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The State of Broadband
Bartbrn writes "Here's an article ripped from today's headlines! Though this sounds like one of those Reader's Digest articles like "Ten Ways to Make Herpes Work For You!", it's actually a pretty interesting nugget written by Stephen Heins, Director of Marketing (uh oh) for NorthNet LLC, concerning the current political state of broadband access in the USA." Although this guy has a vested interest in the process, his take on the situation looks pretty accurate as far as I can tell.
Though this sounds like one of those Reader's Digest articles like "Ten Ways to Make Herpes Work For You!"
wtf?
All this talk of highspeed internet connections, and I'm here, probably forever stuck with a 56k modem :(
I remember reading somewhere(5 years ago) that by 2000, that all payphones will be changed over to broadband web terminals, what happened to that? Is that another pipe dream to be filed away along with flying cars and space stations? -Even in the future, nothing works!
The broadband 'explosion' is crawling to a halt, and many providers are wondering why. It's quite simple, really - everyone has as much pornography as they want.
Pornography has always been the driving force behind Internet innovation, after all. It was for pornography that ever faster connections were demanded, and it was for pornography that the basics of online financial transactions were fleshed out.
However, there's simply a limit to the demand for pornography. To put it bluntly, everyone who uses the stuff is beating themselves sore, and can't possibly consume any more. Thus, the adoption of home broadband connections has dropped off severely.
I predict, though, that our wily friends the pornographers will find a way to stimulate demand. Perhaps they will lobby congress to allow advertisements for pornography on television. Perhaps they will hire a celebrity spokesperson, such as Bob Doll or Heidi Wall. Regardless, once the pornographers get back on their feet, broadband demand will ignite once more.
- qpt
--
Domine Deus, creator coeli et terrae respice humilitatem nostram.
I have no idea what this guy is whining about. If he can't do a better job than the existing "monopolies" (read: people with more market share than he has), it makes perfect sense that his competitors are leaving him in the dust.
And it even makes sense that they do a better job than he does. The concept of the "economy of scale" has been one of the most significant ideas to come out of the Industrial Revolution, and I'm amused that so many people consistently forget its implications. The idea is that the more you do something, the more cheaply you can do it. So, yes, of course Mr. Heins' competitors do a better job than he does, because they've got more of the job to do.
But it's sheer inanity to protest that customers should be forced to buy from minority access providers (read: Mr. Heins), as Mr. Heins so valiantly tries to do.
The free market is what it's all about. Nobody should be losing sight of that.
--
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Well, as one person (whose name I can't recall) said: "The entire body of computer science can be viewed as nothing more than the development of efficient methods for the storage, transportation, encoding, and rendering of pornography.".
It's easy to see how pr0n providers could cater to and increase demand for the broadband market: higher resolution and encoding for stills and motion picture files, high quality sound in motion picture files, Flash site navigation, etc. etc. etc. Figure, what, the average file size of a pr0n JPEG is 40-80KB? You could easily 10x that if you went for higher quality encoding and/or greater resolutions.
btw, Bob Dole is already a spokesperson for the sex industry. "Take viagra! It gave me a stiffy!"
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Does anyone else think of Hole when the term BroadBand is used?
Maybe it's just me....
Blaming guns for crime is like blaming keyboards for first posters. More Guns != More Crime
In the UK, BT is holding back ADSL because of marketing reasons -- ie. it can make more money from dial-up.
Meanwhile, I live in the urban part of town, high schools, businessess, high population .. no dsl .. no plans to put dsl in ... however this dosen't stop them from sending out flyers every 6 months to announce that dsl is avaliable in my area --then you call them and they tell you they aren't REALLY planning on putting dsl in, they just wnated to see how many people are interested to gague wether it'd be profitable ...
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
Apparently you can only get cable modems or ADSL if you live in one of two cities, have a sister called Sue, an even number of vowels in your name and order on a Thursday.
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Since this is a "new" services these problems are coming up this is why the FCC needs to nip this crap in the but now before it gets to much out of hand
Mr Cringley had go on this very subject last week.
Think of all the third world countries in the world and help them first.
I read of one third world country that had huge debts and its people have no hospitals to go when they are sick.
Its politicians are corrupt and can be bought and sold.
Why out in the remote province of California people have no electricity and constantly shoot each other to protect what little they have. Mobs rule in the city of Miami (pronouce My-am-ee).
On top of that the people of this third world country suffer Earthquakes, tornadoes, and Seinfeld reruns.
Don't be selfish, help that country first before you indulge yourself with broad band internet access.
I've recently seen some pretty big claims from CableTV providers talking about brining in 45+ Mbit access to subscriber home with an average thruput of over 20 Mbit. I belive MaximumPC Magazine even had an article on this. In my area we can only get ~4.5 Mbit cable, 1.5 Mbit SDSL, and 2.2 Mbit ADSL. What is available in other parts of the country? Anyone have experinece with *consumer* 20, 30, or even 40 Mbit broadband?
