Telwares in the media: Infoworld

America’s wireless broadband problem just got a lot worse - FCC veto of LightSquared’s plans for massive wireless network may have also put the brakes on widespread 4G deployment.

The issue of America’s crumbling infrastructure isn’t just about bridges, highways, and railroads. It’s also about the overburdened cellular networks that power our wireless broadband and have become an indispensable part of our lives and our economy.

“Everyone wants an aggressive broadband rollout and they want it quickly, but demand has accelerated to the point that innovative solutions are going to hit roadblocks like interference,” says Michael Voellinger, a vice president at the Telwares telecommunications consultancy. “We’re still dealing with an antiquated spectrum strategy, and the risk is there for some serious time and money to be wasted — which appears to be the case for LightSquared.”

For the full article:

http://www.infoworld.com/d/the-industry-standard/americas-wireless-broadband-problem-just-got-lot-worse-186552

Telwares mentioned in dark fiber article

From Bill Snyder’s colum:

From feast to famine: Dark fiber gets hard, and expensive, to find

Early in this about-to-close decade, fiber optic cable was going to be the answer to everyone’s bandwidth problems. Before the dot-com bubble burst, “everyone who owned a right of way, from railroads to telcos, got greedy and started laying cable,” says Glenn Ricart, an Internet pioneer who is now CEO of National LambdaRail. Not surprisingly, the result was a glut of dark (this is, unconnected and unlit) fiber that lasted for years.

But prices are soaring as the shortage disappears. And it could affect the connectivity choices open to enterprises.

Dark fiber can provide high-speed connectivity at a low cost. Instead of paying telcos to incrementally adjust the bandwidth on a physical link as needed, dark-fiber customers can simply light up the circuit with inexpensive 100Mbps or 1Gbps termination gear. What’s more, the use of dark fiber means the circuit can be used for other protocols as well, not just IP.

Until this year, prices were generally reasonable, but have doubled in the last 12 months as the inventory of dark fiber shrinks. By contrast, prices for lit fiber have gone up just 10 to 15 percent, says Ricart.

One reason for the big uptick in prices appears to be a surge of buying by Google and perhaps Amazon.com and Microsoft, which will need ever more bandwidth as they expand efforts in cloud computing. “Google has bought an awful lot of dark fiber from people like us,” Mark Lewis, director of service development at Interoute said at an industry conference in November. It’s not hard to see the connection between cloud computing and fiber: If services are located outside the enterprise, there’s a much greater need for connectivity. Cloud computing still plays a relatively small role in enterprise IT, but buying fiber now is an insurance policy against the day when capacity is needed.

Meanwhile, companies holding dark-fiber inventory have taken portions off the market to push prices even higher, Ricart says. That’s a tactic that wouldn’t work if there weren’t an imbalance between supply and demand in the first place.

Ultimately, the market should correct itself, says Michael Voellinger, executive vice president of IT and telecom consultancy Telwares. “The investment opportunity surrounding low-latency capacity solutions in the context of the cloud and bandwidth-intensive applications and content is enormous. The dollars will flow into fiber,” he says.

Voellinger expects the shortage to be short-lived. But it took about nine years for the glut to turn to a drought, so it’s not at all clear how long it will take for the balance to swing the other way.

The shortage is not uniform, notes Ricart. Enterprises in the largest markets can still find the capacity they need, but in second- and third-tier cities, there is a crunch. His advice: “If I were a CIO in a lower-tier market, I would think about locking in connectivity.”

Evolution, telecom and the Super Bowl

We don’t want to be too serious on Super Bowl Sunday – clearly today should focus on good chili, hero sandwiches, and enjoying a (hopefully) great game to end the season. That said, in the coming weeks, Telwares will be launching a series of documents centered on the CIO agenda in 2009. The Obama reform train is full steam ahead, impacting broadband, the FCC, and other critical telecom foundations. Below are some excerpts to provide you with the direction and flavor of the pending agenda.

“Change is a certainty in the business of telecommunications. Enabling concepts such as real time access and monitoring, on demand supply chains, global collaboration and enterprise presence have all driven the marketplace to demand new technologies and strategies. The speed at which business takes place, and the corresponding expectations, have drastically increased year over year – and it continues to accelerate. Telecommunications will continue to be the underlying fabric that supports all of this activity, and part of what makes it such a mission-critical priority for all businesses. It is the equivalent of a high rise building with a foundation of concrete or one made of Styrofoam, or perhaps the difference between a fiercely competitive market leader and a laggard missing its market expectations. Beyond the WAN, beyond wireless and moving past all of the industry noise is a very simple notion: telecommunications, in the enterprise, will be a differentiator and critical factor in determining success or failure. This applies tremendous weight to the decisions that are made today concerning technology and supplier / partners, and decisions about the future for each organization.

We would like to highlight some of the market dynamics in play. These dynamics also translate into opportunities for most organizations, either in terms of hard dollars or at least in terms of efficient ROI on the technology. But to properly frame the conversation we need to address a much larger subject first – and that subject is broadband and telecommunications globally.

In simplistic terms, our worlds (both business and personal) can and will have to change radically in the next ten years. At the risk of being dramatic, the viability of our global market dominance depends on it. Our economic power in the world arena has thrived on our willingness to make investments in core information technologies.”

Stay tuned for more…