Telecom Informer

    

by The Prophet

You wouldn't know that it's nearly spring here in the Pacific Northwest, given the sudden storm in Seattle that just dumped sleet all over the place.

I'm in town again, working at my old Central Office in between my journeys to far-flung corners of the globe.  It's an unusual role for me, but we're seeing a trend that is different than in years past: filthy CLECs are actually removing their equipment.  There isn't much demand for POTS dial tone anymore, and CLECs are having a lot of trouble competing on broadband too.  So, at least in some Central Offices, they are throwing in the towel.  May as well not pay for a collocation cage that isn't really used.

In 2008, we deployed ADSL2+, which was pretty successful in driving filthy CLECs out of the ADSL business.  It created so much interference in any cable with an ADSL pair that the CLECs didn't have a chance, especially because we used every trouble report as an opportunity to up-sell to one of our own services.  When we began the upgrade, we weren't actually required to provide any sort of line sharing or resale on our Fiber to the Node (FTTN) network.  Eventually, we were required to offer ADSL2+ to CLECs as a resale product, but by then the damage was already done.  A few CLECs like Sonic.net managed to hang around by becoming facilities-based, and FIOS also encroached into our service territory.  For the most part, though, broadband competition consolidated down to a duopoly: The Phone Company and The Cable Company.  Here in the U.S., we "enjoy" the fifth most expensive broadband in the developed world.  The lack of competition keeps it that way and, for my part, I like it just fine.  After all, people who work in industries with a lot of competition have to work really hard, and their pay tends to be a lot lower.  As the manager, in addition to my fat paycheck, I get to decide how long I go for lunch - and today, that was three hours!

What a contrast to my recent visit to Myanmar, a rapidly developing country in southeast Asia.  South of China, east of Bangladesh, and west of Thailand, Myanmar was run by the army for many years.  My first visit to Myanmar was in 2013.  I visited Kawthaung, opposite Ranong, Thailand, for a "visa run" while the military junta was still in charge (these days, Myanmar is a sort-of-democracy while a military junta rules Thailand - go figure).  I met a local freelance tour guide named - of all things - Saddam.  The guy was actually brilliant; he was only 20 years old and spoke seven different languages.  After offering without success to connect me with all of the usual delights visitors to Kawthaung indulge in (drugs, prostitutes, and gambling, to name a few), I managed to convince him that I was really interested in learning how people use phones.  So we went on a phone trip.  I learned that there was only one mobile phone provider: Myanma Posts and Telecommunications (MPT).  SIM cards cost $200 plus an outrageously expensive service plan.  Everyone in the local area used Thai networks instead, even though the signal from Thailand was weak and phones didn't work reliably indoors.  And I learned that if you wanted to use the Internet, there was only one place in town, inside the one hotel in town.  It operated at dial-up speed, was heavily censored, and cost over $5 per hour (a price that was astonishingly unaffordable to the local population).  Most people couldn't afford smartphones, Wi-Fi was nonexistent, and Kawthaung was one of the more disconnected places I'd visited (although not to the extremes of Antarctica and North Korea).

Fast-forward three years, and I landed in Yangon, the capital of Myanmar.  I emerged from my Dragonair business class cabin into a nicer airport than any I've visited in the United States.  There was free uncensored Wi-Fi.  Everything was bright and modern.  Well, I've seen this movie before, in Mumbai.  As soon as I left the airport, I expected it would be like India - smog-choked, traffic-clogged, dilapidated infrastructure, and cows on the road.  Nope.  No cows on the road, hardly any traffic at night, wide boulevards.  Don't get me wrong, it's a developing country, but Yangon was a massive contrast to the stray dogs and burning piles of trash I'd seen in Kawthaung a few years before.  Not far from the Sule Pagoda, the driver dropped me off at my guest house.

My first two orders of business in the morning were changing money and obtaining a SIM card.  I discovered to my annoyance that I had a problem with my money - I'd just grabbed a bunch of USD in $20 bills from the ATM in Seattle before I left.  Unfortunately, in Myanmar, money changers are like kidnappers: they want only brand new unmarked bills.  After several minutes of intense negotiations, they agreed to accept a few of my $20 bills, handing me a black plastic shopping bag full of local currency.

