Dump Broadband, Dig Out Your Modem!

wilstephens writes: "Found this article on CNet about the latest trend of people dumping broadband in favour of their modems. Cheaper, and more reliable service, apparently! 'Katy Ling, a software consultant who had her home wired for high-speed Internet access last year, did what many technology analysts said would never happen: She bailed out of broadband...'"

Comments

Not gonna do it

[well_jung]

I can understand how someone could choose between, say, food or broadband. But So long as I have 50 bucks left over after the car and house are paid for, my ass ain't digging that goddamn modem out of the closet.

And frankly, I don't know anyone else that would, either. I supect the Author's sole anecdotel example is also their neighbor. There isn't a story here.

So be a friendly webmaster...install mod_gzip

[baptiste]

It still amazes me the # of users of my websites that still use modems. We are now planning to install mod_gzip for Apache to help modem users download our larger pages faster. It didn't seem worth it at first with folks moving to broadband, but we still found many of our users listing 'modem' as their primary access method when they register. Plus it'll reduce our bandwidth demand for users who have broadband - they'll get larger files faster too. Yeah, it adds overhead on teh server CPU, but for us its worth it since we have headroom to spare.

broadband is for lazy people

[GunFodder]

With a dialup modem I used to get a lot more done around the house. I could go get coffee while waiting for pages to load, or do some cleaning. And I got a real sense of well-being when I left my machine on all night to download a 100MB game demo and it actually worked!

Broadband situation is generally deplorable

[Ars-Fartsica]

Most people still can't get cable modem or DSL.

Those who can face unreliable service, high prices, and shamefully bad customer service and support.

And its getting worse. Most of the start-ups that may have created competition in this market have gone under, leaving the cable and telephone monopolies in charge.

I don't know if the solution is more or less regulation and/or public involvement, but in the current atmosphere, things are going to suck for a very long time.

This article is crap

[pod]

I read this article yesterday, and it was so painful. The very premise is bogus. You're paying about 2-3 times as much for a cable/dsl line as for dialup. While such a price may be a little hard to justify for people already on a very tight budget, chances are you can spare the dollar a day required to keep your line.

And the value in 'broadband' is not the speed really. We've heard many times now, it's the instant availability stupid. People hate to have to wait (through busy signals potentially) to get online witha modem to check their mail. They like to have ICQ/AIM running all the time to see when their friends are online and to chat. It's all about convinience.

Besides, the article is full of contradictions, for example take this bit:

[ISPs] are looking for high-speed subscriptions' profit margins to bolster their bottom line...

and later:

...operating margins excluding sales and marketing expenses for cable modem subscribers are as low as 5 percent, and they say DSL is break-even at best.

So which one is it? I work for an ISP that does DSL, and let me tell you, there are no margins on DSL. It can easily take a 2-3 years to start making money on a DSL client. Hosting (and dialup to a certain extent) and bandwidth reselling is where the margins are.

And as a later paragraph puts it, high-speed subscribers would "rather sell their grandmothers" than go back to a pokey dial-up connection. It'll be hard for anyone to convert back to a dialup connection.

Is that reliable?

[barzok]

Maybe your users select "modem" with the thought that if they select higher bandwidth, you'll force-feed them a more graphics/flash-heavy site, and they don't want that?

Or maybe they think cable modem == modem?

If I had a dollar for every website form I filled out truthfully, I'd be a very poor man.

Missing the point of broadband apparently...

[Arethan]

I used to work in the Cable Modem industry, back when it was "New Technology(tm)". The biggest selling point that I noticed for the tech savvy was the speed. (Obviously.) However, the tech savvy market is smaller than you think. So the real highest selling point was the cost vs benefit. For example:

_Dialup Model_
56k ISP: $20+/mo
2nd Phone line: $20+/mo
waiting 10 minutes/MB: pain in the ass

_Cable Modem Model_
Modem Rental: $10/mo or less
Connection Fees: $30-$40/mo
waiting 30 seconds/MB: less pain in the ass

The point is, for the same price, or even $10 more, people could have the same non-voice-line-interrupting service, and even get some extra speed out of the deal. People that had the more expensive ISPs (AOL comes to mind) were even more prone to make the switch, since they would actually be saving money by switching. (We provided @Home at the time, which provided content so people used to AOL wouldn't feel too out of place.)

Amen

[Christopher Bibbs]

If I was out of work I'd cut the cable, cable modem, Netflix membership, sell my motorcycles, and anything else to keep food on the table (and keep the table). The article states the painfully obvious. Broadband comes out of discresionary spending and when you need to save money, dropping down to regular dial-up is a viable option to many people.

So long as I have disposable income, however, the extra $20/month to have a cable modem as opposed to a traditional dial-up is worth more, than say, my weekly trip to the arcade.

A better (real) story would be about people who aren't worried about their jobs or the economy dropping broadband because they see no value in it.

Blame it on the Baby Bells

[Infonaut]

Two years ago, PacBell was putting out all of these offers for DSL - cheap, fast, etc. The problem was, they didn't have service rolled out yet. The parent company, SBC, was offering something they didn't have the capacity to actually implement. Why? Because they were scared of cable companies and pioneering DSL providers like Covad.

When I first made an inquiry with PacBell about getting DSL service, they told me I was too far out. So I contacted Covad, and lo and behold, they hooked me up. I had service through Fastpoint Communications. It was awesome. I had true, always-on static IP, blazing-fast DSL.

