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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.
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
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'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
It's a stepping stone to a future where we all have fibre into our homes. But even that will most likely be severely restricted, especially in the US where RIAA and MPAA lobbyists will work to ensure that it is very difficult for home users to share files.
That is, assuming that the US still exists in its present form and that those lunatic islamists haven't infiltrated the system enough to sabatoge infrastructure. I won't even go into the nuclear or biological warfare issues.
Gawd help us all.
:wq
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've yet to make a profit on the DSL
Hmmm, this seems to be exactly what Cringley said in his article. Nobody, so far, has been able to make a profit and they are not likely to in the near(?) future.
You make a good point about the small local providers though -- if there's any hope for the future it lies with them. The big guys overexpanded and overspent, and are now (justifiably) going bust.
DSL is a technical necessity.
Already today, carriers probably pay more infrastructure costs for dial-in users than they pay for DSL. The only problem is they all sit on old voice technology that makes providing DSL much more expensive than it has to be.
So, in a few years, expect IP-over-Voice to be an expensive luxury.
Cringely just has no clue about the technologies involved.
f.
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!
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
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.
Sorry, but Microsoft is a huge proponent of broadband. If broadband fails, then .Net fails. "software as a service" will probably require broadband connections. Most businesses today are on a revolving "subscription" for MS software anyway, so getting consumers paying $19.95/month for MS.NET is what they want. I could see Microsoft buying up @Home to turn it into MSN@Home. Broadband is crucial to their plans.
.Net may fail and take a big chunk of Microsoft with it! :)
On the other hand, if everyone drops broadband,
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.
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?
It would only seem to be inefficient to build multiple analog cable-TV networks. The reality with old analog cable was the physical limits on the cable do limit you really to one provider per network.
The reality of the phone network is that the 4bocs should probably be split again: compel them to split off their services (i.e., telco) from the network side of it. Since the telcos can do both, they can do the classic vertical monopoly thing: ensure that it costs far more for outsiders to get access to the same channel at customers, and if compelled to open the channel, do nothing to facilitate the experience for the customer or outside service provider.