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Broadband Bermuda Triangle
An anonymous coward sent in: "Mike from Techdirt has written an article in Salon.com about how he is the bermuda triangle of broadband, and how the government should kick him out of the country if they really want to save the broadband industry. Apparently, he's been kicked off 4 or 5 different broadband networks in the past year alone as each company went bankrupt or gave up the business."
Mmmmmmm. Floor pie!
It's a shame broadband internet services cant seem to turn a profit. I'd like to see a cable provider provide me with an IP address, and thats it. I'll take care of my email and other services. Something like 'Broadband for Nerds. Simplicity Matters.' or.. something like that...
Don't Tread on Me
hey, if this guy is the broadband bermuda triangle, i must be the dot com bermuda triangle.
all the sites i use and visit have gone bust. webvan...etoys...pets.com....my favorite site now is slashdot. hey wait a minute....
Other powerful interests opposed to the future are large publishers, governments, advertisers and all others want to tell you what to think. Free speech is not what these folks want. They want broadcast and money. If you don't consider propaganda and money equivalents, consider what a green piece of paper is really worth.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
That's a pretty amusing article, but he has it easy. My own curse is with race car drivers... as soon as I start rooting for them, a freak accident is sure to follow.
I submitted an order with an ISP for DSL service 8 months ago and nothing came of it until one day a couple of techs from a business network provider came by my house and said, "Here's your IDSL router." After a quick hookup and entering the DNS variables provided by the ISP's homepage, I was on the Internet @ 144k both ways. I called the ISP and asked what I should do about payment and their response was, "Ummm... we cancelled your order so you're not in our computer." I called the busines network provider and they said, "Talk to your ISP." So I called the ISP a few more times and then they went bankrupt. Their DNS died, and so did my Internet access, for the 2 minutes it took for me to enter a DNS for a nearby college that now resolves all my queries. So the ISP no longer exists and I can't pay them, and the business internet provider that is my first hop says they don't do residential accounts so they won't take my money. Meanwhile, I have a Lucent router I've never paid for, an install I've never paid for, and continuing IDSL service that I've yet to pay for going on 2 months now. I'm wondering that if this could last indefinitely, perhaps I can turn it over as a feature when I sell the property...
"3 bedrooms, 4 baths, 2 car garage, free Internet access for life..."
Note to the audience: Broadwing is a nasty spam haven, and the world will be a much better place once they'll be out of business.
Say no to software patents.
For the LECs (local exchange carriers like Verizon) that is. What you don't realize is that $30-$35 of your monthly $50-60 DSL fee you paid Northpoint, Rythms, or currently Covad went to the LECs. That's right, 50%+ goes to the Baby Bells because of their monopolies on the local loop. Get some competition on the local loop and the Baby Bells won't be able to squeeze out the profit margins from DSL providers.
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
There is a good resource here that explains why all of these broadband providers are going out of business.
If he is choosing the best deal each time he finds a new provider, then naturally he is choosing the provider who, at that time, is cutting their margins the most.
Thus, each time he is choosing the one provider most likely to fail. Amusing, is it not?
Fuck local loops. The Bells will never open it up. IP laws will ease up around the same time this happens.
Let's treat internet infrastructure as infrastructure (aka roads) and have the govt lay the lines. We can fully fund this with the 70+ billion ca$h from the War on Terrorism. Remember, the Interstate highway system was built from Defense dollars during the Cold War, and that's why their symbol is a little shield. If bush can justify handing IBM a check for 1.3 billion in the name of homeland defense, then this should be a congressional walkover.
After that, let private ISP's bid to operate the lines (i.e. maintenance, routers, cacheing, etc.) and make money on service not bandwidth. Competing on the quality of service is more productive than getting into infrastructure wars -- suing who owes what to whom. You can then run your mail/web server and pay only the costs of administering your account, which should be billing you, electricity, and checking that no one cut the line to your house accidently. Shouldn't be too much. Those who want webmail and funky desktop icons which guide you through the internet search process can and should pay extra. Also, I think more people will sign up if there's a fiber optic line heading to just about every home in the major urban areas. As an extra plus, it'll give silicon valley a shot in the arm.
For those whom just can't stand the thought of govt. spending on public infrastructure, you can always just privatize the thing once the lines are laid and enough cutomers have signed up to make it profitable.
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
I've seen more than enough people leave a otherwise technically competent ISP due to impossible service through their customer service department.
Surprising, this doesn't seem to be as big an issue with the dialup ISPs.
If you are *are* going to set up an ISP, get the bookkeeping down first before you buy any of the connectivity equipment. Getting technical help to your customers first is a priority, but knowning whom your customers are is more important than that!
