Slashdot Mirror
The Hard Questions in Broadband Policy
Andy Oram has written a nice article looking at broadband internet access and the governmental policies that need to be in place if fast, symmetric internet access is to be widely available and affordable in the U.S. The U.S. still doesn't have fiber to the home, and if the last couple of competing DSL providers go under, we may never get it. In the meantime, the U.S. government is approaching the problem by eliminating regulations on the Baby Bells, which is sort of like combating street crime by taking police officers off the street.
You obviously havn't been paying attention. LEO satellites are expensive to maintain, and you either have to have a tracking dish or (more likely) and omnidirectional antenna. Tracking dishes are expensive and prone to failure, omnidirectional antennas pick up lots of interference and tend to be unreliable. Finally, just how many farmers in the middle of nowhere are there? How many of them want broadband? How many will be willing to pay a LOT for the access? I can think of one other company in recent times who had this business model: Iridium.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
I don't think the added expense is worth it. As it is, the ILECs don't even want to upgrade their COs, let alone upgrade the "last mile". I'm 18,000+ ft from my CO, and I'm 10 miles outside Boston(!). Verizon out here is losing more DSL customers than it's signing up because of the low quality lines, and Verizon hasn't done a thing to improve the quality. Fortunately there's cable modem service that actually comes to my house and gets me a decent rate.
Running fiber to my house brings me nothing but a higher phone bill. Maybe faster service, but I've had the cable modem for three years and have been quite satisfied with the performance.
I mean, really. What good is having 1GB to your house when you're all going through a 100Mbps box in the CO, which goes to a 45Mb backbone in another location? I can now share at 1GB to my neighbor? I can pay $8 to watch a movie? I can get phone service that has lower QOS than cell or POTS?
Building a network of fiber to the curb is not really different in principle than building the curb itself and the road that it is part of. It's just another part of our infrastructure. Like roads, water, sewer, electrical power and phone service, high speed internet access is infrastructure. Providing infrastructure is a legitimate function of governmnet. With electric power, natural gas and phone systems, the gov't has more of a regulatory role with a company acting as a regulated monopoly. The DOTs of each state contract out work on highways. That's the way infrastructure has been built. It ain't going to happen by private companies, out of the goodness of their hearts building roads. They never do. They ain't going to run fiber to the curb either. There ain't nothing liberal or conservative about this. It's strictly pragmatic. While many folks want to cuss the gov't and regulated monopolies, nobody has a better solution. California has veered away from this type of approach and they are paying the price. That's not the only reason they are in trouble but it's a major part of the reason. What passes for deregulation these days is really a thinly veiled form of corporate welfare. There are no technical reasons we can't have fiber to the curb right now, only political ones. It all comes back to sticking with what has worked before. If you want new infrastructure, stick with implementation approaches which have worked in the past.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
The problem with broadband as currently implemented is that it's too centralized--and problems with availability of service in the event of downtime are just a small part of it. Because it's so centralized, it's open to heavy governmental regulation. And everyone suffers.
Under the 10th amendment of the US Constitution, broadband cannot be regulated by Congress unless it is part of interstate commerce as defined by Article I. If a broadband network were entirely located within a single state, then Congress couldn't reach it.
But state regulations are also a problem. The idea that states are somehow a better protector of civil liberties because they answer more to their constituencies is lunatic: they're just as prone to tyranny as any other legislative government, and the lording minorities can be even smaller and more extreme. No, states can't be trusted to regulate broadband either, because then you'll have rabid right-wing states like Utah and Vermont implementing censorware at the legislative level, and you'll have rabid left-wing states like Massachusetts and Michigan stumbling over each other to mandate subsidized access for the poor.
What I propose is that we should go back to the old pre-ISP model where each user was responsible for his own access. We got it to work back then even though the technology was more primitive and almost prohibitively expensive. If each user is his own master, then he can decide whether to be tyrannical in his little fiefdom (for example, by exercising proper parenting techniques and restricting his children's internet access) or free and easy. There aren't any technological impediments, so let's start today.
You tell him! After all, we're just a bunch of hicks out here who wouldn't know what to do with a broadband connection, right?
So, your solution is to leave rural people off the Internet all together, right?
They are. Well, at least in Ohio our telecommunications companies are governed by our Public Utilities Commission. They are (or were) government subsidized monopolies that have the very lucrative position of having a foothold in your door. They should definitely be regulated and prices should be controlled lest we get into these situations of merger-mania that we've seen since the 1996 telecommunications act where everyone and their brother has been merging. Do you really want to get your phone, cable, Internet, cell phone, etc. service from AT&T-AOL-TimeWarner-Viacom-Worldcom-Sprint? How about we just shorten the company name to AT&T for short and we'll be back to 1984 all over again. How really f***ing ironic that would be now.
According to this: http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/03/27/california.power. 02/index.html, the state is already paying $40 million per day after the power companies were cut off. So, Californians are already paying higher electricity bills, but it's not appearing on the bill itself. Much better to charge it to the electricity bill than taxes... that way people have a choice and an element of control.
I think he was probably referring to the failures of a lot of DSL, and other internet providers, rather than the fail of content providers and other dot coms.