But Fastpoint had a difficult time getting DSL subscribers, due largely to the fact that PacBell was able to jam marketing messages down the throats of phone customers, not to mention TV ads, magazine articles, and the like. Of course, the fact that most PacBell customers were having installation nightmares was beside the point.

I actually had one friend who spent six months trying to get connected through PacBell. FIVE home visits later, they finally got it working. Another friend actually had to contact the California VP of Sales for PacBell in order to get some action on his stalled installation. Talk about a bait and switch tactic.

In any case, Fastpoint went belly-up. So Covad passed me on to Earthlink. Whatever problems Earthlink is having seem to be self-created. Their phone support people are truly awesome - great attitude, very helpful. But it took a while for my service to get started, and I was actually DSL-less for two months. Once it started working, I was moderately satisfied with my new PPPoE (yech!) connection, but not as happy as I'd been before with Fastpoint.

Then I wanted to add a second phone number to my apartment. I had to switch to PacBell for my DSL because since they own the voice line, the only way to get a true DSL Internet and voice on the same line setup is if you use PacBell!

So now I am using PacBell, with an annoying PPPoE, dynamic IP setup. I've just put in an order to convert over to static IP, which means I'll now pay $70/mo., and I'll have five IP addresses, when all I really need is one, perhaps two.

I work from home, so fast, reliable Internet access is key for me. I use PacBell because I basically have no other choice. They submarined the competition, played every stall tactic in the book, and now they're a local monopoly.

Will there be any action on this at the state or federal level? With the current economic and political climate, that's highly unlikely. To me, the subversion of competition in broadband was the real tragedy of the dot-bomb crash. I don't give a crap about pets.com, but we all lost out on a great opportunity when the Baby Bells subverted true competition.

I am among the luddites!

[peteshaw]

Yeah, I dropped my dsl line back in October. My carrier got bought out by RealConnect and at the end of my one year contract I was notified that my 49.95 128K IDSL line would be *slightly* going up to $169.95!

What really annoyed me was the letter itself. Okay, I can understand if costs go up. But (a) there was no apology in the letter and (b)I was given 7 days to make up my mind on continuing the contract.

So I call up RealConnect and mildly explain my position, which is that you are trying to gouge me with an insanely high price. They in turn blamed Network Access Solutions for ratcheting up the residential rates to match business class. NAS is the only provider to the local switch, so after some research, I figured I was pretty much hosed.

Needless to say I do my big downloads from work and at home I say, "Welcome to NetZero!"

Postscript: After one month plus at 28.8K (my phone lines are &@#'d up buts thats another story) I don't knotice it that much. When I'm online my phone calls are forwarded to my cell, and I can't download ISO's, MP3's, or mulimedia, but who cares? I can easily do without that junk. Email, ebay, online shopping, messaging, you can do 90% of your stuff with a dog slow connection.

Re:Extremely satisfied broadband customer

[scott1853]

Verizon DSL service: 768 down, 256 up

Those numbers don't refer to "days" do they.

VPN: The Killer App

[StevenMaurer]

I'll never go back to dialup. Ever.

Why?

Simple, both my wife and I use it to connect to each of our corporate intra-nets using VPN. And if you want to do any real work, NFS mounts, Windows junk, remote compiling - anything - you really have to have enough speed to make it worthwhile.

It's not different for non-technical people either. If you use accounting programs, inventory tracking, anything else using a client-server model, broadband speeds are the only way to go for any real work at home.

Re:Going back

[GreyPoopon]

That's the problem with the cable modems, it's a shared line. So you'll notice different times of the day will be faster than others.

I'm not going to dispute your statements, but I wanted to point out that there's much more to speed considerations than the whole "shared line" concept of cable modem. Let me spell it out a bit. Both DSL and Cable employ shared sections of their network. Both can suffer when oversubscribed. The primary difference is that correcting the problem on DSL is easier and cheaper. It involves duplicating the portions of equipment (usually located at the CO) that are overloaded. Cable, on the other hand, requires a trip 'cross country to correct the problem, and could ulimately lead to the need to bury additional cable to meet demands. Cable is divided into different "nodes," which constitute the shared portion of the connection. When cable slows down, it could be (among other things) that the node is overloaded (difficult to fix), or that the pipe between the node and the cable company is not fat enough (easier to fix).

Despite all of this, my experience has been that the single biggest bottleneck for every internet service I have had is the throughput between the provider and the internet itself. Either their pipe to the internet was a "garden hose," or the section of the internet they connected to wasn't exactly running at a spanking pace. Case in point: I used to have double channel ISDN. This is in some ways similar to DSL. Even though I had a capacity of 128 Kbps, I found that I rarely jumped over 64 Kbps unless I was hitting servers at the ISP (who happened to be the phone company). Because of some changes in price structure, I decided to go with another ISP. Under their configuration, I could only achieve 56Kbps on each channel (for a total of 112Kbps), but I found that my connection was usually running at between 90 and 110Kbps. The difference? The new ISP made sure their connection to the internet was adequate for their subscriber base.

Some suggestions:

• See where the bottleneck is first. Try hitting servers located at your ISP. If your throughput to them is good, you can be sure that your shared connection has nothing to do with your problems.
• See if you can find somebody else, preferably in a new neighborhood who has the same provider but is on a different little-used node. If they're speed is good, then you know the problem is in your shared cable. Seek DSL. :)