SBC Says Lightspeed Strategy Won't Choke Broadband Access By Fred Dawson
SBC Communications' Project Lightspeed service strategy has sparked considerable confusion and even alarm as to what the impact will be on users ' access to Internet content and applications, but company officials say nothing has really changed in terms of SBC's approach to best-effort broadband service.
"The pipe has gotten much bigger, which means the user experience over best-effort broadband will be better, not worse with Project Lightspeed," says Jeff Weber, vice president for product and strategy at the carrier. "But it's important to recognize the Internet is best effort today, and it will be tomorrow, which is different from the managed network we're creating with Project Lightspeed."
SBC has committed to delivering a suite of IP services, including best-effort broadband, IPTV and voice over IP, via next-generation DSL lines at an aggregate minimum rate of 25mbps to each household. Under this scenario, about 5 to 6mbps is slated to be available for best-effort Internet access, which "is what the cable companies are offering," Weber notes.
The 25mbps threshold will not be a barrier to SBC's ability to expand access bandwidth in response to market conditions, including demand for higher speed broadband access, notes Chris Rice, executive vice president for network technology. "We can bond two VDSL2 ports to deliver 50mbps at 5,000 feet (of local loop), which, at 3,000 feet, would increase to 80mbps," he says.
The question raised by consumer advocates and Web companies is whether SBC Edward Whitacre in comments reported by Business Week in early November was suggesting a new approach that would require portals, third-party VoIP providers and other players to pay for use of the carrier's network if they wanted to access its customers at the levels of quality and bandwidth they' ve been accustomed to in the best-effort broadband environment.
Whitacre, referring to Web entities, told Business Week "there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using.. For a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes free is nuts."
SBC officials said Whitacre was referring to the company's plans to charge content suppliers for the quality-of-service, bandwidth assurances, prioritization and other enhanced mechanisms available through the Lightspeed network that would provide users a better than best-effort experience. "It would be senseless for us to degrade the broadband experience for our users when we have competitors who are offering high bandwidth broadband services," Weber notes.
Left unanswered is the question of what allocation of significant network capacity for quality-assured services, including bandwidth-consuming IPTV, will mean to the amount of capacity that's left over for best-effort broadband. Today all the IP-based capacity for consumer services is used on a first-come, first-served basis by packets flowing through the pipe. If that capacity is squeezed by allocations of IP capacity to higher-quality services, best effort in the new environment could be significantly affected.
While SBC hasn't provided specific clarification on this issue, officials say the capacity expansion for IP traffic across metro backbones as well as through access lines ensures the best-effort capacity component will be unaffected. "We're spending a lot of money to provide the carrying capacity for IP services that will deliver a superior experience for our customers in all service categories, including best-effort broadband," Weber says.
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