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Broadband Is Dead (Or At Least Very Ill)
Thornkin writes: "Broadband is dead. That is the proclamation of tech pundit Robert Cringely. With Excite@Home turning away new customers and going bankrupt along with most of the DSL companies, things are bleak and will get worse. The icing on the cake could be this bill which would remand the requirement for local phone providers to open their networks before competing in the long distance market." And at a different scale, apparently the DSL circuits in Blacksburg, VA (a place which liked to claim it was "the most wired town in America" not long ago) are now full, and turning away residential customers.
Everytime I read one of his articles and look at that pic, I always think its in jail with the orange jumper.
It isn't dead because it wasn't ever kicking all that much to begin with. The problem is, our investors aren't smoking what they used to be, and aren't wildly investing in something (like broadband) that isn't likely to turn a good profit.
Broadband will always be available, the market just won't be so damn saturated as it was.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
In other news, Shaw Cable of Calgary, Alberta continues to signup new customers at a rate of over 1,000 per day throughout its service area in Western Canada (and Florida... Don't ask).
Just because *most* broadband ISPs are staffed by short-term-thinking idiots doesn't mean that all of them are. I don't work for them, but I have a couple of friends who do. Honestly, they really have it together.
If cringely could see the forest for the trees...
Fact is, Exite@home hoisted itself on its own petard, the broadband bill is DOA in legislation, and those companies smart enough to invest in cable, or better yet, fiber are holding their own. DSL is a nasty expensive way to try to make last centuries' technology perform to the needs of this one. Sorry to all of those out there who are stuck with DSL. Honest.
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
And the I answer, as I see it: yes, there is!
People don't want to wait hours for web pages. They don't want to wait for days to download an mp3, a movie, a trailer, etc.
So there's the demand.
That's ridiculous. My connection is working just fi&&$^*^(&)#
The truly sad thing is that demand for broadband is and will remain extremely high, these companies seem to have issues either meeting or exceeding costs of service. I know more than a few people who'd kill for a persistant connection it doesnt even really have to be 'broad'band. We all know what a fiasco ordering dsl can be, and cable while usually better as far as service can be hit or miss performance wise. I was on cable for the past four years and moved to a place that doesnt have any broadband options other than satelite (which is plain rediculious for the cost/performance) and have at least once a month checked on the status of it in my area. Long story short it's been almost a year, we have digital cable and verizon moves on it's own time and has no incentive to move quickly to capitalize on 'new-high-growth-potential-consumer-broadband-mark ets' so for now I twiddle my thumbs and consider moving again, only checking on the status of availibility before I move next time.
Perhaps that should read
Cable Modem is alive and well in upstate New York. DSL however has always been much more difficult to get. Not surprising, when you look at the equation:
Old copper + recalcitrant phone company / severe technical limitations + high cost == bad business.
Lets face it, just getting DSL to work is virtually a miracle, and getting it to work on every copper line going to every home is simply unrealistic.
DSL seems to be a good onesy-twosey kind of thing to implement, but I don't envy the people trying to make it work at thousands of subscriber sites.
"But actually trying to use m4 as a general-purpose langage would be deeply perverse" --ESR
I remember quite a while ago, while I was like eleven years old, reading in Wired Magazine about the wave of the future. We were all going to use cable modems. So, I read the article, which was a rave review, salivating. And then I got to the end of the article and they said that you wouldn't get vastly improved uploading speeds. Just downloading. Because that's all home users do.
I was eleven years old, definitely a home user, and thinking to myself, "What? That sucks."
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
For one thing, those that are lucky to qualify for DSL and have the service, never want to give it up, unless of course the next thing is faster.
I think that the industry had a rough go of it at first because they assummed that this was the latest and greatest thing and everybody will be doing it. This is partly true. The technology was not all that it should be. I was not able to qualify for DSL until Qwest reevaluated its conditions on what allows a line to qualify. A lot of people I know would like to have DSL, but can't.
My prediction for the future...
1) A few companies will be able to continue their service, Qwest (I hope) and a few others.
2) The technology will mature to reach the masses in an affordable manner.
3)In 5-10 years (probably closer to 10) high speed internet access will be as common in America as cable tv.
I would like to know that when cable companies started up if they did not have a similar history and set of problems. Does anybody know?
Either give it away or get top dollar, but never sell yourself cheap.
This is off topic, but I do not know where else I should ask.
There are least 50 or so comments posted on this article and the next two but the main page is still showing that 0 comments have been posted. Is anybody else seeing the same thing?
Either give it away or get top dollar, but never sell yourself cheap.
Because there it's usually the big telco-s who are the DSL providers and ISP-s at the same time. And in Scandinavia broadband is also heavily subsidized.
http://www.uprizer.com/
They claim to have a way to use distributed networking to save billions of dollars for fortune 500 companies.
Perhaps the broadband industry will be saved via better or shall i say smarter networking.
Anyhow the economy is bad now, i expect every industry to suffer, even the ones with the demand.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Believing what a pundit says is about like giving change for a 3 dollar bill. Tech pundits can't tell their ass from a hole in the ground. If you listen to Bob Cringely predict the future you might as well read PC Magazine's John Dvorak. God, I hate these morons, they think they are "on the edge", or "ahead of the trend", or "with it", or "legit", or "hip", or "knowledgeable about the industry", or "into the scene", or "not completely moronic" because they used napster or once saw a NeXT box or somesuch. Bah! They know nothing. They are about as disconnected from the trends and about as ill equipped (informationally as well as mentally) to predict future trends as is possible outside of living in a tribe in papua new guinea that still eats human flesh.
Keep in mind that these are the same morons who thought vrml, push technology, and internet advertising would be the "next big thing".
The fact is that broadband still has a substantial customer base that is willing to pay premium prices *AND* still has a large base of potential customers who do not have broadband but wish they do. The number of broadband users will only *increase*. Now, the number of small broandband ISPs may do all kinds of gymnastic activities and will most likely be much much smaller in the future. Nevertheless, broadband is still a viable technology, a hot commodity, a viable business, and a profitable enterprise. Broadband will not go away, not now, not ever.
Just because Cringely calls something dead, that doesn't mean it is. Or if something is alive, it doesn't mean he is. Take a look at the list of articles from his Old Hat page. It's like a tour of Wired covers.
2 1. html
0 6. html
Here is Cringely on Excite@Home
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit199901
"Excite, like it's bigger, badder competitor Yahoo, is entirely about branding and brand awareness, so the name won't go away. Excite is better known than @Home. Current management at Excite won't change, either. Only the pockets get deeper. So in exactly the same spirit in which a little Mississippi long distance company became MCI-Worldcom, look for more content deals from Excite and more customer-acquiring deals from @Home, sucking-up smaller ISPs.
The one thing that has changed in all this is the identity of the competition. Unable to beat Yahoo at its own game, Excite is using @Home to change the game. The new target is America OnLine. "
While he has been right sometimes, he is just as often wrong, sometimes wildly wrong.
Back in 1998 he proclaimed, loudly that the iMac's intro was going to be flawed by the fact that something like 18% of them didn't work. Well the failure rate was under the industry average when they actually came out of the box. I would provide a link, but his Old Hat list starts the week after this column was out. But I remeber it dangit.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit199901
Then in Jan of '99 he said that Apple was screwed because it came out with different colors of iMacs and that was stupid.
Or there was the decleration that broadband was going to make Blockbuster go out of business.
"How long will it be before the time difference between driving to get video on demand or downloading from the Net is a wash? Three years, according to my figures. Add another three years for broad availability and to cover the impact of HDTV, which will make our video files five times larger again. In six years, then, the Blockbuster and Hollywood Videos of this country will probably be have sold their storefronts, too, leaving the strip malls of America to Starbucks and Bennetton. These intellectual property businesses will simply go away, along with what's left of the retail software business. All that will be left is books -- the oldest intellectual property vessels of all. "
It's been three years and video on demand over broadband is only for the peer to peer file sharing crowd.
Unfortunately, the cable companies are still clueless about HDTV, which should be the next item on their agenda.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
It's the fact that that last mile at all parts is *physically* controlled by some facet of the baby bells, none which are struggling in terms of cash flow, which is making DSL seem like a loser. Because they control both the physical access at the CO and at the user's home, every CLEC has to sit and wait for the ILEC to go out and do something; only recently have the ILECs (at least for Ameritech here in the midwest) have been hand-slapped for being 'intentionally' slow in responding to voice-line installs and problems for residental customers, but all that was was a hand-slap in terms of fines in the millions; DSL is hidden behind this issue. If the CLECs didn't have to deal with the ILEC in any way, I would fully expect most CLEC to be able to offer installes within 5 business days, as opposed to the 4-6 week standard now.
However, fortunately, we have Verizon and PacBell at the end of lawsuits from DSL ISPs for being intentally slow, as well as the FCC watching out for the decline of CLECs (the extention on Rhythms' shutdown, for example). However, I still believe that the ownership of the last mile , from CO to the network interface, should not be in the hands of anyone that is providing the service along those lines; either the phone company can sell it off to a different group (possibly owned by the city/town as with mayn other utility services), or it can split off from that. As long as both the ILECs, CLECs, and standard phone ccompanies have to play the same pricing game, there would be much more competition in the DSL market.
I doubt it will be dead, but it probably will end up as being two major CLECs (Covad and Worldcom) along with several ISPs that use ILECs for the last mile. The only probably now is that artificial bandwidth limits are coming into play particularly with those that use ADSL. Certainly speeds are much better than dialup, but given the projected rate of growth of multimedia on the web, more speed is going to be needed for the 'average Joe' and these artificial caps appear to be fixed at the current time.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Yeah, simply because there's no pay-for-play content for broadband on the Internet anymore, broadband is dead. This is, of course, bullshit.
Cringley dismisses out-of-hand the porn industry, which is the #2 broadband content provider on the Internet. #1, you ask? Ever download an MP3?
File-sharing is here to stay, and it's the driving force behind broadband. Nobody that has cable modems or DSL lines is going to give them up once they've gotten a taste of them, and nobody who has them will ever go back to modem unless it's their ONLY option.
I'll believe it when I see it, Mr. Cringely.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
And in related news...
Apple is dead.
Java is dead.
USB is dead.
IBM is dead.
Motorola is dead.
and of course...
Linux is dead.
Pft...
http://windows.scares.us
I've had "Broadband" for seven years. A few years of ISDN, a few years of DSL, and a couple years of cable.
After having DSL I moved and tried to get it again. After 6 months, 4 routers on my shelf, and receiving functioning cable, I gave up on it.
I would not live without broadband. I'm not alone. All we are seeing now is the natural retrenchment that takes place after an all out competition to grab customers saw the entry of too many players with marginal prospects of profit. One day investors woke up and the retrenchment begin.
I'm on Excite now but I'm in NYC. I expect that my service will survive even if Excite does not. Living out in the boonies is a different question. They're marginal to begin with.
If I remember correctly phone service only has about 95-98% penetration. There are still plenty of people that don't have in-door plumbing. No market ever really fully saturates, the margins just get smaller.
After retrenchment it will expand again. Years will pass. Cable and then fiber are the future. All but seriously marginal abodes will have fiber in 20 years.
www.bannination.com Two things float to the top he
In Ellijay,GA, the local phone company offers DSL to 95% of it's customers.
We're talking in the mountains too folks!
Over 18,000 voice lines, 105 wire centers; they've converted hundreds of miles of copper to fiber, and are considering cable tv over fiber next year.
And nearly EVERY customer has DSL access.
The company spent about 1.5 million to make it happen, and customers get speeds up to 1.5mbs; they've yet to make a profit on the DSL, but, the customers are happy and are eating it up.
My point: if a small company can do it, in rough and nonlinear terrain ANY company should be able to follow suit.
Screaming broadband is dead is ludicrous.
I actually read a (semi)unbiased version of the article in a *gasp* hardcopy publication (nuhz-PAPER?). I would just like to comment that bankruptcy filing does NOT mean going out of business. Pat your cable/dsl modems and be rest assured that this is a business manuever. It is not unheard of for companies to declare bankruptcy for protection against their creditors in times of economic strife. Last I checked the tech industry has been hit hard in the market and it would actually be quite good for the company to not be liable to it's debts for the time being until the market restablizes. Excite@home refusing new subscriptions *temporarily* is a part of their filing manuever and by no means implicates their doors and windows being boarded over. So please, don't have any nightmares of returning to the days of 9600 baud and the pleasant screams of a modem handshake.