Example 1 - Traditional widget manufacturer: develops a product in R&D labs. Incurs high development costs, prototype units are each hand-built by engineers. Manufacturing process is developed (at additional expense), assembly-lines are set-up, workers hired and trained. Now the first widgets come off the assembly line and quality-control finds problems in 50% of the widgets. Reasearch determines that a crucial step was missed when developing the process, which then must be revised.
Example 2 - Plumber, a service provider: Fred, a plumber decides to open his own plumbing business. He is a trained professional with 10 years of experince. One day, he may work on a bathroom remodling job, the next he may be working on new construction. He initally invests in a computer to help with his bookeeping, a set of tools, and a truck. After a while, he has more work than he can do himself so he hires a helper. This enables him to work faster, but he would like to take on even more work, so he hires a few more teams of plumbers and helpers, but then needs to expand his administrative staff to cope with the new employees. He hires supervisors and foremen to direct the work.
Now, in the context of the first example, the unit cost of the first 100 units is quite high while the unit cost of the millionith unit is quite small since the development costs can be spread over many more units. This is the basis for the "economy of scale."
The impact of "economies of scale" is much less pronounced in the second example. Yes, the unit cost (to Fred, not the customer) of the first job is much higher than the 100th, because Fred has to recover the costs of the tools, the truck, and the computer. On the other hand, Fred is not able to serve customers more quickly (and thus reduce his cost) just by increasing the number of jobs completed. The increased overhead of the additonal administrative expenses will curb an increase in profits. Fred may, in fact, be better off as an independent contractor and limiting the number of jobs that he can do.
I am a network engineer, not a plumber nor a widget maker, so I'm sure that these examples are over-simplified. But I am equally certain that the telecominications is much more like the service provider and less like a widget maker. Yes, there are economies of scale early on: it will take much longer to recover the cost of a 100 port DSLAM with only 10 customers, but much less with 90. But guess what? The 101st customer will require that an additional DSLAM be purcased, space found in the Central Office (notoriously cramped places), cables run from the MDF (main distribution frame), etc. At the 201st customer, the same exercise must be repeated. At the 1001st customer, an extension to the Central Office must be built, power and HVAC installed, new distribution frames installed, and so on.
I have not even mentioned customer care, network engineering and operations, billing, and all of the other factors assoicated with rolling out a communications service.
Economies of scale just don't apply in the "big" telco world.
Has anyone stopped to think about some of the expenses that the world's broadband providers have? Overpriced Cisco routers and switches (running Cisco IOS), overpriced NT and Solaris servers, overpriced HP NetVue management software, etc. Notice a common thread? Closed source.
Folks, we are giving these people OUR money... and they're spending it foolishly. This the the age where a company's OpenSource Strategy is just as important as their Business Plan. Yet these companies act as though they were in the dark ages. Why do we stand for this? Perhaps we try not to care or don't even know about it. Costs, reliablity, and scalability are all suffering because of the choices our major providers have been making. It has to come to an end.
There once was a time when the town barber was also the town surgeon. There was also a time when closed source projects fit the bill. It's time to move on, it's time that these companies using OUR MONEY join the opensource community and begin to enjoy and pass along the benefits.
Speak out!
"Broadband" does not mean "Fast" or "High Speed", it simply has to do with the transmission mechanism.
Gigabit ethernet is not Broadband.
Cable is.
DSL isn't.
Fiber isn't, usually.
Let's start calling it 'high speed' and quit calling it 'broadband'.
"High-speed cable access is not a telecommunication service -- it is an information service"
What about convergence ? In my opinion, there is no difference between telecom and information. Can anyone defend his point by making the subtlety clearer ?
Recognize your own luxury when you see it.
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
Just one sample from the article:
"FACT:"Until spectrum caps and other regulatory barriers are eliminated, neither wireless nor satellite high-speed services can fulfill the vision of 3G wire-free access to the Internet.
Radio waves have a lot more use than just wireless net. TV, commercial radio, communications (for aviation, coast guard, ships, police, military, satellites), radio astronomy, HAMS, etc. This is just why there are spectrum caps.
Radio spectral ranges are a natural resource that could be used at least 100 times more than there is available bandwidth. So, everyone using radio bandwidth would like to have some more. Whining about that is hardly "news for nerds".
Should we all quit our jobs too? I am willing to bet that over 50% of Slashdot readers from America are either sysadmins or coders, making six figures. To us, broadband is PART of our life and job.
