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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
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.
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
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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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
But that's not "dead" or even "dying". I'll believe "dead" when Comcast turns off my Internet service.
Yeah, and RoadRunner isn't going anywhere eit.*(P&(_&* ^)*(&PFSAS
NO CARRIER
My journal has hot
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.
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.
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
You're right, I do work at a computer firm and every single one of us has some form of broadband at home.. however most of my friends are still in college (and not in a computer-related field), and they are also shelling out $50/mo for high speed Internet. I do think the demand is there.. we are far past the 'early adopter' stage here.
The problem is not infrastructure, it is management. There's no brand recognition in broadband, with all the companies merging and going under.. My cable company has already changed names once, and my internet service has had 3 different names!
With few exceptions, the current providers suck. My Mediaone Road Runner (oops, I mean AT&T @Home now) connection has become consistently slower and unreliable.. Verizon DSL in my area uses PPPOE along with WinPOET, which I hear is a real pain in the ass.
I say, give the people decent service, don't waste money, and watch the subscribers roll in. For god's sake, AT&T calls me every week to find out if I want a cable modem. I already HAVE one of their cable modems!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.