Beware blue cats moving at
I don't see broadband dying. I do see a lot of providers going under, but in most cases, it is quite well-deserved. There is demand enough to go around. The Internet has become an integral part of both businesses and homes. Any self-respecting (desk jobs, at least) business will have an always-on connection today. Even my non-nerd friends get cable or DSL at home simply because they spend time on the Internet, and they want fast and convenient access to it.
However, a lot of providers got caught up in the hype. They raked in millions of investor money, set stupidly optimistic goals for themselves and got proverbial suits waaay too large for their proverbial bodies. Take Exodus for example, with their we-will-withstand-a-nuclear-war-bunkers.
So basically, any firm who has asked itself "do the clients really need this, and can we afford to run it in the long term" will do just fine. This is perhaps the Old Economy way of doing it, but hey -- the time of crazy new business models with investors on speed is past. Perhaps rates will go up, perhaps one provider will establish itself as the Sole Monopolistic Ruler, perhaps we'll all get screwed in the end. But it's just capitalism. Nothing new.
Broadband IS dead, or certainly dying. By this, I mean that the industry for providing homes and individual users with Internet access at speeds in excess of 500 kilobits-per-second is not generally viable, and the current players in that business are likely to decline over time.
But that's not "dead" or even "dying". I'll believe "dead" when Comcast turns off my Internet service.
Cringely may have good insights but he needs to lose the sensational headlines.
Fizz
They are all wrong. The net is the future of publishing. It is a public resource and should be protected by existing laws. To deny any person the ability to publish on the web on their own terms, without editorial control like any meat space news paper, it to deny that person constitutionally protected rights of free speech and press. There are no valid techincal justifications for this kind of violation. Effective public legislation should be going in the opposite direction, and those companies who oppose the public interest like this should be stripped of their franchises.
We must not let anti-terrorist hysteria accelerate the loss of our rights. The USA ACT destroys our fourth amendment protection for security in our homes, possesions and personal effects. Beware of Anti-Hacker legislation that removes your first amendment rights to free speech and press.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
A Globe and Mail article states that a $1.5 billion Cdn plan to bring broadband service to every rural Canadian will likely not go ahead due to the need to spend more money on security. Its a shame as farmers should have the right to download porn in a timely fashion as the rest of us.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
This happened when they switched to the latest version of Slashcode. You don't see how many comments there are until there are at least 50 (I think?) and if you're not logged in as a registered user, you don't even see the story at all until it gets enough comments.
It's supposed to prevent fr1st p0st1ng. It didn't help much.
I live in the UK and I just my new DSL in. It costs insane amounts of money (equiv of $200/mo) but I get a 5-IP block and 256kb/512kb of up/down bandwidth and it's very low-latency and reliable (well, between 5am and 10pm anyway, Demon seem to like doing maintainance at midnight). From what I can tell broadband is only on the up in the UK - are we really beginning to beat the US here? if so it's going to be the biggest irony I've seen in a while ;)
Looks like it's time for the Japanese to come rescue the U.S., again. Just wait 'till the Pokemon generation takes over the telcos! As it is their mgmt probably still pines for the days of leasing handsets forever, while being governed by senators old enough to have been personally acquainted with Thomas Edison.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Then, there is an inevitable fall off in demand.
Demand, as far as I can tell, has not slipped. Availability is the problem. I would sign up right now, if only DSL or cable were offered here. This is true for my co-workers and some of my neighbors.
You have something above your lip.
Broadband is not dead. Broadband is really in the hand of large companies.
We have seen Northpoint, Covad, Rhythms and now @Home all go down the tubes. These were all pretty much small companies who's business plans were centric to broadband, with exception of @home but it got bought by a doomed DotCom) But pretty much their ENTIRE revenue stream came from providing people service. The growing pains of emerging technolgies have really hurt these companies as the cost to set up and run service has been consistently outweighing incoming revenue. I would like to see some of their business plans and ETA to profitability.
On the other hand - Who is still providing service? The major players left are the baby bells, and Roadrunner. All companies that get their major source of revenue from something else OTHER than broadband. The baby bells get it from telephone service. Roadrunner gets it from it's media conglomerate father. Starting to make sense?
We're slowly seeing the remaining DSL assets get bidded on and bought by major companies. Maybe that will help their businesses survive and not leave their customers "out in the cold."
Execute? [Y/N] _
Here in Europe ADSL seems to be profitable for all companies providing the service. I pay about 35 USD /month for a 256/128Kb connection. Is it much cheaper over there un US so those companies are losing money? What's the exact reason why all of them are going down the drain?
In Canada, we've seen regulatory agency take a significant leadership role in deploying broadband.
Its affordable, intensively advertised, mostly reliable. FCC needs to take the same leadership. I'm growing more left wing in my old age...
As I understand it though, Excite@home's business model is as a portal. They pay local utilities (including my isp) for subscribers, and hope those subscribers give a flying fuck about their home page. I'm not sure if its a one time payment (probably is if TV Cable network model is followed), but if it is, then it going OOB won't affect my isp in the slightest. Similarly if it has to fire sale the portal.
I would like to say that this man is an idiot.
I am a residential customer of Bellsouth Fastaccess DSL, I pay 45$ a month for 1.5 mbits down, and 256 kbits up.
I have yet to have any service outages, and while the service is PPPoE based, it still works wonderfully reliably.
My friend just signed up recently, and there's no reason to suspect his experience will be different.
Just check dslreports.com, and notice how almost every entry on Bellsouth is a "smooth ride", or at least, acceptable.
Broadband is far from dead.
The "domestic" Speedy grants me a static IP address and is supposed to have the low ports (0-1024) blocked - but they aren't. It costs around US$ 45,00 /month in total. The one I have at home is 128 Kbps.
The "business" Speedy at the office gives me 5 static addresses (although not in the same net block) and is currently 256 Kbps. It costs around US$ 80,00 and is promised to never have any ports blocked.
Both flavors can be juiced up to 2 Mbps if I'm willing to pay up to US$ 400,00/month.
Technically the service is provided by the phone company and you shouldn't need a specific ISP for it to work. Legislation, though, forces customers to sign up with the provider of their choice for what is essentially an "Internet tax" - it's the workaround found to resolve jurisdiction over the service.
I call it a tax because the ISP side of the equation is totally unnecessary. The thing works equally well with or without the ISP. All the ISPs do for Speedy customers is to provide support - which I don't need anyway.
Anyway, the formula seems to be working and a big portion of my city's Internet connection has become DSL lines, both for home and for business purposes.
Well.... I know in Canada, at least one of the major cable companies (Shaw Cable) who, of course, runs Shaw@HOME, has told customers that it will be continuing service regardless of what happens to @HOME.
Network service will stay.. what will go are the @home specific services: email addresses, website, etc. They are already transitioning existing users, and signing new users up, using @shaw.ca email addresses I believe.
As for DSL.. It's widely available in Canada... and doens't appear to be going bankrupt.. perhaps because it's actually run, for the most part, by our phone companies, not by middlemen (which, if you ask me, is the real problem)
This is probably a good thing for the majority of us. The web site designers with T1-itis will be forced to clean up their act and go on an eye-candy diet, (every web site should be viewed over a 28.8 dial up connection before being promoted into production). It would also benefit network admins whose bandwidth is being consumed by employees surfing those bloated sites.
The situation here in Canada seems very good. The two best services price/performance wise would be Cable/DSL. Either go for $40/month and are fast.
There are packages offered by both companies to sweeten the deal. Cable suppliers will bundle with TV channel packages and Phone suppliers will bundle with long distance packages.
Right now, I own my own modem so I pay $30/month free of packages and strings attached (except that I must have basic phone service).
I have used @Home and ADSL in Victoria (~.35 million people) and found both were excellent with the usual tradeoffs (Cable faster in bursts with higher latentency, ADSL consistantly fast (1.2Mbit) with low ping times.
Currently I'm in Ottawa (~1.0 million people) and use a Nortel 1Meg modem from the phone company and pppoe on Linux. Its speed is almost always limited by other factors closer to the site I'm trying to connect to. When the site fast, I generally get 103Kbytes/sec (after overhead/error checking is factored in!) which is fast enough for me.
Not sure if the service providers are making any money like this, but the competition is stiff, even if there are generally only 2 companies competing for your money.
You say "The fact is..." -- just where do you get your golden facts? If you want to show us how right you are and how wrong they are you'll have to do better than this.
As far as I'm aware, "broadband internet connection" just means "fast net", right? It's pretty silly to say that fast net connections are all dead, now and for the forseeable future. I have DSL, my friends have DSL, and many of my workmates have just gotten DSL. If all our DSL companies went out of business simultaneously (insert telco conspiracy theory here), we'd go to someone else with our money, or run 802.11x, or string cable across rooftops, or dig trenches and lay optic fibre, or we'd move somewhere where we can. Hell, we might even start our own local broadband company.
Broadband's too simple a concept to die, really. It's like normal net, except faster. Duh.
This is a stupid post?
I live in a city of 150,000. Just signed up for DSL yesterday. I had 3 local choices for DSL (not Cable though).
Broadband is not dead where I live (Wisconsin). Shit, my 65-year old father has DSL and he lives in a town of 8,000!!!
At first, I wanted DSL for broadband over cable. I called Verizon or whoever it was I was getting it from and they told me I was in perfect shape to receive it.
And then they told me I was too far away.
And then they told me I was fine again.
And so on.
Finally, After about a month and a week or two, I just called Time Warner to get road runner. By the weekend, it had been set up.
I'm not suprised these guys are losing tremendous amounts of money. (DSL)
i had DSL since it came out in my area. At first it was pretty fast & reliable. Then swbell started advertising the hell out of it until they had more demand for it than supply. Service went to hell soon, & swbell apparently isnt interested in upgrading the network, so disconnects & slow lines became everyday fare.
whats the point in paying extra for broadband dsl when much of the time its no faster or more relaible than dialup? Also tech support was non-existant, always getting connected to the tech support sub-contractor of the month. who, of course has no idea what DSL even stands for.
sadly enough ive switched to TW/AOL cable & love it. Its faster than DSL ever was, & when i call them, THEY ANSWER THE PHONE!
this is very important. all business folks pay attention, you will only have a successful business if the business plan includes answering the phone when paying customers call. seems strange i know, giving people what they pay for, but i digress.
so when you say DSL is dying, i say good riddance.
I read the subject like "Borland is dead" and got worried until I read the subject again :)
How come legislators are constantly screwing the people directly or inviting business to screw the public?
And how come not enough people get to know before it's too late?! Sure, news networks and syndicates protect their interests by reporting what they want, but still. Why is it that there is no one single good source of information for Joe Schmoe where the information is easy to understand and instructions on how to write a congressman are comprehensive. Or even very much easier than that - sign a paper or something.
It is really uncool that the ATA is not a law that is contingent on a state of war or something like that and void in times of peace. I would have supported the ATA if it was in effect in its current wording only if it was contingent on something serious. Face it, getting life in prison for reading somebody's e-mail sounds a bit Talibanish to me. Now somebody might say that the law doesn't allow that. No, the law is written in the same loose language as any other and is deliberately drafted to be subject of interpretation. That's how innocent people get convicted...
It is seriously making me wonder if I should move to another country... Several of my friends have suggested this as a course of action. I can't help but starting to listen to it. At least there are countries out there that can't have their government just starting to wiretap somebody because some sicko wants to. They just unleashed the dog....
I've had Comcast @ Home [cable modem], outside of Philly, for about 3 or 4 years now and my speeds are still flying [their routing is par none]. Downstream I consistently have downloads (from fast) sites in excess of 300KBps (yes, that's bytes) and often much faster. I've pulled well in excess of 900KBps with simultaneous downloads. While the upstream is not nearly so hot, I do average around 90KBps. It's slowed down nominally since when I first got the service, but I'm still pulling the quoted rates. My latency is also still excellent.
All this for about 40 bucks a month. I can hardly complain about that; my only real complaint is with their service departments (tech support and service), they're idiotic there.
But given the money, I really can't expect much better. I still consider it quite a bargain though. I'm getting everything I paid for, and more. I find it difficult to believe that DSL can provide a better value and, empirically speaking, they simply don't.