New infrastructure costs money and sows the seeds of its own discontent. Anytime a new infrastructure has been built (to my humble recolection) it seems it was done by a highly profitable monopoly which stole from the poor to give to the rich, and was then with much fanfare broken up by the government, or other sufficently powerful force. Literally. You had the finacial infrastructure crafted by J.P. Morgan (who laudably didn't really profiteer as he might have) bringing the U.S. to the stage of the finacial world. Rockafeller with real estate in New York. Carnagie(sp? with steel mills. Hell, there's even a game called railroad tycoon. But this goes all the way back to glory days of the British Empire, and has continued on to the present day with Ma' Bell, and Microsoft. I'm certainly not saying it is right, but without excessivly powerful monopolies bending countries (and sometimes the world) to a common vision the U.S. would not be what it is today. One might make a credible argument of the fact that we would be the poorer if not for them. Now I'm not saying that monopolies enrich the lives of those who suffer them. Clearly, that's a silly assertion. I agree that everyone who suffers monopolies and cartels are probably much worse off. But after the fact, when the powers that were are a relic left to rot in history books and carved into edifices, the lives of the people that use the infrastucture are enriched. If only by the fact that they were built with a common vision. If this particular pattern has stood the test of time, over a period where few things can claim the same, perhaps there is something to it.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
Well, actually, the DMT version of aDSL is broadband. It uses FDM with multiple carriers.
High speed internet (dsl, cable) isnt taking off becuase there is too much red tape 3rd party DSL providers have to go through in order to provide the service to the end user. Coupled with the fact that they have no clue how to market it, it makes for very slow roll-out to urban areas.
yo, Manhattan (NYC) is Verizon-only territory too and i have DSL (earthlink) but guess how long it took to get it? SEVEN GODDAMN MONTHS. Why? Verizon. You can bet your last dollar that had my DSL provider been Verizon itself that i'd not have had to wait more than maybe a month or so. But no...
One would think that at a mere 55 miles from Washington DC one might be able to get a pretty spiffy internet pipeline. But oh no.
Our local cable company a few years ago was planning to offer cable internet access. Then they, Media General, were baught out. For a while, our new cable company, Cox, offered limited one-way cable internet using a 64kBps cable modem downstream and a standard 28.8 modem for upstream. Latency times were so horrible that unless we had a huge download to do, we used our 56k line because it was faster for web access.
The cost of the service was $39.99 per month for the access, $10 per month for the modem, and $20 per month to the phone company for the extra dedicated phone line.
The more rural parts of the area who had Adelphia as their provider had 256/32kBps cable service at $40+10.
Then, the Cox switched ISPs from ISP Channel to RoadRunner. They had to upgrade all of the cabling to and in the neighborhoods to offer two-way cable access. There was a 2 month period where dial-up was it and the large number of users hopping on their 56ks again caused huge amounts of down-time on the few local dial ISPs. Finally we have our cable service back. It's cheaper now without the extra phone line, it's faster, but it's still slow, averaging 100kBps down and 20kBps up.
Verizon, aka Das Mann, has no plans to put DSL in the area despite numerous promises that they do, and flyers offering it.
.cig - what you do after winning a good flame war
There may be a good technical reason for rural customers having DSL and urban customers not having it.
DSL requires clean copper from end to end. In a lot of urban areas, the phone company ran out of pairs out of the central office (CO) a long time ago. They solved this by using a thing called a SLIC-96 (subscriber line interface card). What a SLIC does is take 96 phone calls, encoded them to digital at 64 kbit/sec, and puts that on 4 pairs of wire. So, that new housing development gets all its needs solved without running new wires.
However, a SLIC will KILL a 56k modem, and DSL is right out. It may be that your local area is just chock full of SLICs, and the telco would have to run a SPL (shit pot load) of pairs from the CO to enable DSL.
For rural customers, the scenario is different. The only traps waiting for them are loading coils. A run of wire has an intrinsic capacitance, that gradually rolls the signal response off. In order to keep the voice band of 0Hz->3kHz flat, the insert inductors (loading coils) to offset the capactiance in the voice band. However, this doesn't come without price: everything above 3kHz is toast.
However, telcos haven't been installing loading coils for a great many years, since they knew this sort of thing was coming. Especially in a case where they had to upgrade the rural plants, they pulled a bunch of pairs and have clean copper in the ground. (The single biggest cost in pulling wire/fiber is the hole in the ground: the cost of the cable itself is trivial).
The other thing that is happening is that in the urban areas, the ILOC (incumbant local operating company, a.k.a. baby bell, Verison in your case) must provide space, equipment, and service to any CLOC (competitive local operating company, a.k.a. Bubba's Barbeque Pit and Phone Company) at a loss.
Now, why would Verison upgrade their racks again...?
www.eFax.com are spammers
1) Repeal all laws granting legal monopolies to cable and telephone companies. The ex-monopolies will either have to resell access to ISPs or risk a competitor building new (and state-of-the-art) infrastructure in their territory. Works for me either way.
