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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.
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.
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.
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.
DSL works fine in the Netherlands. The problem in the US is badly managed telecom companies trying to revive their business using a silver bullet called DSL.
In the Netherlands the copper network is in good shape and the largest problem has been getting the local telecom switches converted (a process that is still not completed everywhere). In most of the larger cities people have a choice between cable and DSL. DSL tends to be bit more reliable but also more expensive and cable has a bad reputation mainly due to the fact that companies like @home are active on the isp site there. The competition between cable and DSL has stimulated quality improvements in both.
I've had my DSL connection for nearly a year now. Apart from some technical problems in the beginning, I've enjoyed a good connection and get exactly what I payed for. In any case, DSL and cable are of course a temporary solution until we all can have a fiber optic connection.
Of course in Europe, local telephone connections not for free (like in the US), so people are more likely to take DSL to save money. Basically if, like me, you want to be online a lot, DSL is much cheaper than a regular modem connection. In the US your local connection is for free so you can be online all day relatively cheaply.
Jilles
Where I live, the city utility department has built fiber loops throughout the city. We get coax to the wall, and bandwidth is about two to three times what ADSL users are getting. Rather than hassle with administering the whole deal, they contract out to local ISPs for the residential users, and run a nice cable TV business on the side. It's put the local giant @home creeps on their heels, as they can't possibly hope to compete with the utilities department. IMHO, this is the way to go: keep money and benefits local. Our tax dollars happily at work. I recognize that this makes me some neo-socialist fruitcake to some here, but how much do they pay for bandwidth? I pay $25 a month, and could do cheaper if I really needed to.
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
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.
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 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.