"Flamebait" would have been a better tag (not that I'm easily baited ;-)...
seriously, when did he say that? he was referring to big expensive cutting edge connectivity technology not access in general.
----
Just one man beneath the sky,
The powers that be really do not want the average person having large upstream capacity. It gets in the way of their "franchise" to provide broadband media.
Dog is my co-pilot.
That's is a braindead assessment. They aren't trying to "eliminate" regulations but rather remove those that prevent some of the baby bells from providing a service that they are CAPABLE of, but are currently not ALLOWED to because some laws that were instituted with the stated intent of providing for more "fair" competition. I'd be curious how much money was involved in that decision...
What it's done is to unfortunately, it's given a bunch of companies with shitty speculative business plans the opportunity to have a go at it, while disqualifying other companies from competing at all (at least in certain areas).
The solution to this problem is very simple for cities. The local government, either the city or the county, needs to own the physical infrastructure. They need to run the wires or fibers into every building in town, and run the other end into large, empty, central offices. Then the building owner or whoever is at the end of the wire gets to decide what to hook up to his wire in the central office. If he chooses an Internet service provider, that ISP has to lease space in the publically owned central office and install its own equipment. There would not be any exclusion of anyone from central office space, as long as they could pay the rent and someone wanted their services.
What an excellent attitude. Cynicism has been the driving force behind every positive social change, and this post has plenty of it.
Big business, in an ideal economy, has to know what's best for you, in order to suceed. You know why? Because in an ideal economy people like you don't just tolerate being pushed around by big business. If a company rips you off, you refuse to do business with them.
Society has become incredibly apathetic in this regard. Instead of taking a stand when a company tries to take advantage of you, everyone just likes to whine and run crying to the government, expecting them to make it all better.
Would you really prefer the government take advantage of you, instead? What makes you think that they're any more capable of being fair, when we have plenty of examples of corruption in government and of politicians doing things that certainly aren't in the best interests of those being represented.
Sure, you might say that we give our elected officials their power, and we can just as easily take it away. What you fail to realize is that you can take the power away from the big, abusive corporations just as easily. Just stop expecting the government to do it for you.
Only on slashdot can a posting be rated "Score -1, Insightful".
Thanks praedor, nice coverage of reasons for regulation of industry, if a little sarcastic.
I would like to note that moderation is the key to good regulation as it is the key to being successful at most things. There is a delicate balance between overregulation and do-as-thou-wilt, right-wing and left-wing, nationalism and treason, etc, etc, that must be struck to gain the maximum benefit for all involved. I always take the views of extremists on either side of a debate with a grain of salt.
I'm in Calgary, AB, and we have the option of cable (Shaw Cable -- pretty damn good) or DSL for internet (well everyone except me has the DSL option--I'm too far from the telco).
Pretty much every Canadian city with >50000 population, and some with less, have broadband internet. I'd say it's going pretty good here.
The baby bells don't want to spend money to make more bandwidth available cheap to the average user. These are the same companies that have made it difficult or impossible to get ISDN service so they wouldn't cut into their lucrative 56k leased-line business.
Frog legs are actually quite good. I prefer them deep-fried. There's not a whole lot of meat on an individual frog leg. I'm guessing its roughly parallel to a chicken wing in overall meat quantity. A standard bucket (~2 US gallons) would probably provide enough meat for about 2-3 people to eat a meal.
I recently at some excellent frog legs in a restaurant in Houma, Louisiana on West Main Street. For the uninitiated, they really do taste something like white-meat chicken.
You've underscored the basic problem with the cable-delivered broadband mediums. The CATV companies really do view it as a two-way medium to the extent that they view an addressable cable box as a two-way medium.
You can take a conspiracy/Chomsky-styled critique and say they're afraid of losing their place as "entertainment providers", but I'm not sure that's completely accurate. I think a lot of it comes from simply not having experience as a telcomm provider.
I also think that a few people serving MP3s, porn or warez are largely to blame for the absence and restrictions on upstream, just as a relatively small number of people who misuse guns totally misrepresent the larger gun-owning population (to pick a totally loaded analogy..).
You're so right. Since Verizon and Cablevision haven't got their act together to provide DSL or cable modem access to Old Bridge, NJ, I have decided to go for the competition. If they don't want my money then somebody else will. All fine and dandy, BUT... guess what, there is no competition. There is no other cable or local telco in my area. I'm trying to vote with my money but I DON'T HAVE A CHOICE.
Now a good business sense will tell you that this is a good opportunity. But tell me, will you try to start a business to compete with these two? Guess not... and if the municipality somehow decide they want to supply this service to Old Bridge residents I bet they'll get sued on unfair competition by the same two companies.
Ain't that great? The problem with what you're saying is it applies only in an IDEAL economy. Wake up, this is real life...
If con is the opposite of pro, is Congress the opposite of progress?
Bandwidth-wise it's a matter of network size. Reliability is quite good -this I know, I work on that stuff.
-- Colin
Informed about current events? Not from American television. ;)
On the bay we talk about buckets of crabs. Which do the same thing.
Best Slashdot Co
I only have connectivity when I want it, regardless of where I am. All my phones (home, cell, and work) have caller id on them. If someone wants to connect to me, I decide if I want to aswer or not.