2) The Federal government is being greedy as hell with their auctioning of spectrum licenses. A "land rush" model would be more appropriate, with the first company to occupy spectrum (deploy service) registering their claim with the government (and meeting certain qualifications, ie, real service and not a white noise generator). Yes, this was Ayn Rand's idea. Cheaper for the companies than paying hundreds of $billions to Big Brother (guess how they'll have to pay that back?), and it makes it far more likely that we'll get 3G (and whatever succeeds it) soon and cheap. If companies can share spectrum, this model works even better.
Well, I would think that an OC-3 will allow for future growth. Unless they only want a few hundred customers (thus never making the payback on their DSLAM, rent, etc), or provide lousy service to their customers (oversubscription on a "trunk" line is a terrible thing), they should be putting in a DS-3 at a minimum. I'm sure Verizon wanted them to install an OC-x to allow for growth without having to go back every 6 months.
The problem with all the deregulation in the telecom act of 1996 is that it was sold to the American people as a way for grassroots orgs to create and run telephone and cable systems. The reality was that groups of companies wanted to resell phone service (not actually run new lines), and the major telecoms wanted long distance. No one really expected a bunch of "regular folks" to run a phone system (grassroots), but that was the image many people in congress had when they signed the bill. Of course, CLEC equipment still costs money, renting lines still costs money, and since you are running with 0 customers (and the ILEC has 96% of your potential customer base), you better be ready to loose money for years, perhaps decades.
The only real threat to ILECS at this time are cell phones. Cable companies (if they can get their s*** together and get through the mess AT&T made of subscriber valuations) have the best chances of anyone of really putting an end to the ILEC stranglehold. They just have to get their reliability problems under control, but that's easy.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
[Fact] It is far more likely that competitive DSL providers (DLECs), Competitive Local Exchange Companies (CLEC) and independent ISPs created the competitive environment for copper-based high-speed services, which motivated the Baby Bells to upgrade their systems.
With facts like these, who needs fiction ?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
It gets worse...
Here in the UK a common term of service is that you can only use ADSL or Cable for 24 hours in a day.
Fine you say...
That works if there are ONLY 24 hours in a day...wait till we start colonising other planets and 'permanently on' means permanently on for 24 hours then waiting another few hundred hours before you can surf again.
Go ahead prove me wrong, but they really do restrict to only accessing the service for 24 hours in a day.
Surfing on Mars will really stink compared to broadband in the US
He who has the gold, makes the rules and the ILEC's and cable companies are all buying politicians as needed to prevent any incursion into their monopolies. I used to co-own/operate and ISP and my experience to date says the broadband report is at best optimistic compared to reality. Read the AOL/TWC terms of service, would you want to work for someome who said we get 75% of your gross income to start plus these additional terms and fees? The only reason for the outrageous terms is to prevent anyone from being able to afford to even think about sharing access with AOL/TWC. I think I'll add aol.com and rr.com to my mail filters on my personal machine and just reject any email from them as well as verizon and bellatlantic. I have no desire to talk to a monopoly.
Actually ... it's not THAT bad. Comparing it to everything else around, the situation is bearable. It used to be a complete mess one year ago, where they were technically incompetent.
Now, it's almost good! The prices have decreased, and while there is lots of chaotic situations where the bandwidth and latency suffers terribly, it compares favorably to sucky leased lines providers (ever tried Easynet? don't).
There is a reason for it. They have (close to) no competition ... now. But they know it's coming and have to put a lot of effort into it.
I had to relinquish my DSL connection as I am moving, and trust me, I understand how good it was, now.
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It's called "The Last Mile Problem". For whatever reason (and I suspect Greed), high speed data can not reach the people willing to pay for it and buy the services it can provide. The reason many .Dot Coms went belly up is not that they had bad ideas, but bad timing. To sell their wares, they needed wide band access to their consumers and that wasn't there.
Until it is, the promise of Internet and the impact it will have on the lives of the average person remain Vaporware.
Tomorrow is Open.
but n/a in my instance... Verizon had nothing so much to do but to certify my copper pair as clean. there was no visit to my abode ('pre-war' co-op apartment building) nor any wiring or re-wiring to be done, not in my vicinity and as i stated previously we are talking New York City, Borough of Manhattan. (center of the known world, heh heh, all your media giant are belong to us)
all your 238 country are belong to USA
The current state of broadband access in the US seems to be isolated. Most of the problems and monopolies seem to be only where people are. I bring the example of much of the US. If you exclude population epicenters such as Chicago, Madison and Milwaukee competition is well kept. For local telephone services it isn't just a baby bell it is GTE, Ameritech and CentryTel. All offering a broadband package in the area, even in remote rural areas. Cable is service has merging coverage in most of the Midwest with most Cable service provided by Charter Communications. While I'm not going to get into details of broadband. People crying wolf about telecommunications should understand some things. The Telecommunication Act of 1996 has worked similar to how it was intended. Broadband prices will eventually fan out. For example 512K Cable here is 39.95 a month, the exact same price per month for service. This is more of a poorly written rant. Sorry for wasting your time.
