Deconstructing the Divide: Extending Broadband xDSL Services to the Periphery

Abstract

In the telecommunications industry, timing is everything. Nearly ten years ago the Telecommunications Act of 1966 (TA96) deregulated telephone services in the United States in order to spur competition at the local level. This attempt to establish facilitiesbased competition between incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) (for example, Baby Bells') and competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) has not been particularly successful. In part it was believed that deregulation would not only lower the cost of local telephone service, but would also dramatically enhance the quality of service offered by telecommunication providers (Loube, 2004). However, recent research suggests that the residential telephone rates in many markets have actually increased (Loube, 2004;Wimmer and Rosston, 2005) and that measures of service quality remain mixed (Clements, 2004). Fortunately, many analysts and policymakers were able to see beyond telephony. TA96 also provided directives for the deployment of advanced telecommunications capability (that is, broadband) able to handle voice, data, graphics, and video. (1) Specifically, section 706 encouraged each of the fifty US states to deploy these advanced capabilities in a reasonable and timely manner. In hindsight, the timing of the TA96 could not have been better. Today, the vast majority of the US population has access to telephony, data, and video services over a diverse array of physical infrastructures, including local telephone systems, municipal electric utilities, and cable and wireless networks (

The spatial distribution of broadband providers in the United States: 1999–2004

“…The maximum geographic range of xDSL service during the late 1990s and early 2000s was approximately 18,000 ft from the central office. This geographic constraint eventually changed with the advent of remote switches and the aggregation of customers/signals to a fiber connector linking the remote location to the central office (Grubesic & Horner, 2006). While this is only a single example, spatial scale, technology and the supply and demand-side determinants clearly impact the availability of broadband (Flamm & Chaudhuri, 2007;LaRose, Gregg, Strover, Straubhaar, & Carpenter, 2007;Prieger, 2003;Prieger & Lee, 2006;Youtie, Shapira, & Laudeman, 2007).…”

Who’s Superconnected and Who’s Not? Investment in the UK’s Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) Infrastructure

“…Firstly, this coefficient could have been impacted on by premises being densely located close to the exchange and therefore still achieving acceptable speeds over copper. Indeed, DSL coverage is highly geographically nuanced based on premises location (Grubesic & Horner, 2006;Grubesic, 2008;Grubesic et al 2010). Perhaps this is suggestive that in future research, it might be more appropriate to use the percentage of postcodes with NGA enabled instead of sync speed measurements as the dependent variable.…”

“…For example, we have seen advances made in the technologies used at the exchange, as fixed narrowband communications are upgraded to faster variants of broadband Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL, ADSL2+, VDSL, FTTP) or cable technologies. The quality of the connection obtainable over DSL is however highly variant depending particularly on the geographic distance of the premises from the nearest telephone exchange or street cabinet, and therefore how much copper the signal must travel over as a transmission medium (Grubesic & Horner, 2006). Over copper the broadband signal suffers attenuation as well as interference known as cross-talk, whereby both factors can lead to speed and reliability issues.…”

Online Networks and Subjective Well‐Being

“…What really matters is the so-called "local loop", i.e. the distance between final users' telephone line and the closest telecommunication exchange or "central office" (Grubesic and Horner, 2006;Grubesic, 2008;OECD, 2009;Falck et al, 2012;Czernich, 2012;Campante et al, 2013). For the supply of traditional voice services, the length of this distance does not affect the quality of the connection.…”