrier but according to the company it is early days yet.
“These are the early adopters around the world who are going to take a service to the market and we’ll see how disruptive they are,” Livingston said. “We’re in the first and second inning of a whole new market.”
— Monica Alleven , special to Light Reading