Of course, with net access, its even easier to controll the worlds access to oneself.
Cheers,
Rick Kirkland
Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but with the recent trend towards huge corporate mergers, does this mean that there is a possibility of all the Baby Bells merging to once again form one Big Daddy Bell?
Highly unlikely, I would think (hope?). Such a mega-merger would never pass muster with the Justice Department, although we are seeing regional mergers that combine long-distance and broadband providers with traditional telcos (think Qwest/U S West).
More importantly, since the breakup of AT&T there have been so many acquisitions and reorganizations by the Baby Bells that their corporate cultures are sufficiently balkanized to preclude even the thought of joining forces again.
When I first moved to my current apartment I was thrilled to learn I had a choice of either DSL (from ASI/PacBell) or Cablemodem (from ATT@HOME). I chose DSL because of the faster upload speed. After a month of dealing with PacBell, I finally gave up (they are incompetent) and went with Cablemodem.
:)
The download speed rocks. Easily in excess of 1M, usually much higher. The upload speed bites, choked off at 128k.
Other problems:
1. No servers. You can't set up your own web server. That violates their AUP. They provide webpage space, but you can't set up your own CGI stuff and reliability is extremely poor (their web servers are constantly down or swamped).
2. Email is extremely unreliable. Email can get stuck in their system for several months or simply disappear. It's a real pain when an important email pops in that requires your immediate attention, but dated from two months ago. I'd run my own mail server except that violates their AUP of no servers (and they are constantly port scanning to see if you're doing anything funny). They slipped a little disclaimer into the contract that basically states, "email is for recreational use only, blah, blah, blah". One day they're going to send out some official notice via email. When that happens I'll pop off a legal notice that by using email for official, no-recreation purposes, they have legally changed their policy (although IANAL). I can personally get very reliable email via the VPN to my office, but my wife is stuck with @HOME email service. To compensate for their suckiness, she's opened up several of those free email accounts. But those are all web based and so are inconvenient to use (anyone know of a reliable and free pop3 email service that works with @HOME?).
3. Customer support sucks. 40 minutes on hold (minimum) to talk to some trained chimpanzee who blames me for any problems. Hell, I just asked if the mail server is down in the area, I don't need to reconfigure my bloody system! (it's an inhouse policy of @HOME to always blame the customer, regardless of the problem). One time I was arguing with support about the email. When the woman started in with the "it's a very complicated matter and is beyond me" speech, I told her who I worked for (look at my email address) and it was ok if she wanted to get a little technical. That shut her the hell up!
4. 128k upload speed. I know I already mentioned this, but it needs repeating. My company allows me to telecommute once a week (more under special circumstances, e.g. daughter is sick). The limited upload speed makes it a real pain when I connect to the office via the VPN. BTW, doing that violates their AUP. Fsck 'em. I do it anyway.
ATT@HOME is basically treating the internet as a variation of the t.v. You turn it on and they push enterainment (and commericials) at you. Your control is limited to what channel you watch. If you go much beyond their definition of the internet, you will violate the AUP. They don't get it, I guess. When comparing technologies, the internet is more like a telephone than a t.v.
-- Will program for bandwidth
There are several movements afoot to provide fiber to rural homes; but not by the telephone companies. The movements are largely being undertaken by Public Utility Districts (PUDs).
In Washington State the mostly-agricultural Grant County has over 7,000 miles of fiber laid by the Grant County PUD (http://www.gcpud.org/zipp/default2.htm). This system, when it's completed, will connect every home, farm, and business to the fiber network and allow the users to select from a among a group of competing ISPs for their email and bandwidth. Local ISPs can also sign on for their bandwidth out to the 'net.
The 1-year-old project originated when the PUD engineers lobbied for a remote-meter-reading system and escalated when someone suggested that they could just as well provide high-bandwidth using fiber.
GCPUD is farther along than most but it's far from alone. Several other Public Utility Districts in the State are following close behind them. However, there are some pitfalls: a few legislators, supported by the telephone companies, are fighting it with legislation prohibiting the PUDs from providing Internet access.
How ironic that rural America, long ignored by the large ISPs (AOL doesn't even have a local phone number in this county), telephone companies and cable/DSL providers, will be among the first to get bandwidth connections that will be the envy of the country.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
You are right that the lack of solid business plans killed dot-coms. But I think Kushnick's point is that if almost every small business in the country had high bandwidth access, you would have seen a better and more creative integration of the web with established successful small businesses. Instead, we got a bunch of venture capitalists trying to score big on an IPO, or egomaniacal CEO's trying to own an entire "space" on the web (ie, be the only online pet store).
One example: if it had the bandwidth, maybe the corner grocery store would let you order online, and have your groceries ready for you when you got to the store, saving you time. Instead we have WebVan and HomeGrocer.com, fighting to become the only source for online grocery shopping. High bandwidth on the last mile could really democratize the dot-com business model, take it out of the VC's hands and put it into the hands of local, already successful, small businesses.
