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.

Comments

Cringely

[Wyatt Earp]

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.

Here is Cringely on Excite@Home
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit1999012 1. html

"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/pulpit1999010 6. html

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.

Broadband isn't dead...

[Masem]

It's just that Ma-Bell is doing it's best impersonation of T1000 from Terminator 2 and recollecting the bits of itself before it regains it's monopoly on phone lines.

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.

Not dead in the Southeast!

[Spazntwich]

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.

Here it's very much alive

[KGBear]

I'm in Brazil. I've 2 DSL connections, one at home, another at the office. Both are provided by one of the local phone companies. Telefonica's DSL offer is called "Speedy" and comes in one of two flavors:

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.

Re:Headline problem....?

[JanneM]

This is not from the formerly state-owned telco - their deal is 512kbits, dunamic IP, for around $30.

This is from a smaller company specializing in ADSL. As far as I've been able to determine, as long as you're technically eligible (within a set distance from a switch and no filters in betwwen), you can get it.

/Janne

Re:I feel curious.

[rcs1000]

OK. 'ADSL seems to be profitable for all companies providing the service.'

From whence came that gem of wisdom.

In the UK the largest ISP, Demon, owned by Thus, is unprofitable. BT charges all DSL ISPs an astonishing $60 a month for use of their copper. ISPs can only charge a small mark-up (c. $10). Would you like to run a broadband ISP on $10 per month? To make things worse, BT then limits the number of sign-up to 10 a week. That's right - you can only sign up 10 customers a week and only have $10 a month to maintain your equipment, rent your bandwidth and hire your support staff. British broadband ISPs are losing money hand-over-fist and when the VC money runs out will need to merge.

In Germany, T Online, the largest broadband ISP is signing up lots of customers. Germany has the largest ISDN user base in the world and is the process of converting them to ADSL. Unfortunately T Online isn't making money out of broadband either, as customers are paying less per month for ADSL than they did for ISDN and T Online has to buy expensive equipment and do lots of costly installations.

I'm not saying broadband is dead. Of course it isn't. Technology pundits should be banned from making ridiculous statements. But is true that there is no viable business model for providing ADSL right now.

Blacksburg Broadband

[hiner112]

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!)

How true that is...

[TDScott]

In the areas in the UK where it's available, broadband works well and is cheap, with ADSL and cable offerings (from BT and NTL respectively) are around 0.5Mbps for £25 ($40)/month. That's respectable, even if takeup is a little lower than they hoped.

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.

Blacksburg isn't just DSL ...

[Cylar]

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?

Broadband fine in Canada

[canadian_right]

In British Columbia, Canada, you can get adsl or cable internet service from your friendly local telco or cable monopoly for about $40 CDN ($30 us) a month. They don't try to sell me anything but a connection. The telco has a web site, but its mainly customer service stuff. The telco makes a reasonable profit, and I get reliable service (2 outages, both less than 6 hours over 1 year). There are limits in the TOS about how much bandwidth I can use, but I've never come close to the limit. You aren't allowed to run a business unless you pay more for a business connection, but otherwise there are very few restrictions.

Once again, the boring but sensible Canadians do things right.