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Dial-Up As De Facto Standard
Oswald writes: "Over at ZDNet, John Dvorak reveals his thoughts on broadband. He makes some good points on his way to concluding that broadband may be a very long time supplanting low-bandwidth connections." DSL service to my house took too many months and five technical visits, and resulted in mangled service and work orders, haphazard billing,and an intermittent connection. Now the initial carrier has gone out of business, and I didn't feel like paying more for the replacement. Dvorak has a point, but for the 10 year picture, I'm optimistic for broad(er) band.
When I got DSL a couple years ago, cable wasn't available in my neighborhood, and I don't even have cable TV (which is an extra $20 of something I don't really want).
But even if it was, I would have chosen it because it's was a static IP address - cable was already using PPPoE or DHCP. (Worse, my friend signed up for the same provider a couple months later, and at that point they were giving away a minimum of 3 static IPs!). Not to mention that I'm close enough to the CO to get rated speeds and AFAICT, it doesn't congest during peak times.
Plus, no server or business use or VPN restrictions, DSL WAS a much better deal. Of course, now my provider is borderline fucked company, and it's impossible to get a consumer static IP anymore. But you can see why people used to talk about DSL.
Whenever I see anybody mention high-speed internet access, it's always DSL that is mentioned.
Haven't you heard of cable? Have you been paid off by the DSL sellers to mention their product? Or are you too cool to associate yourself with TV?
Did you know that cable modem is delivered in many places within a week? Setup charges are usually waived too. Nobody I know who has cable is unhappy about it.
Quit whining and get the better product.
-- satisfied RR customer
PS: I have no association with RR other than as a satisfied customer.
Ameritech was telling people in Illinois "never" too, but now it looks like they aren't going to be able to say that to the majority of their customers. The Illinois legislature has just passed some new laws (which I believe are awaiting the governor's signature) that are said to be some of the most consumer-friendly telecommunications legislation in the country. You can read more about it in this Chicago Sun-Times article but the part that is germane to this discussion is the provision that "SBC/Ameritech and Verizon must offer high-speed Internet service to 80 percent of customers by Jan. 1, 2005." If they can do it in Illinois, maybe your state legislature could be convinced to do it too.
It's worth noting that Ameritech has always pretty much had their way in Illinois (Chicago has had some of the smallest local calling areas in the country for a major city) but they have angered the state lawmakers by letting their service decline to almost third-world levels over the past year. In some cases it has taken over a month to get a phone service restored after an outage, in parts of Ameritech's service area.
As I understand it, this all started when SBC bought Ameritech and transferred or gave early retirement to many of the more competent and experienced Ameritech employees, with the predictable result. They then tried to bully state legislators to get their way, a tactic that may work in Texas but that sure doesn't fly here in the Midwest (especially when the constitutents are screaming about the poor service they are receiving).
So, in Illinois the legislation was passed in part as a response to unbridled corporate greed, but there is no reason to believe that legislators in other states would not be receptive to passing similar legislation, if enough people were to ask for it. Unless, of course, your state is one of those where the phone companies can in effect buy a legislator!
The above is, of course, just my opinion. If I am uninformed on any point, please feel free to post a correction.
He meant 300 *KBYTES*/s
We have unconfirmed claims that Ziff-Davis doesn't care that Mr. Dvorak spews illogical tripe all over their editorial pages, as popular sites, such as slashdot.org, link to the inflammatory pages, helping them to gather more readers, and more money.
Our undercover source claims that Dvorak may be full of shit, regarding his claim that it will be multiple decades until broadband is widely deployed in first world nations.
--
"Don't trolls get tired?"
Will The Telephone Ever Become The Standard?
by John C. Dvorak
December 31, 1877
My nomination for "most foolish company" this year is the obvious choice, Bell Telephone. What a foolish notion, this concept that the public is interested in real-time audio transmission. Why would anybody pay for such a capability when they already have the ability to send perfectly functional text-only messages for a much more reasonable fee, via the postal service, or the telegraph.
While some of us 'early adopters' might think it's reasonable to expect people to have a telephone in their house by the 21st century, the fact of the matter is that it's an unneccessary luxury. For half a decade we've had the telegraph, the British have had postal service since the late 17th century and it has worked just fine.
This 'telephone' is an unneccessary expense for casual communicators, and will never affect the lives of most people for centuries to come. Real-time audio transmission? who needs it!
--
"Don't trolls get tired?"
Cable has disadvantages compared with DSL but where I live DSL is not available. The phone comapny is not savvy in such matters either. Installations in areas where it is available have been problematic for many people. By contrast, Road Runner ain't bad. It's alot faster than dialup. It's affordable, always on and it's been very reliable. The install was easy. Having had this experience, there's no going back to dial-up and unless my needs change drastically, I won't bother with DSL.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
There's still a lot of people like me, that don't have any reasonable broadband options.
The only thing I can get is GEO satellite, and the latency on that is awful.
So, I'm still dialing up.
They need to sweeten the pot. If I could get a static IP, and no restrictions on running a web/mail server, I'd be willing to pay it.
The question will be irrelevant, as soon as LEO satellite service comes into being (2005-2008). At that time, it won't matter where you are. Unless you live in a tunnel. :-/
My boss pays for my boardband connection as part of our work from home plan. (In MN we have enough snow days that it breaks even every year compared to a paid day off for everyone). He has been complaining that my ISDN line is twice what everyone else is paying for broadband. They are also getting much faster speeds. I've considered satalite. My boss would love to save that much money. Problem is I forward a lot of X connections when I work from home. Latency is an issue.
Of course my point is like most Americans other then dial up, my only reasonably priced alternative is satalite. Many parts of the world are just as bad (come to think of it, many don't have phone lines so satalite is the only option)
ANd even *he* can't get DSL. What chance do you mere mortals have?
:)
hawk
It's not just dead time. I know that at the very least my ISP explicitly states that they will disconnect based on connection time, not on usage level, when they feel the need to disconnect people. I'd strongly recommend looking at your TOS to find out.
Yup; the ISP I help admin keeps track of average monthly usage. If we run into an "all lines full" situation for more than 15 minutes we drop the top 2 people currently online. Repeat every 5 minutes ad nauseam. It's plainly stated in our ToS and the people who get on to just check their mail aren't ever in danger of getting dropped during their daily 5 minutes of usage.
It seems to work out quite well for everyone because the leeches usually get pissed off and leave for another ISP, which helps keep our user/line ratio in order and helps us keep costs down (we don't have to subsidize leeches by raising rates). Hell we even have a number of always-on people who don't seem to mind our disconnections because a) they know they are using it as always on and accept the occassional drop and b) we have the most competitive price in the area.
So I guess "leech" must be a technical term meaning "person who actually attempts to use the unlimited connect time we advertised to them", eh?
Nope; we define the actual service as "unlimited interactive" -- meaning you must be in front of the computer, using it most of the time, not sitting idle.
You won't get booted for downloading all the linux kernel releases (several days' worth of traffic)... you do that every week though and your hours will rack up and you will be booted. Fairly simple.
When I bought my house 2 years ago Verizon (then Bell Atlantic) was promising DSL availability in the area, but not for me. Their website indicated people a half mile away were eligible, but I wasn't. I mentioned to a Verizon tech that I already had ISDN, and he said he does the same process to qualify a DSL line as they do for ISDN, so I should be OK.
A few months ago I finally got ahold of a real person there, who gave me the top 5 reasons it may not be available to me, to which I said "Fine, let's find out what it really is. "
1) If it's distance then I know this isn't an option, I'll do something else.
2) If it's the build-out in your CO, I know it may be coming.
3) But if it's just an arbitrary # entered into your database then maybe I can get it!
She said ok, we'll have to do a manual loopback test, it may take 6 weeks, etc. I said fine, I've been waiting 2 years, what's another 6 weeks?
Guess what? It was #3. Two weeks later I had a DSL modem and was good to go. My neighbors (both programmers) are now trying to get it and keep getting the same run-around. The line GOES PAST THEIR HOUSES to mine.
Moral of the story is, DON'T BELIEVE THEM. KEEP PRESSING and force them to do the manual test. They have got to be one of the worst companies I've ever done business with. They just dropped a number range into their website, and if your # isn't in it the operator will tell you it's not available. I realized what it was when I found that if I plugged in other phone #'s the "not available" message came up on a 100 boundary, i.e. xxx-1199 was OK, but xxx-1200 wasn't. The fools just don't update the #*$*# database!
The revolution will NOT be televised.
Because of poor neighborhood wiring, no matter what I do, I can't get a dial-up connection better than 24.4K, but that's not the only reason I moved to a cable modem. My real reason was for the 24x7 connection. Now, my wife actually uses our net connection because it is always on. No more waiting for dial-up connects.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
And in my market, the final cost is about $42.00 including taxes, so the actual costs are almost a wash. With free installation and no monthly contract, this may even be cheaper than some ISP's and many DSL services!
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
hmm...
I don't get it...
t_t_b
--
I think not; therefore I ain't®
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
If you saturate the link (which is possible), your downstream speeds can all of a sudden drop to the same speeds as the listed upstream speed or worse. DSL links don't work quite that way.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
For example, there is nothing to stop Cable companies from filtering or blocking things they don't like. Already most of the Cable Modem Service agreements forbid the user from running Web or Ftp servers.
What will happen if you try to set up a web site that critizes or competes (at least in the eyes of the cable company's lawyers) with the cable's owner. They will shut you down.
I hope to switch to DSL service when it becomes possible.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Yeah, broadband is like cable in another way as well. People are paying the big bucks to front the infrastucture because of the reward of real-time porn! In the 70's/80's real-time porn was 24/7 pre-recorded movies on the tube. Today it's 24/7 live (or even interactive) porn. On the other hand, Porn didn't really drive the phone infrastructure... that system was well in place before phonesex became popular in the 80's.
If broadband were available everywhere and people were _still_ choosing dialup, I might agree with Dvorak. But the fact is, right now many people are forced to use dialup. It would be interesting to look at the statistics in markets with healthy broadband options.
Once cable modems are more ubiquitous, I think things will change. I don't have hope for DSL... even if you assert that DSLs aren't shared (though the upstream is) it's just way, way too limited. I checked last week now that we have a phone line... no DSL. (We could get ISDN, if we want to pay high prices to have a massive cut in bandwidth.) If you can get it, the odds are likely that it will take a long time and you'll have a couple problems along the way. The immediate mass-market future looks like cable modems, where you hop over to the local electronics store, buy a DOCSIS modem, plug it in, and sign up over a website. That's the present here on Long Island, and it's much closer to the ease of dialup setup than DSL. (Not that dialup is easy, but at least you don't need to schedule an install appt!)
Yes...BUT....I think your cost-debunking argument assumes that if I stay with dialup, I'm gonna pay for a second phone line. How likely is that, really? Most people I know who are sticking with dialup don't bother with a second phone line. More to the point: As nice as it sounds, I don't need continuous high-speed connectivity. At least, not yet. I'm a Joe Sixpack user, not a Linux kernel hackin' geek. About the only real benefit I'd get from broadband would be in the "cheap thrills" department: Listening to music online. For everything else I want, I can dial up, do my thing in about four minutes, and clear out so my wife can go back to talking to my sister-in-law. I wonder if the ISPs aren't making much of a profit because dialup is commoditized so thoroughly. If it is, it's no surprise it's a de facto standard: At this point, so few home users have a real, practical need for fast continuous connections that it's hard to figure out how to market broadband to them. I know I've repeatedly toyed with the idea when RoadRunner has sent me their stuff and repeatedly concluded that apart from the GCF (geek coolness factor) there's no reason to lay out the extra $$. Hell, if the free services were more reliable, I'd go back to using one of them.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
I know lots of people have had problems getting one or both of the great broadband connections, but I couldn't be happier - except perhaps if high-speed DSL was a little cheaper for me.
FYI, my cable provider was MediaOne/RoadRunner (don't know who might have bought M1 now though) and my DSL providers have been Qwest (line, service, formerly USWest) and BitStream Underground (service). I'm located in the Twin Cities. Tell them all I sent ya, I'll split the referral bonus with ya ;)
- Headius
I think that what may help change adoption will be people getting used to easy, and dedicated, access to broadband from work. Here in the UK, broadband is being very slow in roll-out as British Telecom controls all the exchanges, and cable is taking its time. But it's been a while since we've had a jump in modem speed, and if broadband can get going before someone thinks of a way of increasing it again, it's got a chance.