So instead of buying any more they've decided to take their ball and go home, so to speak. But when Heins says that "independent ISP owners and operators are willing to pay fair-market rates" it does make me wonder what he means by fair-market rates .
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
Multimegabit consumer internet access cannot work with the current "all the packets you can eat" fixed pricing that most ISPs (but strangely not colocation facilities) have.
The upstream capacity cannot be purchased for $79.95/month in 20Mbit increments, more like $1000/mo for 1.5Mbit incrememnts, plus carrier charges. (I'm betting that there's some price break to go to DS-3, and again some break to OC-3, but the equipment and circuits are more expensive).
ISPs of such high-speed service would need to charge you by the packet or byte. This would enable "hogs" who necessitate upstream connectivity purchases to pay for the service they're using. You can always gamble that most people will sit idle most of them time (my home service averages 58 bytes/sec, with full-time DNS/Web/Mail service), but it doesn't take too many people @20Mbit/sec running servers or deciding to download all the ISOs they can find to choke off an OC-3.
Moderate down
What do you mean? You've never seen AT&T's Public Phone 2000 in an airport or train station? Talk about a high-tech marvel. They were so far ahead technologically, they didn't even have to wait till 2000 to build the thing! Now if only someone knew how it worked. And why it has that screen...
Want to know about a situation where living in a proclaimed "rural area" really bites?
/shit/ for broadband. Absolutely nothing. Adelphia cable is oversubscribed and not accepting new customers, and is unidirectional anyway. And then despite being 9000 feet from the CO, I ran into fiber on the loop when I tried to get DSL. Oops. And of course satellite is right out.
Welcome to Loudoun County, Virginia. I moved out here to live close to my place of employment. In the past few years Loudoun was sly enough to lure all these high tech companies out here. Let's look for a second at which companies have buildings and/or HQ in this general region:
AOL
WorldCom
PSINet
EDS
AT&T
Oracle
Winstar
...probably a lot more that I've missed.
Looks neat, right? Until you move out here and realize that there is
Granted, this isn't ma bell's fault so much, as it is the county for luring in the high-tech companies w/o appropriate infrastructure. But there's something bitterly ironic about the fact that I live 4 miles from the largest ISP in the US and can't get broadband. They call this area "silicon valley of the east". Well, if this is an oasis, I'm in the fucking desert.
Here in central PA there are some enthusiasts that are trying to break up Verizon (former Bell Atlantic, former Ma Bell). I'm not sure of who, or the specifics, but Verizon is airing a radio ad campaign against (of course) the break-up. Basically, they are saying that it will cost 1 billion dollars, raise our phone bills, cut thousands of jobs, etc. Since I don't know much about this, I'm asking for any thoughts on why a break-up would be a bad (or good) thing. I always thought that it would encourage competition, and therefore, be a good thing.
I've been pushing my local cable (AT&T) and phone (Ameritech) offices to bring some form of broadband to my area. What have I gotten? Several emails back stating that 'there is no more need for broadband in your area'. All this while I watch a city less than an hour away go from 384K DSL, to 512K, and now up to 1.5M DSL...all within the past year! Seems to me the companies could solve some of this broadband divide problem by expanding their coverage instead of upgrading what they do have.
SmashTech - No smashing of tech involved
I'm also a Verizon customer and I live right in the middle of nowhere and get 0 for service. My understanding of the GTE-Bell Atlantic merger is that Verizon has to offer all of its services in all of its markets by 2004. I'm not exactly sure about the date, and they will undoubtedly be granted an extension anyway. But look on the bright side... in 3-10 years I'll have something more than my POTS line! Yippee!
"I thought a few telecoms might go bankrupt, and maybe 3G would take longer to roll out than previously expected. It was all a big joke -- it never once crossed my mind that 3G might never even happen. "
There's always sufficient, but not always at the right place nor for the right folks.
Administrative, marketing, legal, and other general office costs make much less of a price impact when serving 150,000 customers than it does for 1500 customers.
Does "economy of scale" matter as much for the service industry as it does for manufacturing? No.
Does it matter? Yes. No question about it.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
1) Last week usen started offering 100mbit service for $50 a month. Yes, that's not a mis-print. 100megabits. That's 66 T1 lines for $50 a month. It's not available everywhere but they do have a roll out plan. It's supposed to be available in all cities in Tokyo (including mine) by October this year. Just FYI this is fiber optic service. They've been laying the cables for a while.
