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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.
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
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Domine Deus, creator coeli et terrae respice humilitatem nostram.
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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I think you blinked and missed it. In Amsterdam there were high-speed all-weather web stations clustered with pay phones all over town for the past couple years. Now most of them are gone. I don't think they got a lot of use - I saw lots of people staring at them and taking pictures, but not many actually sidling up to do some surfing.
Likewise the web kiosks that were placed in shopping malls all over Malaysia have vanished (no great loss, as half of them were displaying BSOD at any given moment).
Yet both countries have thriving internet cafe cultures. In Amsterdam they've now got what seems to be the largest internet café on earth, and it's been packed every time I've been there (and with its high speeds, ludicrously low charges, comfy workstations with nice LCD screens, and well-kept machines, I'm there quite often).
I just think people didn't want to do their webbing standing up. And a fair number of them wanted to be able to run telnet, IRC clients, etc., which most of the kiosks don't offer.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
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.
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.
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
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.