./ters are willing to pay that bit extra, but why should most people bother? I can't see my mother-in-law being interested - she's quite happy to press the "Internet" button, to wait for the strange noises to stop and then send her mail. If there were only a few pounds (dollars) in it, then she'd probably go for broadband, but until then? I think that the early adopters (that's us, people) are going to end up footing the bill for now, which is somewhat different to the modem case, because although we helped bring down the cost of modems by allowing them to become consumer items (and standard in new PCs), it's the infrastructure that we're paying for this time.
Of course, cost needs to come down, too.
rocking for 28 months now, with as little as 4% downtime. I've got a static IP and get great thru-put. What I can say is pac-bell's phone support system SUCKS !!!! Hold-times are high, calls are lost, follow-up is VERY RARE. They had DNS problems for 4 days before they could be convinced to look into the issue, luckily I've mapped out their environment nicely and can switch DNS's as the need arises, SF, Sacramento, LA.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Our AT&T exploiter's service is soo poor, even my Digital TV pixelizes from 15:00 to 19:30 every night. I've got friends on cable modem that don't even try to get on until after 20:00 in the evening. My DSL is steady all the time.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
It is hard to get people to change. I know with Broadband it alot more than just getting people to change the way they do things. Avialibity is a big issue. But once something become so widely used it is always hard for people to change what they are doing.
Well, I get 2.4Mbit/s, always on (non-metered), and fixed ip for ~25USD a month - they could double that price and it would still be worth it for me (attn. Bonet employees: please disregard previous statement).
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
It's not the speed of broadband that is its greatest asset, it's the always-on quality. The ability to leave a large file transfer overnight without the need to get up and disconnect, no tying up of a phone line, be notified of mail as soon as it arrives, being available over ICQ whenever you want. For my part, the speed is just a nice bonus.
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Check this out:
World Wide PacketsThis is the future
I can only speak for personal experience, however using both Rogers@Home and Cogeco@Home I have never gotten a daily average of less than 100 KB/second (or more impressively sounding 1Mbps). Right now I can download at a sustained 200 KB/second (2Mbps). Every now and then my speed drops a bit but then Cogeco subdivides and once again I'm hitting 200 KB.
@Home is up past 3 million users so it's hardly like they're a startup tricking people into thinking they're fast.
DSL supports a minimum of 1.5Mbps? I'm not sure what you're talking about but in most situations that's the maximum if you're nestled right up beside the telco and have perfect lines. I know lots of people who signed up for their 500Kbps DSL and get that once in a blue moon.
The simple reality is this: For the past two years I've been downloading at 200KBps and having conversations with people with DSL (maxing out at 50KBps) where they proclaim that @Home is going to hell and soon it's going to be super slow, blah blah blah. During that time the number of @Home users has been increasing geometrically, yet I'm still getting 200KBps and those friends are still getting 50KBps. This whole argument really is so absurd with DSL advocates pulling out hypotheticals of what if there were 10,000,000 on one cable drop compared to one guy sitting beside the telco, etc. How utterly foolish.
If ever @Home started to get slow I have the option of getting DSL. However there's a fat chance I'm going to do that based on the theory of which one is faster, when for over two years the opposite has proven to be the case.
Of course, as I noted in another post, it really comes down to what's available in a particular area and how well it works. DSL beat cable modem into Minneapolis by 3 years, and works just fine. You've had a cable modem for two years on a ring that hasn't added more than a handful of users in that time. Lucky you
Here's the fundamental flaw in your argument. Your supposition seems to be that the cable companies (each of which builds its own infrastructure BTW) dropped in X bandwidth, and as users increase X gets divided among them. Hardly. Each of them has been adding users, as mentioned previously, geometrically yet each time there is an appreciable drop in net bandwidth per user they are obviously upgrading the core. You mention if they are allowed on: Do you think @Home is denying customers? Every new customer is paying for a little more infrastructure that makes it better for all of us. In reality I would say if anything that on average my experience has been improving rather than degrading.
Again this brings us back to the fact that the biggest anti-cable argument tends to be hypotheticals rather than reality. If the cable company oversold a connection more than the telephone companies oversell the connection to the switching station (which is a fact that most DSL supporters seem to fail to mention...) then hypothetically cable may be slower. Well I've been going at 4x the speed of the local (comparably priced) DSL for years now...
I live in Southern Ontario and I can say that I know of no one that doesn't have cable at least running to their house. A couple don't have it active, but it always seems to be built in as a natural home building step. Weird.
That's good math...if only it were actually correct. KB=Kilobyte. Kb=Kilobit. Mb=Megabit. 200KBps (note the big B indicating 200 KiloBYTE) = 2Mbps (generally there are about 10 bits including crapulence per byte). A T1, which is about 1.544Mbps (Megabit / second) can transfer ~154KB (KiloBYTE) / second.
Thanks for coming out though.
In three separate locations I have gotten and been online with cable (@Home) in no time whatsoever with zero hassle. While there may be a delay in getting a technician to do the install, anyone technically adept can pick up the hardware and do it themselves presuming the cable wiring in their house isn't ancient. Regarding the oft criticized reliability of high speed, 98% of the time the problem (which is incredibly rare) is up the network several nodes...hence it isn't the high speed connection whatsoever but the infrastructure of the high speed provider. This sort of problem affects anyone using the net be it through dial-up, cable, DSL, or DS3.
I remember way back when with dial-up modems it was common for people to have problems because of line noise, crosstalk, etc. It was standard to always state to the tech service that it wasn't for a modem though as the phone company would refuse service then (you had to say that the interference disrupted voice conversations to get them out to fix it). The point being that dial-up went through years of trouble as well while the system was upgraded and cleaned up.
Cheers!
Umm... Ford can and does sell you are car/truck with the limitations on mileage and useage... it's called a lease, exactly the same thing you have with your broadband connection. you are leasing...
So in fact they are following industry standards in pricing and use. It's the un-educated consumer that get's stuck with something that they didn't know was there.
If you want unlimited bandwisth use, BUY your bandwidth.. I.E. a T-1 line, just like they do. Otherwise dont be suprized when they pop up another limitation around the corner with the guise of "the terms are subject to change without notice" clause....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I remember a rant he had published on how online services wouldn't become popular. Hell you guys complain about the cost of broadband? try paying $3.95 an hour for compuserve access plus paying for access fees to most of the desired areas. Or paying your long-distance bills for access to the better BBS's (1200bps was a screaming modem at that time too!)
the cost of bandwidth, and connectivity has dropped to the point that broadband access is chump-change, Dvorak is still as clue-less as he was back in the 80's, and the amount of change we are going to see in the next 5 years is going to spin everyone's heads (except dvorak, he will always be the same.... pretty much clueless and a person to ignore.)
...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The background:
You are not the only one. Most people in my city (Collegedale) have their mail delivered to the PO boxes at the post office here in town (37315)because this city does not deliver mail to anything other than PO boxes. However the town about 3 miles away (Ooltewah) does deliver mail to the area (using 37363) including our city. So, my mail is currently picked up at the 37315 one, but if I plant a mail box in my front lawn, I can get a 37363 address.
The problem:
Comcast offers cable modem access to 37363 but not 37315 (my town) offically. So, get this...If I specify my address as have the 37315 zip with the exact same street address, comcast says that it isn't available here. However, if I specify the exact same street adderss with the 37363 address, I can order the service.
Oh well. We must think beyond the confines of someone elses databases and the monkeys using them.
---
Sig Return: 204 No Content
You say "presuming the cable wiring in their house isn't ancient."
What cable wiring? I have no such wiring here, and the installation would be scheduled for 2+ months in the future, or so they told me when I called to inquire a few months back. It would also cost me drastically more for that installation than the "self-install" option that the local ADSL provider quoted me. (The cable provider stated there were no self-install options, nor alternatives to that installation fee.)
As for ADSL, that wiring is already present (since yes, I have telephone service) and all I need to do is stop by a brick-and-mortar shop with my identification, pick up a box, bring it home, and plug in a couple of items.
Additionally, ADSL costs significantly less in monthly fees than cable would cost, and has no minimum service contract, also unlike cable. (From what I understand now, they'll even refund your money if you choose to discontinue service after a month, in a "risk-free" offer they now make.)
One of the benefits of ADSL over cable is the fact that there are no additional wires needed, if you already have copper-pair voice telephone service (as most current dialup customers have. I know that VERY few people in my area have POTS-over-cable-television service, and that the cable company discontinued offering that except ro the few existing customers they now have.)
Obviously someone will chime in with all of the cable risks associated with being on someone else's subnet, and with the ADSL drawback of distance from the CO, but the fact remains that those copper pairs for voice are virtually ubiquitous, and the cable television wires are not. (Cable television is not even available yet in many of the places I've lived, with "no forseeable plans for the future," yet POTS has been available to them for quite a while.)
Uhm, no. Ford doesnt sell you a car with limitations. You can lease a car with limitations (or you can even lease one without but you pay more).
As for the bandwidth purchasing, you dont ever BUY a T1 either. You lease the line from the telco, then hook it up and RENT bandwidth out. And, no matter what, unless you own a branch (Hi alter-net/UUnet) you are going to be under contractual obligation to pay for whatever bandwidth you use.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
... long before most people will even get cablemodems or dsl. 2.5Mbs will simply rock.
I haven't read the article, but just from the quote, he has a point.
Streaming video is encoded to one or more bitrates. Usually just one. Most of the time the bitrate chosen is the one with the greatest potential audience: one that will fit through a 28.8 modem.
You can encode your stream with multiple bit rates or encode multiple versions of the clip, but that's more work and a lot of people don't bother.
Dvorak's point is: it doesn't matter how good your connection is 20 Kbs video looks crappy. And that's what's available a lot of the time.
The Math Maestro Tutoring Services in Seattle
I think John's pretty much hit the concept on the head of dial-up. People here are often the ones in the .0001% of people with decent broadband connections so you can apt-get and feel like a l33t hax0r d00d. Slashdot is far from being represenative of anything but slashdot. AOL has roughly 20% of the online eyes in America and most of those eyes are looking at the internet through John's 34Kbps goggles. The other top dogs in the ISP space are also serving users with slow fucking connections. People have been pointing out that the broadband user base is growing and dial-up ISPs have gone out of business or been bought out. Well ISPs get bought out real quick because large ISPs can afford it and want the hardware and user base. Broadband is increasing because availability is increasing. People have been waiting months of years for broadband access and are finally getting it. We are NOT in the boardband era and John's correct in saying 34Kbps ought to be considered a standard connection rate.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Sure most of us have dsl at work, but some jobs monitor the networks closely, besides some stuff you want to just look at or download from home.
Personally until you can buy DSL equipment in a store like you can buy a regular modem and install it like you would a regualr modem and can connect to ANY ISP, dsl will be for a small select group to have. (FYI: DSL is not available everywhere. In Case You Didn't Know).
I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
Flame away, I have a hose!
Only 'flamers' flame!
It sounds like Dvorak doesn't know what a standard is, which make it hard to keep reading. If MS Windows is a standard, then why is there only one implementation of it? Oh, he had WINE and Odin in mind... (yeah, right).
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
oops....bytes....not bits ;-)
*sing* I'm a karma whore and I'm okay....
I work all night and I post all day
In Soviet Russia, hot grits put YOU down THEIR pants.
You'd be hard pressed to find a town in Canada where you can't get cable and/or DSL. Here in Ottawa I have Rogers Cable and, aside from one or two hiccups over the past year, I've had pretty much uninterrupted service 24/7. Plenty fast too - I sometimes get 300kbps downloads. My Linux gateway is up to 210 days uptime now too...;-)
All that being said, I don't think it would take that long in the States if the regulators got serious. I only pay $40/month for mine (and that's in Canadian pesos too). I mean, when you can get cable and DSL in Kenora (small town between Thunder Bay and Winnipeg) for crying out loud, I can't see why you Yanks can't get your act together.
*sing* I'm a karma whore and I'm okay....
I work all night and I post all day
In Soviet Russia, hot grits put YOU down THEIR pants.
Broadband has been "just around the corner" for 15 years or so.
There is every reason to suspect it'll be just around the corner for another 10.