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Junkbuster refused to show me the page at all. So for those with similar problems, this link gets you past the ad:
d band_bermuda/index.html?x
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/12/06/broa
The main problems I see are the marketing, and the definition of 'Internet'.
Now.. I know, to us geeks.. when we think 'Internet Provider' we think, someone to provide us with a connection, and to route us some IP. Period. We also expect them to have (or delegate to us) proper reverse-DNS. ANd that's ALL we require. Now.. we sort of expect them to have DNS servers for us to use with our resolvers, because that's just traditional (not to mention easy to do), but that's only a convenience. As is the outgoing mail server, and incoming mail services.
Now we have ISP's selling you on their 'content' or their 'portal'. WE have ISP's refusing to allow SMTP connections through anything but their own mail server... and the list goes on.
So how do we get out of this mess? How do we make a clean separation between routing IP and all the other services they can provide? I know we geeks would love to see an ISP with modularized service. You get 1 IP with your connection, and that's it. No other services are provided by the ISP. Then the ISP could sell web space, email accounts, webmail, portals, high-speed local content, etc.
Oh.. and regarding those 'useless' services many of us don't use (like your 10MB web space, or 5 email accounts). A friend of mine moved, and was looking for a new connection. He asked the Telus people (Alberta, Canada) "Hey, can I trade my 10MB web space for a static IP?" They said "Sure". THat's the kind of thing I'd like to see.
Disclaimer: This may read like an ad for Internet America. While it is somewhat of a testemonial, I am just a satisfied customer, and receive no financial compensation for saying nice things about them.
In days gone by, I'd dream of an ISDN connection, or even dedicated 56k. But the price/performance just wasn't there: around $100/month for the physical line and connectivity. DSL, of course started to look attractive. I'd never been a fan of cable modems, what with the shared media, dynamic IPs, and generally draconian TOS.
When I moved to a Dallas suburb, I priced various offerings, and ended up with Internet America. I stayed in a month-to-month apartment for about 6 weeks until I bought and closed on a house, and the following factors were important:
I needed dial up access for a short time, month-to-month while I was at the apartment.
I wanted to make sure that the TOS were reasonable. Some are downright insane: pinging remote hosts, even with consent, was considered "hacking" and could get your account suspended. Running any server, even an smtp sink (non-relaying, of course) was verbotten, and forget about a static IP. Often there were stingy traffic quotas.
Naturally, I wanted to make sure that service was likely available in the area where I'd be buying a home.
Internet America fit this bill nicely: dial-up and DSL, reasonable TOS ("Oh, things like SMTP are fine, even a Web server as long as you don't saturate the uplink -- we're geeks, we understand" from tech. support), and various access plans (fast, faster, and fastest, er, duh, I guess).
I was a bit out of range from the CO (15.6 kft) so they couldn't piggyback on the existing POTS service. But, for an extra $15 a month, they'd lease a dry pair and add the cost to my bill. Bottom line is that I've got 768 kbps down by 384 kbps up on a dedicated pair for $74.99 a month, plus tax ($81.18). Not exactly cheap, but they don't appear to be going out of business.
The big plus, though, is service. Static IP? No problem, I get one free. Their tech people admitted to having looked at PPPoE over ATM, and having held their noses, decided it wasn't the way to go. I had a few glitches with billing (like not dropping the dial up charges when I get DSL), and the odd 15 minute outage but these were resolved (actually we're still looking at the outage but as it happens so rarely it isn't a real problem and is hard to track down -- they suspect their DSL modem). They even back-credited me for 2 months of dialup charges while I had DSL -- many providers won't do that under any circumstances, being so eager to nickel and dime their customers.
Now, like most slashdotters, I'm not your typical "one computer plugged into the DSL modem" guy: I've got a headend with the DSL modem, a 10/100 Mb/s 8 port Linksys firewall/router doing NAT, with wired drops to rooms all over the house. I run [GNU/]Linux, sink my own email, plan to provide SSH access, and might run a non-advertised web server (on other than port 80). In short, I use the DSL line as a shared connection for the whole house's traffic, eventually with 3 or 4 computers behind the firewall. As long as I don't excessively saturate the uplink, Internet America is "O.K." with this.
Basically I get DNS delegation (for my domain) from register.com, DNS and secondary MX from iicinternet.com, and am very pleased.
Compare this with my neighbor across the street is in Southwestern Bell Hell: he pays $49.95 a month for draconian TOS with PPPoE. He gets dropped at the strangest times (not just when idle), and his DSL modem requires frequent power cycles because it loses sync. His service is down so much that he retains a dial-up modem and needs it weekly. I'm over there about once every 2-3 weeks resetting his DSL modem, or reconfiguring his networking options. He isn't using a firewall (oops), and I hope his box does not get r()()73d, as they say ('course it's just running Windoze).