That said, even with certain mediocre broadband services, I find it difficult to believe that their relative lack of speed had much to do with today's problems. Besides the fact that it's still many times faster than dialup, not to mention less of a hassle once configure, most of the broadband companies were adding new customers on a fast as they could. Their problems are more financial. With DSL, the economics simply aren't there to compete against cable modem for the home user. With cable modem providers like @home, they've just made some really stupid financial moves, such as acquiring overly priced and troubled internet companies and maybe even underpricing the service a bit. I strongly suspect that the major cable modem services will survive. Even if @Home goes completely under, their existing cable modem service offers solid economics.
And at a different scale, apparently the DSL circuits in Blacksburg, VA (a place which liked to claim it was "the most wired town in America" not long ago) are now full, and turning away residential customers.
In the big city of blacksburg (14,000 full time residents and 25,000 Virginia Tech students) the majority of people that are in the area already have broadband, either on campus or as an ethernet connection from their appartment to the campus network. I'm not sure what kind of connection the campus has but it is nice. Cable access is picking up any slack that is left by any dsl problems. As a matter of fact my appartment building is getting wired for cable internet access later this month. (Whoo hoo! No more 56k!)
I have never had better service than with Optimum Online. I have them here at home in NJ and at a small company that I do consulting for (yes, the have business cable... not T1 for them.) The service simply rocks. Amazingly quick downloads. Amazingly quick uploads. I'm surprised I haven't gotten a speeding ticket.
I thought that headline read "Broadband Is Dead (Or At Least Very III)... I couldn't figure it out. I had to copy and paste that damn headline and change the font to Courier. Damn you Taco!
All this makes me glad that Comcast is taking over their own network. I use Yahoo and CNN all the time for my content. I just want to pay for a pipe, that's all. Don't roll in some charges to cover some "content provider" I'll never use.
Even more so than content surfing I telework 40+ hrs a week, so again.. I JUST NEED A FAST CONSUMER-GRADE PIPE.
When will the cable companies do video-on-demand by putting hard drives in the digital cable boxes? How long can it take to xfer a 1GB movie to your cable box over the LOCAL LAN? It can't take all that long. Download it for $3, watch it an unlimited number of times for 3 days, and its automatically deleted. It just doesn't seem that hard to me.
Intelligent Life on Earth
I @m so k-rad! @meR!Ca 0Nl|ne rocks!
BSD is dead
Ya, right, especially now that it's set to be the most widely distributed branch of Unix due to MacOSX.
Business 2.0 had an interesting article earlier this year about the possibility of using the relatively cheaper DSL service to replace T1 voice lines for small and medium businesses.
I thought that headline read "Broadband Is Dead (Or At Least Very III) ... I couldn't figure it out. I had to copy and paste that damn headline and change the font to Courier. Damn you Taco!
If broadband goes under, here's what I am going to do:
I am going to run my own broadband service. That's right, I think I can make money where other companies failed. Why? Because these startups were idiots! Everyone wants broadband! My friends who really aren't computer people, are signing up for DSL or cable, happily shelling out $50/mo.
If you can't make money providing a simple service to customers who will pay you $50 a month and be happy if they can just get their porn, well you're dumb. I may be oversimplifying things, but here is the fact: Plenty of times, people have wanted things. Stuff like cars, computers, and broadband Internet. If people want things, the bottom line is that SOMEONE is going to sell it to them! When these companies fail, it's not because people don't want the product - it's because of poor management. Management that couldn't see the eventual downturn in Internet companies was coming, management who thought $2M super bowl commercials, where most of the viewers weren't actually in the service area, were a really good idea.
Yeah, the current round of dumbshit broadband providers is failing.. so what? There are millions of people out there, without service, who are PRAYING for someone to come along and take their $50/mo. Broadband just isn't going away.. it's not an inherently 'unprofitable' market. Few things are.
This from a friend of mine who's a sales support engineer in their business-customer division.
(Also, while Cringely sometimes has interesting things to say, where Excite@Home's concerned, he's off his gourd. Remember his article a little while back about how unprofitable @Home absorbed poor profitable Excite and bled it to death? Never mind that the collapse in Web ad revenue is killing portals all over the place, that's got nothing to do with it -- just @Home's poor management, right?)
-- Some things are to be believed, though not susceptible to rational proof.
The trouble is that the market here has been hoisted on its own petard - when no subscription, toll-free, ad-free dial-up is available (though for how much longer, no-one knows), Joe User can't see the point in broadband.
..from a 10 year resident.
While I can't speak directly on the current DSL situation, I know for a fact that Adelphia is running Fiber cable all over the town, and even more impressively to the dense neighborhoods +5 miles out.
My neighboorhood is getting cabled as we speak, and they are claiming to provide 2 way cable modems when complete.
Stop wasting your time on slashdot open source loosers, go back and flip some burgers. I'm hungry!
How can a dsl company possibly stay in business if they have to compete with the phone company? The phone company should not be allowed to sell the service. That gives them too much control on the market. If they'd simply put lines in and let everyone else sell the service then we'd have fair competition and the phone company couldn't promote it's own agenda as easily.
Northpoint had excellent service. I wish they could have stayed in business, would have saved me thousands of dollars over the T1 that I have now. Both lines were actually with Savvis. T1 is just dang expensive for a small company. It's more than my house payment!
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Part of what made/makes Blackburg so wired is not it's DSL, but the Ethernet which is wired into the some of the apartments. While it did suffer from a slump a few years ago, the amount of fiber in town seems to have been growing again, and more places are getting wired.
---------------
What if the Hokie Pokie really is what it's all about?
I'm getting a T3 and a warehouse and starting a homeless shelter-style facility for displaced geeks.
That's where the money is.
Game... blouses.
It's a damn shame that the circuits in Blacksburg are full, considering almost every apartment complex, and most of the town, has access to a high-speed ethernet connection with a rediculous amount of bandwidth. Oh, and the cable modem network is still very much alive and well for those that don't have the ethernet set up.
;-)
Title of this article definitely needs to be changed to "DSL in select areas is at capacity"
As long as there are customers who demand a product, there will be a seller. Especially because of all the infrastructure that has now been put in place. Providers aren't going to suddenly start digging up cables because broadband isn't as profitable as they thought.
Cringley says that the industry will see little or no growth, and then a sentence later he claims that will lead to its decline. That's just silly. Cable modem went up $10 bucks a month for me last month. That doesn't mean I'm going to give it up, it's just too nice. Besides, if it wasn't for my cable modem - I wouldn't be able to get thousands of dollars worth of free software.
My Karma was at 49, then they switched to words. All that work for nothing!
Verizon has to be the worst telco company out there. The terms of service now ban you from any "Server activity" which can include napster,
musiccity/morpheus/winmx or anything that acts as a server to share files.
Verizon is the first company to force "Net Consumer" where your connection is effectively limited to "consuming" the commercial aspects of the internet.
This will be the death of the internet IMHO. The internet existed long before monopolies like verizon were able to control the whole east coast portion of it.
It has been discussed on http://www.dslreports.com, but i can't say it enough. Send in your complaints. They're making people who need to to "use" the internet purchase a much more expensive "commercial" dsl connection.
Why is it considered commercial for me to be able to send/receive email from work, login to my home pc and test things i want to learn? Why am i being charged more for not "consuming" what verizon shoves down my throat?
To add to it, even when you signon to verizon's support website you have to register for there portal, there is no escaping the commercial grip verizon is enforcing on customers that don't want it.
I think DSL companies are killing themselves.. no simpler way to say it. The internet isn't a system to consume like television, it is a 2 way interactive street. I want to run a node in which people can interact with me and i pay 100.00 bucks a month for the speed/connectivity to run a node and verizon now says that is illegal.
I'm sorry, but verizon doesn't own the internet. Sure they own the pop, but the "internet connectivity" isn't Verizon's to filter and put laws on. Verizon doesnt own the content, sites, and ip that i use when i connect, so how can they claim responsibility to limit it when infact on the top of the TOS they say it isn't there's to limit.
its hogwash i tell you. Verizon is like Comcast but changing the TV shows and overriding commercials and putting in what THEY think is right, how they think they can get away with that is beyond me.
Q: How is Bin Laden like Fred Flintstone?
A: Both may look out their windows and see Rubble.
where is much more on offer then in the US it seems. Here in Santiago, Chile you can choose from around 2 differend Cable broadband providers and around 4 differend DSL providers. Granted that it's a bit more expensive then the USD25 that seems to be the norm in the US.. it's more around USD40 for a basic package and it's not available in the poor parts of the country. but there's no sight of anything dying here..
The US is just now paying the price for it's run-wild monopolies, companies get lazy, and fuckup, and leave people without any way to get broadband.
-- Aji con Todo!
It's not the first time I read broadband-woes on /., but it's the first time I see something that bad. I dunno for the US, but in Canada's broadband internet is stronger than ever. Companies no more advertise for internet acces with 56.6 or 28.8 devices. The two broadband leaders in Quebec, Videotron (300 kbytes in download, 15k in upload ) and Bell Canada ( about 120kbytes in download, 15k in upload, soon to be 1000kbytes in download and 100kbytes in upload ), are getting more and more subscriptions each day, and it's cheap as ever. If you already have cable at home (which a lot of folks do), it's 30 bucks a month for broadband with Videotron (but you have to buy the 150$ modem though) and about 40$ a month with Bell (they don't sell it to you, but they'll replace it with a faster one at no charge when faster speeds will be achievable on their network). North of the border, BroadBand is more alive than ever. Hell, I don't know anyone who used old 56.6 or 28.8 modems anymore.
...continue to run fine, having saturated their bandwidth long ago...they are turning away customers.
Why don't we just have more small-town ISPs? If I could get the funding (that's something I have absolutely no clue about) I'd even start something. It's a simple business. You just keep the servers up, charge people monthly, and have the cable company take care of the lines (ahhh...there's the problem!)
Seriously, though, I've had cable for close to 4 years, by a small ISP that caters to just this area. I was worried that we would be screwed when comcast bought out our local cable company, but it appears they let the ISP continue business as usual *whew*.
My only gripe is that although the service is reasonably good, when there is a problem, the admins are pretty clueless (microsoft shop, go figure). If I were to do it, I would certainly offer a better software solution than what they do for web-hosting, dns, dhcp, etc.
OK, let's look at the monopoly issue. Monopolies per se are neither bad nor unlawful - only when they are improperly regulated are they bad and unlawful. Only one electric company can provide service to my house, because it is just not cost effective for there to be more than one power line to my house. It's what is called a "natural monopoly" - look it up in your Econ textbooks. Now, if somebody comes up with a disruptive technology (Mr. Fusion, anyone?), then that natural monopoly ceases to exists, and competition is restored, but until then it makes sense to allow the monopoly to exists but regulate it!
Now, DSL service is a natural monopoly - there is one owner of the phone lines running to my house, and therefor trying to create fake competition by allowing multiple companies to bill me just doesn't work. I get my telephony, DSL, and Internet service from the same company (my phone company), and so when I have a problem, it isn't the "The wires are bad, talk to the phone company" "No, the DSLAM is bad. Talk to the DSL company" "No, the router is dead. Talk to the ISP" garbage. I say "Gene, my DSL is down." "Yes sir, we'll get it fixed right away."
The same for cable modems - there is only one owner of the coax to your house. Pretending there can be more than one provider of cable modem service is not the answer - regulating the cable company is.
Now, on to the second item - the technologies involved.
cable modems - a hacky technology done right. The idea of shared bandwidth, limited upstream bandwidth, and using a line topology rather than a star topology went out of fashion when 10Base-2 died. However, due to the standards, I can buy just about any cable modem, take it home, plug it in, call the cable company and give them the MAC, and I'm on the air.
DSL - a better technology done horribly wrong. Layering TCP atop PPP atop ATM was bad and wrong. I was helping an aquantance fix his DSL service - we had to reset his router to factory defaults. We couldn't get it to connect because it was unable to automatically determine the virtual circuit number - it saw the DSLAM, but it wouldn't move freight. We ended up calling the DSL provider, and waiting an hour and a half for them to call us back with the parameters to reset the router. Not that we were doing anything complex - we weren't doing VOIP or VODSL - we were just moving TCP/IP packets.
Wireless Great in that there is no "last mile" to wire up, but there are only so many MHz of bandwidth to modulate a signal on. You get too many customers in an area, and you are going to get slowdowns.
Satelite Sorry, but until somebody can work out how to get a signal to geosync and back faster than C, this is great for FTPing down an ISO, but not for browsing.