Dvorak is in the Cassandra role here. Pointing out that broadband isn't here yet won't stop companies from creating buisness models based on broadband access. All it'll do is allow Dvorak to say "I told you so" when the inevitable happens.
Sometimes being right is a thankless role.
--Shoeboy
I'm getting a little annoyed at all these 3l33t 15 year olds using daddy's DSL and spouting about how dialup's are ancient and are holding everything back.
Dialup is the only choice in many areas. At my home for instance, I cannot get DSL, cable, or even ISDN.
Interesting. I was thinking recently about how or whether broadband internet access would start to shape the way we build cities. Historically, the form of a city has reflected the dominant transportation mode available at the time the area was being built up, which takes you from the narrow foot/donkey paths of yore up to the 30 foot wide cul-de-sacs of today. (And, similarly, from the 20,000+ people per square mile densities of old US cities to the 1500 people per square mile density of the Kansas City metro area.) And until recently, there was no universally compelling reason to expect any different pattern.
But, interestingly, sprawl has a serious cost in terms of providing services like high-speed internet access. Whatever you might think of telecommuting (I think it will be a failure), it's definitely the case that more time spent on line means less time spent on the road. More important in the short run is the fact that most sprawly suburbs of the past several decades will either require a drastic rewiring (= $$$) to get things like DSL ramped up. So it's just possible that we might all decide we have to give up on or scale back the one-house-per-acre kind of development that makes this all so painful. Indeed, it looks to be more and more the case that DSL is a very poor match for sprawling development; being 4 miles from the CO suddenly has a huge penalty attached to it. This would be interesting, and perhaps a positive sign if you like old-style cities, except for another nagging problem: Many inner city neighborhoods are not much better off in terms of DSL-based broadband, because the cost of upgrading some of the oldest telephone systems doesn't make sense, either, especially as the growing importance of cellular networks make the existing copper wire infrastructure less relevant for telephony. I would have thought that cable modems would pick up the slack there, but I know that in the city where I live, (Columbia, Missouri) the cable company isn't very interested in upgrading the system to provide service to the (poorer) urban core, and are fighting the satellite TV companies as hard as they can.
So, what to do? Build a whole new generation of "internet-optimized" neighborhoods while pitching the urbs and the exurbs alike? I'm not really sure. One would think that wireless technologies could really help a lot here, but then you should note that they would tend to (strongly) favor compact development. Indeed, as I have accidentally found out over the past year, your 802.11b network can be fairly easily shared with your neighbors. :-) A generation or two down this
road might be very interesting indeed.
Babar
Now, this is an area where I would really like to see some hard numbers provided by a neutral third party. We all know that DSL might not be available even where it is listed as "available"; similarly, cable modem access that is "coming soon" could take weeks or years to arrive. My best guess is that actual availability is not as bad as you suggest. From some recent FCC data, I would guess at an availability rate of between 50% and 70%, although costs might still differ strongly from place to place.
Small towns, by their very nature, are, well, small. They will never be on the leading edge of anything much, which is of course both a plus and a minus. What I think will be interesting is whether the lack of access will become a material factor in people's relocation decisions in the near future. If it does, we might see some *very* interesting changes in the pattern of urban, suburban, and exurban growth of the last several decades. Population densities have been going way down in many places during the last century as the car has become a dominant transportation mode. It would be interesting if advances in communication technology could reverse that trend.
Babar
Just like a yank to mistake 'American' culture for 'North American' culture....
A pound of C4 located convniently to your neighborhood plant should take care of Qwest's plans (or lack thereof)
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
That's very nice, if you happen to live in a DSL lab. I suspect, in another five years, DSL will probably be recognized as dead horse, anyway.
I'd give the big wheel, and myself, more credit for understanding the infrastructure and corporate politics issues than you seem to be willing to give.
Living in Qwest's "service" area for several years and having become closely acquainted with about a dozen highly placed Qwest employees by now, I would judge their corporate culture as sufficiently customer-hostile as to preclude the possibility of broadband access in my neighborhood indefinitely. I have no reason to think that my contacts there are trying to mollify me. You must understand, that this is a company that can't even get POTS right for the majority of its customers, let alone deploy high-speed internet access.
There may be something to what he's saying. I think Dvorak is normally a blowhard, but let me tell you a story.
For the better part of a year, I tried to Qwest (then US West) to either stop sending me ads for DSL or install it in my home. I spoke with many of their representatives, tested my lines online and through their service office, and finally encountered someone very high up in the food chain in their broadband department, who was smart and helpful (if you know Qwest, you know how amazing that is) and went to the trouble of gathering data about my phone lines and making the necessary calculations to determine whether DSL would work in my home, and if so, how well.
This was, in summary, the conversation we had:
"So, thank you very much for going to all this trouble."
"Oh, no problem, you're welcome."
"What did you discover? Can I get DSL at my house?"
"I'm sorry, it's not going to work."
"Does that mean, it won't work now but it will work at some point in the near future?" (Qwest kept our hopes up with slogans about new equipment and plant upgrades. Everyone would have DSL Real Soon Now.)
"Uh, no. I'm sorry. You will never have DSL at your location."
"Never? Never as in 'we have no immediate plans to provide DSL in your area?'"
"No, never as in you will never have DSL, ever, unless you move somewhere else."
"I see. Well, thanks again for your trouble."
The punchline: I live approximately 500 feet too far from the nearest DSL-equipped central office, and the plant in my neighborhood is so old and crappy that Qwest has no plans to do anything but patch it up forever. It's funny, because I get acceptable analog modem connections (48 Kbps most of the time). One would imagine DSL would be no problem here at some point. Yet, a pretty big wheel at Qwest said, "never." DSL may become widespread, but it will never be ubiquitous, even if I am the only exception (which I seriously doubt).
Thanks for your time.
Not everyone can justify spending $480/year for a cable modem when a dial-up costs only $240 ($20/year) and ties up your phone line. Wait, at best, an extra phone line will cost you, at best, $20/month, so we're looking at about the same price. What is my point? With a little digging and thinking, his prices are bogus.
Broadband will not be a 'standard' until a lot more people have access to it. Plain and simple. Also, people sign up for dial-up because their computers come with special offers and modems. A lot of these people don't know any better. They're taking baby steps into the world of computing and may not understand the benefits of broadband. They may not even know that they can access their AOL through their cable modem.
Dvorak, as usual, is just being sensationalist.
--Mike
ShockwaveAdam seems to be closing the doors. http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,5092 019,00.html.
i remember when they cable guy came to put our box in in the early 80's. he had to run coax every leaving bits and pieces of sheilding and wires in his wake. it was expensive at the time (hell our vcr was huge by todays standards) and here we are now. cable tv is cheap enough to be used to educate the masses and teach them the moral lessons of pokemon.
:?), at least some might think so). like any new technology it will take some time and the time is inversly porportional to the demand. if enough people want it it will get there alot quicker.
my parents and the others on my block were footing the bill for for the infrastructure and now that it is in place whe have cable tv in every home (better than clean water
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
IMHO, having bandwidth intensive applications on your website not only isolates your from reaching a large portion of your user base, but it also tells me that you haven't done something correctly. Even Flash, as complicated as it can be, is a very compact data format relative to MPEG, QuickTime, or other multimedia formats. Pretty pictures tend to distract the user from what they are at the page for in the first place. This isn't to say that media intensive sites don't have a place, for they do. But only in a limited set of circumstances.
My rules for designing good websites are:
Make em standards compliant
Make em work on different browsers on different platforms. Incompatible with the first point, but there we are.
They only have content that is necessary to the purpose of the site
I assume that Dvorak's audience here is web designers. If so, he's telling us nothing we didn't aleady know. (And if you're reading Dvorak for tips on web design, then, umm, go here instead. You'll be better served.) The net is still (thank Buddha) primarily a text-based medium. Even on high speed connections it takes a significant amount of time to download multimedia content. It's just simple politeness not to require your users to download that crap unless they request it. But even if broadband does become universal, the Right Thing To Do(TM) will still be to make pages that are as lean as possible, for simple reasons of maintainability and professionalism.
If, on the other hand, you have no multimedia on your site and it takes longer than 8 secs to load on a 28.8 connection, you should probably be reconsider your design choices and/or toolset. Throw GoLive out the goddamn window & get one book on HTML & one on JavaScript, k?
(BTW: I saw Princess Mononoke for the 1st time last night. 5-stars, friends! Ck it!)
- Rev.My favorite head scratcher from this article:
. Compare this situation with Windows and Linux: Windows is dial-up, and Linux is broadband--a niche market.
Apropos to what? I use linux with a 33.6 modem every day. Weird, man.
Must be nice that you, and everyone you know, lives in areas where broadband is available. In the Real World, they aren't. Unless you are lucky, or live in a rich suburb, you don't get broadband. Many small towns have neither cable modem or DSL, as there is no incentive for the companies to upgrade their systems to provide it. I suspect, based on what I saw while living in Utah, that 30 years from now there will still be substantial portions of the country on dial-up. Heck, there are towns in Nevada that still use party-lines for their phone systems. IIRC, BellSouth didn't replace the last mechanical phone switch until about 30 years after the electronic switches were invented.
Best Slashdot Co
I strongly suggest choosing your ISP independently of your broadband wire provider if it is possible in your area. My DSL runs through the same ISP I've had for about six years now, and I have no complaints about the quality of my connection and service. Downtime is very minimal and backbone connectivity is good, the same things I looked for in a dial-up provider years ago. They let me run a static IP in bridging mode, and aren't heavy-handed about the reasonable use of servers.
As far as the ATM connection between myself and my ISP, I've never seen any bottleneck that I could attribute to that portion of my connection. It surprised me, as I figured oversubscription rates on the ATM cloud would introduce serious bottlenecks from time to time. Does not seem to be so.
Mryll
After the web page involved was necessarily stripped of content to do this and when, of course, the number of users dropped precipitously as a result, refused to believe the real reason for it and demanded the sysadmins and web engineers "prove" to him "why the page is now being delivered more slowly [instead] to the users".
In other words, spend as much money per line for upgrading lines used for both modem and voice lines (which don't need the upgrade) as it would cost them to add DSL service to the line - and then have to add more DSL hardware on top of that for those who need better than this still half-assed service, which would still be delivering digital data through totally unnecessary analog-to-digital-and-back conversions.
I can only conclude you must work for a modem manufacturer.
The problem with DSL is that telcos are trying to do it over ANCIENT POTS lines. Much of it untwisted, oxidizing, all connected at rats nest type junction boxes, alligator clips, etc. Good enough for voice. But no more than that.
And this whole "how many feet are you from the switch" contingency only proves that DSL is a HUGE KLUGE.
It's not just the quality of the old lines. The distance limit is inherent in the use of the copper pairs.
A copper pair has stray capacatance, inductance, and resistance. The stray capacatance and inductance combine to form a transmission line. If it's balanced well enough that the audio isn't crufty, it's balanced well enough that the first hundred or two megahertz is pretty OK, too.
Deviations from a smooth twised pair (like the stuff you see in junction boxes) distort the smoothness of the transmission line, producing some reflections and other pathologies. But the amount of havoc they produce is dependent on their size relative to the wavelength of the signal - and the wavelength of one megahertz is pushing a kilometer. (That's why T1 (and Primary Rate ISDN), with a carrier at 1.544/2 MHz and harmonics several times higher, can travel over ordinary pair, junction boxes and all.) Just don't splice in a branch with a few hundred feet of wire to give options on what house to feed. (Or cut the branch off when somebody wants to use the line for DSL.)
But the wire also has resistance. And that makes the transmission line a LOSSY transmission line.
The distance limit comes from the fact that the stray resistance is in SERIES and the stray capacatance is in PARALLEL. That forms a low-pass filter. The farther you go down the wire, the more AC is attenuated, and the higher frequencies are attenuated more than lower frequencies. They are also shifted in phase as you go farther down the wire, and the combination of the two effects distorts waveforms as well as losing power.
After a few miles, even audio becomes muffled. (Then phone companies may add "loading coils" - lump inductors which level out the high frequencies a bit up to the resonance - a couple KHz - but eat everything above that. Which is why you can forget DSL, base-rate ISDN, and 56k modems in rural areas.)
A DSL modem acts like a bundle of narrow-band modems operating at a comb of frequencies. Each modem handles only a narrow range of frequencies, so the phase distortion within its band does not produce significant waveform distortion of its portion of the signal. The modems are independent, so phase differences between the separate carriers can be ignored. And the modems can independently adjust their gain, so the selective fading of the higher frequencies can be compensated for - up to a point.
