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Why ADCo?
Ian Peon writes: "Phoenix center recently released a study (pdf or doc) addressing the 'Last Mile problem.' The paper explains why no one has yet been able to crack the cable and phone providers' local monopolies -- and offers a solution: An ADCo (Alternative Distribution Companies) business model.
SF Gate has a good article on this."
Interesting idea but not really feasible I feer. I'd love it if time-warner had a better competitor than Verizon but the govt really fucked us when they allowed the local monopolys (phone companies, power companies, etc). Now I think the thing I'd be really trying to figure out is how do we convince people that they need broadband. As with ISPs back in the day, you had to convince people that they needed, not just wanted to be on the internet. Now they need to be convinced that they need to pay $40 a month as opposed to the $17 so that AOL goes faster. I have a suspicion that this might become a losing battle, which is a shame for the technology in the long run.
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
Being able to garner a 33 percent market share sounds nearly impossible, especially if it must be done within a reasonably short period of time to satisfy financial constraints. Although /. users and other technology-minded people may be interested in switching utility providers, I don't think the average household is sufficiently frustrated with the local ILEC to bother with having a fiber optic line installed. Moreover, although fiber optic lines have been discussed as being necessary for video-on-demand and other expensive cable services, the cable companies are likely to provide the necessary lines. In short, I don't think enough people really care about their phone providers to demand such a service.
A much less costly alternative would be to install some type of wireless communications network. The company would only need to install one or two of these per square mile, and with a small receiver located in households' basements, they could get phone service, cable, and internet service. Providing phone service would in fact be easier than current cellular technology, since the houses and receivers are obviously not going to move; encription could be used on the internet links, and I don't really see any reason why providing 100 channels of cable would be all that difficult. All of this from small transmitters located atop telephone polls every thousand yards or so.
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One of the major problems with ADCOs is, predictably enough, running the cables. Overhead and buried cables are usually prohibitively expensive, which is why the only way the telecom/cable companies were able to afford them was with subsidies and legislated monopoly status. Therefore the companies are forced to use sewers and other undesirable underground networks to run cable. And this is where the problems begin.
The sewers in my town are extremely old and small. There are frequently "conflicts" among the carriers when installing and maintaining these cables. Rain has proven to be an issue, as have insects and other much larger creatures. Running these cables in sewers is decidedly jury-rigged and isn't going to work out as a long-term solution.
One of the ADCO companies was considering transmitting signals through water supply lines (!). They claimed that there was a significant amount of potential bandwidth in the water supply network. I am not sure if that ever came to pass.
But one thing is sure: whether it be 802.11b wireless or something else, some other technology is going to be needed to replace the sewer-and-heating-duct kind of cabling that ADCOs rely on.
df
BUT, even the SFGate article says"
"The reasons for that, boiled down, revolve around the costs involved in small telecom companies trying to do too many things all at once."
i haven't read the study in depth yet, but looking at the TOC and skimming the section heads, they seem to ignore a POLITICAL reality....
The Telcos ***DON'T WANT*** to solve the LastMileProblem.
The Telcos had, up until the construction of the fiber backbone, ARPANET and courts' decision that made telcos open the backbone up to competitors, a REALLY SWEET business model
strictly "Cost Plus, Plus" and very cozy relationships with their Fed/State regulators, many of whom were telco execs doing the "Public Service" tour of duty...which made the telco business a "name your own rates" kinda business
the more broadband deployed, the less value switched circuits have, and the more value packets acquire
the Telcos would much rather sell analog switched, retail priced voice services (where they created the business model and still control it), than...
...packet based, circuit-less (or virtual circuits, if you prefer) communications, where they cannot charge per packet and have to share their packet revenues with broadband providers...
i'm routing, uh, rooting, for the ADCOs, but, if you will recall, CLEC's were also supposed to solve at least part of the problem, and before them the RBOC's (soon to be "The RBOC or So")were going to wire the "bridge to the future"...
as a engineer geek, it sounds to me like the ADCOs can solve acutally solve the deployment of high speed fiber to the businesses and homes in the local loop (though you'll probably end up with a very limited number of very big ADCOs, economies of scale being very real)....
but, what about a business model that will allow broadband providers to survive w/o the consumer being charged "per packet" (like Docomo) or "per bandwidth" like fractional T?