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
An 8-cent postcard sent to anywhere in the country in a couple days is a great deal. Seriously. You couldn't physically transport a piece of paper anywhere in the country by yourself for 8-cents. Even taking it across town would cost you more. And the first monopoly you mention is also responsible for safe workplaces, a cleaner environment, social safety nets that prevent the least fortunate of society from starving to death or dying from preventable disease, and a world-leading literacy rate, among other things. The second was also responsible for long distance rates in excess of $1.00 per minute, phones that you kept in your house but couldn't own, and couldn't get with your choice of colors or features.
In the absence of the regulation of the marketplace and competition, which phone companies don't have because they are government granted monopolies, some other sort of regulation is necessary. If not the government, what do you suggest?
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
I don't know why DSL providers and ISP's are going bust. One would think that there is enough demand for the service. Either they can't keep their customers because they don't know how to deliver the service and keep it running, or they under priced it and expect to make it up on volume.
In the case of Flashcom I have another answer. They simply forget to bill their customers and hope that they will send in the monthy check anyway. Yes that's EXACTLY what flashcom did with me. I NEVER got a bill and had to call to ask what I owed. I was able to do that once, after that it became impossible to get through to them on the phone without being on hold for an hour or more. When they finally announced they were terminiating service I had to send them a certified letter in order to pay off my account!
It was a real shame too, because except for once or twice (right after the service started) I had ZERO down time with them.
You couldn't physically transport a piece of paper anywhere in the country by yourself for 8-cents. Even taking it across town would cost you more
/usr/local/games/bin/fortune.
Yes, but when there are 200,000 of them, and my cost is the same, I'm sure I could do it. Cheaper too.
safe workplaces, a cleaner environment
Unh hunh.. These are the schmucks that took forty years to even restrict sales of benzene, and fifty to reduce the maximum exposure to a level that wasn't giving everyone cancer. Sure sounds clean and safe to me!
social safety nets that prevent the least fortunate of society from starving to death or dying from preventable disease
I'm laughing. Everone that lives solely on social security is below the poverty line. Welfare is a joke too.
I didn't mean to imply AT&T was good; Just that they were the least of the two evils. Oh, and it's a quote from
.sig: Now legally binding!
There were in this country two very large monopolies. The larger of the two had the following record: the Vietnam War, Watergate, double- digit inflation, fuel and energy shortages, bankrupt airlines, and the 8-cent postcard. The second was responsible for such things as the transistor, the solar cell, lasers, synthetic crystals, high fidelity stereo recording, sound motion pictures, radio astronomy, negative feedback, magnetic tape, magnetic "bubbles", electronic switching systems, microwave radio and TV relay systems, information theory, the first electrical digital computer, and the first communications satellite. Guess which one got to tell the other how to run the telephone business?
.sig: Now legally binding!
What's really scary is the potential for denial of service attacks. Once someone cracks a home machine on a 100 megabit pipe they can really do some damage. Imagine a someone launching an attack from dozens of machines on connections like that. Now imagine that someone being every script kiddie alive because there would be tens of thousands of insecure boxes sitting on big fat pipes.
However some of these things become less of a problem when dealing with a local merchant over the internet rather than a large corp:
for example the credit card issue and international range of reach can both be eliminated by payment at the time of delivery to established customers (to eliminate fraudulent orders) of the store who might want home delivery (or simply to be able to pick up the entire order) of a list of items from a local store daily/weekly/monthly for a reasonable additional charge allowing placement of web orders. The availability of the website could be advertised simply to existing customers in the area to generate awareness without requiring a search.
A decent website with some simple forms without a payment system and a minimal security system to reduce possibility of fraudulent orders isn't that difficult to set up even if you don't hire a big $$ comp-geek.
Admittedly it is more difficult to do this than to balance the books, requires some investment, and might be easier to do in a manner not using the internet. The risks vs. rewards would need to be looked into to decide if this would be a viable expansion to a business and in a lot of cases today that equation is that it is more trouble than its worth, Having a server with cheap bandwidth and possibly easier website design software might change that equation to make this model more appealing.
-------- This space intentionally left blank --------
Um... it was the conservatives with Pete Wilson that did this 'deregulation', not the liberals. Not that the liberals did anything well with it, but they're not the ones that caused it, they just inherited it.
"This message is composed of 100% recycled electrons."
Heh...point taken. :-)
"This message is composed of 100% recycled electrons."
...we can begin by forcing the FTC to aggressively pursue the fraudulent claims being made by DSL carriers/providers alleging coverage areas far greater than they can currently support.
"The regulatory regime in Canada is really favorable to building infrastructure,"
...
"Now Australia is looking to Canada as a model for how to promote broadband competition."
...
"American ISPs are looking to models from Canada"
...
"These things are not a problem in Canada"
Canadians.. is there anything they aren't the best at?
-gerbik
You make some good points about highways, but the analogy doesn't make any sense. How many casualties are we going to get from lots and lots of fiber? What could possibly be wrong with lots and lots of people who didn't have fat pipes having fat pipes? If you're worried about connectivity, just shut it off and step away from the computer, right? The solution to the ills of technology is more technology. Problems with smog? Clean emission cars & stuff. We're not destroying any previous infrastructure (railroads) to build the new stuff (roads).