Eventually the signal in the higher bands is too weak to reliably extract from line and modem internal noise. So the modem drops off the higher carriers and runs at a lower data rate. And the farther out, the more you lose, until there's really no point to it...
Want to go farther? Use thicker wires, spaced farther apart. (Lower resistance and lower capacatance.) Want to go still farther? Use an amplifier/filter combination (like the cable systems do) or a repeater (like some extended-DSL systems). Want higher data rate, ditto - and also use a different insulation. (Insulation can attenuate REALLY high frequencies by "inductively coupling" a "stray resistance" into the "stray inductance" of the line.)
But if you replaced the copper with a type-II superconductor and the plastic with vacuum insulation, and didn't foul up the smooth twist too much, you could run your DSL line to the other side of the continent.
The main thing that "category >3" lines are doing is twisting the copper pair more often and more evenly, so frequencies in the hundreds of megahertz don't couple to nearby wires and get interfered with, distorted, or lost. For the first couple megahertz, phone lines are OK except for the selective attenuation issue. Cat 5 still has the same selective attanuation as Cat 3, which is why you can only run it around in a building rather than all over the city.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Guess what: businesses with T1 lines are still subject to bandwidth restrictions by their ISP. They get you coming and going.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I'm being pedantic. I know. It's horrible. ...but I'm getting sick of people thinking that broadband simply means "fat pipes."
In reality, the distinction is between "broadband" and "baseband." Broadband sends the data signal over a carrier frequency. In most cases, this frequency is your cable television information. Baseband is sent directly over the wires as spikes in signal, much in the same way that old-style telegraphs were sent, as with Morse Code.
Having said that, I suppose it's inevitable that "broadband" will eventually become a codeword for "high-speed, generally residential, Internet access," but I'm fighting that trend every step of the way. :)
Dvorak's pundit-ism aside, I don't understand why, if it available, so many people shun cable modems. Where I am, CM access costs around $35 per month. Compare that to the average(local anyway) cost of dialup access of around $20. No brainer, right?
Well, of my friends and acquaintences who have dialup access(everyone but me) they are also paying for a second telephone line?!? Now your dialup access is costing you $10-$15 more than the cable modem! And to show for it you have crap speeds, and dubious quality, at best.
Most CM providers will give you the nice web server space and email addresses, just like you can get from any other dialup provider.Hell, if you don't like the CM ISP's email/web service, just fire up your favorite Distro(Solaris x86 included) and put that 20GB HD to work. That's what I did.
It is one thing if you can't get CM access, but if you can it just makes more sense(to me anyway).
Dvorak's comments are a joke. Yes there are problems with SOME broadband service providers. But I have a friend who hasn't had telephone access in two months because some scam long distance co. wont give up the lease on his phone line, and they are refusing to provide him service. Which just goes to show you, there is f'ed up service in any kind of service bureau.
I say Dvorak should stay on TechTV and talk about how much of a hardcore "gamer" he is, and leave my broadband alone.
*** Water floats, but it also capsizes boats! ***
misses what is lining up for the future. After reading his rants for a few years, and spending the next decade pretty much trying to ignore him, I'm certainly not surprised that he is clueless when it comes to the future of "broadband" access.
That future is fiber and fiber is, as you read this, being spread around counties in at least one state (Washington) by public-owned utility districts (PUDs). Within 3 years at least one rural county (Grant County) will have every building that is connected to the electrical grid also connected to fiber. Enough bandwidth to run telephone (VoIP), Internet, Cable Television (now *there* is a switch), and probably more.
Two small towns in this county are already pretty much wired up to fiber with customers choosing amongst several local ISPs for their bandwidth. In fact, anyone can be an ISP if they are willing to pay for the bandwidth out (via the fiber, naturally) themselves.
Of the three entities capable of stretching their existing infrastructure to accomodate fast 'net access (telephone companies, cable companies and electrical power distribution companies), the last one is the one almost completely ignored by the "popular media" and, not surprisingly, Dvorak.
It is likely to be the dark-horse in this race. Dvorak will probably claim to have predicted it
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
Broadband content is not like HDTV. You don't need sites to provide special "broadband" content to get an enormous benefit from the modem. Simply getting through that obnoxious Flash download in 3 seconds instead of 30 every time I go to my bank's site is justification for the exta $20/mo, in my opinion.
Slow down there, Ace. Nobody said broadband doesn't make one's surfing experience more pleasant. But do you know what the average AOL-type user does in response to slow dial-up connections and the consequent undesireable net response? She doesn't whip out her checkbook to buy more bandwidth. She just doesn't surf the net very much. She doesn't reload Slashdot every ten minutes to see if there's any new posts. And she is happy that way.
Most AOL-type users want to check their email and do some light web surfing. Dial-up is sufficient for that and any content provider targetting a mainstream audience should code for dial-up. If your bank actually has Flash on their home page, they don't deserve your money. A banking website should absolutely shoot for the lowest common denominator (128-bit SSL aside). Broadband is for gear-heads, gamers and SOHO users and will be for quite a while.
She has one phone line (cancelled the other one when the price went up).
She will never pay $50 a month for broadband, not when dialup is $20 or less.
Same with my sister, and three brothers, cousins, aunts, uncles and so on. I'm the only one paying for broadband.
Are all my relatives hicks? Nope, just cheap. They don't see enough benefit to go through the hassle and expense.
Dvorak is correct, widespread broadband is MUCH further off than any analysts have been speculating.
(to be fair, one brother had DSL, but has moved to Germany where he cannot get broadband at his apartment).
Admittedly, during the peak-hours it's slow (it actually stops being broadband
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Anyone who's studied Economics knows there's a crossover point in the use of substitute goods. For example, witness the switch from coal to petrol (gas for Americans). Back in the late 1800's, petrol was considered a waste product that refiners flared when cracking oil in a distilling tank. Then the IC engine was perfected and a practical use for petrol was found. Meanwhile, the use of coal for various applications was becoming uneconomical. Over a period of decades, people switched from coal and animate energy to petrol. The same thing will happen with broadband. Eventually, the cost of maintaining an analogue cable plant and a circuit-switched topology will become too great for the telcos to bear, and they'll transit people over to broadband. Another example: I just switched to digital cable because it's actually cheaper than analogue cable. The cable operator can offer four times as many digital, MPEG2-encoded channels in a 6MHz band as they can with an analogue channel. It's cheaper for them, and they pass the savings on to the customer. The fact that I get about three times as many channels for a couple of dollars less each month is icing on the cake. Now, true, the cable op might (and probably will) hike rates once a majority of people have switched over. But there does exist that crossover point.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
As much as I hate the cable monopolies, they've got their act much more together than the DSL ninnies. By coincidence I ended up with DSL from Pacbell and Cable from @Home/Adelphia simultaneously. What a world of difference. DSL was sluggish with speed bursts and the service terrible. Cable was up and running in a couple hours, no problem with speed of about 1.5 for a year now....
--
OliverWillis.Com
OliverWillis.Com
An Operative with an Agenda
I have two very different experiences in getting DSL setup at home:
1- In Atlanta, GA. It took over two months to get the connection setup. A COVAD technician had to come over to my place twice to setup new RJ45 hookups to my phone line. The connection was slow (180kbps download) and expensive (90$/month).
2- In Montreal, Canada. I got my ADSL connection setup in just over a week, 1.4Mb download, with static IP, for 35$/month. I received the modem, plugged it in the phone line, hooked it to the hub and voila! My point would be that I think the quality of service depends a lot of where you reside.
v.90 is lousy. It has very low bandwidth and an incredibly high bandwidth:latency ratio.
ISDN is the solution. I daresay that most home users would be perfectly happy for the most part with 128kbps links of relatively low latency. Keep in mind, also, that ISDN has an incredibly low first-packet latency as well. If you have automatically dialed on-demand ISDN connection, I put it to you that you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between that and DSL unless you tried downloading ISO images or movies or the like.
What killed ISDN was Pac$Bell's greed. I was perfectly happy with ISDN until they made it metered. If Pac$Bell would simply once again offer unmeasured residential ISDN I am sure it would supplant DSL very quickly indeed.
ÕÕ
ÕÕ
Back when I was working at MCI, we'd charge $1600 a month plus local loop charges for a T1 line. For some customers, local loop charges were more than the base T1, too. We still had a terms of service though, and reserved the right to cut your line off if we got enough complaints that a customer was using their connection for spamming.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
No, John's job is to write troll-like articles that get linked to from places like slashdot. That way, his page gets thousands of hits, his bosses make plenty of ad money, and they keep him around for another week.
--
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
This is fact. Everyone I know in college got DSL or cable the instant they got their own places. While a lot of users may be getting dialup, once they, and their kids, try broadband, they're never going back.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
In think we are looking in the wrong place. Cable Companies have a chance to totally steal the business off of the LECS. Everyone might malign the cable companies, but one thing that they are doing is making it easy for you to connect (with self install or idiot install). DSL's run by the LECS basically, suck in my opinion, until you get it setup. The telephone companies are under this mass assumption that we will continue to pay ridiculous prices for Voice and Data and not look to others for service. I believe that everything will come into the hosue on one piece of cable, be it fiber or coaxial. Everyone will complain about Cable Modems, but with exception of a couple outages (for which I got credit for....try that with a LEC!), I am nothing but happy! I started out with a Legacy modem and moved to DOCSIS because of a problem. DSL has too many problems becuase it's all related to heavy duty business stuff like T-1's and T-3's and must be configured similarly. I ain't saying it's easy to setup a cable modem (for the company anyway) but they seem to have less bureaucratic horse manure to deal with unlike the too big for their britches LECS. The only other little problem I have with my cable modem just every once in a while (usually starts when a special on new accounts is going on) is that occasionally they outsell the avaulable IP's on the DHCP server and sometimes you can't get one, but this happens so rarely now I don't notice.
Gorkman
I read this a while ago in PC Magazine, so I've had some time to think about it. I agree with most of what he says, but I question whether broadband is really decades away. After all, it hasn't been that long since the mass market got modems. Before that, SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) was to give your data to a data processing center. Modems were a radical new way to connect to other computers. Taken in this context, broadband is not nearly as radical a change.
.).
Granted, dialup access has been entrenched in the market as the de-facto standard, but eventually companies will realize that they have to compete with dialup on a cost basis moreso than a bandwidth basis if they expect more people to sign up (including installation costs . .
Most people just use an internet connection for e-mail or casual web browsing, so a moderately faster connection would be appreciated, but few people in that market segment see the necessity for it. On the other end of the spectrum are the people who run Gnutella/FTP/HTTP/etc. servers and are constantly uploading/downloading files. For these people, more bandwidth==necessity. If the broadband companies can compete on cost as well as raw bandwidth, they'll be able to draw in more customers (and raise the bar for other companies, hopefully providing fast, cheap access to everyone).
DSL companies sell more equal footing. Mine, Telocity, provides static IP with few restrictions (I think they have some kind of upload limit per month). It's not perfect, but it's much much better. If Bell South does not screw them and they can keep their lines open as well or better than the cable folks, the cable folks can kiss me goodbye!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
That's the way to go. Fiber cables are more secure for the future and ether works really well. After all the reports about other systems working all but good I thought that building a good net would be the future.
;)
Besides, fiber might rid us of AOL
Teledesic to the rescue! And Hughes, Motorola, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Loral, Alcatel, Orbital Sciences, etc.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Timothy, ever think that they went out of business, cause they offered shitty service?
My previous place had Covad DSL, and that was fairly reliable as well, though the speed of that connection was not nearly as fast.
I think that as cable companies and phone companies upgrade/update their infrastructure, we'll see more people get DSL or Cable. I think it will be something like the Cable service. You'll not really have much of a choice other than to use AT&T At Home or Pacbell DSL (here on the west coast).
Competition can be a bad thing, ie: look at the energy situation here. But if I had 2 choices, that would be better than just one. Kinda like using either Satelitte or Cable. Both cost about the same.........
Dvorak's statements could be akin to this article 10 years from now....
--
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
Dvorak was a pretty smart guy back in 81-84, but he is currently completely lost. He's the guy who you expect to hear "why do we need these here new fangled pentium boxes? My old 8086 is workin fine!" He is a media head, not a techy anymore, and he is bitter because he can't keep up. I assume because he is so out of it with technology, he figures no one can use the stuff.