2) NTT (Japan's version of AT&T and still a virtual monopoly) is offering 1.5mbit DSL for $60 a month throughout the country. They have some competition from 2 or 3 other DSL providers but the other providers have to work through them.
3)The power companies were recently deregulated allowing them to sell more than just power. Their first product is 3mbit service through your powerline. Maybe California power companies should offer this service to help their financial problems.
Japan *was* behind the U.S. but it looks like they are quickly going to pass the U.S. in terms of being *wired*
from article : [Fact] AOL Time Warner Inc. CEO Gerald Levin recently stated that the basic cost of providing high-speed cable services was about $12 a month, so the company could tap into a potent new revenue stream by selling wholesale access to independent ISPs like EarthLink, which has agreed to pay a wholesale rate of $24 to $27 per subscriber per month.
[Fact] Independent ISP owners and operators are willing to pay fair-market rates. The problem is that access has not been available at "any" rate. Only AOL Time Warner's extortionate rates have been announced to date.
So lets snap together some DNS', routers and some basic security and let it rip sometime this year right? I mean, to quote Winston Zedmore, "We have the Tools, we have the TALENT!" do we not?
interested parties can email me.
I won't be happy til I have 20Gbs optical fiber into my home
Through the perception of illusion, we experience reality.
I think MediaOne has now started to offer local phone service in my area, with lots of features for a fraction of Quest's - which would be great except that I'm exchanging a monopoly that is being forced to compete for a monopoly that doesn't have to. I want fair competition already!
Another problem is when one company owns both the cable and phone provider in an area and offers either DSL or Cable but not both. For instance AT&T and MediaOne have the same owner, and they only offer one or the other for DSL and Cable services in most areas. I saw a report on this in the Star Tribune, and their justification was that they didn't want to compete with themselves.
Maybe I'm just upset that most of the monopolies offer inferior service speeds and no static IPs for higher rates than independent companies for residential service. I also think DSL advertising from the telecos is deceptive - $20 for high speed access... let us not mention that you need an ISP that is ~$20 and probably $10 more for high speed access.
I haven't actually looked into the costs since last year because I've been under a year contract with PhoenixDSL that has been transferred to Telocity (with the bankrupt Northpoint providing the line). I'll be shopping around again soon - I like having a choice - unlike cable!
I live in a rural area but I think this is what has happened to me. Every day at around 9-10 am and 530pm, the line quality degrades so much that my external USRobotics modem can't keep the signal and disconnects. As a home worker this pisses me off. Thankfully the 3com PCMCIA card (it is v.90) in my 486 laptop behaves a bit better and connects at a less optimistic speed (~31200) and stays conencted all day.
Unfortunately broadband is out of the question. BellSouth want to get everywhere wired up with ADSL by 2002 (they claim) but currently have no plans to put it in here. Intermedia actually came in a year or two ago and took out all the internet capable cable equpt and swapped it with another county
I can't even get ISDN reasonably. Bellsouth's areaplus plan which makes any of the POPs local is not available with ISDN. The only ISP which has a local pop (valley.net) has not returned any of my numerous calls or e-mails.
Sprint ion isn't here yet (big surprise). I think it's going to have to be Starband but I'm half suspecting that the satellite's going to have an imperfection is its dish so that we can't get it here.
Rich
"I have not even mentioned customer care, network engineering and operations, billing, and all of the other factors assoicated with rolling out a communications service."
From what I hear on a daily basis, Southwestern Bell DSL neatly sidesteps the customer care issue by just not providing any.
If third world countries weren't broke, where would your new pair of Nike's come from? Get real. Just as Mr. Cringely's article pointed out the fact that ILEC's make it hard for CLEC's to make money so they get to keep their monopoly, the same holds true for the US vs. third world countries. If we helped them enough, perhaps they'd become developing countries and eventually compete with us. Bye bye cheap sweatshop labor. Hello higher prices. I think it's time for the US to become a nationalist country. Fuck the world and mind our own business. Close the borders.
