From DSL Prime:

G.fast will be at the Broadband World Forum in Amsterdam next week. Telekom Austria turned on a customer using Alcatel and Sckipio gear. Broadcom also has something. Europe has already committed to 40M lines of upgraded DSL. The growth is so strong Dell’oro says DSL chip sales went up last quarter. Take a look at the new site, http://gfastnews.com/. 300-700 megabit!

First G.fast line: 536 Megabits down – 536 Mbps and upload 116 Mbps.

Telekom Austria has linked up a company offering working and event space via G.fast. It’s only “A customer” but a powerful symbol. the first actual customer connected. TA doesn’t expect volume deployments until 2016, however. They see G.fast as an alternative to fiber for 400,000 apartments in Vienna alone. Many are older buildings where people are resistant to drilling for fiber. The French report a similar resistance to drilling. Gear is from Alcatel and Sckipio. more

More: G.fast:A Golden Opportunity For Copper-Based Broadband? Emerging DSL Technology Targets Aggregate 1-Gig Speeds

In the TV content world, it is getting expensive. The cable TV rate increases are contributing to cord cutting. Add in that there isn’t much on the 500 channels you pay for to get the 10 that you watch, and people are cutting the cable cost out of their lives.

Non-cable providers are shifting how they offer TV. Many smaller telcos offer Roku boxes. I haven’t seen a Netflix-Roku-Broadband bundle yet. Netflix has been added to a few providers as a channel. AT&T has a bundle of U-Verse broadband, HBO and Amazon Prime for $39. DirecTV let’s you buy NFL Sunday Ticket without the satellite dish.

“Lowell McAdam, the chief executive of Verizon Communications, recently signaled his company’s acceptance of a la carte by announcing the launch of an Internet-based TV service that would offer greater programming flexibility than any other pay-TV provider.” [Richmond Times-Dispatch] McAdam ruins it with his next sentence: “No one wants to have 300 channels on your wireless.” But then McAdam is CEO of VZ after being in charge of VZW. He is a cell-head, not a Bell-head. He thinks everything interesting is mobile. He does continue with: “Everyone understands it will go to a la carte. The question is what does that transition look like.”

One thing is do the content providers like Disney/ABC/ESPN, Fox/NewsCorp, TW/Turner allow OTT or a la carte? They have been bundling channels for a few years to insure that the crappy channels still make money. Without bundling, crappy channels may die. Considering that I mainly watch ABC, CBS, Fox, CW and USA and sports, I couldn’t careless if E!, MTV and the rest fo teh Reality TV channels died. As a society we would be better off.

One again a collection of news tidbits about CAF, Rural Broadband, UNE, Cloud, Google, WOW!

WideOpenWeb (WOW!) is a MSO that overbuilds. WOW admits that everyone offers the same bundle. In many cases, it comes down to service. If you have a culture of service – like Rackspace does – then it isn’t customer service, but customer experience that will pay dividends. WOW talked about that at an expo.

Nice points made by Schmidt in Europe about Google. Apparently, GOOG worries more about Amazon than Bing.

“The next Google won’t do what Google does, just as Google didn’t do what AOL did.” – Schmidt

Revealed: ISPs Already Violating Net Neutrality To Block Encryption And Make Everyone Less Safe Online. An interesting read.

I don’t know how many people know of TDS but it is an ILEC in the northern mid US. It also has a decent sized CLEC. TDS went on a buying spree for data center and cloud services. TDS is also the majority owner of US Cellular. TDS is a long standing COMPTEL member and has sat on its board for years. TDS launched cloud backup for $5.95 per month!!

Want Your Business to Thrive? Join a Peer Group! Mentioned here are Vistage, EO and HTG.

A LinkedIn discussion: “Is cloud becoming a commodity? We say no, not necessarily. We should be talking about how not all clouds are created equal. There are still large margins in IaaS.” No more than web hosting did. I think the messaging in almost anything telecom and IT is for the masses so gets so watered down that it all sounds the same. Plus marketing is constantly using buzz words to get SEO out of their press releases, which results in a release that says nothing. So they all sound the same. When they decide to start branding, it all won’t be a commodity.

Windstream spoke with Wireline Competition Bureau staff on October 6, 2014, to ask the FCC to reiterate that an ILEC carrier is not relieved of its obligation to provide DS1 or DS3 UNE loops when it transitions from TDM-based to IP-based technologies or avails itself of the copper retirement procedures. Windstream emphasized the continued importance of UNEs for competitive communications services used by entities with lower bandwidth needs, which include small businesses as well as smaller sites of multi-location business, government, and nonprofit entities. Windstream also provided data on its spending for DS1 connectivity used for customer last-mile access. [NECA]

John Deere makes the case for Rural Broadband.

AT&T has big data on rural wireline that it shared with the FCC for CAF (Connect America Fund) II project. Interesting read.

I read Nicholas Bates’ blog each morning along with Seth Godin’s. Every day. Today was about the Master Plan 7.

This isn’t how I normally blog — just a bunch of links, but lately there has been so many articles with at least one really smashing good point that I wanted to share them with my readers because the topics are scattered too. Like personal development above, motivation, PR and more.

What if PR stood for People and Relationships? is a slide deck e-book by Brian Solis and illustrated by Gapingvoid’s Hugh MacLeod. I use a lot Gapingvoid cartoons in my slide decks. I read Hugh’s daily cartoon and have read everyone of his books, including the Rackspace one.

Brian Solis has the 2014 State of Digital Transformation highlights on this LinkedIn blog post.

How a Small Change Can Boost Your Motivation and Performance

How To Persuade Anyone Of Anything In Ten Seconds by one of my favorite writers, James Altucher.

How To Create A Billion Dollar Monopoly According To Peter Thiel. Thiel basically is talking about a Blue Ocean Strategy. In other words, you need to create the category that you will win in, like AirBnB, Cirque du Soleil, Starbucks.

Peter Drucker said that a business has 2 purposes: marketing and innovation – both designed to create a customer
.

Long before a president was hired or the Veeps of different stripes or the CFO, COO, CIO, CTO or even the CMO, there was just the founder. Maybe the founder had a title like president, Managing Partner or CEO. Yet he did it all, including janitorial.

When you talk about a public company, it gets complicated. Too complicated, in fact, for me to address it here. But for non-public companies, the CEO’s primary job has two parts: product and sales/revenue.

When the CEO is working IN his business, he is primarily a technician. He or she is primarily making, shipping, doing product. For example, if he is the programmer, technician or installer.

When the CEO is working ON his business, he is planning strategy, marketing, product development.

The CEO sets the stage for the company culture including its values.  It all comes down to the Why – what the
company stands for. (Is your company great by choice?)

We are in the 4th quarter of 2014, set some time aside to plan for your 2015. A goal setting webinar is set for 12/8/14. REGISTER NOW!