Just three more hours seapeople and you can finally take me away from this crappy God Damned planet full of hippies
Hell, you could say the same thing about any piece of computer hardware: there's no incentive to market gigahertz chips until there's a lot of demand, and there won't be a lot of demand for gigahertz chips until there's programs that need it. Well, guess what, there are. Hello Windows XP. Content is created based on the percieved future of the medium (everyone wants to be first in), not neccessarily on its present adoption rate.
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
On occasion, yes, you control prices. Otherwise the "competitive companies" mysteriously raises their prices in lockstep. Whyfore are cable TV rates rising?
Businesses exist to service stockholders, not their customers. Customers are just a factor to be managed, like suppliers or office space. With a little help from their lawyers and business managers, they can manipulate prices into ever higher spirals.
Adam Smith was not a prophet of the lord, just a theoretician.
If competition should be driving prices down and service up across the board, where the hell is the broadband? And when it is there, why is it metered so brutally? Ans: too many pigs feeding at the trough.
Broadband is slowly making inroads into people's consciousness
This is quite true. Especially if you look at the fact that most universities provide broadband connections to their students IN THEIR DORM ROOMS. Kids are getting hooked on it, and they're much more likely to go out hunt down an apartment in a DSL or cable capable area.
As soon as all the old modem-fogies are dead and only the college-graduated broadband junkies are left, the demand will be high enough to get ubiquitous high speed connections.
-Erik
Woah, have we had different experiences. I had Telocity hook me up and it's been sweet love ever since. They had this spat where a router in Chicago was deep-sixing itself randomly on weekends, but that was fixed some time ago. They've given me my static IP, they've not complained that my home machine is hosting a multitude of servers, and they haven't throttled my bandwidth.
God bless them.
I get a static IP and no bitching for $49.95/month :) That's with 768k up and down.
Actually, a T1 line works more or less like that, just forcibly pumping bits over copper. DSL uses a quite sophisticated modulation scheme so it can work over wires that couldn't handle a T1.
DSL ought to work much better than it does. Most of the problems seem to stem from inept coordination of installation, bad tech support, the involvement of too many organizations, and insufficient regulation of service quality.
1. Paying a $50 bill every month, service or no service.
2. Enduring month-long outages at a time.
3. Having the support number auto-hang-up on me after 40 minutes of hold time. (I'm serious!)
4. Calling 10-12 times and never getting a support representative to take personal responsibility for my case.
5. Calling the service line and telling them that it's their damn routing table and that they should do a rip and rebuild again (They love that!)
People shape laws. Not the other way around.
Good old John, it's nice to see just how "on the ball" he has tended to be in his predictions of the past four years or so...
You know, things like, say, the iMac will fail because it doesn't have a floppy, the iBook will fail because it's too "girly"... those two models may have sold in the millions, but you can still bet that John's shaking the ol' finger of doom!
And he used to be so widely respected... oh well. I guess that's what happens when people stay on way past their prime retirement time.
My sig is too lon
The biggest obstacle regarding widespread adoption of 'broadband' vs. dialup is the cost. Most people are fine with the speeds of dialup for accessing the internet, although usually become very accostomed to the high speed that cable/dsl/etc. offers. I know 3 people who said "I don't need that kind of speed" who today would shudder to go back to dial up from cable. But lets face it. My cable bill is $90/month for 3 ips and no premium channel service; without @home, it'd be $35. Not many people can afford the $55 or so a month (plus extra $200 or so for initial set up charges) that is required for broadband access. And not everyone can justify these high costs. I know, a 2nd phone line is ~20/month and so is dialup access, so you're looking at a price differential of $15. But that's assuming they have that 2nd phone line. Odds are that they do not. (we're talking about most people, not everyone.)
So why does it cost the user so much? Why doesn't a provider simply drop their price to $25 per month, and grab most of the market? I would switch from my time limited $10 per month AT&T dial up account to broadband in a second if it didn't cost so much.
I was trying in vain to find the category of Foot-in-mouth - writers; one that would contain at least msrs. Dvorak and Metcalfe. Since there is no such thing, could you please add it ASAP. Just combine 'humor'-foot icon with Bill G.'s face and there you have the icon.
People who want to read articles like this (both of them) can search for it, and others (me included) could read it only if the alternatives are quantum computing or space stations.
Thanks in advance!
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Disclaimer - I do not work for Verizon and in no way benfit from this message.
It seems that lots of people here like to complain about how crappy their service is. Well, in my opinion, you get what you pay for. The majority of the problems I have seen first hand are almost always from DSL providers who buy and resell from Covad, never pay their bills, and get cut off.
Everyone also likes to bitch about Verizon's DSL, ranging from crappy support to constant outages. I have Verizon DSL. I like it. I like it alot. I pay $60/month for 1.5 down and 512 up, consistantly get much higher down speeds than what I pay for, only waited 3 weeks for install, have had zero outages in 3 months, and have never even had to call tech support.
Spend the extra money on Verizon, go buy yourself a router that supports PPPoe (I use LinkSys - 8 port $200) and you won't run into the "we don't support Linux" problems.
I mean, come on, $60/month is really not that much for basically having your own T1. 3 years ago this would have been an astounding price (when people were paying 1500/month for similar bandwidth). In 3 more years I wouldn't be surpirsed if we could get 10Mbit/sec for little more than an addition charge on your phone bill equivalent to call waiting or caller ID.
Dial-up is dying.
I am Jack's broken heart
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise
Sure, I have my own DSL sagas circa 1998-2000 that I certainly do not want to relive. Lately though, my experiences with PacBell Internet have been a lot different. Fast, reliable connections, 75% of my questions getting answered (they still need to work on that), low hold times for tech support. I actually get roughly 5.5Mbps download (it's enhanced DSL) and the full 384K up, and my pre-war apartment builing is wired with farily oxidized Cat 3 cable, (and the C.O. is about 1.5 miles away as the crow flies)!
I characterize my earlier DSL experiences as those of dealing with an emerging technology and a provider experiencing massive growth pains. I still hear DSL horror stories, and yes, when I design a website, it is still with an 8 second load time@48K in mind, but I would not count DSL out. The fact the dialup is growing faster than broadband suggests that broadband will grow, because dialup is a stepping stone to broadband for the newbie, and let's face it, at this point _ALL_ growth in consumer access is due to newbies. Where I live, you have to be completely insane to pay $10 less a month (compared to DSL) to get the second phone line so you can talk and surf. Maybe time isn't worth much to some people...
cat
Far be it from me to disagree with the great Dvorak, but I have to believe even the non-geek crowd can be taught to crave bandwidth. DSL providers and cable operators are sure trying. Has anyone seen the cute (the first few times you see them) Roadrunner commercials? Beep-beep!
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
In European countries, where you're billed on a pay-per-length of connection basis, the biggest asset of dial-up, ie cheapness, fades away for heavy Internet users (which I am). I share my life between Paris and New York: in France, I have broadband access, whereas I'm still with good old dial-up in New York.
Otherwise, the claim "dial-up is a standard, and standards tend to stay" is rather Dvorakiesque (read: stupid) in my opinion: standards stay for compatiliblity reasons, plain and simple. This is not a problem with broadband: you don't have to change your PC, your operating system or the plugs in your appartement when you decide to go cable or DSL: just buy a modem.
Dvorack complains about the 20Kbps streams he's getting. What if the DSL bandwidth provider used their LOCAL bandwidth to provide content? $3 to stream a movie at full bandwidth, for instance? Given that the cost of distribution would be VERY low the only real cost would be that of putting together a content server (now cheap and getting cheaper) and licensing from the RIAA... (fill in various expletives) Maybe for the extra $30 (from $20 for dialup) a DSL customer outta get a few moview streamed for free? Betcha people would sign up like mad for something like this, and would also be much happier with the service they're paying extra for! -Ben
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
It's interesting that you are so certain that where *I* live isn't "the Real World". A neat little way of discounting everyone's experiences but your own, isn't it? "Oh, you don't live in the Real World (TM). Only I live in the real world!"
News flash, bub. Most people don't live in small towns or the ruburbs, anymore. I'm not particularly thrilled about it, but most people live in cities and the suburbs. Personally, I live in the city of Pittsburgh (PA). Hardly a rich suburb. Maybe I'm just lucky.
Ok. Every now and then I enjoy reading an interesting (albiet ignorant) ZDNet article. But what is this guy talking about?
34 Kbps, the typical speed produced by a dial-up connection (plus or minus 10 Kbps), is a true standard.
Well sure, but it's quickly becoming outdated. With roadrunner in the price range of a dialup account plus an extra phone line, who would want to stick with it?
Nobody today can produce a Web site and not care about the dial-up user. So everything gets designed and optimized for the lowest common denominator: 34K.
And I used to have to still consider people using Netscape Navigator 2.0 when I was designing my web pages. Do I still have to? NO! Because OLDER TECHNOLOGIES ARE BOUND TO BE REPLACED by something faster and better. I still make my pages VIEWABLE with even lynx, but will they get the experience without a better browser or a faster connection? Now, today we still have to consider the dial-up user. Yes. But why would we begin to call it a standard now, right when it is being ready to be replaced?
A couple months ago my Grandmother (still trying to stay ahead of the curve, god bless her heart) called me to discuss this crazy commercial that she saw where she could send movies and stuff to others! I set up a call with roadrunner to her house, they installed it, and she loves it. Ask anyone who has used broadband if they would go back to a dialup. The resounding answer will be no. Whether or not the companies that base their business around it make it (won't even go into their business plans) is another story. Just my $0.02.
Revelations 0:0 - The begining of the end.
... those online services had a niche market, as tech savvy geeks represented the market.
The net is used by nearly all and a good majority of them are not tech savvy, nor do they wish to be - they just use the net as newspaper, TV, or radio, or telephone.
And bandwidth is still expensive - any high traffic site faces $5K and more for monthly bandwidth charges - that may be peanuts for a large company but that is prohibitive for most citizens ...
Though I do agree that Dvorak is a clueless hack to be ignored ...
AZspot
... mark on this one ...
I'm reading a lot of comments here where people are questioning the ease of setup, difference between dialup and broadband, etc. ... While, those are good arguments, I have to say you arn't getting the point - Broadband is not taking off as fast because (1) it's still not available to a large segment of the population, (2) it's still nowhere simple as plugging a phone line in and getting a dial tone and (3) a good deal of people really don't see the need for broadband over a standard dialup connect ...
DSL providers and cable companies have scaled back their rollouts - in my neighborhood, cable access was supposed to be here already but the target date keeps slipping (first it was summer of 2000, then it was early 2001, then it was end of 2001, now I'm told by Cox that they're re-examining their rollout strategy - whatever that means ...). I keep getting ad fliers telling me that I'm elgible for DSL but when I call, I'm told I can't get it and that there are no plans for when and just to keep checking back periodically. I believe Sprint broadband is available but I'm not too familiar with it and fear spending money on technology that may be defunct after a year or two ...
Dialup net access is simple - you plug in the phone line to the back of the computer, and most people are so lazy that they are paying $25 a month to AoL just because their machine came preloaded or they popped in a 30 days free CD, not realizing that they could receive the same service for $15 a month or less from a local ISP. And sorry, broadband is not as simple as cable hookup even - most families have issues with multiple PCs, extra costs for wiring, etc. ... - it's not a big deal for techies like /. posters and readers but for the average Joe it is a larger hassle.
This may shock some geeks, but broadband access is not seen as a "must have" by many. Again, the average Joe feels he is served enough with email and basic net access. He's not downloading ISO images or building an MP3 collection. Yes, this may change at some point in the future, but not for at least several years. Also, many don't realize the difference unless they are a heavy net user - and Dvorak is right (o, it pains me to say that ...) about the web being standardized for a dialup connect visitor - it doesn't make sense to do otherwise - and he's right - streaming media via broadband still looks choppy - it does make the net surf exprience a quicker, smoother one, but unless you use the net frequently, is it worth the extra money and hassle?
AZspot
Indeed, dial-up is a great deal more reliable, although this isn't due so much to the technology as the support behind it. Consider:
:P
DSL - The phone company puts multiple people on one DSL line (yes, you do often share, despite the "cable sucks, it's a shared line!" hype), and has absolutely no clue how to support it well. One of my friends uses DSL, and it's awful - disconnects almost every day, and a blatant lack of tech support from the phone company. I notice that the people I see most dropping from my online games are the people on DSL.