Peace,
Amit
ICQ 77863057
[o]_O
"Broadband is the right of all sentient beings."
Peace,
Amit
ICQ 77863057
[o]_O
But isn't that the American dream? Working your ass off to make your life better?
Peace,
Amit
ICQ 77863057
[o]_O
From the article:
Kushnick thinks that, if the fiber had been laid, a wealth of new businesses would have sprung up to offer services and we wouldn't be experiencing the Internet downturn we have now.
What killed the dot-coms wasn't a lack of connectivity. It was more likely a lack of a solid business plan.
Will I retire or break 10K?
It's ironic that the problems currently facing the centralized communication networks -- the baby bells, I mean -- are exactly the sort of problems that the 'de-centralized' internet (assuming the 'internet' is the content flowing over the networks) was supposed to solve.
It's also becoming increasingly interesting -- to say the least -- to see how centralized networks (or, more specifically, corporations whose livelihoods depend on the centralization of their resources) cannot -- under any circumstances -- co-exist with de-centralized users or content.
De-centralized 'content' threatens the centralized 'form'.
Katz, are you listening?
OK, the problem with fiber is not as extreme as it is with cars, but... what will happen if there is no rural fiber subsidy? Well, the rural folks might get some kind of wireless network. They might get nothing, and for some of them that might be reason to abandon the country. Fine. America has a long tradition of people moving to get what they want. The black exodus to Chicago. The gold rush. The sun belt boom. The whole country to begin with. None of these migrations hurt anybody. A "fiber migration" away from far flung rural areas to the city could spark an urban renaissance. It would do it without government intervention. We don't know what the future holds. Broadband is *not* essential. If it were, people would have already abandoned areas that don't have it. I speak from experience. I am not in a rural area, but I am in a broadband blackhole. I have not moved because there are other far more essential reasons for me to stay. I am not "suffering". This is a convenience we are talking about. Not food, shelter, or clothing.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Implicit in many of these debates is the idea that everybody having broadband is a good thing. Why?
Are we going to duplicate the same mistakes that were made with highways? Everybody just had to have paved roads through their county. We tore up rail systems and built roads. Now everybody complains about smog and sprawl. Highway casualty rates are the equivalent of re-fighting the entire Vietnam war every other year.
So what if only a few get broadband? The countryside will be a refuge from the ubiquitous connectivity that can be just as confining as it is liberating. I say, don't subsidize any of this crap. That will just result in more taxpayer expense. Then 50 years from now some unforseen social problem will arise because of it. The same liberals who advocated the subsidy that created the problem will advocate some other subsidy to solve it. Feh!
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Broadband isn't a right
. Internet access isn't a right.
Anyone with a 100Mbps ethernet connection in a large office knows that the link speed alone is often not the limiting factor!
Furthermore, the assumption that the only, or primary, costs involved are the network termination equipment is simply incorrect. Yes, if we are talking about terminating a 10Gbps (or even 2.5Gbps) SONET or SDH circuits, there will be an expense. But, don't forget that the larger the network (i.e. the greater the number of "end-systems") the more intermediate systems (routers, switches, repeaters, etc) are required. Each one of these network elements then must be monitored and managed.
Now, if we assume that the service will be priced inexpensively enough for consumers to purchase, and that there is enough consumer demand for this sort of service; and if we can assume an inital customer penetration rate of, say between 1-10%, the number of network nodes in a city of 500000 is between 5000 and 50000. This is becoming a fairly expensive network to manage.
One possibility is that a city or other entity could build the fiber infrastructure and then lease "dark fiber" to service providers. This is the model deployed Stockholm, for instance. This approach has the advantage of shifting the expense of active network elements to the service providers, but now additional expense is introduced by separating the operation and repair of the fiber component from the transmission equipment (which still may be separated from the higher-level network-layer elements such as routers and servers).
Futhermore, consider the "peering problem" that will occur if many ISPs and internet users choose to interconnect with multiple IP networks: Through careful address allocation policies, the internet community (by means of regional routing registies like those provided by ARIN, RIPE-NCC, and APNIC) has constructed a hierarchical routing system that limits the growth of the size of routing tables on the core backbone routers in use on the internet. This is important for two reasons.
First, routers have a finite amount of memory. Even if memory is cheap, it still needs to be installed and perhaps increased from time to time. Each upgrade causes downtime as the router is taken out of service and upgraded.
Second, and perhaps more important, each provider advertises its network reachability information to others through a external routing protocol (BGP-4). The BGP process on each router must compute the shortest path to each network and inject that information in the router's fowarding table. The more complex the routing table, the longer BGP takes to update the fowarding table leading to network convergence issues. Also, since BGP-4 is mostly manually configured, an increase in complexity serval of orders of magnitide would require the development of new extensions to the system, this would be futher exasperated by the limitation currently imposed by the use of 16-bit autonomous system (AS) numbers which identify each administrative realm of routing policy. Someone will have to absorb the expense incured in the development and implementation of new rotuing protocols. Then, again, each core router will have to be upgraded.
Inexpensive broadband technology is still a-ways away. It will revolutionize the internet (and probably telecommunications, in general) when it becomes available, but that revolution itself will not be cheap.
