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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.
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?"
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.
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!)
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.
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!
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.
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.
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).
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.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. :)
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
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.
... 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
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.
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"
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. :)
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.
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.
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.
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)