When we finally realize that the wire to your house is a natural monopoly, allow the companies to own it as such, and then have the local corporation commissions watch them like hawks, we will always see broadband being priced below what it really costs to provide, and thus going out of business.
One last thought: what if we did a Rural Electrification Act style program for deployment of broadband?
www.eFax.com are spammers
I'm on my fourth ISP. The first three have all gone out of business and I have their useless DSL boxes to prove it. Now I'm facing the fact that my second DSL provider may go bye-bye. It's a pretty grim future for broadbad in my opinion. Even if the phone company (Verizon) continued to offer DSL, it's such a bad service (friends have had endless QOS problems) I doubt I could bring myself to use it.
I'm so spoiled by broadband that I don't think I could bear to go back to a modem. On the other hand, not having any sort of net connection at home would mean I might actually have some semblence of a life.
In Hong Kong broadband is very much alive and kicking. Hong Kong is strange in that if you're even a slightly heavy user of internet (read: >150 hours a month) then its *cheaper* to get broadband (because there is always a minimum per minute charge for dialup of US 0.3 cents which really adds up). Most people in Hong Kong have access to at least 5 different broadband providers and competition is strong - yet all of the companies are doing well.
Right now I'm paying US$35/month for unlimited, unfiltered, unadultered cable modem access. But there are lots of other options as well, DSL using PPPoE, internet via interactive TV, and so on.
In the US the only different thing is that providers there tend to screw over their customers at every opportunity, which in Hong Kong is not possible because it is so easy to just switch to another provider.
There are very few people here who don't have at least two options for broadband. Even fewer only have one, and very few (maybe 10% of the population) have no broadband options at all.
The article mentions the city of Chicago is also providing financing to deploy it's "own" public/private consortium network called CivicNet, spurred by local business leaders, as well as a host of other local government initiatives.
Broadband is alive and well north of the border. Right now, Bell (the local monopoly) is offering ADSL for $20/month for the first six months (price goes up to the regular $40/month after).
$20 CAD = $12 USD
Imagine: $12 a month for DSL. My last order (January) took only 4 days to get it up and running. Compare that to 84 days (literally) from Telocity in San Francisco.
My dad got a cable modem. He's paying $40 a month. And they allow connection sharing -- just a hub and DHCP, no special software, nothing.
At work, we have DSL from dsl.ca (someone not the phone monopoly) an we even have a static IP. Imagine that.
Paul
As a 10 year Blacksburg resident it's surprising that you say that DSL is full in Blacksburg, as I know for a fact that two different friends of mine have just gotten DSL installed. While it may not be full, getting DSL is still a real pain in the ass, and takes forever.
:) In fact a significant portion of the apartment complexes and business complexes in town have Ethernet and in addition to that Adephia Cable is running over 400 miles of fiber through Blacksburg by 2003.
Luckily I live in an apartment with Ethernet access, so I don't have that problem..
It may not be "the most wired town in America" anymore but Blacksburg still has the most internet infrastructure of any place that I've run accross.
--Remove chicken to e-mail
Broadband/DSL/Cable modem are brand new - 3-4 years young only. We have a long way to go before we can judge whether these technologies are doing well or not. By subscribing to these tech we are setting a trend. Car, telephone,TV are 70 + years old and www internet is 10 years and email is 30 year old only. So let us all hang in there, subscribe to DSL, Cable modems, keep using FreeBSD, Linux and keep going.
-Go FreeBSD!
The Excite@Home has NOTHING to do with the viability of broadband Internet access as a business proposition, whether delivered by cable, DSL, or wireless.
It has everything to do with AT&T and Excite's arrogant corporate leadership.
AT&T, as majority owner, has intentionally led Excite into bankruptcy so that it can pick up the pieces at fire-sale prices, cheating legitimate investors who bought Excite shares on the open market. I'm one of those investors, and yes, I'm bitter. Some bastards ought to go to jail over this.
But it's not all AT&T. It also is Excite's arrogant management that blew millions of dollars on Internet-bubble nonsense such as BlueMountainArts and the Excite portal itself. Good lord, kill that piece of crap and bring back Infoseek; at least it was useful.
And a good share of the blame also gooes to ATHM's other main corporate investors, Cox and Comcast, which lost the power struggle with AT&T but made sure their pockets were lined at the expense of independent investors.
Cable modems aren't going away. They continue to be an efficient and effective way of delivering broadband to the home.
Around here, DSL is well and thriving. As is internet over cable. And other technologies are just starting to emerge (internet by local utilities).
Broadband: I'm not dead!
Cringely: Yes, he is.
Broadband: I'm not.
Cringely: Well, he will be soon. He's very ill.
Broadband: I'm getting better!
Cringely: No you're not. You'll be stone dead in a moment.
Broadband: I don't want to go on the cart
Cringely: Oh, don't be such a baby.
Broadband: I feel fine.
Cringely: Can you hang around? He won't be long.
Broadband: I think I'll go for a walk.
Cringely: You're not fooling anyone
Broadband: I feel happy! I feel happy!
Much of the install-cost problem for DSL providers is self-inflicted. US telcos have generally chosen to provide DSL through a separate subsidiary, then outsourced the physical install, and bundled the service with an ISP account. The result is that four organizations have to cooperate to install a DSL line. As commentators have pointed out, most of this coordination takes place via phone calls and fax messages. That's the real problem.
I called @home this past Monday because my network connection was dropping packets like hot potatoes. Once I got a human on the phone, I told them I was pinging my gateway and I was seeing a 70% packet loss. He immediately told me, "Don't you think you ought to leave those kind of things to us technicians?" What an insult! I didn't know you had to be a certified phone jockey just to know how to ping an IP?!?! So anyway, after _he_ pinged my gateway for a few minutes, he confirmed the enormous packet loss and scheduled a trouble call, and much to my surprise - for the very next day even.
The next day came and no-one showed up. I work from home and I was here all day, not to mention my very loud doorbell. No excuses, they simply didn't show up. I waited a couple of hours past the scheduled appointment time, just to be a courteous end user, and then I called back to see what happened. The technician I spoke to this time was very quick to apologize for the mishap and very hurriedly tried to see what the issue was. He said my account info never made it onto their outgoing trouble call list for that particular day. I said OK, honest mistake, and I re-scheduled a new trouble call. The new appointment time sucked though, it was 3 days away. I figured I might have to do the dial-up thing if things got really bad, as if a 70% loss wasn't bad enough.
So Friday, the new appointment day, finally arrived. The tech was supposed to be here between 4:00 and 6:00pm. Much to my disbelief no-one showed yet again. It was Friday afternoon, and my need to drink beer overcame my need for less packet loss so I decided not to call it in. But this morning I got up and immediately gave them a call. I found yet again my account was not added to the outgoing trouble call list for the day, and yet again I would have to be rescheduled. At this point I was ready to really lose my cool and start telling them all my favorite curse words, but I didn't. I rescheduled (again), but this time it was for 5 days away. Pretty sad that they have 5 days worth of trouble calls scheduled. That's a lot of people!
Of course I've been hearing about @home's recent money problems, but does lack of money make networks break? Or is it really a lack of competent @home technicians and phone jockeys? I'm totally fed up with the @home run-around.
Heh. You might actually have a legitimate gripe, but single-issue voters (you aren't even from Louisiana, are you?) scare me. Tauzin has done a lot for the state and the nation, and will continue to have my vote for as long as he wants to stay in congress.
Need a Linux consultant in New Orleans?
I don't see how broadband can be dying when its not even available to everyone yet. I live in one of the Broadband black holes where my best connection is on dial up at 36k. According to the cable company my subdivision is not even wired for cable , yet I get a cable bill every month and HBO is nice. Then there is Qwest. It will be a cold day in hell when they actually care about what happens with a meager residential customer.
To PROVIDE broadband to 1 customer at the LOW end costs approx. $50-75 a month that IS if the customer stays at least a year. To get 1 DSL customer costs approx $1000-$2500 depending on several factors. Cable modem ISPs costs are fairly similar.
:)
Now you spend $2500 to get 1 subscriber.. who pays you $30/month for something that is costing you $50/month.. how do you expect to make a profit?
And with Broadband.. Road Runner is facing a possible class action lawsuit in Hawaii because of its bad performance (it was designed for 10k people and they signed up 50k). Other states/Areas are facing similar overselling.
In my area I tried GTE and TW cable internet.. both are OK at best around 3-4am.. otherwise they are slow.. at times slower than my 56k $10/month connection because they are overselling their bandwidth.
Companies need to understand they only have a certain amount of bandwidth to sell and give more Bandwidth to each customer.
well that was my rant
Verizon expects the customers to believe that they were "surprised" by the demand for broadband, even though it's been available here for three years and demand has been growing steadily since it's introduction.
Verizon has little incentive to expand it's DSL capacity. However, I expect that once all the ISPs that deliver DSL are gone, Verizon will magically take a renewed interest in selling DSL.
Much as in other industries, the laws that affect telecom are bought and paid for by Verizon, et al. Unfortunately, as with Microsoft, Record Companies, etc. they've already gotten too far, and it will be really hard to stop them.
Cringley falls into the same trap as everyone else when talking about what broadband is used for. It's not about speed. Nobody cares about "multimedia", and the reason that the video clips on CNN's website will never attract customers is that none of their customers care about the stupid video clips, not even the broadband customers; I'll go to their website to read the articles, and I'll watch TV if I want video. (When the major news sites pared down their website to the bare essentials on September 11, did you miss all the fluff?)
The reasons I have DSL are:
I wish broadband companies would stop trying to sell their service as some sort of expensive low-grade form of cable TV and instead figure out how to explain to customers the real advantages of a reliable, persistent internet connection. As first steps they could stop blocking ports and using dynamic IPs, and they could stop advertising high Mbps numbers, which nobody believes, and "streaming video", which nobody wants.
--Bruce Fields
It's a simple matter of the price being too high in a lot of markets. Broadband is alive and kicking.
There are too many legacy companies run by legacy CEOs, with legacy business models trying to charge legacy prices. Get them and their boards-of-directors out of the way and let the dat flow. It's about economy of scale. Once they lower the price , bandwidth will become cheaper and broadband will follow and the masses will hook up! It's a stupid cliche, but it's true.
Build it and they will come. Will you ever go back to a modem? I don't even own a modem
anymore. 'nuff said....
http://tinyurl.com/3t236
I am hopefully about finished with a monumental cluster-fork from SBC/SW Bell and can tell you for certain that any amount of customer service would compete with the idiots at Bell. I would gladly pay a little extra to get away from SWB, but there is no other choice. Charter just bought ATT cable here and, even though I can see three of Charter's (brand-new) billboards touting high speed cable Internet connections out my window at home, they will not take orders or give details of cable Internet service. If there was an alternative, I would jump on it and I know that there must be others out there who would do likewise.
Broadband? dead? That's quite unlikely with the kind of demand that it's getting. It's way too much of a good product to die off, the demand is still there, modem technology has not gotten better recently, people still want to get on DSL or cable modems. If the demand is still there, there's a very good market. Just because @HOME fails because their business practices and product policies suck doesn't mean that the market is taken down with it, despite them owning most of it at the moment. Someone will come up to replace them.
He's pining..
.
here in southwestern ontario (canada)
we have ADSL from our monolithic phone company@128/1500 kbps
and the QOS is fairly decent
also the local cable co. offers a similarly priced package ($40cdn) @ approx. 256/3000 kbps
The same for cable modems - there is only one owner of the coax to your house. Pretending there can be more than one provider of cable modem service is not the answer - regulating the cable company is.
Regulation -- that socialist solution -- is indeed the proper solution for monopolies... or at least getting them to get off their butt and inovate, instead of trying to impede everyone else's effort.
I live in Newnan, GA, a small town southwest of Atlanta....I average ~T1 speed from home, and I pay $10/month. Yes, $10/month. The city owns a utility company that provides cable modem access throughout the city/county, and I get incredible speeds. Businesses in town connect to the 100MB backbone for just $250/month. BellSouth is a HUGE player in every town around here, but as Newnan Utilities expands its reach, it keeps killing Bell's DSL business. They just can't compete. It's pretty incredible.
These companies that are going under are run by incompetants and conmen. They have used processes of overselling their throughput and relying on new customers to pay their current operating expenses in a sick Ponzi scheme. This policy killed many ISPs whose owners were short-sighted enough to get lured into this trap.
And when the economy slows, guess what? Most consumers don't buy new luxury services, and most DSL service is ultimately a luxury.