Cable - Ok, you have to share a cable line with others in your neighborhood. Honestly though, I've never found this to be much of a problem, and neither have any of my cable using buddies online. We all still get great speed. However, the tech support is just garbage most of the time. I had to jump through multiple bureaucratic hoops to get up to a "high level" tech support guy who pinged my cable modem and told me "everything looks fine." Thanks a lot.
When I was having massive lag spike problems with my cable modem, I was seriously considering going back to dial-up. Modem may be slow, but at least it's reliably slow.
For broadband to really replace dial-up modem, the companies need to support it better, and actually give a damn about their customers. They seem to think I'll stay with a provider who can't give me stable service, even if I do get 800k/sec downloads when it's working. I won't.
"Windows is dial-up, and Linux is broadband--a niche market."
Let the rants/flames begin!
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
From Dvorak's article:
I'm not sure what he's trying to say, here. If anything, most video servers are far better optimized for real-time bit streaming than most FTP servers. And "peer-to-peer" is so broad a classification as to be meaningless. As any Napster user can attest, it's quite common to find oneself at the receiving end of a 0.1 kbps feed from some hapless dialup user supporting 20 simultaneous downloads.
The point Dvorak seems to be trying to make is that the "last mile" (be it dialup, DSL, cable, or dedicated connection) isn't the only potential bottleneck in the path from a content provider to your computer. I used to work for a broadband media company, and I can attest that there are quite a few DSL providers out there who offer megabit connections to their subscribers, but who have an aggregate CO-to-backbone bandwidth adequate to support less than 20% of their subscribers at maximum rate. This oversubscription model works most of the time, as odds are good that only one subscriber out of five (or fewer) will need max bandwidth simultaneously. But let the law of averages fail, and suddenly everybody's bandwidth suffers.
Similarly, there can be significant congestion between the content provider and the backbone, if capacity on this leg is poorly modeled or if demand grows beyond what was modeled. I call this phenomenon "suicide through success", in which a content service becomes popular, grows faster than was planned, and at some threshhold number of users saturates its outbound pipe and begins to degrade for everyone, driving users away.
The best summary of the situation I've ever seen is: "Solving the broadband problem by increasing DSL and cable modem penetration is like solving traffic gridlock by widening driveways."
--
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
As soon as they get done splitting the internet up between "porn" and "non-porn" they can start splitting it up between "Antique dial up sites and content" and "Modern day broadband sites and content"...Segregation is the answer.....We will keep the slow old timers on their side of the internet....And us modern day 300 KB/S cowboys can enjoy a fun journey without having any slowpokes in the way....
Imagine a Napster utopia where no 56kers are allowed to enter......Sweeeet speeds.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
http://www.newnetworks.com
It has all kinds of links to good stories on Broadband Issues, each of which would be worthy submissions to SlashDot.
enjoy!
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Well Dvorak's article was good for a laugh. The one true thing about broadband was something he didn't even mention: the slow pace of DSL/cable rollout due to political maneuverings by the big telcos and cable providers (which has delayed DSL rollout where my parents live in Ohio for years now).
Having been a cable modem user for the past six months now (Comcast@home), I do know that I will never, ever go back to dialup. I pay about twice as much as dial-up users do in my area and it's worth every penny. I'm in the process of moving and the availability of broadband access is right up there with rental cost. I will simply not move to an apartment that doesn't have cable or DSL access.
Has everyone forgotten Teledesic? It's well-funded, affordable, and going into operation in 2005.
If Teledesic keeps its promise, 56KB dial-up will be as obsolete as gopher and Lynx.
Web sites should be preparing for universal broadband access the way software developers rely on faster processors and cheap RAM and disk storage. If the history of software is any indication, there is less risk in betting on the future than in clinging to today's technology.
and it might be even possible one day to have a phone line as fast as a DSL, of course, then it would BE a dsl.
More correct than you probably realised. All a DSL does (well, "all" is a bit negative.. .it's actually quite a bit) is modulate your TCP/IP (or whatever is coming out of your nic) to a high frequency analog signal which it then amplifies the hell out of to get it across that up-to-18000 feet of low-grade twisted-pair phone line running to a DSL demodulator connected to a fiber line. Of course, it adds a bunch of error correction as well, but it is a pretty good hack of a 100 year old phone system. Once it's there it's probably sent via ATM to your ISP, where it's changed back into a TCP/IP signal and sent out over whatever connection your ISP has to the net.
Both DSL (and the UHF-ranged VDSL) and Digital Cable/Cable-modem suffer from the same difficulty - infrastructure costs. Whether one "wins" or the other depends on which can provide the service quickly enough in a particular area, and keep the costs of recouping the investment from preventing people from buying into the service. Once those initial costs are covered, and the roll-out of, say, DSL is fairly complete, the pricing can be rolled back (if there is sufficient economic or regulatory reason for the phone companies to do so) - rather like the cost of a 3 minute coast-to-coast long distance call dropping from around $25 in the first years of the service to around $.20 now (in NON-adjusted dollars).
Fiber's expensive. Really expensive. Way too expensive to run to people's homes. It's an unfortunate reality, but it will be a long time before we get rid of that 24 gauge twisted pair running out of our phones.
On a non-bandwidth-related issue, however, this is a good thing. We're in for a summer of proving that our power grid (at least here in the US) isn't up to snuff. Put in fiber to the home (at least in place of twisted pair) and your phone only works if youhave power. I, personally, want that 56 milliapres being sent to me by a big battery at the phone company.
Here in Qwest territory (I know, it's more in Bell South and Verizon territory) DSL is only about $10/month more than a second line. This goes to the availability point made earlier - if you're someone who is on line more than a half hour to an hour a day, DSL makes the whole experience better and isn't that much more expensive than the second line you'd likely want for your phone anyway.
As far as content goes, there's certainly some out there. I've gotten high-speed realvideo from quite a number of sites and, of course, www.nakednews.com has a broadband feed that's quite good. :)
On cable, the best 'broad' band is the range of frequencies carring Playboy, Spice Channel, etc.
Yes it does!!! If you can't afford to buy (ir T1) the car you lease (DSL, CABEL) with the milage limitations and all.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
Maybe time to change your ISP.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
I remember reading this guy's column in Byte magazine back in the early 90's. And if I remember correctly, he was actually pretty well spoken, and his opinions seemed to be well thought out.
But lately it seems like everything he says is some sort off ill informed knee jerk reaction.
Claiming that Broadband is losing the fight for wide acceptance is just utter nonsense, at least if you live in Canada.
The city council here (Kamloops, BC) has recently announced that they will be pushing to do an infrastructure upgrade to provide fiber to curb for the entire city. And then anyone that wants high speed fiber optic connections will be able to get them easily and inexpensively.
Does this sound to you like a luke warm reception to the concept of high speed access to internet services, for the masses? I certainly doesnt to me.
Bandwidth is just one of those things you can never have enough of. My expectations of bandwidth use are minimal, being a telnet junkie (see .sig), but other things take more. Web surfing, gaming, ASPs (as in applications, not MS), all drain the bandwidth hideously. I certainly wouldn't look forward to viewing Flash 27 movies over a 56k connection.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
When people find out I have a cable modem (relatively high speed too - 1.5Mbps at peak), they say "Wow, you must spend a lot of time online."
And I tell them, no, that's why I have a cable modem. To reduce that time even more.
Life it too short to be surfing, or waiting while surfing. The cable modem actually cut the amount of time I spend online checking stocks, mail, looking for information, etc.
I know a number of people that have ridiculous phone bills (>$50 a month). Imagine the cost savings if these people got broadband and had a way to use it for teleconferencing?
is that broadband providers are stuck on the old dial-up mentality. They think that they can get away with the kind of service that they used to subject dial-up users to (disconnects, unable to get a connection, etc). They price their services with the expectation that the average user isn't actually going to use the service all the time and won't be sharing large files. They advertise "always-on" connections and "instant downloads" but as soon as you try to stay connected all the time and actually use the bandwidth you pay for, they become upset. Ford doesn't sell you a truck and then make you keep it in the garage 18 hours each day and limit your mileage. Broadband providers should provide what they advertise. Gone are the days when you can run an ISP that is busy most of the day. Likewise, you can't sell broadband service and expect that people won't use it.
Uninnovate - Only the finest in engineering.
I think we also forget that not everyone is willing to pay the price of broadband, which is alot higher than the $9 dialups you can get. Many people just don't need it.
Unfortunately, too many of us in the web industry forget or totally ignore the fact that not everyone is broadband. This is a major reason the web is such a bloated cow.
Maybe the best way to think about his articles is to cheer for the opposite of what he's saying.
/*drunk.. fix later*/
$20 a month where, pale face ?
Many countries (Like Brazil, where I live) has per-minute telephone charges, which rises the cost of dial-up connections significantly.
A 24x7 dial-up connection can cost up to US$ 500,00 (five hundred american dollars) here. This is twice the cost of a 512 kbps cable modem or DSL access here.
As you can see depending on how fast the connection is broad-band can be cheaper than dial-up if your telephone company has per-minute charges.
What ? Me, worry ?
...it just seems like Broadband's "EA" stage is going to be a bit longer than some others. But, if you compare broadband adoption/use to PC use, you'll see that it's most likely way ahead of the curve. The major detractor for the masses is that "BB" service is still at a price that most Internet user refuse to bear. Why would a family who spends only 10-15 hours a month online, doing nothing but e-mail, maybe some banking and IMing want to pay double what they're paying now for service?
Personally, I suspect that two other things are probably restricting the growth of broadband...
1. Many people have "BB" access at work and simple spend time at the office surfing and thus don't need high speed access at home.
2. Many people have never used broadband, thus they don't know what the difference relative to dail-up is like.
I personally have cable access and every neighbor who's seem my access, now has broadband as well. There's something about going to your favorite website and seeing it load in 1/10th the time or watching an MP3 download in 1/100th the time it takes for their dail-up, that makes the cost seem much more reasonable.
I think John D. is wrong about it taking decades for it to be ubiquitous. In fact, if AOL ever really gets behind "BB" and makes it affordable at say $30 a month, you'll see an explosion of "BB" use among the masses.
Ruger
Sig, we don't need no stinking sig!
I started of with @home last October with a free install and two free months. However I was soon greeted with lost email, dead connections and a webspace service that worked once in a while. The final straw was a rate increase of $6 which jumped my annual bill to $600 dollars. I found a dial up service for $200 a year and decided that I'd rather download files slower and use the $400 for more important things. I no longer suffer lost email, a web site that loads very slow and better usenet service. If one of the modem racks go down at the ISP I can dial up another modem rack.
Will the last company to abandon Linux please turn off the lights??!
John Dvorak is a whiny windows-bitch. I cannot stand him.
> I must say that is an excellent analogy.
What gets me is that I a couple miles from my home, cable access is available. However, since I don't live in an area that economically well-off, the cable compnay won't bother servicing me. Is there anything you can to do lobby a company into supporting your area, when it's completely possible, but they just won't bother?
Let me know if you find any good deals ! I've looked at www.net4nowt.com who seem to have real people reviews of all the ISPs that I could use, but so far (still) all of the xDSL lines on all of the ISPs are either full up or 100 quid + per month. I'm on 64k ISDN at the mo, which is OK for surfing email etc etc, but it sux at napster / aimster etc etc.
Two wrongs may not make a right, but three
No, it isn't. Most sites load not much slower. What really is painful is downloading huge files.
I looked into this for while as I'm paying nearly that much in POTS charges, but now I've decided to run my own web proxy, upgrade to 56K (yep, I'm still on 33.6)' hopefully that'll reduce charges whilst speeding up access a bit. I'll look back at DSL when the contention ratio is better and the service is cheaper. Oh, and I've got the OpenBSD firewall/gateway working properly... at present it keeps locking the password file apparently at random...
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
1. Many people have "BB" access at work and simple spend time at the office surfing and thus don't need high speed access at home.
2. Many people have never used broadband, thus they don't know what the difference relative to dail-up is like.
That's funny. My father is a UNIX developer for a large international telco equipment manufacturer, so he's quite accustomed to browsing on the fat pipe at work. When cable modems first became available in his area he swore up and down that he didn't need it, he'd never use it, and his V.34 dialup was good enough.