I then proceeded next door to the cell phone shop.  MPT, once the only mobile phone company in Myanmar, now has a lot of competition, and very competitive rates.  SIM cards cost $1.50, and I bought a 4 GB data plan for about $10, giving me access to a slow 3G network where I was able to attain maximum speeds of about 256 kbps (4G is deployed on a single tower in the country, near a popular mall in Yangon).  Fortunately, tethering is allowed.  I ended up needing to buy a lot more data packages because the availability of working W1-Fi throughout the country is very limited.  There is a huge amount of competition, but Internet access is very expensive and the Internet experience is very different for people in Myanmar than it is in most of the world.

Why is this?

Myanmar's telecommunications landscape is almost the exact opposite of the U.S.  Here in the U.S., we have limited local competition, but we're awash in international bandwidth for transit.  Every major Internet backbone in the world has a point of presence here, and usually more than that - they have fiber.  Since over half of the world's Internet traffic still originates, terminates, or transits through the U.S. (owing to the massive Internet data centers here hosting the majority of the world's most popular sites), telecommunications carriers need fast connectivity to our data centers.  If you're in an American data center, you will generally have access to ridiculously fast, cheap connectivity to anywhere in the world.  We just don't have that from home, where Internet service comes from a duopoly with little incentive to innovate.

Meanwhile, in Myanmar, Internet access is very slow and outrageously expensive because an international expansion project stalled for three years while the government changed in the middle of it.  Fearing the uncertainty of the business environment, an international cable consortium led by Singtel waited out the change in government before resuming the project (and in all fairness, it wasn't clear until recently who they could even have made a deal with).  There is only one small 100 Gbps undersea fiber-optic cable serving the entire country, and it's running at full capacity; the new project will bring an additional 300 Gpbs.  By comparison, Facebook provides 160 Gbps of uplink to every single rack in their data centers - and each data center has hundreds of racks!

The meager amount of bandwidth in Myanmar is not just bandwidth for Internet service, either.  It's the available bandwidth for Internet, phones, corporate private networks, and anything else you can think of that runs over an international fiber optic network.  More than 50 million people have to share it.  This means that people almost exclusively experience the Internet using mobile phones and apps.  It's so slow using a laptop, that it's practically unusable; you can pretty much only use email and slowly browse the mobile versions of some websites.  Remember night and weekend rates for phone calls?  Myanmar actually has these for Internet; it's cheaper to go online in the middle of the night when demand is less.

Although there is currently no competition for international bandwidth, there is a ton of local "last mile" competition.  Rather than only one mobile phone company operating in Myanmar, there are now three.  And while the service is slow, it's usable, bringing Internet service to people who have never had it before.  Internet companies are naturally doing everything they can to gain influence in the market.  Lacking a concept of "net neutrality," web services pay mobile phone carriers to "zero rate" access to their services.  For example, my MPT service offered a stripped-down version of Facebook for free (I couldn't see pictures or videos, only text).  Telenor, another provider, offers "zero rated" WhatsApp and Line access, and Ooredoo offers free Facebook and mobile games.

Competition isn't just limited to wireless carriers.  There is competition with wireline carriers too, both formal and informal.  I was surprised to discover the guest house I stayed in was equipped with fiber to the premises.  While the equipment has the capacity to deliver Internet service at 1 Gbps (along with VoIP phone and IPTV), the only affordable service is at 1 Mbps.  Another company, Myanmar Net, provides a hybrid wireline/wireless service.  They run fiber to wireless access points sitting on top of utility poles throughout Yangon, then sell access to their Wi-Fi hotspots.  There also appear to be informal ISPs in various neighborhoods.  I spent a lot of time checking out utility poles in Yangon, and frequently spotted haphazardly strung Category 6 Ethernet cable.  Given the very high cost of Internet access, it's not surprising that neighbors have found creative ways to share a single connection.

And with that, I'm back to removing DSLAMs, shutting off access cards, and taking the allergy medicine I obviously forgot.  A... aaa... dammit!  Don't you hate it when you almost sneeze and can't?

Stay safe out there, and I'll see you again in the summer.

References
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