Switched circuits are wasting assets, telcos and analog voice are doomed businesses,BUT...
..so far, no successful new business model has emerged to replace them
...
Ten quid, she's so easy to blind. And not a word is spoken...
Posting a link to an EVIL M$ .DOCument on the Slashdot branch of the Holy Church of the Penguin? WHat is this world coming to?
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The Cap is nigh. Time to get a fresh new account.
Does anyone besides me think that making all data lines a public utility would be such a bad idea? Our roads are a public utility. Why not make our data the same?
I'm not advocating that the government-run everything. I think we all know that would be a nightmare for more reasons than one. If the government owns the cable, then there's nothing keeping different data service companies from using portions of it. This could work from the big pipes, all the way down to the last mile. On the backbones, companies would rent out X number of fibers, and Y amount of floor space wherever said fibres meet. The last mile would probably take a while longer to get set, but the same principle would suffice. Each local unit (neighborhood, apt building, etc) gets one of those metal boxes you see sitting around. The data companies just get to rent out space inside of those, to switch from the fiber to the copper that runs to your home/apartment.
No monopolies. Fair competition. And by leaving the operation to the data corps, the existing players still get to stay in the game. I'm sure someone here can come up with something, but I can find no reason why having the government own the physical layer only would be a bad thing. I realize that there is little chance that the telco lobbyists would let an Idea like this fly, but hey... I guy can dream of the perfect net access can't he?
It's pretty obvious that the main stumbling block is getting new connections into houses. Houses are traditionally built with two wire based connections; power and phone. In the past couple decades it's included cable, which is another market that's developing (developed?) a strong monopoly over their local domains.
Remember when cable started coming in back in the 80's? They had to send trucks down every road in every neighborhood burying a cable to get into your building.
That's obviously what these guys are doing, but doing it by loopholing themselves around regulations to cut some of the costs.
I see these "ADCo's" going through a struggling uphill climb, again, a lot like cable companies did twenty years ago. Robots and sewer lines are nice, but I think they'd be much better served to just duplicate the cable company business model instead of looking for instant gratification type solutions, because it's proven to work.
IMO, when construction companies start realizing that people need more than three wires into a house, they'll start laying fiber under neighborhoods and selling it to local companies. Now *that* would be a moneymaker; laying extra lines would be dirt cheap if you already have the ground torn up.
MS and Intel gave us enormous improvements in their products over time in order to sell us upgrades. Telcos and Cable companies, who sell you a subscription service, have substantially less incentive to improve their product. Better to charge you the same for the same old service, and keep what profits they can from the underlying semiconductor/optic cost drops.
I fear that both these players are going to stick with 1 Megabitish services for a long long time. Video that fills my screen still seems a decade away.
If telcos gave you sufficient bandwidth to the last mile, they'd lose their existing revenue model to VoIP/Microsoft.
If cable companies gave you sufficient bandwidth to the last mile, they'd lose their control over video distribution channels to the surf-anywhere web.
I think broadband will be accessible for nearly anyone who wants it, and at cheaper prices than today (i.e. $20/mo, not $50). But I'm not convinced the bandwidth is going to start going up at Moore's law rates of the underlying semiconductor/optic technology improvements. Not even close. The geographic monopolies are too strong, and the benefits of cable/telco collusion are too profitable for them to not keep us on the leash of slow improvements.
--LP
According to a heise article, 60% of German customers have access to alternative local loop providers. However, 98% are still served by GT.
Sadly, nothing much will change anytime soon. The government still holds a huge percentage of GT's stock. If their monopoly were broken, the stock would deflate like Enron's and that windfall of cash could not be spent on securing the next election by way of pork.