I don't really think that phone lines will die. One of the most expensive things is to run lines to all the houses, and phone lines are already there, telcos should try to use them.
In the meantime, the U.S. government is approaching the problem by eliminating regulations on the Baby Bells, which is sort of like combating street crime by taking police officers off the street
Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but with the recent trend towards huge corporate mergers, does this mean that there is a possibility of all the Baby Bells merging to once again form one Big Daddy Bell?
---
The AOL-Time Warner-Microsoft-Intel-CBS-ABC-NBC-Fox corporation:
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
That's my knee-jerk reaction too...I automatically cringe whenever I see the gov't stepping in to interfere in any way with the free market. Maybe it's because I was raised by an economist, I don't know.
Pardon my ignorance, but how did the poster arrive at the conclusion that deregulating the baby bells is like removing police officers from the streets?
You dope.
Where do you think "Rights" come from (whichever "Rights" you seem to think are legitimate in contrast with the illegitimate rights to broadband/internet rights)?
Well?
God? The ether? Nature? Tradition? Old pieces of parchment?
Try this: "Rights" are "Rights" when enough people decide they are.
So how about we take a look at the possibility/desirability of making broadband/internet access a "Right" instead of bleating about what is and isn't?
EC
My best bet right now is for satellite access for my rural home.
Wild Blue is poised to come online in early 2002 and further down the road, Teledesic, in 2005 (scheduled). Unlike current satellite connections, Wild Blue's will be 3Mbps (albeit with high pings (300ms+), nevertheless, it should be affordable and relatively easy to install.
Teledesic's system will be 64Mbps with very low ping times, since it uses Low Earth Orbit satellites (LEOs). I believe this is what is going to change everything. Sure, fiber would be good for you city dwellers, but 64Mbps for a guy in the middle of farm land is pretty good. It will probably be less BW for home users, but they are saying that it will be price competitive, so I'd expect nothing higher than $50/month, but probably more like $30-$40 for 1 to 3Mbps (that's just a guess, tho).
Up until I got my cable modem for the bargain rate of less than $40 a month I was sure I would have to wait on the telephone companies to offer competitive rates to string a T1 into my home...Of course their was ISDN or at that time ramblings about DSL (if you happened to live next door to a switch...) Cox@home solved all my problems for a reasonable fee. I feel sorry for anyone waiting on the "baby bells" for a reasonable solution....Everywhere I turn I am reading articles on how the phone companies have bothched or missed the boat on consumer bandwidth solutions. For me I can just choose to move wherever Cable service is available and cross my fingers that the EULA's do not get to far out of hand.
IMHO
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
oops
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
In the meantime, the U.S. government is approaching the problem by eliminating regulations on the Baby Bells, which is sort of like combating street crime by taking police officers off the street.
Uh huh. Because as we all know, all good things come from government! We can't trust that no good public sector to actually produce things that people want.
In fact, Michael is right. Clearly things are moving too slow, so the government needs to turn the Internet into a utility! Water pipes are utilities, why not data pipes?
Before you know it, we'll have a nirvana of 100mb fiber running to everyone's home! Universal access at last! And the best of all... a benevolent government running it all, watching out for our best interests. No one getting mislead into choose the eevil AOL, you will only be allowed to choose the friendly, helpful government.
Man, I can't wait until Michael is President.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
That's the thing that irks me. Greed to the point of "That's a good Idea! You can't have it because I want it"
If they can't have it, they gotta stop you from having too. Worse than a bucketful of frogs.
[A bucketful of frogs refers to an old country story of if you have a bunch of frogs in a bucket, when one tries to get out, the others will try to pull the potential escapee back into the bucket.]
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
that reminds me an article in vancouver sun recently,
apparently schools are not allowed to experiment
with networking technologies, they must allow
local telcos provide that for them. There are
hight tech neighborhoods sprining up everywhere.
Most midpriced condos that are built now have 1-2 ethernet jacks in every room. 50% of residences in
downtown area over here are wired for 100Mbps
fiberlink.Two way. 80 bucks. 59US or so.
Go Canada go.
From the internet to the legislature: "Please leave me alone. I do not wish government regulation or interference. I have only grown to where I am today by you slimy bastards keeping your hands out of the pot as much as possible."
did the democratic party subsidise this article? this article seemed to spew democratic gut beliefs all over. let the governement regulate service providers?! PLEASE! NOT MORE LEGISLATION! WE NEED LESS GOV'T CONTROL!
what i really don't understand is if company A comes to town and builds a fibre internet access where everyone on the network can download ISO's in seconds, and charges 60$ per month, should they have to let company B come to town and "lease" their lines (at a presumably discounted rate) to become a service provider? if I build the network, i sure as hell ain't gonna let someone else come and make money off of it
and on unfair pricing by the current broadbands? i don't see how it's fair to criticize them for being subsidised by their other services (even though i don't read any hard facts of the such). does ford/gm plan to make a profit on every vehicle line they put out? or do they know that a few cerain models are selling at a loss just to keep their vehicles on the road? if a cable company or phone company can provide broadband on the same line that's already going to the home, don't you think they have a right to do so? even if one product isn't making as much money as the other? do all the channels on the cable network make money for the cable company? i would guess that some of those channels are loss leaders as well. it's just a common business practice no matter which industry you're in.