That lasted until the day he needed me to test a piece of hardware on one of my PCs. He came over to my house and we had to download a 10MB driver package for the device. He was absolutely dumbstruck by how quickly it was downloaded to my system (cable modem). He had the cable modem service ordered and installed within a week. Apparently he knew that it would be faster than dialup, but didn't realize just how much faster it could be. I mean, I've got a T1 at work that I share with 60 other employees. My cable modem gives much better throughput than I get at the office. There's no comparison!
The other thing about broadband is that it changes the way I use the Internet (dad too). I used to spend a couple hours a day dialed in and reading various tech news sites or downloading drivers/patches. But I never played online games and I found it very difficult to take part in an online discussion (like Slashdot) because it takes so long to load pages that there's no hope of ever reading all the comments in a single article. During my first week of cable modem usage my "sessions" dropped from a couple hours every night on dialup to about 20-30 minutes on cable. I'm now back up to a couple hours per night, but I get a lot more done in that timeframe. Dad discovered the beauty of Napster and Gnutella and what-not. Now to mention he has VPN over cable to his office (now that's a true timesaver there!). He's very happy with it.
Broadband will slowly, but surely become de-facto.But not in the next 10 years. there will be ways to increase the speeds of a dial-up connection, and it might be even possible one day to have a phone line as fast as a DSL, of course, then it would BE a dsl.
Cable though, is increasing rapidly, I recall only 2 people in my town of 30,000 having cable, now that number has jumped to about 500.
Cable might become the standard, but the speeds of broadband are never really realized. I've got a 5MB connection, but at the highest, it has gone 760kb.
Lets work on the speed!
Slashdot Hypocrisy at work?
I just canceled my DSL with Earthlink this week. In the 9 months that I have had DSL, it has gone out 3 times for various reasons including once cutt off by ATT because they didnt know what the line was for! (The bell tech guy needed some extra wire for a phone line so he decided to cut my DSL line all up for spare parts) Because so many companies are involved with the delivery of the service (earthlink, covad, ATT) it is simply a nightmere to manage, and none of the companies wants to take responsibility for all the communication errors. I will soon be getting a cable modem which will hopefully alleviate the problem. In addidtion to the down time of my internet connection, the bungeled serivce cost me time from work to wait for techs ("they will be there between 8:00am and 1:00pm!!" only never to show...), hours on hold, and loss of hair.
He probably is on crack. If you don't agree with me, check out some of his previous articles. This article is typical of his writing style. Talk about someone who fears change, who'se whole perception of the world is messed up, and doesn't even bother to research simple facts. Whenever i'm looking for a good laugh, i look up one of his articles.
The (Hopefully) Great Slashdot Blackout Apr 21-27
But it's not the speed that the market is standardizing on, it's the price. Dial up costs around $20 a month. It's been that price for a long time. Until DSL or Cable can offer something that's price competitive with that, dial up will continue to be the major player.
What I would invest in is DSL coupled with wireless modems and a neighbor who splits the bandwidth/cost with you.
Don't be surprised if the cable TV operation gets sold to one of the bigger corps at some point. They've been gobbling up cable co-ops all over the place (and it's not a bad thing.) There's a lot less regulation on cable, which makes cable much more desirable to purchase than phone.
Most AOL-type users want to check their email and surf the web a whole lot faster than they can now. One of the most common complaints of your average modem user is that the Internet is slow as hell. People like that would love broadband, but most of them don't even understand it yet, and don't appreciate the difference. To them it's just another $20/mo they don't need to spend (while meanwhile they pay for n channels of HBO they don't watch :) Instead of getting broadband, they limit their web usage. My point is that once they try broadband for a while, they get to like it a whole lot-- and it changes their surfing habits. The net becomes a whole lot more useful. As their friends and neighbors start to get high speed connections, more and more people will begin to jump on the bandwagon.
Cable modem subscriptions went up by 18% or so last quarter, so it looks like they're starting to catch on. Do-it-yourself modems and aggressive advertising are mostly doing the trick-- not to mention that cable modems weren't even available in a lot of places until recently.
Color TV is just a luxury, too. The truth is, waiting for a modern site to load over a modem is just plain painful. Most dialup users don't realize this, as they've never used broadband-- instead, they think the net just has to be slow. Broadband is slowly making inroads into people's consciousness. The best thing about it is that it doesn't require you to make some massive choice as a content provider-- any site that works over a dial-up connection will work even better over broadband. And those 20K internet streams are generally the result of poor site design. I consistently find myself taking advantage of over a megabit of my connection, just for day-to-day applications: watching movie trailers, downloading files, etc.
As far as the increasing numbers of dial-up customers; well, that seems to conflict with another recent study that showed cable-modem and DSL use to be up significantly while overall numbers of Internet subscribers dropped. In any case, dialup connections are easy to get into and out of; they don't represent any sort of commitment. It's fairly likely that a good portion of the new dialup crowd will eventually find themselves using broadband.
Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense. I read the whole article, and it was this fallacy that got me particularly teed off. Broadband content is not like HDTV. You don't need sites to provide special "broadband" content to get an enormous benefit from the modem. Simply getting through that obnoxious Flash download in 3 seconds instead of 30 every time I go to my bank's site is justification for the exta $20/mo, in my opinion. You don't have to be watching streaming video to appreciate the difference. Most of what I do on my broadband connection is simple web browsing. Browsing a catalog, or graphics-intensive site (and most modern sites are) on a modem is slow and unpleasant compared to the same experience over a broadband connection.
There were some pretty interesting research studies carried out when cable companies were considering entering the market, comparing the usage habits of broadband vs. non-broadband households. These people were not early adopters in the classic sense, they were average households that were selected and given a free cable modem. What they found was that the broadband households used their computers much more frequently than non-broadband families, and they used it much more like the TV. It tended to live in the living room (or some other family area), and the whole family would make use of it much more frequently and casually as compared to the dialup families. Mothers and children actually tended to very big users in the broadband households, unlike the non-broadband families. They also found that people stopped thinking of the Internet as something you had to "log on to" or "go to", but rather as just another app on their machine.
You may feel these results are pretty obvious, even mundane. But the implications are fairly profound for the industry. Average families, once they've been given the connection, have a hard time going back to dialup. They do notice the difference, even if Mr. Dvorak (I swear he only got his job for having a great name) doesn't think it's so important after a few weeks of casual usage. The tricky part is convincing them to make the switch, and that's something that's just going to have to create its own demand, the same way the dial-up net did. Putting more streaming video on the net is certainly not going to entice too many people to buy cable modems.
It seems strange to me to see so many people saying they have problems getting high speed connections installed. I've had a cable modem at three diffrent locations, and when I moved some where they didn't have it, I just got DSL instead. All of this was with no problem. They all took about two weeks, basicly just schedueling time. On the last install it was right around christmas, just a week or so before, and I had no problem what so ever, they even wanted to come out earlier so they could take off the day before christmas. The service was with speakeasy and the carrier was covad. No one told me I would have to wait more than two weeks.
I was all set for a good old rant about this, but I have to admit, he has a point. For those who can't be bothered reading the article (hi guys), he's saying that there's a Catch 22 with broadband. There's no incentive (or profit) to supply broadband content until there's a lot of broadband, and no incentive to get broadband until there's a lot of content.
It's hardly rocket science, but he makes a salient point. Read this, and have a good think:
I have to hold my hand up here. I was with AOL back in the day, when there was very little alternative in the UK. I got off of it at soon as it made financial sense to do so. I expected my friends and family would to. They didn't. They stuck with it. I've shown them the alternatives, I've set them up for them, they're just a click and a phone call from freedom. And still they stick with AOL. It's what they know. It's all they need. They don't want to be bothered with changing ISP, and they most particularly don't want to go through the risk and hassle of changing to DSL or cable, because really, it wouldn't benefit them that much.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
You're quite right. In the UK, I can pay my cable company £20 a month for a second line and unlimited diallup access, or £25 a month for 512/128kbs always on. The choice is a no brainer.
And you're quite wrong. If it's a no brainer, why isn't everybody doing it? I have friends and family that happily pay their £15 a month AOL tax. They won't switch to broadband. They won't switch from monopoly telco BT to another telco or cable company. They won't even switch to another ISP. It's too new. It's too scary. They just don't see the need. I don't understand them, but they don't understand me. I'm a geek, they're not.
Dvorak is right on this one. He's an cud chewing moron, but he's right, because he understand other cud chewers. There will be no great consumer demand for fast always-on in the next few years, because until you have it, you don't know you need it. Sure, now that I've had it, I won't give it up. Ever. But me and thee (and Canada) are not who Dvorak is talking about, and we're not who the cable/DSL providers want to sell to. Because we'd use the connections, and that's bad news for them.
Their dilemma is that to make money, they need to pitch their services to people who don't need them and won't use them. That's got to be a tough sell.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I think that they need to stress the fact that broadband is often as cheep or cheaper than a dialup plus a second phone line. People see $40 for broadband vs. $20 for dialup and they think it is twice as expensive and not worth it.
What they don't seem to realize is a second line is often ~20, so if your online enough to need a second line you might as well go broadband.
In my living room we have 6 computers all sharing a 56k line. You can imagine how unbearibly slow it gets when 2 people are downloading, 1 person trying to surf, another uploading, etc..
We have to live with this because the only broadband available here (and 20 miles from here) is satelite. While satelite would be a whole lot better than what we have now, it is much too expensive for upstream and downstream service(www.starband.com).
If only cable and DSL was available to everyone...
Dvorak cites cost as a primary strength for dialup. And that's about it. Let's debunk this.
Anyone who uses the Internet for dialup will be paying $10-$20 for a basic anytime dialup Internet account. What Dvorak fails to mention is this does require a phone line. An extra phone line jacks the cost of your phone bill up I'd say $10 (very BEST case scenario) to $20. So basically, you are going to be paying $40 for what is a second rate connection.
Now how much is Cable & DSL? You will pay about $53 with tax and modem rent with ATT broadband (formerly Comcast @home.) That extra money enables us who run Internet-centric (ie. Debian; apt-get on broadband just feels so good) operating systems he calls niche operating systems to keep our systems running new and improved software all the time.
However, the above is just an example of the many vast benefits broadband offers. There are too many things -- like having a static IP and being able to receive mail directly to your machine -- that make broadband worth what it is.
Since this is a competitive, fast moving industry, Dvorak [from one perspective] partially invalidates the claim about broadband not catching on via stating dialup trends increasing; I would certainly expect broadband to do everything within it's capacity to compete more and more, even if that would mean lowering prices. I will not be suprised when we see cable drop down to $40 a month.
Also, last but not least (and to end this tired rant) Dvorak is completely ignoring the fact dialup ISPs are being eaten up left and right by other ones larger than them. Put two and two together; they're obviously not making that great of a profit. Hence, the desire to move into broadband. Retrospectively, we will need regulations to get the phone and cable companies to release their hold.
mwtr / THIS SIG HAS BEEN PRAYED OVER AND MAY BE USED AS A POINT OF CONTACT (ACTS 19:12)
Admittedly, I didn't read the article, but dialup is already on its way out in some cities. I live in Orlando, FL, and I've noticed a significant change in phone line quality since roadrunner became available pretty much everywhere in the area. The phone company (BellSouth) doesn't really seem terribly interested in maintaining phone line quality for dialup users anymore.
I *had* a cable modem. Maybe my experience was not typical, but IMHO the @home network has really crappy availability. Their DNS servers were never available. I found another ISP to pull DNS from, and then I could not access the internet as the default router was down alot.
I set up some automation on my home system to validate connectivity to the outside world, and I averaged more than 50 hours of outage time per week. when I finally got through to the tech support department to complain, they suggested there was a problem with my Windows and I should re-boot and see if that helps. I explained I don't use Windows, and they ended the call because I was using an un-supported OS. Bastards.
I now have a DSL modem, and the only major outage I have experienced was when there was a fire at the CO.
Cable modems? No thanks.
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
Want cheap broadband??? Want great service??
Answer: Move to Canada.
There's some kind of regulation in Canada that says you can't charge more than 50 dollars a month for a highspeed connection. I'm not sure if that applies for satellite though.
I've had great high speed access for years......
And for mail checking with pine (at the weekends), my narrowband connection will do perfectly.
It's just /. that spoils the picture... :))
Linux *is* user friendly. It's not idiot-friendly or fool-friendly!