DSL service has always been facing a slow death through a combination of phone company error-misdirection to the smaller ISPs, coupled with an unwillingness to share procedural data.
Most posts here (as well as Cringely) have overlooked wireless. While the infrastructure for cable and DSL (miles of cables and vast banks of centralized switches) are ~ twenty and fifty years old, respectively, wireless relies on fresh technology with very low cost of installed infrastructure. Further, as the technology changes, you change the transmitters and receivers and software, which are cheap compared to laying and maintaining cables and switches, and independent of any fixed wire technology.
Who doesn't have a cell-phone now? I pay 2 cents a minute to call anywhere in the US. Yet no one foresaw this as little as half a dozen years ago. I don't even bother locking my car when my cellphone's on the front seat...it's more hassle for someone to steal one now than to buy one.
Broadband is already far along in the process of co-opting the excellent technologies developed for digital cellular. I traded in my T1 line last year for a 10MBit wireless connect beamed to me direct from my ISP. It costs me 35 bucks a month.The ISP can give this service to anyone within ten miles (they put up a little antenna on a building downtown). I routinely get 750KBytes up and down in real-world use.
Broadband is not endangered, only the retro technologies used to deliver it. Within the next few years, small entrepreneurs like my ISP will rapidly move in to fill the vacuum (pun intended) left by the likes of @Home. Broadband is not capital intensive, it is imagination intensive, so it plays to the strengths of smaller companies. The typical wireless entrepreneur will not have to protect or monetize existing assets like phone wires or television cables. Wireless can be installed simply and cheaply, and it works right away.
I think we'll see a replay of the situation in the mid 90s, when limber ISPs pioneered services based on (cheap) modem banks, then were amalgamated into the larger telcos and cable companies. Fast-moving technologies always favor the fast-moving players.
I may not know the latest in this, but where I live (Sweden), broadband is becoming availible more and more. I do remember that some of the broadband companies had problems with not expanding fast enough, or too few signed up, but I am not sure how it is right now... cause I know more and more people are getting broadband, and some companies are really trying to expand, building their own high capacity nets and so on. But I mean, I'm not saying *all* the broadband providers are doing great.
Will work for bandwidth
The way I see it is like this.
If a pundit is right, he'd get a job doing something other than guessing.
Kind of like all the retired service people (Majors-Lt. Generals) you see spouting away on TV these days, and during the Gulf War. If they had anything worthy to add to the conversation they'd be in an administration position, still in the service or at a 3 Letter agency.
But they're just pundits now.
Broadband is dead because no one is willing to pay for bandwidth. Everyone thinks that they should be able to get T1 access for $50 or so a month, and there's just not the infastructre behind that. Businesses whoose marketing plan is to sell things for less than they paid for them will obviously go under. If you give some kid 1.5 Mb access, in about 5 minutes he will be downloading 10 MP3s and the Episode I DivX. I work for a local ISP in a good size town, and DSL is killing us. Verizon charges $49.95 for 768k DSL service on their network and we charge $57.50 (Verizon's line charge of $32.50 and $25 for us). This is compared with the $1400.00 a month for a frame relay. ($700 for verizon, $700 for us).
However, if you give people 768k, they will use it. Our network started becoming saturated and having major lag issues. As a result, we limited our DSL to 384k and are refering anyone who wants faster than that to Verizon.
The point is, that if you compare the cost to provide someone with a broadband connection, it does not match up with the profit generated, if any profit is generated. I guess that the idea of handing out more bandwidth than you have is fine as long as you know that there will never be enough users be connected (i.e. dialup) to take all the bandwidth, but with the "always on" availability of cable and DSL, it just doesn't work. There's only so much bandwidth to go around. Even if you installed a new fiber cable, that can only be divided up so much. People just do not realize how much bandwidth actually costs.
My dad works for comcast, in fact he was one of the chief engineers in charge of deployment of cablemodems in southern NJ. His scoop is that support was always a nightmare with @home, because you had to deal with two completely separate companies who would often blame each other if something went wrong. Now Comcast plans to do what @home did by itself, cutting out the middleman and hopefully smoothing out the system.
.. are you talking about? This whole problem is caused by the fact that the local carriers (Verison, etc.) are government monopolies. As is cable in most areas.
Thanks for the slap, AC. I'll imagine you are ignorant rather than malicious.
I have a cable modem with a blocked incoming port 80 and a very poor ToS. What that means is that I have to use another port to serve HTTP and that makes it more difficult for people to connect to my machine for any content they may be interested in. My Terms of Service (TOS) explicitly forbid such a service to begin with.
It is impossible for me to get DSL, though the physical network exists. The phone company only wants a certian number of DSL connections and they have it. My line could carry it, but they won't let anyone hook it up for me.
Dial up is an option, but the topic of conversation today is broadband.
My point is that this is intentional. It is in the interest of many parties to see that the only avenue for convenient individual web publishing comes from a few large companies. As it was for the printing press, so it is now for the web. The conditions of most access are as ludicrous as restrictions on presses once were and still are in some parts of the world. Comments on Slashdot and add ridden web pages at GeoCities do not make a free web.
I don't understand why Slashdot linked to this article. Then again, this article does feign professionalism by dropping a few names and seemingly related facts only to then make broad and exaggerated statements about consumer Joe, technology in general, and the entire capatalistic system. I guess if Slashdot can post Jon Katz, then it can post Cringely.
Biodiesel : domestic, renewable, clean, and in the fuel tank of my bone stock 2002 New Beetle TDI
I have a cable modem and Time Warner service. I have never encountered serious problems with either speed or reliability, nor have my neighbors. But I live very close to a university where most of the housing is apartment complexes. According to a friend of mine at the cable company, service in my area had been planned for "a long time," and that TW had anticipated a lot of subscribers and had beefed up their pipes accordingly. Perhaps the biggest problem is underestimation of residential demand outside of areas that might be easily predicted as high bandwidth use areas? I know plenty of people around here have access, especially when the apartment places advertise cable w/ high speed internet access as part of their move-in packages.
I posted the following pipedream on mn online-service on February 16th... bowdlerized below... because I think broadband is not a destination, it is a road sign. we are headed for IP end-to-end on all public communications. my thought, and I like my current DSL just fine, is that we really need to line up the trenchers and push fiber to all neighborhoods, terminating 1 or 10-gig ethernet from several COs into each neighborhood at a specialized router with ADSL outputs. these then use existing feedline copper to customers, where what should be a $250-350 home router with 40-min or so battery backup splits the stream down into the services... anything/anytime TV, DSL data, VOIP phone, etc. all configs of the headers to the CO would be remotely done, no more truck rolls. no more fights among ILEC/CLEC/DLEC companies, you just bring in a feedline to Dropbit Destinations from Qwest or Verizon or Mudhole County Telco or wherever, and you have connectivity to sell any service to anybody. Cringe didn't have on his desk when he wrote his article... a news release that Qwest put out for Friday's fishwraps that they have just finished the first use of new Nortel gear to take all internal-office traffic on the voice network to IP streams. see at http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1002,33%257E17 8774%257E%257E%257Efilter,00.html
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I agree, it seems to me also that the broadband picture looks good in Canada. Monopoly telcos are happy to offer DSL everywhere I've heard about, and their competition are the monopoly cable companies. It seems to be enough competition to keep everyone honest.
DSL access is generally a matter of walking into a telco store, checking your phone number in a database for probable line quality issues, ensuring port availability at your CO, buying a modem/filter package and DIY installing. Rates are typically $35-40CAN/mo for 1.5 down, 640 up.
Third party DSL providers are active, and don't seem to be fighting too much with the telcos either. However, residential margins are slim for them, so the only place where third party DSL companies seem to be really active is in the business market. Static IPs, knowledgeable tech support, higher prices. In the small building where I work, every single company has third party DSL access of this type, and we have some of the most crusty old phone lines I've seen in Vancouver.
I know some rural areas aren't well served, but I would be interested in hearing if any Canadians are having trouble with broadband access in urban settings. Is my experience only representative of major centres? Vancouver and Toronto and their surrounding regions are where most of my information comes from. How are things in Moose Jaw and Thunder Bay?
If you say, "now I'll be modded down because of X", I'll happily oblige.
Cringely didn't seem to notice that, two years after their initial announcements, Sprint has finally rolled out their service. Based on the web site and hype, it seems to (finally) be everything they promised back in 1999.
I don't have the service yet -- so I can't comment on how good it is -- but I'll post something when it's installed.
Cringely is really off the wall this time. Yes, there are lots of failed providers of broadband, but there are others doing okay. Mostly small ones who don't have NASDAQ ticker symbols and big publicity.
@Home failed because it was a bad business. They had a nice gig doing the ISP stuff for the cable industry, but they got caught up in dotcom mania and bought the third-rate search engine Excite for a ridiculous amount. Excite never had a prayer of breaking even, so the whole thing was weighted down. Excite was also irrelevant to @Home's mission, which was to provide the cablecos with an ISP back end.
The data CLECs who tanked had bad business plans too. They mostly spent too much on collocation cages (needed before 1998 to access the loops) and they went into each others' markets, so a single telco CO would have half a dozen of them dividing the market among them. They also designed for a high breakeven, assuming that the others would have no market share. And they had big expense structures. So they tanked.
Cablecos do not need @Home any more. They can create in-house ISPs, as MediaOne did (ignore the @Home label, which is a borrowed trademark used because AT&T now owns them). They can and will also learn to work with ISPs, providing (without being forced) choice in ISP service. That does require some serious network reconfiguration, and since @Home had exclusive contracts with most of the cablecos into 2002, the cablecos aren't ready to open up. But with @Home finally being put out of its misery, the cablecos might finally recognize that they should work with other ISPs.
Excellent post. You spelled it out pretty thoroughly. If you weren't already at five, I'd mod you up even more.
No one cares about "streeeeeaming video"!
Nobody cares about streaming anything.
People don't want to tie up their phone line by reading their email. They want to browse a few of their favorite sites and not sit there twiddling their thumbs while the (inevitably bloated with graphics) page loads.
Some people want to play a decent low-latency game of quake (though unfortunately many broadband providers seem to trade latency for bandwidth whenever possible).
...for I am the great AC and I will divine your future. I will tell you if:
You will have a new romance in the next week (no)
You will come into a large amount of money in the near future (no)
Broadband will live or die (it will still be there)
And, I guarantee that, in the long run, My predictions will be correct more than 49% of the time.
I find Cringely entertaining, and read his articles on that basis, but we should all be suspicious of any concrete predictions about the future, as a matter of course. While his motives are probably harmless in that he is simply promoting himself, ignoring the uncertainty of the future is the first refuge of anyone pushing an agenda. This ought to be a no brainer for any person living in the modern world.
I think the customers who want streaming video far outnumber those who intend to set up "persistent client," even if you are in the latter group. If you think "fancy multimedia and porn videos" is a worse advertising concept than "you can have persistent clients!", you are severely disconnected with the real world.
I'd rather be lucky than good.
DSL and Cable modems both suck in blacksburg. DSL is way way overpriced and Cable is run through Adelphia, which still only has download-only (two-way was promised a year ago but never delivered). But bburg is still really wired. Most of the apartments offer ethernet connection. There's at least two companies that offer solutions to apartment complexes by running cable, phone & ethernet for residents. They lease bandwidth from VT, so they use the on-campus connections, and run fiber from it. Of course VT's network rocks, but is severly limited because we use Network Virginia, which is nothing more than being forced to use Sprintlink's connection to the backbone. This SUCKS. They have crappy routers that blow out all the time. UVA has gone to using Qwest and apperently they have a better uptime. Oh, and I have some credability here, I just graduated from VT. go hokies!
The reason most people have DSL is porn.
I'm not joking. "Streaming video" right? Which sites really use it? Porn sites. Which sites propelled RealMedia into the spotlight? Which sites have consistantly upped the demand for bandwidth as soon as it becomes available? Which sites have been the most successful online, before and after the "dot-com" bubble?
Admit it, Slashdot, porn makes the Internet go round.
As for the rest of your reasons for using DSL, they're pretty marginal. Remember that during the outbreak of Code Red, most of the home clients running IIS who got infected didn't even know they were running it. Having a static IP is a big deal for you and me, but it isn't to people who are used to dial-up ISPs and have never thought it possible or necessary.
