Bandwidth Without Usage Metering

By: John Shepler

Perhaps the most unpleasant experience of broadband is hitting your data cap. You may have forgotten it was even there. But, like the cop hiding behind the highway billboard, it pops out at the most inconvenient times and, boy, are you in trouble. Let’s have a look at what data limits are all about and what you can do to avoid hitting them.

Where Did Usage Metering Come From?
The big problem is scarcity. Bandwidth is like electricity. If we had unlimited amounts at minimal costs, there would be no need to meter it or even limit your line speed. Such is not the case.

Take 5G cellular for instance. The demand for Internet broadband has always been way ahead of capacity buildout for the cellular networks. 2G was pitiful. 3G was still bandwidth starved. 4G LTE greatly improved on cellular capacity to the point that most people didn’t run out before the end of the month.

5G offers the promise of billions of “things” all communicating autonomously and people using fixed wireless from their cellular provider to replace services like DSL, cable and T1 lines.

Have you been watching what is happing with 5G? There is a mad scramble to build towers, feed them with fiber optic cables or microwave backhaul, and lobby the government to assign more and more of the limited radio spectrum to high speed Internet. It’s cellular vs satellite vs independent WISPs (Wireless Internet Service Providers) vs television vs government vs everybody else to grab as much bandwidth as possible.

Why? The amount of spectrum you can press into service determines the speed of your connection and the amount of data to divvy up among users. Thus the feeding frenzy among service providers.

Even wireline and fiber optic services have their limits. Twisted pair landlines are pretty pokey by today’s standards and fiber optic requires a huge capital investment. A fiber bundle has enormous capacity, but only where the fiber has been run. It doesn’t blanket an area like wireless does. Each location needs its own fiber connection.

How Carriers Allot Their Capacity
All bandwidth services have limited capacity. Wireless has the most constraints because the electromagnetic spectrum has only so much available in the popular frequencies that travel reasonable distances and penetrate walls. Fiber and HFC (Hybrid Fiber Cable) is less constrained but has high costs to build out.

Carriers divvy up their capacity and sell it to users by slicing and dicing what they have. The two limitations that they put on users are speed in Mbps or Gbps and usage in total Gigabytes. Speed determines how much of the total bandwidth you can use at any given moment. Total capacity limits keep a few high data users from uploading and downloading continuously so that other’s can’t get online.

You see, the price you pay for Internet access is much less if the carrier can assume that you aren’t sending or receiving all the time. Much of the time you may not even be accessing remote servers. When you do, you’ll send or receive a certain bundle of data and then pause before doing more. By allowing many customers to share one big line, providers can give everyone reliable access at greatly reduced cost. That’s the principle behind cable broadband, satellite services, and cellular broadband.

In practice, this works well for consumers and many smaller businesses. They just don’t need to be sending enormous files one right after the other. On cable, you may never hit your allotted limit or even know what it is. With cellular and satellite, you may have and “unlimited” plan, but just try continuously streaming video or doing massive data transfers and you’ll run into what the carriers call “fair use” provisions. Yes, there are limits to unlimited plans.

What happens if you consume more that your “fair share”? Your service provider may choose to simply issue a warning, or may slow your speed so you can’t hog so much of their capacity. Or they may charge you for extra GBs of usage. Worst case, they’ll simply cut off your service until the next month’s billing cycle begins.

How to Avoid Usage Metering
Medium and larger businesses and heavy Internet using companies with cloud services and remote backup storage may well exceed even the most generous fair use quotas. The best option then is to order services that aren’t metered at all. Those tend to be private lines and dedicated Internet access.

Dedicated lines without usage metering give you two advantages. First, you are not sharing with other companies or residential users. The capacity of the channel is yours and yours alone. If you order a Gigabit Dedicated Internet Access fiber service, you can feed it traffic continuously and nobody is going to complain. Plus the speed of your service won’t vary with competing traffic, because you have sole usage. This is particularly valuable with business critical applications and real-time services like video conferencing that run in the cloud.

A private line is like dedicated access except that the Internet is never involved. You connect point to point or in a private mesh network where others cannot interfere. Even the core Internet gets congested from time to time. Your private lines are like private superhighways. Your traffic, and yours alone, is what is carried. If you are using cloud services extensively, consider a direct line from your business to your cloud provider for the highest performance.

Have you been hitting the limits of your Internet service or being warned by your provider that they may heavily up-charge you or cut off access? Consider the advantages of ordering dedicated private lines and dedicated Internet access without usage limits to keep your business running smoothly.

The Clever D Block Initiative

In the bandwidth feeding frenzy that was the recent 700 MHz spectrum auction, one small bank of frequencies went unsold. Sadly, D Block did not meet its reserve price and remains assigned to the UHF analog TV channels scheduled for shutdown next February. What makes this sad is that of all the new possible applications for the 700 MHz band, D Block was slated for perhaps the most important role of all in an ingenious plan to bootstrap a new nationwide public service network. So clever was this plan that I think it deserves another look. It might just be the blueprint for how to get other things we want in this less than robust economy.

The origin of the D Block idea goes back to the horrific morning of September 11, 2001. As the Twin Towers came crashing down in New York City, we were shocked to learn that the loss of life was exacerbated by an electronic communications fiasco. Firefighters couldn't even coordinate with police officers because their radios operated on different frequencies. What's more, this problem permeates the entire nation. Public safety two-way radio is an ad-hoc service with no national network. That's what D Block is intended to fix. Combining the D Block frequencies with the current public safety frequencies offers the opportunity to coordinate a suite of broadband and narrowband services that all police, fire and rescue units could access.