I think you're asking quite a bit out of the government in this case. Do you actually expect them to be able to resolve disputes within the bandwidth? Do you expect them to troubleshoot multi-vendor conflicts and determine who came first and who caused the problem? How do you expect for these kinds of issues to be resolved once your land rush occurrs? In the courts? Six-guns at ten paces would probably work better. Comparisons of phone companies and other types of media always make me smile. There is something critically different about phone companies that even cable companies don't achieve. Local telco companies have a significant burden placed upon them in the form of legal responsibility (enforced from mid last century). What this has caused is a reliance upon the telephone (and local telephones) to be our preferred method of communication. Cable has no such legal burden. There are times and places for controlled monopolies to be granted. Stating that ALL monopolies for ALL cable and ALL telephone companies be revoked is extreme and misses the point. Of course competition is good, in some cases. The problems with competition in mission-critical systems where the levels of reliability are "assumed" and not shopped for opens a significant can-of-worms. Case in point, I had dial-up ISP for years. Occasional busies, but I could always try a few different #'s. Also, I sometimes had additional dial-ups (school, work, etc.) that could always be used. I was NEVER off the net when I wanted to be, but I didn't really want to be there that much. Now, not only do I WANT to be on the net, but I NEED to. Due to my work, I now need telco levels of reliability from my network access, however, I also want (and need to some level) the speed of broadband. At this point I bring in the COMPETITION HEAVY past year of broadband providers (and I'll focus on DSL because that's the most competitive area currently). These providers dropped price and added bonuses to try and grab customers. Invariably, they would under-spend for capacity because of their attempts to compete. This led to denial of service, slow response to problems, poor quality of speed, etc. All BECAUSE of competition. The uber-competitive person would say this is great and viva-la-free-market. However, what is missing here is that for over a year now many of us have been forced to endure sub-standard providers as well as stock-holders and investors losing money on failed providers. In the case of certain areas it is EXPECTED that some level of service be provided. Water, Power (hah!), etc. are necessities. It is arguable that the phone is a necessity and I would back that argument in today's society. It is becoming so that the Internet will be one such necessity in the future and the government is being careful about letting it get out of hand. One way they are doing this is by placing broad-band restrictions to increase the levels of service. When dealing w/ products that have become "necessities" it is at least justifiable (if not required) for the government to put some form of regulation on the industy. If this is via managed competition, limited monopolies, or whatever, then in this kind of market it appears appropriate. Viewing this situation from this kind of perspective may lead to understanding for the government's actions. Or not... :)
Your analogy breaks down in at least one regard. Once Fred the plumber gets paid for a job, that's it. Telco's keep raking it in every month.
Computers are cheap because more people want them, therefore they can be mass produced, bringing the cost of manufacture down. However, broadband is not a manufacturable good the way a PC is; it is an infrastructure, and requires a multimillion (or multibillion) dollar investment up front. Think of it this way: fifteen years ago cellular phones were expensive as hell. Why? Because while you and I and our buddy Bill might want cellular access, very few other people wanted it. It was expensive to erect towers for a cellular network, so the companies limited it to big cities where there were enough potential users for the company to recoup their investment. Small-town people eventually saw the big city users and demanded the way-cool city slicker cell phone service. By this time, the companies not only had the consumers' demand as incentive to move into smaller areas, but they had years' experience in creating and maintaining the infrastructure, so they could roll out the product cheaper. This let them invest in even smaller markets, since they had less to lose. We now have fairly ubiquitous cell phone access in the U.S., though it took some time. I assume that the same will be said of broadband in ten years ("man, this sucks: I live out in the sticks and my ISP only gives me 384k.")
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Guess what? The only kind of broadband access I can get is by satellite! I might as well be living in Borneo, except I suspect that some individuals there have better access than I do.
The local cable company advertises its broadband access on a special channel 24/7. But when you log on to actually order the broadband service, they tell you that access for cable modems is only available in some areas, and guess what, being a few miles south of Washington, DC doesn't qualify.
Similarly, if you call up a DSL provider they will eventually tell you that you must be within 2.5 miles of a central exchange, and I am not that close.
So to get broadband I would need to buy a satellite dish and pay a service fee about double what I would pay for DSL or cable.
As Lenin would say, What is to be done? I say take away the cable and phone company monopolies. What good are monopolies that are literally five years behind the times in what is supposedly the most advanced country (well, one of them, anyway) on earth?
Instead of investigating President Clinton, Congress should be investigating my lack of broadband access!
Marjo Wycam, Master of the Programming Arts
On the other hand, my sister uses her HP computer for (a) e-mail, (b) web surfing, (c) AOL instant messanger, and (d) mp3s. She has no idea how to use wsftp, let alone ftp from a command line. Her computer-oriented friend taught her how to telnet to her school's mail, but other than that, she's not particularly l33t.
If she got broadband, it would only affect one of her four main computer activities (mp3 downloading). And since she usually only downloads the latest MTV pop single rather than entire albums, the speed doesn't matter much. The promised "killer app" of streaming video doesn't matter to her; why watch a smallish window on your computer when you can watch TV? Unlike us geeks, to her a computer is only a tool to accomplish a small subset of things, things that can be accomplished without DSL or cable.