There are things broadband ISPs can do to attract people like us, but, let's face it, we're more of a liability than a benefit: we use more than our alloted share of bandwidth (much less than the number they quote in the commercials, and easily exceeded by your distro's latest ISO), bitch at the slightest problem or outage, and expect a lot more out of the service than your average user. They don't want us. They want the average user who sits at home collecting his porn and doesn't bother them.
Cringley falls into the same trap as everyone else when talking about what broadband is used for. It's not about speed.
I'm still online with phone lines that give me the equivalent of a 28.8. Web pages don't take that long to load, and I've discovered that even with a lousy dial-up account, I can download or
peer to peer trade one hell of a lot over the course of a month with the right software. Right now, it's costing me 19.95 to do this. I would pay 10 bucks more a month for 256 or 512K access, as long as I can do all that I can do with my dial-up access. Extra speed is just not worth all that much to me; I have reliable connectivity and patience, and only so much time in my life to mess with whatever I'm downloading.
The real problem with broadband is that it's a luxury for a lot of ordinary users and there's no compelling reason to cause them to upgrade. I'm not interested in having it unless it's inexpensive.
Seriously, like others have said, I've been broadband for years. I had ISDN, then DSL, and am currently running both DSL and cable as I evaluate the latter. (Cable is winning.) Broadband is a pretty lively corpse around here!
"Good times and bum times, I've seen them all and, my dear, I'm still here."
-- Follies
You (other nation-states) should consider what Canada plans:
Gigabit Internet To Schools And Homes by 2005.
There plans that are being implemented already for communities to consider how to get connected
All found at http://www.canet3.net/
For this to be done is not hard to imagine. Telcos for the most part are charging insanely cash cow prices for really high speed >15Mb/s.
Lets pull some numbers out of someplace say ~$10million to lay fibre from LA to Seattle. charged at $100 000/month for oc3 that works out to paying off the cost of installation in 10 years, pretty good for capital investement.
So as ca net proposes why not get communities to lay their own fibre? and force the telcos to charge sane prices.
(http://www.t1sales.com says $13000/month for t3)
(http://gometanet.com/connect/fiber.htm says for OC3 155Mb/s $150 000/month)
Well for what ever reason we decided on modems, now many places in california dekota and florida are runing out of telephone numbers.
Phone companies are strugling to keep pace
As a result countries such as sweden switzerland russia and parts of china because they spent 4 years layging out high capacity infrastructure can have the entire country by into the digital web at rates like 10 us dollers per a month or even give it a way.
*DSL is in complete disarray.
You don't need to be a Cringely to predict *DSL's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *DSL faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *DSL because *DSL is dying. Things are looking very bad for *DSL. As many of us are already aware, *DSL continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
ADSL leader PacBell states that there are 7000 users of ADSL. How many users of SDSL are there? Let's see. The number of ADSL versus SDSL posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 SDSL users. MVL/DSL posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of SDSL posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of MVL/DSL. A recent article put Cable Modem at about 80 percent of the Broadband market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Cable users. This is consistent with the number of Cable Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Qwest, abysmal sales and so on, ADSL went out of business and was taken over by Northwood who sell another troubled broadband service. Now Northwood is also dead, its corpse turned over to another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *DSL has steadily declined in market share. *DSL is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *DSL is to survive at all it will be among hardcore child pornography dabblers. *DSL continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *DSL is dead.
dinner: it's what's for beer
I'm disapointed in every one of you! Seriously. I am looking at some of these messages, and they are complaining they are only getting like 180Kb/s or what not. Oh gimme a break. I'm on a 56k modem still, I'm lucky to get 3 or 4 KB/s. You used to be on a modem too, about a year or so ago. But I want you to remember about 5 years ago, when we had 2400 baud modems, and then the cool thing happened, they came out with 28800 modems. That was one of the coolest things ever made. Now people are complaining they are only getting 180Kb/s, when I'd die to have that kind of connection. Don't you guys remember when it took 30-45 minutes to download a mp3?
$40 standard $30 if you own a modem $25 if you own a modem and can get the student discount available to some universities (not sure if they're still offering that this year) Note that at today's exchange rate, that works out to $15.96 U.S. a month. (or $25.54 with modem rental and no discount)
Its sad to think it might be dying. There is absolutely no way I am going back to a 56k modem after using broadband for over 3 years. I was out of the country for a while and yeah ok, 10 computers in an internet cafe all going through 1 pirated wingate machine and a 56k modem fine, ok, sure, I am in Nepal.
A little searching around revealed the one t-1 in the country, plugged into an interent cafe! woo hoo?
So I still didnt suffer, came home tried to get a cable modem and they kept screwing me on the install so it took over a month. Had to buy a modem, and it was pretty horrible.
So how is it that Canada and other countries are planning on gigabit to the school and home? Is it because they do things with less hype, fanfare and bullshit biz deals (nasdaq) that kill a company or an industry?
This is one of the few instances when I'm glad the government has allowed these monopolistic companies to exist as they do. Wide open competition seems to have wrecked the high-speed market in the United States.
The Government of Canada has this initative to make high-speed Internet available to 95 percent of the people who want it. Maybe the United States needs some national strategy too.
Bibo Ergo Sum.
Amen, take that to +6, it's the always-onness of the connection not the speed in itself. (Although I guess we do like the speed too :)
NTL cable here in UK rocks, unlike BT ADSL which suffers from every single provider problem already described (random availability, rancid copper, clueless salesdroids, etc.)
I would NEVER go back to using a dialup unless I had to, and I have plenty of friends who are desperate for a broadband connection but can't get one. So how the industry can say it's a hard sell is beyond me I'm afraid.
"They can have my broadband connection when they prise it from my cold dead router..."
"Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace." V.Stone, Microsoft Corporation
He can't tell the difference between dying and saturated.
Now, DSL service is a natural monopoly - there is one owner of the phone lines running to my house, and therefor trying to create fake competition by allowing multiple companies to bill me just doesn't work. I get my telephony, DSL, and Internet service from the same company (my phone company), and so when I have a problem, it isn't the "The wires are bad, talk to the phone company" "No, the DSLAM is bad. Talk to the DSL company" "No, the router is dead. Talk to the ISP" garbage. I say "Gene, my DSL is down." "Yes sir, we'll get it fixed right away."
Okay, mr smartypants, let me give you an example of how a REAL monopoly works:
There is only one ISP in my area. Adelphia Powerlink Cable. Verizon limits all calling areas so that i cannot access a dialup ISP without paying for long distance, so Cable is the only realistic option for me. I pay $60/month for the shittiest service in the world. They limit my upload speeds to a theoretical max of 16K/s, but in reality, we never see anything above 3K/s. Downloads are slightly better, ok average we get about 8-9K/s downstream. ON CABLE.
So, this is fine, it's cheaper than dialup, for slightly better speeds, right? So why am I bitching? Well, 5 times a day, the DNS servers crash. 15-30 times a day (usually once an hour), all bandwidth DROPS to 0.0K/s for 4-5 minutes.
*RING*RING* (after 3-4 hours, which is the average wait to get ahold of tech support) "Adelphia Tech Support, how may I help you?"
"Yes, my internet stopped again, and your DNS servers crashed again."
"No, no, nothing crashed. The internet is just rebooting now. It reboots quite often. They do that to make your downloads go faster"
"Hey look, you fucking idiot, I'm not a fucking 80 year old clueless granny. Fix your damn servers or I'll withold payment"
"We'll just cancel your account."
You see, Adelphia has absolutely NO DESIRE to fix their damn problems (and I know it's not me, because everyone I know who also has adelphia has the same exact problems with the same frequency as I), because they have NO COMPETITION. Verizon won't offer DSL in the area for some odd reason.
Monopolies are bad. If you disagree, you're a fucking idiot.
...this week, on Thursday, and when talking to the head office (had some trouble getting Verizon to switch over) the ISP, NAXS, said that they are EXPANDING into Blacksburg....so I don't know where you get your information, at least for BBurg being 'dead'...
Adelphia has just announced that they are raising powerlink prices to $80/mo in my area.
Let's face it, for the majority of people broadband internet access has been a myth (especially outside of the USA) with most people using dialup modems at 33 or 56 kbps.
So sites that are low bandwidth (eg pages load within 10 seconds on a 56k modem), well designed (don't rely on gifs to navigate), and aren't saturated with ads should hum along nicely anyway.
It's about time web developers stopped testing their sites over 100Mbps fast ethernet LANs, and tried to navigate their sites over a dialup connection instead. Maybe then the main reason for broadband (pages load faster so you can see that you don't want to be there and hit the back button, without having to wait three minutes for the final closing table tag and all those navi-gifs) will change to actually delivering heavyweight content (movies on demand, software downloads)
Company runs out of money... good employees get laid off.. you get stuck with the retards.
On another note, have you tried clearing your IE Cache?
Broadband customers: 3,000,000 for @home
Broadband subscription: $50/mo
Broadband revenue: $150,000,000/month
Broadband yearly revenue: 1.8Billion dollars
Now thats a lot of money just for subscribers.
And there are more opportunities for these companies but most are run by idiots.
Broadband companies might be dead but there is current market and this market is growing. I bet Apple and Linux with they had a market like this.
Or Sweden
_ ca ble_hux.htm
http://www.acc.umu.se/~tfytbk/mattgrand/
Or Palo Alto:
http://www.wbsmith.com/FTTH/statuslog.html
Or visited the Nikkei's Asiz Biz Tech site:
http://www.nikkeibp.asiabiztech.com/newsc.html
Look, don't believe Cringley on this one. He's usually very good. But on this he so far off base Tom Candioti could pick him off with a knuckle ball.
Cringley is either very confused or just doesn't read his e-mail. Or both. I sent him a long note about Huxley IA's FTTH over 3 months ago when he did his last article on Broadband. Apparently, he has totally ignored it. Here's an article about Huxley in Broadband Week.
http://www.broadbandweek.com/news/010305/010305
It's not Broadband that's dead. It's the Baby Bells who are dead! Our government currently chooses to let the Baby Bells rule, giving them near monopoly powers over Internet access in this country. (By the way, I don't think we need to call them "Babys" anymore. "Bohemuth" would be better).
There are U.S.manufacturers building optical switches that run above 3GBs (that's "GigaBits per second"). We've got at least two FTTH connector manufacturers in the U.S. that deliver home service at from 100MBs to 500MBs.
The average modem user gets 28-56Kbs and Cringlly is smoking bananas if he thinks such devices are some kind of solution.
I myself have Sprint Broadband which is a mere 5Mbs download - but thats still about 2000 times faster than what my modem was running. It's also 50 times faster than what Northpoint was running before our local Bohemuth Bell (SBC) killed Northpoint.
What can you do: If you want high speed Internet, I suggest you take a look at the FTTH links, go to Google or:
http://biz.yahoo.com/industry
and type in "fiber" or "FTTH."
Then get up from your chair, go to your municipal government, and form your own CLEC. Then put out bids for your connection service.
In the mean time, Broadband is alive and well and living in Korea. And Shanghai. And Charleston South Carolina.
Will FTTH ever reach Cringley? Will it ever reach you?
The real question is: Will you ever reach FTTH?
(FTTH stands for "Fiber To The Home." ftth.org and ftth.com are Korean Web sites. Welcome to the real world, Mr. Cringley.).
Regards,
Rich Katz
Java Skyline
www.javaskyline.com
Broadband U.S? It hasn't been born yet.
If this really is true, if broadband is dead, it's no surprise. You can't successfully sell a product if you don't offer it to a wide audience. My neighbourhood is right in the center of a non-broadband zone. If I lived 4000 feet to the south, I could have cable. If I lived 2000 feet to the north, I could have DSL. East and west, go about a mile each and I get DSL. Go an extra 5 miles east, and I get my choice of DSL or cable. I live in a large, higher-income neighbourhood, lots of people willing and able to sign up for broadband. But no one seems to want to provide it. It's the provider's own damn fault, these financial losses.
Then again, now I'm a college student at a small southern art school, where I share an OC12 connection with 200 other students in my dorm. 3.1 megabits/sec right now... ah, such is the life =)
~Aaron.
student of animation and the fine arts
This is an example to cite to the "Marketplace will Provide" true believers. There's more to making technology work than simple profit-and-loss.
Apparently you don't get the military pay scale. After 20 years, you 'retire' with a full pension, get a six figure job for a defense business so that you can lobby your old buds at the pentagon, and if you are lucky, grab a consulting position for a TV network to boot. Maybe when if one your pals get elected, you play the revolving door and come back and do another tour in a political position.
