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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.
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.
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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. :)
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.
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