Cable here in Vancouver is $40/month. Your average unlimited dial-up is $20-25/month plus the cost of the phone line. Most people just see that cable is roughly 2x the cost of dial-up and say to themselves that cable is too much and they dont need that kind of access.
But they sure do sing a different song when they cannot get their mail.
Cable is easy to sign -up, get installed and to use reliably. Anyone in a city of 500,000 and up shoul be able to get cable of some sort. Dial-up is fucken useless.
I have both cable and DSL. They are roughly the same in cost, but DSL is unreliable ( I hear all the stories from DSL users -- Luckily I have never had a problem with mine). Cable is much faster, while DSL is throttled down according to how much you pay. DSL allows me to run a legit server, but cable lets me DL *.iso's like a monkey bastard.
This spring we were swallowed up along with another company and now work for a large ISP that is continuing it's aquisition spree. Mainly because the dial-up market is saturated, and they can pick off the little ISPs for a song. The boom is over and the ISP market is settling down.
I can see the authors point, most of the world is not like Canada, but where there are TV's so can there be a more useful net expereinece that more closely resembles the internet we envisioned.
Cable Modem installation was under an hour, and I didn't even have to reboot the PC (already had a net card) to get it to work. Unless you live in a cave or the sticks, you already have cable access. Digital cable is coming, and that will be even more bandwidth available. I wont call DSL dead, because it never lived.
I think the best evidence of the timeframe of broadband acceptance was the proliferation of "free pc" deals and "free dialup" in the last year, and the sudden disappearance of all of these schemes from the market. The large dial-up companies had already decimated the local ISP's, but quickly realized that their victory might have been in vain because of broadband technologies on the horizon threatening to take the spoils they were planning to use paying their war-debts. Their marketing guys decided that signing people up for three-year contracts would secure a healthy profit on their investments, even if it meant huge rebates. They figured that three years of a steady profit was better than betting against DSL/cable. Even AOL, who tried to mask their purchase of Time/Warner as "buying content", made an overt move towards broadband cable providers. After they saw the huge response these deals attracted, they figured they could hold out a few years more, and cancelled them. In the end, though, I think the national ISPs who offered rebates just picked up people who wouldn't have gotten internet at all otherwise, akin to Wal-Mart force-selling crap to people by placing it on the end of the aisle with big signs. Neglecting the technical issues of broadband, I give it five more years tops. After people spend three years downloading ever-increasing websites at 56k they are more than happy to shell out another $20 a month for broadband. Besides, I know of no one who, after using the internet (especially broadband) hasn't become addicted.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I've had DSL here in Dallas/Fort Worth for 4 years altogether now - first of all from GTE, then with SW Bell for the last 18 months after I moved apartments. My experience with both installations is nothing like the horror stories of mixed up work orders, bad connections, etc. The GTE installation did take a while to schedule - I guess it takes time to train engineers etc - but once the line-man came, it worked straight away. I had to pay an installation fee for the hardware, and a "nominal" fee for the modem, but it worked fine. Had to fart around with software settings myself, as I was running Win2K beta, and they only "supported" Win95/Win98, but other than that, no problems. After I moved to SW bell coverage area, service was even better. I took the precaution of calling SW Bell to see if they had DSL in my apartment before signing the lease; many apartments said the service was "coming soon", but calling the phone company was the definitive way to find out how soon! Anyway, the SW Bell engineer made an appointment with me, and even called me at work an hour before he set out for my location, so I could meet him without having to wait around all day (other so-called "service companies" please take note - customers do not like sitting around all day waiting for someone to turn up!). When he arrived, he checked the line, gave me a few filters to put on phonees connected to the same phone line, and told me to plug in. The service worked straight away (SW Bell now have a self-install option in this area), I got a free modem, and didn't even have to pay a service charge (I just happened to move in while SW Bell were running a free installation promo). Seems to me that companies like Bell Atlantic etc. should send their engineers to Texas for some training, or else start hiring SW Bell folks away; having seen many complaints from others about poor service, lost work orders, etc. I really feel glad I live where I do - aside from the great weather, low taxes, cheap gas ....
I agree about the dial-up speed when travelling, though. By and large, I'm always pleasantly surprised at web page response when using a laptop in hotels. It seems a lot faster than I remembered dial-up used to be prior to DSL; however multi-media is still REAL slow, as are file transfers when downloading service packs etc. Thinking about subscribing to Ricochet service for on-the road use.......
"Thanks for the article, I just have one question. What the fuck was he talking about?? "windows is a standard, not a product, sure it gets debugged, improved, new versions come out and it gets faster and better, but it's a standard." How about we apply the same logic to bandwidth: "bandwidth is a standard not a product. Sure it gets faster and better, but it's a standard." Why don't you ask this fucko who's still using windows 3.0? or 2.0? or 1.0? Oh but people still use a version of windows so it's a standard. So, same thing with bandwidth, sure, it's a standard, but in ten years from now we'll all be laughing at how slow cable speeds were (Let alone what we'll thing about dial up). This guy is such a fool, the last thing he said was "broadband may be decades away." so what does that mean, 20 years, at least? is this guy on crack! Of course people don't want broadband now because of the price. Does anyone really believe that bandwidth isn't getting cheaper and cheaper, daily? Does he really believe that we'll be going at a poky 34kbps in twenty years? or even in five???? The thing is, besides the price and the fact that it's more difficult to install since it's a new, niche product, DSL is basically the same thing as dial-up. Agreed, it's very different on a technical level, but to the user its essentially the same thing: stick a card in your computer and jack it into a phone line. As DSL becomes more ubiquitous, users might not necessarily even realize that they're using another product. In other words, if DSL is available to every phone jack, then there really isn't a difference from the users point of view. He says that most users are ambivalent about broadband, and I agree. But when their phone jack has access to DSL, and when Dell tells them to get a DSL/Ethernet card instead of modem, for say, 10 dollars extra, they *will* listen. What's this guy smokin?
Ok, maybe that was more than one question."
I regularly get 1.5 Mb/s downstream and 160 kb/s upstream, which apparently is about in the middle of the pack.
Here in Ottawa, MANY of us are on either cable or dsl. It is only the rural areas with problems breaking out of the 56k standard.
I'm waiting for wireless broadband. Now that laptops don't cost a lot more than desktops I think mobility will be the new driver. Who wants to cable up their house? --especially when standards change every few years. Let's just get some low-flying satellite contellation to link up our laptops.... that way we could use them in our flying cars :)
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Once again John boy takes a legitimate concern and instead of taking a reasonable position he runs straight into the realm of absurdity.
Dvorak says "Broadband may be decades away."
WHAT? This is like saying that since we Americans like SUVs and pickup trucks so much, fuel efficient cars may be decades away.
Sure, our vehicles aren't as efficient as they could be, but we're doing better than we were 20 years ago. To draw the tangent, sure only about as many people use broadband as use Macintoshes (I happen to be in both groups), but the relative newness of broadband and the fact that in many areas it's not an option should bring that into perspective. In 5 years even web browising will be so plug-in heavy that people with 56k modems will be like those poor SOBs today with 14.4k modems.
Dvorak assumes that we will continue to have the same crop of users forever. As people younger than us venture out into the world high bandwidth will be a must. People who are college freshmen today are NOT going to go back to dialup when they move into their first apartments after they graduate.
Dialup has taken a shot through the heart, death is certain, the only question is "How good are those paramedics?"
-You can cry, but you'll still die. There'll be no tears in the end.
Wireless internet may be more feasible than generally thought. We can start with the obvious: G3 Phones or Starbucks' free 801.b. The next obvious step is an extension technology which lets you connect to the guy who's connected to starbucks - extending the range. Soon enough someone connects to you.
The obvious problem is spectrum saturation - but there is an interesting fact - in P2P models - actual saturation and power consumption goes *down* as node density increases. This is because distance is *much* more important than bandwidth in power calculations causing increasing returns.
P2P radio as a cooperative "free" solution for the DSL leg of the journey is a much better "OpenSource" and/or shared resource solution than fee services and it's surface at the speed of light so it's much faster than satellite.
It is a fallacy to pretend that nowadays broadband access does not make a noticeable difference compared to a 56k connection.
I believe that Dvorak is a little bit too infuriated with his DSL problems (hey, aren't we all) to make a honest and objective point on that issue. The thruth is that installing a DSL connection is a real pain in the neck and it can be very frustrating to deal with the incompetence of providers and their tech 'support' departments.
But then again isn't it a little bit dishonest of a former high-profile journalist desperatly in need of attention to publish nonsense like that just because he can't measure the difference?
56k might be considered as a standard for web development, but high quality video will never make it into that arena, and I really wonder where his 'tests' where conducted.
I have been hearing all over the place about the time for getting DSL is a couple weeks, to a couple months even... Just thought I would throw out that the local telephone company I work for, we sign people up and have their DSL working within a few days and have hit over 10% penetration rate. I believe that DSL and Cable services will become more and more an everyday occurance, and the timeframe will be less than a couple years (Just judging by our own network growth which took us from less than 1 percent to over 10 percent in under a year)/
Technological advancements more often than not, develop out of a demand for change, expansion and improvements. Therefore these demands produced the deployment of these technologies. What we are seeing at this point, is the users not liking the corporations running it (telcos) Therefore if the telecommunications industry does not respond immediately to the demand for the bandwidth to support such applications, someone else will. The "telephone companies" could be taken over by the internet (voice over IP) My point? If their business model is not adjusted, we could be in for a surprise when other corporations answer to our call. Therfore Dvorak could be in for a shoker because this will happen in the next 5 years. Dvorak is very opiniated technology wise but as far as I know from reading his work, his economics sense is very poor. People also often use broadband to describe something that it isn't. In terms of bandwidth, transmission can be categorized as narrowband, wideband and broadband. Narrowband is currently defined as supporting transmission speed up to and including T-1 i.e 1.544Mbps. Wideband is multi-channel capacity that is between 1.544Mbps and 45Mbps according to US standards also known as E1 standards. Technically speaking, broadband is defined as a multi-channel transmission facility that operates at rates greater than 1.544Mbps. HOWEVER, as the parameters of wideband are defined as 1.544Mbps and 45Mbps, many consider broadband as being 45Mbps and greater. (Greater than 34Mbps according to international standards.) Therefore, IMHO we are indeed a decade away from seeing "REAL" residential broadband
OK, I called @home for broadband cable and got my service 3 days after. The guy came over and installed it in less than half an hour after which I whipped out my router and set up my home network. It is probably the best internet solution out there. I have a static IP and I'm constantly online which allows for me to host my own domain name. And I noticed someone wanted faster modem connections. Well the FCC stops you at 53 but even if you tried I doubt you'd make it much more without going into installing an ISDN line or an ADSL/SDSL line. Cable is great though. I installed FreeBSD 4.3 from FTP yesterday in less than 2 hours including setup. The average download speed was around 290K per second down. 290 K PER SECOND DOWN! Do the math on that one. It comes up to be about 2.32 Kbps.. T1s are becoming useless for broadband download access. Ofcourse for upload it's not as good (capped at 128 Kbps), yet broadband offers much more than the good old 7K maximum that modems will bring you. Most people buy cable internet because it's cheaper and better also. You get 24/7 connection, high bandwidth download (and upload somewhat, anyways better than modems), and the advantage of being able to use any DOCSIS cablemodem to connect to whatever network you want. And over a regular modem you can't share the connection with more than 3 computers without crapping it up. I've seen a 35 node network run off of 1 cablemodem that worked better than 56k speed. That sounds wrong because it should be faster, but that's the fact.. If we'd consider 300KBps (~290 ;p) to be the cablemodem standard speed that means 2.3 megabits per second. Do the math: (2.3 * 1024 *1024) / 56000 = ~48... That means that network would have been able to put 48 computers and be equal to a 56k modem. But most people will have 2 computers in their house. Maybe 3 or 4. That means FAST ass downloads. And cable modems are cheaper in that: 20 bucks per month for phone line + 20 bucks per month for ISP = 40 bucks a month. I get cable for 35. And cable is MUCH MUCH BETTER! I'll leave you off saying broadband is the way to go. Plus porn downloads faster ;p
Is there any value to installing a new, sleek pretty DSL modem to replace the old clunky, but WORKING DSL modem?? are newer DSL modems faster? more efficient? or just smaller and prettier??