Or you could just toil away at the 3 letter agency for $60K a year until you are dead.
I live in Texas, and, i believe, its been the law for quite a while that the regional Baby Bell, Southwestern Bell has had to share its lines to competing companies. Additionally, i think that i goes the same for any DSL providers, there seem to be about 5-6 in a city of about 200k... jake
Beer, now there's a temporary solution -- Homer Jay S.
Yeah, just about everyone I know who wants it has a broadband connection, too, except me. I live near Washington, D.C., which is supposed to rank high when it comes to connectivity. However, I can't get broadband access. I have been eagerly awaiting it for at least two years. My guess is that it will not be available until 2003. What incentive is there to provide more service? I guess your perceptions really depend on your own circumstances. If you live in a neighborhood where you have had broadband available for a year or more, you probably disagree with Cringely. But if you live in upper-middle-class neighborhood in the suburbs of a major city, and you just can't get broadband access, then you probably strongly agree with Cringely.
hmm, the analogy for what I've thought about the DSL thing is like if Ford owned the rights to the internal combustion engine and was the sole manufacturer because it owned the entire nation's supply of some critical part. Now, if GM & Chrysler wanted to compete, they'd have to buy engines from Ford, then package them with their own options and amenities. How can one compete like that?
Do the indie DSL companies have to buy time (space, whatever) from the telco and then hope to resell and still compete with the telco? How can anyone stay afloat like that? You'll be priced right out of the market... (if I'm full of sh|t on any of this, lemme know... I don't claim to be an expert!)
how about a government owned infrastructure?
bad: might make it easier for them to infringe on privacy
bad: 'socialism'
good: they can sell use (at a published, regular price) to service companies that can compete for the consumer's business across wide and overlapping areas, instead of having your phone company decided for you by where you live in the city. Which would lead to better customer service, not only on the phone, but in services offered (ooo that 1MB/sec dsl?)
Cringely is a media whore who has a very limited realistic grip on technology issues. (check out some of his other writings on the web to see what i mean - he would like to be the new esther dyson but is more like esther ransom !)
To proclaim a technology dead you need to point out the alternative tech and the real reasons why its is dead, mismanagement and financial collapse of vendors due to over spending and under capatalisation is NOT sounding the death knell of the tech only the death knell of the companies who cannot survive in the current market due to teir own over burdened financial state.
Corporate collapses in Aust have taught me a few things to look for in the new media collapses -
1. How many of their staff had 17" TFT flat screens instead of standard monitors ($3500 VS $350) (hint - ALL staff at One Tel in Au DID !)
2. How many Vice Presidents did the company have ?
3. What was their travel budget ?
4. Was renumeration linked to performance
5. How many companies did the buy instead of consolodating the market they had ?
These are just a few points
I suspect all of the above apply to these companies and more - many of them went mad and bought out competitors - in the process paying multiple thousands of dollars per user (money they could never get back ) some to these companies had 80-100% debt to equity ratios (some even more)
Dont lose sight of the fact there is a differnce between bad management and bad tech.
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
cya
Look, if you are going to steal a quote from the late great Frank Zappa, at least quote him RIGHT. He said it this way, "Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny". Now, go to your room. And stay there. Oops, I just realized that it is likely that is where you are now and where you can be found 24/7/365. Heh, call out for some pizza.
Uh, we must be reading different articles, because I'm reading one that says exactly that. Further, it says that this is why broadband providers are getting reamed, because they believed (bwah ahahaha) that they could sell content that we know damn well that we can get for nothing.
I agree with your points, but I think so does Cringley.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
This is what's known as "answering your own question".
Oh look, a small profitable competitor! We must assimilate them and show them the folly of their ways! They must divert all money from tech support to hiring an executive creative team to plan broadband content strategy...
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
My generation grew up in Tacoma really hating being the butt of all the jokes about the famous Aroma of Tacoma from all the pulp and paper mills. And we hated the fact that there was absolutely no local music scene. Oh, there were some great Tacoma bands, but once a band got their act together they'd stop playing in Tacoma and you'd have to drive to Seattle to see them. And we had one of the worst, most outdated cable systems in the entire country.
Then our city power utility, Tacoma City Light, convinced our City Councile to pay to wire the entire city with a fiber-optic network. The seed of the network was to allow better management of electricity, but the spin-off benifit would be that for just a little more money the city could have a cable company that was a public utility.
Before the City started debating the idea of a municipal cable service our cable franchisee, TCI, said that we wouldn't be seeing more channels or broadband until at least 2004. They certainly moved us up on their schedule when the City deceided to lay fiber.
And when the City of Tacoma went into the cable business and started to offer cable Internet access they did so in a way that anyone in the open source community has to love. Click Network, our municiple cable company, is not the ISP. To get Internet service over the Click cable you sign up for service with one of several competing ISPs. It gives you the best of both worlds. Competition keeps prices a lot lower, and the service a lot better, then any other broadband offering in the area. And because the fiber is owned by the City, they can demand minimum levels of service from the ISPs.
Now a few other cities are looking at the success our system has had and are debating doing the same. And AT&T, Qwest, and all to other major broadband providers are doing their best to convince them that it is not a good idea to compete with private enterprise. If they win in Tacoma, then I will agree that Broadband is Dead.
-- Bob Honan I stand by the truth, which is why I never stand by Republicans.
Broadband is alive and well in some places. 1 of 4 Canadians now connect via broadband; the province I live in completed a full fibre optic installation (copper to the nearest switching station, fibre everywhere after) over 21 years ago.
The government announced today a program to bring hi-speed to every rural resident within 3 years (a program to complete access to every address in Canada, no matter how remote, finished last year. Currently every school and public library in the country, no matter how remote, has a dedicated full-time link; in 3 years the goal is every classroom).
Broadband customers in Canada outnumber AOL sunbscribers over 10 to 1.
Look, it's simple. Just about every square inch on earth can get ISDN (very cheap), and likely FrameRelay if they are even a modest company.
Almost all cable companies provide broadband access, and cable companies span the USA, with remote areas sometimes not covered. Often, people don't WANT to get a cable modem because of the propaganda that they've heard, or because they don't currently subscribe to Cable TV service, so the price for ONLY Broadband service is more expensive.
And always, even if you are the one-in-a-million person who is in just the right area that they aren't covered by one of these broadband technologies (again, that's very unlikely) there is always the option of Satelite broadband, which is not limited by geographic location.
So, my point beiing, DSL is not the only game in town. In fact, it's one of the lesser options available. Other technologies are more reliable, and Cable Modems are far cheaper per-bandwidth. Everyone has broadband access availale if they aren't stuck on the unlikely notion of only paying $40/month.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Broadband is failing because their market analysis was way off bead and their business model was ridiculous. Somehow they expected to get the CLECs and ILECs to first provide them with the external bandwidth and space for their DLS equipment and be able to undercut the price that the LECs could offer for the same service. Typical dot-bomb thinking. Broadband technology isn't dying and neither is availability, what is dying are the companies with the shittiest management and business plans. THis is natural and ought to speed the fuck up so LECs can buy the equipment cheap and increase their own capacity. I think municipalities ought to start laying down their own fibre (maybe alongside or inside gas lines or power lines) and then reselling it to LECs and cable companies for whatever they want to do with it. The cost would end up subsidized inside city taxes you're already paying and the work will be done by crews already paid for to do some other work. Costs for broadband would be dirt cheap especially if the resale contract to the LECs put the responsibility on them to do line termination and all switching/routing.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Indeed, Dsl is dead. As it should be... Limited by distance and quality of existing lines, its a wonder they ever tried to get it into production.
As to demand. In KC Time Warner Cable not only met their yearly subscription numbers by june, but they are well on their way to having double what their goal was. In fact... there is so much work, that they even have 4 sub contractors just to keep up with the demand.
2 reasons for RoadRunners success. If you have Time Warner Cable... You can have RoadRunner. period.
The second reason. Your not limited to how fast your internet connection is, Your limited by how fast you can click.
Presumably, college students will continue receive a 4-year exposure to broadband, and will be therefore provide a continuously expanding receptive mass market to whomever manages finally to find a workable economic model.
OK...someone please clue me in. When did the laws of economics change?
I'm a geek. I have broadband now, which I get relatively cheap. I PAY for this, and I'm willing to pay more if needed.
If/when Excite@home dies, there will be many more like me who are already "sold" on the concept of broadband with cable modems sitting around. So you're telling me that nobody will crop up to sell me this service, for which I'll gladly shell out cold, hard cash?
I live in blacksburg (go hokies!!), and let me report on the state of broadband...
if you live on the va tech campus, you obviously have bandwidth, OC-3 i believe, but i think its been fairly saturated this year.
Some apartments (college park, some foxridge) have ethernet jacks in the walls, which are wired into the campus system
I live on lee st, 10 minutes (walking) from campus, and less than a three minute walk from the Verizon office (you can see the cell phone tower from my apartment). And the ONLY OPTION for me is adelphia cable.
Verizon is not offering any more DSL, even though i'm 2 blocks up and one block over from the office.
To make matters worse, adelphia isn't even offering two way cable modems, i'm using a DIAL RETURN cable modem, i get at best 60K download, and 28.8 modem upload. And i get kicked off after being on for about 6 hours. Without fail. And adelphia's pulling the "two way service will be available in"current_month+2.
For the most wired small town in america, this sucks. Course i think that claim was made on per-capita that use the internet on a regular basis, its over 60%.
Anyway, go hokies!
~Zero.
It'll be a cold day in december before Virgnia Tech beats Miami.
sig?
I totally agree that the limited upload sucks. I was really looking forward getting to the point of being able to send/recieve wave files and monkey's audio (lossless)instead of crappy mp3 files, which eat up processor, as well as viewing web pages with photo-quality bitmap images instead of washy, color-faded jpeg images. Right now, my pentium 133 could display and play the same things I do with my 1.2 gig athalon. But because the big businesses won't invest in bandwidth, we're spending money on so-called faster processors to compress and decompress - which slows our view of the internet as a whole.
As far as the reasons, I have asked several ISP services why the upload speed on their high speed connection is lower than the download speed. I usually get all sorts of funny excuses, the most common one being ask someone else. I've heard things like "the FCC won't let us" although I have never been able to get a FCC rule or other fact out of them. Some of the better techs tell me that it is too hard to transmit upstream on a cable system, without causing harmonic interference to other cable viewers on the line. This is about the only good one I have got out of someone, which is technically feasable. I see no reason why it cannot be overcome, but it is a reasonable excuse.
But then, what about DSL? Up to August of 2000, I was in the process of moving to Quebec, Quebec (City), Canada. One of my many reasons for this was the fact that they were much more technologically advanced, with regard to mass communication, especially the internet.
Bell Canada was offering a DSL-like system, which basically blew away any connection I had ever used short of a public university server. The system uses the long-unused yellow and black wires of the existing telephone system for the internet, and the red and green for the phone. A nortel modem conects to the phone jack just like a standard phone would, and you have.... yes
1Megabit UPLOAD and DOWNLOAD!!!!!. I first thought that something was being mistranslated from french, but the customer service person was japanese and spoke perfect english. The demo was a quick download on what was napster, 4 files simultaneously, in about 15 seconds, coming from Montreal. We then tried connecting to a site and uploading some files. Same great speed. The service rep then told me that they would be upgrading the system at the end of the year, and that it would be running at 4 Megabits Upload/Download.
And all for $29.95/month, plus $10 for the modem rental (ok, that's $39.95!) Canadian dollars!
I then asked how much it was for the total, with telephone. He informed me that local phone service was included with the service. I explained to him how crappy our computer connections were, and that there was this strange problem with upload always being less than download in the US.
So, for all of you who think that two wire copper cannot send high-speed data, you are just plain wrong. It is our money-hungry telephone giants, who have tried to do everything but upgrade their vastly obsolete telephone networks...much less replace them with high speed internet. In many places in the US, we are using wires for phone that are many times 40 years old, corrodded, brittle, and othewise unreliable. Then, mix every possible different type of digital and analogue technology together, and make them all talk. What a big mess. Phone companies need to let competition in to take over, or get going on new networks. After all, high speed internet is the death of their business. (I have already disconnected my phone, don't use it enough to substantiate the bill)
Broadband will survive, as the internet is a permanent part of world communication. Excite at home can go - apparently it wasn't so exciting!