Seems like such a good idea should have been implemented already. But some six and a half years after 9/11, there is still no nationwide public safety network. Why? Building out a whole new network is an expensive proposition. The cost has been estimated to be some $6 to $7 billion. In the big scheme of things, it seems like this amount of money could be included in our federal budget without causing a noticable bump. But in these times of big deficits and slow economic growth, it's hard to get broad bipartisan support for even a project as worthy as this one.

So here's the clever part. How would you like to get that brand new public safety network for free? Well, at least free to the taxpayers. Before you jump up and say that's impossible, take a look at what the FCC tried to pull off in Auction 73. The A, B, C, and E Block licenses were sold to commercial entities for cash on the barrel head to the tune of $19 billion for the Federal Treasury. But D Block was held back. In order to win a nationwide license for this spectrum, bidders had to commit to creating that nationwide public safety network. Why would they do that? Because in consideration for building the public safety network, the winner would get to share the spectrum for commercial gain.

The 10 MHz D Block and the existing 10 MHz public safety spectrum in the 700 MHz band were paired to create a public/private partnership. The reserve price was set at $1.3 billion and the doors swung open to prospective bidders. Everything sold quickly except, you guessed it, D Block. The lone bid was for about a third of the reserve price. Major carriers wanted nothing to do with the idea. A dejected Federal Communications Commission is now soliciting public comments on how to rebid the shunned D Block.

Alternatives include reapproaching Congress for the funds, perhaps delaying any action to see if a new administration might be warmer to the idea. Or simply forgetting the idea of a national public safety network and selling off D Block for commercial usage. But I say not so quick. There may still be a way to get that new network for "free."

It comes down to a matter of incentives. The fact that the D Block auction failed simply means that the terms and conditions weren't attractive enough in this economic environment. The idea still has merit and it could well be the right answer at the right time. Let's face it, as a nation we're strapped. Between skyrocketing oil prices, plummeting housing prices, a credit crunch and anemic economic growth, a public/private partnership might be the most expeditious way to get things moving. But what incentives will do the trick?

The variables to play with are the reserve price, any lease costs for commercial use of the existing public safety spectrum, public financing of the buildout, preferred tax treatment, and perhaps first crack at any new spectrum that opens up. The idea is to sweeten the pot with incentives that don't result in out of pocket expense to the taxpayers. Public financing wouldn't necessarily cost us anything if it were just a matter of ensuring that the monies are available to loan for such a large project at reasonable market rates.

If this approach still isn't enough to make it happen, then a fallback position would be to keep the partnership but have the public kick in some cash. That's not quite as desirable but it is a way to privatize at least part of the massive effort involved in building and running such a system. Can you think of other ways to make this work? If so, make your voice heard to the FCC during this public comment period.

I'd like to see this very clever plan work out for the public safety network because we certainly can use it. Both 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina taught us that big disasters can come upon us with little or no warning. We need to get prepared for whatever the next challenge is. Beyond that, there is a model here that might work to solve other problems. I'm thinking crumbling infrastructure, a shortage of domestic energy and water, even more of a stretch into education, employment and crime. The right incentives might just unleash the proven power of business on some of these seemingly intractable public sector needs.

Hey, Look, More Spectrum!

If your dreams of a Wireless empire were dashed by the results of the FCC's recent 700 MHz spectrum auction, you're not sure how you'd make your fortune with that Public Safety D-Block that's still up for grabs, and scrounging around in the "white spaces" isn't quite your style, take heart. There's soon to be more juicy spectrum slices on the market.

So what happened? Did the FCC find some more available bands hiding in the attic? No, they've pretty much cleared the shelves. What's happening now is what might be termed the secondary market. It's a little like collecting art. Sometimes people will collect unique works of art for decades, only to decide later to auction off the whole collection. In this case NextWave Wireless went to a lot of trouble to collect licenses on rare slices of the microwave spectrum. Now they've decided they really don't want them after all. NextWave is going to concentrate on its hardware business and has hired Deutsche Band and UBS Investment Bank to help them sell off the collection.

NextWave's licensed portfolio is enough to make a cellular carrier or WiMAX startup drool in envy. It consists of 154 licenses in the Advanced Wireless Service (AWS) bands at 1.7 GHz and 2.1 GHz, 30 licenses in the Wireless Communications Service (WCS) band at 2.3 GHz, and 22 licenses in the Educational Broadband Service (EBS) and Broadband Radio Service (BRS) band at 2.5 GHz. That's 206 licenses that cover a population area of 251 million people in the United States.

How much will you have to pay to be a Wireless spectrum baron? That remains to be seen. NextWave is reported to have spent around $500 million to build their license collection. What they'll be able to collect on their spectrum sale will depend on how valuable the big players happen to think these licensed frequencies really are. The 700 MHz feeding frenzy was at least in part due to the highly desirable propagation characteristics of radio waves in the UHF band compared to the higher frequency microwave bands. But who knows? Perhaps Google will take a second shot at getting into the wireless operator business.

My guess is that NextWave's portfolio will command a pretty penny. Wireless communications is still a growth story. Cellular carriers may have mature telephone services, but they're still low on the learning curve when it comes to deploying mobile television and high speed broadband services. How much broadband penetration has there been in the automobile market? How much mobile video service is there really? Not much. Not yet anyway.

Some of this spectrum might be snatched up to support backhaul service for existing tower sites. All the carriers are feeling the pinch of limited bandwidth as they try to upgrade their wireless data services to 3G and 4G capability. Bonded T1 lines will get them so far. After that they need fiber or wireless to support higher transmission speeds. WiMAX will only exacerbate that problem.

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