Is the extra $25 a month that I pay worth it? Obviously I think so.
Again, this is just a review of my experience with a particular provider. I've heard grumblings about them from others, but am satisfied myself. Naturally, YMMV.
You could've hired me.
Reminds me of Al Gore's talk about getting Internet access to everyone, which is not a bad idea (of course, Al Gore is still an idiot).
The only issue I see is the same one the post office has. For 34 cents or whatever-the-heck first class mail costs these days, you can send a letter across the street or to some lonely shack 5 miles outside Scuffboot, Nebraska.
If the government is going to lay the infrastructure (I think comparing it to the Interstate system is a valid analogy), then how much would it really cost to lay fiber to every little hamlet across millions of square miles of these great United States? After all, if public money pays for it, it should benefit everyone, if possible. (Forget that, that's too naive).
I think it's a great idea, but it would just be too expensive, so I think we're stuck with the piecemeal development, which is of course hampered by monopolies and stupid regulations and general incompetance all around.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Surprising, this doesn't seem to be as big an issue with the dialup ISPs.
It happened to me with Qwest 56k dialup all the way back in 1998. I signed up online from a neighbor's house. My new account was activated immediately. The charge for the ISP service was supposed to appear on my monthly Qwest phone bill...
It never did, though the dialup ISP service continued to work.
Three months later (I originally thought maybe it was due to "bill lag"), I called them to see what was up. They asked for my login, and I gave it to them, and they said that no such login existed. Then they asked for my address and residential phone number, which I gave them, and they said that I had definitely not signed up for the service. I told them that I was using it every day, and the lady kindly explained to me that it "must be settings still left over from your old ISP" that were providing me net access...
I got nervous and didn't use service... I didn't want to suddenly recieve a balloon bill years later or get sued or something. I signed up with a local alternative instead, and later, with @home (grrrr).
However, I still used it as a kind of "test" account every now and then because it was so reliable and the phone number was easy to remember. Eventually, I moved from my apartment, my old phone bill and number became nonexistent. Qwest sold out their dialup ISP to a major national ISP. The account continued to work.
The account was *finally* closed about three months ago, with nary a word from Qwest or the ISP which took over their dialup in my area.
*shrug* just a dialup free 'Net story.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
say "access to everyone". I used the roads analogy. Is there an I-xx near everyone? No. But in most places, yes. In the urban centers where 70% of us live it will be great. Think roads. Think the armies of construction and cable workers which are already employed laying stuff to your house or repatching the road that goes to your driveway. What if they laid some optic cable, the next time they reasphalted that road?
But..yeah, it is wishful thinking. Problem is, almost all people I talk to think it's a good idea. Even a majority of fiscal conservatives think that this is a legitimate infrastructure expense. Also, I can't think of too many corporate entities who are opposed to it. Boggles my mind why it's not being done.
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
You're talking about the manifestation of a principle I think gets overlooked a lot: if you want a competetive market, you don't let any one player own or control the delivery network. Whether it's electricity over a grid, communications over wires or airwaves, or operating systems on an manufactured computers.
So what you're saying is absolutely true. If we're going to get to the point where markets are going to operate for the public as a whole, we're going to have to get this through to people who set policy.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
We wrote a science book of BASIC programs for the Coleco Adam.
i splay" fetish, which led to some of the first decent video convolution filters at Apple, and contributed to WebTV's set-top abilities, etc. etc...)
*Poof*
We re-wrote it for the PC-Jr.
*Double Poof*
The standing joke around the office was we were going to write a million-dollar ransom note to Apple...
Somehow Apple survived our publication. Guess we really weren't cursed after all.
(Before you snicker about the Adam, it was the start of Steve Perlman's "lets-get-large-amounts-of-readble-text-on-a-tv-d
(OK - it also had a howitzer for a printer.)
(OK they did just as well at selling computers as IBM would do selling Cabbage Patch Kids.)
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Sure, plenty of Slashdot readers will sign up, but Joe Sixpack is perfectly content with his 28.8K connection to AOL.
Step into the way-back machine and swap 'broadband' for broadcast TV:
The customers will be there when the service is. Having the government install the infrastructure makes it affordable.
As a former Charter employee (I also worked for @Home, but that's another story) I'm shocked that you ever got more than 2.2KBps. With the myriad of headend, line, and server problems Charter has, it's amazing you were able to get on at all.
Of course, Excite going down the shitter doesn't help matters much, either.
economies of scale & all that.
Only one state in Oz has electricity supply problems & that one's privatised