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Broadband Is Dead (Or At Least Very Ill)

Posted by timothy on from the cringing-with-cringely dept.

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.

5 of 371 comments (clear)

  1. No hype by evilviper · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  2. Headline problem....? by rant-mode-on · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Perhaps that should read

    • Broadband in the USA is Dead....
    1. Re:Headline problem....? by the+eric+conspiracy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Perhaps that should read

      Broadband in the USA is Dead....

      I think it should read "Cringley is an Idiot".

      Broadband is doing just fine where I live (Central NJ). Most of my neighbors have cable modems on Optimum Online with it's great 1 Mb/sec up 5 Mb/sec down service at $29.95/mo. Just about eveyone I work with has some sort of DSL/Cable modem sevice as well.

      The only thing that is slowing down broadband at the moment is the economic slowdown in the US has some Telco's profits in the dumps. As soon as things start picking up again broadband will really take off.

  3. Broadband is not dead, it just smells that way. by notestein · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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

  4. Doesn't anyone have a clue what broadband is for? by bfields · · Score: 5, Insightful
    But wait, there's more! Not only is the broadband carriage business in trouble -- so is the broadband content business. There isn't a single company providing high-bandwidth content to mass consumers that is making any money on it.... When you watch a broadband video clip on abcnews.com or cnn.com, both companies are losing money to bring you that content. And the accountants have spoken: There is no way they'll ever make that money back. So companies that used to put a lot of money into high bandwidth content are putting in less and less money, so there is less and less content available. If you thought it was bad before, it will get worse.

    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:

    • It allows me to log in to my home computer from work and while travelling.
    • It gives me the option of running various kinds of servers and persistent clients that give me more control over my web pages, my email, etc.
    • I can use google more easily for quick reference, since I don't need to wait to make the connection and don't need to worry about hogging the phone line.
    • I can download software, OS upgrades, etc. This dosn't require lots of Mbps, just a persistent connection--I can always let downloads run overnight.

    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