In fact, both Taiwan and Singapore have rolled out fibre to home or neighborhood fibre (where there is a fibre switch on each street and it gets converted to ethernet).
/mentality/ of the industry which is preventing their engineers from spending lots of money to completely rebuild the infrastructure. Much like the US auto industry and the US steel industry, the US telecom will soon fall to the likes of NTT and New Taiwan National Telecom.
The difference between American/European and Asian telecoms is in the maturity level. The Asian telecoms are still very young and are in the expansion state, whereas American/Euro telecoms are embroiled in corporate takeovers, their CEOs trying to make an extra buck, and generally playing the "Ma Bell is in ashes let's fsck" game. The Asian telecoms were virtually nonexistant until the late 1950s and 1960s after they finally recovered from the last world war. At the same time, AT&T was THE evil empire. (Imagine that if you wanted to buy a telephone, you had to buy it from your local AT&T office).
So while the asian telecoms were just building their networks, the Americans and Europeans were laying down T-lines and E-lines, respectively. Thus, it is much easier for Asian telecoms who have not yet "institutionalized" to retrofit their systems. Note that "institutionalization" has nothing to do with "monopolization" nor does it have anything to do with "decentralization". It is the whole
You're right. We don't need no stinking gov't regulation. Big business always does what's right for the common man, the environment and the furure. Trust big business, they know what's best for us, not some elected official.
- - - If the sun is a star, why can't I see it at night?
Exactly!!! I'm sick to f-ing death of people who say that we don't need gov't. and that capitalism will provide for the unfortunate. Yeah, right. Those big business folks sure put the bucks into the places with no return on investment, don't they. You hear about BillG giving a million dollars to some charity and everyone thinks that's some great sacrafice on his part. That's like a nickel to the average guy. Sure the gov't can be corrupt. Look at Nixon or that lying sack of crap, Reagan. Talk about dishonesty. They're outta there. Try voting a CEO out. If you don't buy the products and the business sags, they lay off 10,000 people and get a huge-ass bonus. Anyone remember AT&T? At least the money going to gov't flows two ways. We pay taxes and we get infrastructure. Sometimes it's wasteful. What's your point? People have jobs, the economy rolls on. Give control to big business, like the minority of the population did in the last election and the money only flows uphill. The infrastructure become private property. Those that control it unregulated, prevent competition and we might as well bend over because we're about to get the big one. I trust politicians far more than I trust businessmen. Politicians owe their livelyhood to the public. I was channel surfing last night and came across CSPAN and CSPAN2. Funny, there weren't any "Corporate Board Meeting" channels. Ever wonder why? But I digress... Impeach Bush and We'll Call it Even!
- - - If the sun is a star, why can't I see it at night?
It is a luxury, but not as much as you might think. For one thing, if your job involves the net, having good access to the net is very very useful [say you're a web developer, having a way to check your company's pages on an outside connection is handy]. Also, if you use open source software, a fat pipe becomes a blessing from above [ever try to download a whole CD ISO over a modem?]. So, sure, right now it isn't a necessity, but then again, according to the government, neither is transportation.[I guess everyone ought to be able to walk to where they work, or they shouldn't have a job, right?]
-={(Astynax)}=-
-={(Astynax)}=-
"Darkness beyond Twilight"
Oh yes, the EVIL of government regulation: that keeps your water clean and safe to drink, keeps your workplace safe, protects your air from being tremendously fouled by unregulated business, CREATED competition in the phone/long-distance business (you are probably too young to remember the days of ONLY AT&T, not owning your phone, no choice in phone service provider).
Oh yeah...we saw what deregulation/unregulation does. It created all the evils of the early industrial revolution in which pollution was horrendous, workers received NO consideration for quality of life, job safety, etc, unions were REALLY not OK and workers were horribly abused physically, the environment was free for utter anhililation. Please, let's go back to THAT.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
True, broadband access is not, and hopefully never will become, a necessity in the way electricity, water, and fuel are today. However, as more and more services are offered exclusivly on-line, there will be a gap between those with broad-band access, and those with slower access.
An Example:
Here at school all class registration is done on-line via a web-based system. Based on your class standing, you are assigned a period of time in which you can access the system and register for classes for the next term. Everyone with the same class standing registers during the same period of time. For example, everyone in their second sophmore term registered last Monday beginning at 6:00pm. Here is where the inequity between broad-band and traditional access comes into play: If you are registering from the campus LAN (computer labs, dorms, on-campus apartments, etc.) pages load almost instantly, while if you are registering via a modem connection into the university network, pages load much more slowly. The result is that students registering via the campus LAN are more likely to get into their first choice of classes than are those registering via a dial-up connection.
Now lets expand this further. Lets say that many services now provided by traditional means are provided through an application service provider setup. Those without decent bandwidth will become second-class citizens.
We need the government write legislation which provides a fair, competitive market-place, to ensure that everyone has access to broad-band internet. Also, remember that 100 or so years ago, neither electricity, water, phone-service, or natural-gas were a 'utility' by your definition.