The upload/download speed issue shows three major things:
1. You can only download as fast as you can upload. This should be a basic principle of logic, but what they want you do is to download from non-"home" run sites, such as excite, aol, yahoo, e-bay etc., all which generate money, and pay big bucks to run big servers. ISPs are taking the cheap way around this, as they are doing everything possible to avoid putting expensive servers up. If the everybody had the ability to run their own site, advertising monopolies like clearchannel, gannett, hearst-argyle and fox would go out of business.
2. The internet, which started out as just that, has become the direct-connect net. For example, when using telephones, to do a conference/multi-party call, your phone is connected to a swithcher, which is connected, initially to another phone. When another person joins, they connect at the nearest switch which is part of the connection, not your phone directly. That was the way the internet was originally supposed to work. Now, the big companies such as AT+T, and public universities, are stuck with all of the interconnect traffic. Therefore, if you serve or upload, all the people connecting are directed to your modem. Thus, it is no different than a dumb telephone connection, which does basically the same thing, except that instead of breaking off somewhere down the line, 3 lines are all running to you, which wastes lots of bandwidth.
3. Consumers rate or view the actual speed of a service by its upload speed, not its download speed. Everybody that is waiting out the technology will continue to wait, until the ISPs are confident, and have matched upload and download speeds. This shows their systems stability, reliability, and consistency.
My experience with @home has been superb -- but I think that's because my cable operator is Comcast. I have had cable modem service for more than four years, and it has always been very well managed.
Guns don't kill people -- people kill people.
But the guns seem to help a bit. (apologies to Eddie Izzard)
Once again, the boring but sensible Canadians do things right.
Anarchists never rule
...like they do NOW for that kind of bandwidth.
It'll kill all those lucrative T1/T3 sales...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
You're confusing your personal preferences with those of the general population.
Not in a billion years would you catch me wasting my time playing Quake (or anything like it).
However I do listen to internet radio for several hours a day - even if my monitor is off and I'm just hanging around cooking or whatever.
And I am a big fan of international news sites with video clips. Likewise many of my policy geek friends here in DC do the same. In fact, the access to international news multimedia is the main reason why many of them got DSL or cable modems.
Different strokes for different folks.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
I and most of my family and friends are on broadband in Canada,
be it Telus, Shaw@Home, or what have you - there's some private
DSL providers too. Things are a little rough all around, but there's been no troubles
with either signup or services - other than some downtime for me when they upgraded some systems.
I will not say that business in this country is glorious, but there's no difficulties
in obtaining broadband here. At least not Alberta/BC. Other than areas that don't
have broadband of course - but there aren't many anymore.
I will say however I've been on a waiting list for commercial DSL for 4 months now, sticking with a low 1 megabit residential *g*.
Hope things stateside start improving!
>In many places in the US, we are using wires for phone that are many times 40 years old, corrodded, brittle, and othewise unreliable.
I had a load of diatribe about how much I hate Bell right here but I lost it beucase Bell's lines can't even keep my 14.4k connection up. Must be the 15km of crusty Canadian copper that bell refuses to dig up. Its pretty easy to blame a trouble call on a customer when the only two pieces of equipment you give your workers are a butt set and an VOM. "Yeah, I just dialed the test line and your line sounds ok as far as I can hear". Wow. I see you didn't pass your hearing exam, Mr. Bell Tech, cuz all I get is 60 Hz hum. Maybe if I dial 611 on the broken line they'll believe me. Well, 5th call's gotta be a charm.
You say that, and then you go on to say that you and your friends use your broadband connections to view international news multimedia/video as if that's some sort of valid response? Not to mention your comment "Not in a billion years would you catch me
I'm no Gallup pollster, but I'd bet the farm that broadband users whose primary interest is in watching video clips from international news sites is several orders of magnitude lower than the folks playing Quake, Counterstrike or UT:
Most folks aren't that interested in postage-stamp sized lossy video when there's a tv in the living room, kitchen, bedroom and minivan. Most folks listen to the radio in the car, not in their living rooms or kitchens, let alone at a desk with their computer.
My god, you imply you're a policy geek. I hope you don't actually have a meaningful role in implementing public policies based on your self-centered worldview. Certainly the original poster's claim that "nobody" cares about streaming anything is factually incorrect. But he's far closer to the truth than you are. Maybe I'm misunderstanding your intent, but if so, that's only because your argument sucks. If you're just trying to point out you and your buddies represent a handful of people who do care about streaming anything, well, international news clips was about as unpersuasive an example as you could find. Or did you just not want to admit your preference for streaming porn?
I'll second that, I've got a cable modem through Rogers (cable co. up here). $40CDN a month (~$27US) for 2.5Mbit/s down and 0.5Mbit/s up, and yes, we really do get those speeds with a fair degree of regularity. I don't often see many 300KByte/s downloads from a single site (though I have hit some, a few months back my Debian updates used to come in at that speed, REAL nice!), but getting two sites at 150Kbyte/s each is certainly not unheard of.
I also have friends in the area that are getting DSL through Sympatico (Bell Canada's ISP). Same price, peak performance isn't quite as high, but the system does often get up to 100Kbyte/s from a single, well connected site.
Ohh, and all of this is in a city of only 100,000 people (Guelph). This summer I actually got slighly faster cable modem performance while living in Sudbury (also only about 100,000 people) through their cable co. (subcontracted through local ISPs). What was really interesting about that though was that they had begun offering cable modem service to all the small northern communities in the area. Several of the cities were only 2500 to 5000 people.
Long story short: broadband definitely CAN work, and work well, even in fairly remote communities.
for fast, cheap broadband is Bill Fogal's semiconductor. If I read those pages correctly, it will eliminate the need to rip out the thousands of miles of existing copper cable and replace them with optical fibres, while providing LOTS of bandwidth. And more...
According to Tom Bearden, it should become available early next year. I just hope it doesn't fall into the same black hole that comsumes so many of these weird inventions.
I think you missed my point. All I'm trying to show is that, contrary to his assertion, there are different preferences - not that his preferences are wrong and mine are right.
Unless you have a whole array of satellite dishes and decoders - and some long cables to parts of the world in different satellite footprints - you aren't going to be able to get this stuff on your TV. There is virtually no inernational news coverage in the US.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Now, it appears the overall gist of replies to this section are all that "conventional broadband is not profitable." or "telephone monopolies are stagnating broadband growth." Whether this is true or not, (I believe it is in some places, but that is just opinion) I guess we have nothing left but unconventional broadband. Consider the alternatives.
Satellite internet is not dead, its just starting. And no, I'm not talking about direcTV. Its fine for TV, but the latency is too high. I'm talking something like Teledesic. 288 satellites orbiting at less than 1400km. Having a 64mbps download and 2mbps upload from anywhere on the planet. Line latency "as low as 20ms and less than 75ms on all links less than 5000km." The problem? Not available until 2005... Unless too many investors pull out and it dies before its fully realised. With 288 satellites, thats one heck of an initial investment.
Fixed base wireless, like zNet for example, offers 512k wireless for 49.99 now (normally 69.99) 1mbps for 119.99. Oh, and their bandwidth is symmetrical, same for both upload and download. Their service areas are not restricted by surrounding broadband providers, nor are they limited by the quality of existing cable/telephone lines. Proliferation of this form of broadband is more likely to become widespread than teledesic, but I kind of like being able to connect to the internet from anywhere on the planet.
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
I'm surprised to hear this.
When I had MediaOne's flavor of RoadRunner service, they changed out the ever-failing General Instruments box with a Toshiba DOCSIS box and I never had a lick of trouble out of it.
I did not note any upgrade to the cable plant serving me. Made a great impression on me, and I now wish that I had that cable modem instead of this CRAP Telocity sometimes-on connection.
slashdot: A failed experiment.
First off, what the /. readers need to understand is that DSL was a dead technology before it ever hit the mainstream. It's expensive for phone companies, and VERY picky. You need to live within X thousand feet (cable feet, not air feet) of the local CO, the cabling between you and said CO must be of good quality, etc. All these factors make for unreliable service, and varying bandwidth.
Cable networks, however, don't have nearly as many limitations. I used to install cable modems a few years ago, and I learned quite a bit about the system. First off, as Cable companies have been rolling out new lines for digital services, they've been offering more than just Internet access. For instance, my local Cable operator, MediaOne (now AT&T), offers Digital Telephone, Digital Cable TV, and High Speed Internet access. All of these items individually might not make it worth the work for them, but when they bundle the services together on one line, BINGO...we've got proffit!
Technologically, cable is simply a routed network. Each node (neighborhood of x Hundred or so subscribers) is routed onto the backbone (usually fibre), whereas the DSL option is a switched network. Granted, using a switched network makes it harder for people to "eavesdrop" on your data, and inherently faster, they are much more expensive to implement than a simple routed network. Consider the difference between purchasing a hub, and a switch for your LAN.
Anyway, I think what we're witnessing here is the next-generation consumer. In general, the public is getting more and more tech-savvy, and they can spot the Bigger Better Deal (tm) much more easily. Frankly, if for nothing else, I like having TV, Phone, and Internet charges on one bill because of the convenience. The Local Bells have had their chance, and have screwed us for long enough.
-Tom
Has anyone heard of this great old technology called ISDN? It's always-on, faster than a modem (with significantly lower latency), and best of all, it's available right now from your friendly local telco monopoly.
;-)
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
I live on the outskirts of town and even though Verizon has fiber buried to the new phone distribution box in our neighborhood we cannot have DSL due to two reasons 1) our Copper "legacy" circuits to our neighborhood have Loda coils on them and Verizon is unwilling to remove them. 2) Verizon won't upgrade & expand the DSLAMs to provide DSL over Fiber capability (which would expand the range of DSL much farther (the limit is now 2 miles from where the DSL leaves the fiber and goes to copper).
Verizon is a nihilistic & monopolistic phone company that should have never been allowed to merge with GTE.
Oh, and don't let your cable-modem get fried during a lightning storm... It took 3 months before a tech could be scheduled to come out and replace it. (seriously) Then it was up for a month, then lightning took it again.. once again it was 3 months before a tech could replace. I'm on my 3'd one now, and so far it's held up. (2 years) Oh, I'm not a complete moron, I had a surge protector/UPS on the power, apparently it was spiking through the cable line! Very weird, and very poor customer service/technical support! Also, they had this weird problem with deleting my e-mail account every Sunday night. It would take me 2 days to get to be able to e-mail again. I swear if I hear one of those tier 1 techs tell me again to wait 15 minutes while they "refresh"......
Peace!
ShortedOut
As they say, hindsight is 20/20.
Personally, I prefer to see clearly. That's one the reasons why I'd rather not gaze into the crystal ball.
Ball-gazers are responsible for many of the dot-bombs. They've been responsible for many problems in society: e.g. "The War to End All Wars" which didn't.
Why not just live in the now? It's a lot easier to see what's happening now, and deal with it. Sure, the future is interesting, and if I want to think about it, I'll read some Kim Stanley Robinson or something and wonder a bit. But really: we have to deal with the present. There's enough happening at any given moment to give anyone pause for thought.
Sure, think about the consequences of your actions, because the future will become the present. But don't go around saying things like "DSL is Dead!" when I'm using it right now. :) Perhaps some American DSL companies are in trouble, but that's not an indicator of the future, but rather the present. What happens next depends on what everybody does, and predicting that's a fool's game.
Perhaps DSL will die. ISDN has almost no usage anymore, it can happen. I hope that RS-232 will go away. But there's no grand destiny here. What will happen, will happen; what we need pundits for are to help us cope with it when it does happen, because individuals are largely powerless to control these things.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
True... South Korea and other countries enjoy much better and widely available broadband than the USA.
With the DMCA, the technical exodus from the USA has begun already. Look at several high-profile cases that we've read about here on Slashdot.
The lack of broadband here in the USA will be just another reason for technical people to leave. I would love to live in Europe....
Dr. Demento On The 'Net!
Sure they are. They are huge proponents of PCs too. Their liscence says they can deny your use of their OS at anytime. The only way to turn your PC off is to be able to see it.
You don't expect anything from MS but push and digital rights management do you? Their OS is just what industry desires. It's difficult to share with, impossible to meaningfully modify and easy to break. MSNet Broadband is going to be like any other MS service, their way or the highway. When you deviate, click, they will finally get to exercise the end user liscence agreement they love so much. ME is a shadow of the future for M$, powerless users marketed to advertisers and "content" providers. Barf.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.