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.

Comments

one of many ways Verizion frustrates customers ...

[OmegaDan]

I live in a verizion only town ... a so. cal town of about 100,000 people ... dsl has been avaliable here for years, if you live in the rural part of the valley! ... Thats right, they put dsl into the rural / agricultural portion of town ... my buddy who has a 10 acre farm has dsl, the budweiser clidesdales (sp?) live a few miles down the street from him and THEY could get dsl ...

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 ...

Re:pleh

[raju1kabir]

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?

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.