Come test your mettle in the world of Alter Aeon!
but needs to be underscored:
Net Access is a Privilege, Not a Right!
-----------
MOVE 'SIG'.
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
So a small number of broadband ISP's are set to corner the market and charge high prices. I say, what's the big deal?
Electricity is a true "utility". It is useful, nay, vital for so many daily tasks that there is a real need for the government to regulate the electrical utilities, and prevent monopolization and price gouging. The same is true of water, natural gas, mail, and (to a lesser extent) telephone service.
Internet service is _not_ a utility. So far, internet service is not necessary to perform any daily task. Oh, I'm sure that the "need" for internet service will eventually be forced upon us; I can see a future where companies will start billing customers and sending important notices entirely through e-mail. Broadband access is even less of a necessity. So why should the government involve itself in the business of regulating ISP's?
hyacinthus.
I think there inlines the regulation part. There is no choice for me and the price I have to pay. I'd love to switch providers and get away from this PPPoE crap that Linux doesn't much like (it works, just a pain).
And no, I don't trust my government, but when did this become an excuse as well? They are supposed to represent us but I hope I don't give the impression of greed, abuse and corruption.
What I'd like to see is a middle ground (maybe a little govenrment involvement.. maybe some funding of sorts) and then let things even out... Once competition is avaliable, then no government action is needed at all...
He\'s an idiot.
Do forgive him.
OTOH my friends on the south shore who have Cox @Home have constant service headaches, outages, hacker attacks (you can have your fixed IP address, I *like* PPPoE), have found customer service to be ignorant, unresponsive, and rude, and while they get more bandwidth than I do they don't seem to get what they were promised.
OTOH I've heard of people with similar DSL headaches elsewhere. It all depends on who your provider is and how serious they are.
Oddly, my regular phone service went out last month due to a bad line from house to pole, but the DSL continued to work. I have been using BellSouth FastAccess for about 4 months now and have never had even a 5 minute outage. Go figure.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
The PUD's are planning to send the guy with the cable to your house anyway, though, because it's to their advantage to install the remote meter-reading network. They're willing to pay for him to drag a cable out there anyway. So it's gravy for them to give him fiber instead of copper. They don't have to charge you for the most expensive part of setting up the infrastructure because it's something they would have done themselves anyway to save money on meter readers.
You're right, though, after the wait for cable and painful measurements of house-to-CO distance for DSL, it is pretty ironic that the most rural folks of all may get even better connections than those of us "lucky" enough to be in broadband now.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
First, we were worried about telephone lines for everyone, now its broadband. This is going to be the communications issue for the next fifty years. Why that long? Because thats how long it will take to reach every corner,(I'm talking to that desert home in Arizona to the Applachia) of the country with a DSL, Cable or Ethernet connection. Japan already has us beaten out on the widespread Ethernet idea..but how long will it last?
Phone Lines are dying out as a Internet Connection, They are in widespread use, that is true, but it is not feasible for the next generation of Web usage.
Slashdot Hypocrisy at work?
Unfortunately competition and monopolies are antithetical. Unless you can come up with a plan to convince Verizon et al. to voluntarily fragment into a dozen competing ISPs, government regulation is the lesser of two evils. Or we could just deregulate, deregulate, deregulate and pick up the pieces later like we did in CA.
Fortunately, most of us who live in the US usually have ISPs which we pay per month for UNLIMITED access. The biggest price to us will be the time it takes to have to wait through these interrupting ads.
But what about some other countries -- the UK comes to mind -- which have pay per minute connections? How do you think these people will feel having to pay to be forced to watch these "commercials" while trying to surf the web.
What a bunch of weirdos..;)
What would one *do* with a bucket of frogs? I mean, sure, crabs are tasty, but frogs? How many froglegs can a person eat?
What is it you 'old country' folk are doing with these frogs? Does Jerry Falwell know about this? I sense an urban legend in the making.
Brant
Brant
Argle. Bargle.
In the meantime, the U.S. government is approaching the problem by eliminating regulations on the Baby Bells, which is sort of like combating street crime by taking police officers off the street.
Yes, and we all know how well government regulations helps competition!
Imagine the slashdot effect when everyone has 100mb? ;) Readlly though, such a service will only be profitable if you can sell services to the average consumer. Examples of such are obviously telephone, tv/movies, MUSIC, video conferencing. What good will my 100 megabit connection do me if trading movies and mp3s is illegal under the DCMA. It makes me wonder what will all that bandwidth be for, if we can't do anything k3wl with it!
But worse than you doing free advertising for them by distributing their stuff to friends, you might actually shun their content completely and do something on your own. Instead of mindlessly consuming addictive and useless content while being fed advertising, you might actually engage in dialog with other human beings--no revenue opportunities there, no way to get you to consume more. You might even broadcast a school production of an out-of-copyright Shakespeare or Bach work and not have to pay anyone for it. Such civic activities would be downright un-American.
And if the excuse of bandwidth limitations doesn't work anymore (128Mbps downstream, 128kbps might start looking ridiculous to even the most clueless), restrictive terms of service will keep you from using fast uplinks for anything that might endanger anybody's revenue stream, whether you have a legal right to or not.
What else? Just fire up your favorite Gnutella client and download away...