For cable and DSL to thrive, the companies have to market it towards people like my sister. In fact, the best ad I saw for broadband was for Media One's cable service a few years ago (this was before they merged with ATT and became Comcast): a young lady on some shopping web site. She picks up the phone and calls her mom. They chat for awhile. Then the woman asks, "mom, I'm on [URL] looking at sweaters. Which do you think will look best on me?" Her mom (offscreen) surfs to the site and renders an opinion. "Thanks, mom. Love you, goodbye."
The important thing wasn't speed or "always on"; it was the ability to talk on the phone while you surf the web. And to do that, you could get a second phone line ($20) and a dial-up ISP ($20) or broadband ($39.95). And, by the way, broadband is faster, always on, etc.
So, to market this whiz-bang-ain't-it'cool technology, we geeks need to better understand Joe and Nancy Consumer better. Once we do this, we create demand for broadband, which will make it profitable for companies, causing it to spread.
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If you were on a SLIC, you'd be on it 24/7. It sounds more like to me you have crosstalk from other lines, and they happen at that time of the day. You might try disconnecting the modem, picking up the phone, dialing a single digit to quiet the dial tone, and listening. See if you can hear any voice on the line (it will be pretty faint). If so, call the phone company and complain about "hearing other people on my line." DO NOT MENTION THE WORDS MODEM OR HOME WORKER If you say those words the phone company will try to nail you with a business line charge. Say you hear other people talking on the line and maybe they will re-route your pairs away from the problem. Or maybe they will make it worse....
www.eFax.com are spammers
All very true, but for people like me living "in the country" within walking distance of a city that has DSL, there's another problem. Distance. Well, that and stupidity.
The idiots at Bell put the CO 15 km away (even though the fiber going to the CO runs 5 km away from my house... Don't even get me started on the neighbouring school that has a 27 km Bell fiber run for high speed internet).
So why can't I get DSL?
- There's too few people on this exchange (I checked the phone book, yes, an entire 4 pages dedicated to my exchange) to make money hand-over-fist as it is.
- To get DSL going that far Bell needs to install a remote DSLAM. Hahaha, yeah right, install _more_ equipment? For just a few thousand users... I mean, it would take an entire *YEAR* to get that money back!
- Their crap is so freakin' out of date they can't even offer me a 56k centrex leased line for their exhorbitant price of $75 a month! Not to mention the fact that Touch-Tone service still costs an extra $2 a month here, in the year 2001.
- They're morons. The lines they laid were so woefully few that most people round here can't get more than one line. If they installed DSL they can have my second line [along with God knows how many others] back in a heartbeat. Not to mention that most houses here are in the $200k+ range (that's about 25% more value than most city houses round here) so subscribership will likely be higher.
Just my two cents. I'd better stop reading this thread - my anti-Bell blood pressure meter is going through the roof again!
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
>I think it's going to have to be Starband but I'm half suspecting that the satellite's going to have an imperfection is its dish so that we can't get it here.
Welcome to the Rural "Cone of Silence". It's completely amazing... within seconds of passing the city limits sign cell phones stop working, my Blackberry pager goes offline, and Satellite reception goes down 40%. And I'm on the top of a 200 ft. hill -- you can see for miles round here!
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
FACT: "It is far more likely that..."
A more definitive statement I have never heard.
FACT: "Anecdotal evidence strongly suggests..."
Are you KIDDING me!?!
FACT: "Analysts report that..."
Oh, wow, it MUST be true...
Some parts of this may be true but this article sure sounds more like a bitter failing small ISP exec than anywhere near objective 'state of broadband'...
Economies of scale are only supposed to work across a defined range anyway so in your example , sure the economies may not be in hardware. But if the same billing system can handle 300,000 accounts a month that's better than 50,000.
And then you sell them more stuff. And make even more money.
If you people would just do as you're told, everything would be OK.
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To add insult to injury, today I received my cable modem software and serial number. Thanks, NTL! Looks like the only broadband I'm having is from the base of my coffee mug on this shiny new coaster...
How many more years am I going to have to wait around until people start waking up to the real issue of consumer broadband? That issue is that asynchronous connections are going to turn the Internet into a completely passive medium. You can watch, but you can't create. Sure, with a cable modem or DSL I can watch a TV show streaming across the web just fine. But I'd never be able to stream my own, not even to an intermediate server which would handle the larger scale distribution. If you think its paranoia that I think we're being set up to watch the Internet turn into TV, go ask any broadband provider why they cap upload speeds. The reason isn't because THEY have a capped upstream (they buy synchronous bandwidth) or even anything like "we're afraid people will use it for illegal stuff and we'll get blamed", the reason is because if you are serving content, you must be making money right? People wouldn't put up personal web page with multimedia conent and want to run the server from their house unless they were just raking in the cash, right? That's what they're doing. Either charge for it, or don't serve. The Internet that was built on personal web pages and experimentation is dying. Don't say I never warned you.