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What's Holding Up Broadband in the U.S.?
ProfBooty writes "A recent opinion piece in the Washington Post discloses that the broadband could potentially aid in the economy's recovery (and that Canadians are 2x as likely to have it, South Koreans 4x), but it's not regulation that is the hold up, it's *surprise* content holders' fears of 'piracy' as well as unwillingness to adapt to new markets. Also discusses the governments of Canada and South Korea and how they were involved in bringing broadband to the people. In additon discusses how in the past, Congress would pass laws as to protect innovators as well as the old guard." The article's by Lawrence Lessig.
Can't help but think that part of this is due to the LACK of regulation rather than regulatory delays. Thanks to careless deregulation (read Reaganomics), the telcos have merged with the content providers, and as a consequence the new behemoths are hedging, looking to provide a utility service at luxury-good prices.
That said, some telcos are making the investment, particularly in new neighborhoods.
The demand is there, but I think there are people who would rather go through a root canal than put it with all the BS associated with getting DSL or cable installed.
DSL, with its ridiculously long install wait time, crappy PPPoE platform (In other words, shell out another $100 for a router that will do it for you so all your machines can have a 'normal' connection), and a general lack of value (+$15 for a static IP? Get real Ameritech)
On the other hand you have cable, which @home and all their partners managed to bumble enough to make people stay away from cable for a LONG time.
The content is THERE, these pundits are screaming that there is no killer app for broadband, as if having it will make things easier for users.
Straight up, when I saw "holding up", I read it as meaning "propping up".
When you look at the beatings that broadband providers are taking, it seems like the only thing keeping the whole broadband "revolution" going is the mindless optimism of marketing droids, based on the mythical "average user" spending all of their time (and disposable income) sucking down advert laden pay-per-stream postage stamp sized Britney Spears videos from the provider's portal. It's insane (gee, do I pay-per-view for a postage stamp, or do I pay-per-view to the same provider down the same cable, but have it go to the big widescreen TV on the other side of the splitter?) but it seems to be the only thing keeping the rollouts going.
This is an interesting piece, but it doesn't address the basic problem of broadband. Those of us who already have it know exactly why we want it: we want a fat and unmetered pipe to go find and create our own content with. But the pricing is aimed at bringing in Ms Average User. Frankly, I just don't think that's going to happen, not until the price is way down (in which case you've got to gouge that bit deeper on the pay-pers), and sooner or later broadband providers are going to give up this nonsense about selling content, and are going to have to start charging a sustainable amount for a sustainable service. And those of us who have got used to (fairly) affordable broadband are going to catch it right in the shorts. Oops.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
(Umm, you forgot pr0n ;-) And that is why there's a lack of demand.
While copyright infringement may be the "killer app" for broadband, it's not the content industry that's killing broadband. It's the fact that the ISPs can't profit from these users.
From the ISP's point of view, transiting hundreds gigabytes of data per month per user costs money. Your $50/month broadband connection doesn't cover the ISP's transit costs if you keep the pipe saturated. Until the ISP can find a way to make you pay for the transit cost of the data, the ISP will not want you to keep your pipe full.
(Side note: I believe this to be a defence of USENET -- it may well be cheaper for an ISP to transit in 300GB per day once, and then all your multimedia downloaders can l33ch from your NNTP server, which is on your local network, than to l33ch from P2P users that may not be on your local network.)
The original business plan ("Gee, our market research shows we have users interested in online music and video!") was for the ISP to sell you streaming audio/video subscription services. As we all know, the content offered was, and is, laughably inadequate, copy-controlled, and more than often, both. (No, Mr. Eisner, I don't want a copy-crippled .WMV or .RM stream of whatever ABC deems "must-see TV" this season. I just want my fscking DiVXs of Futurama and Babylon 5!)
Since there's no money in giving customers what they want, that leaves the not-for-pay "killer apps", for which the ISP receive no revenue.
None of this changes the fact that Messrs. Rosen and Valenti would love to kill broadband outright. I merely dispute that they're the ones at fault in this particular instance.
The site's not responding for me (Slashdotted? big site for that), so I'm going by the summary, which *completely* misses the mark with broadband's failures. Broadband in the U.S. is failing for two reasons: the infrastructure is owned by companies who are neither competent to nor motivated to provide broadband, and population densities are such that updating antiquated infrastructure is expensive.
Consider the telcos, who are responsible for providing DSL. They want DSL dead, because it cuts into their massive-profit sales of T1s. They're also big, lumbering bureaucracies, which deal badly with change. I won't recount my own DSL horror stories, but there are plenty to be had at DSL Reports. Technically DSL is functional and capable, but the businesses behind it, and the support bureaucracies, are not.
Cable has different problems. First, there's the cable companies; in my area, and in others, cable Internet is simply not an option because the local providers don't offer it. There's also the problem of bandwidth sharing. It's true that DSL bandwidth is also shared, but it's shared at a central point, which is easily upgraded; with cable, mis-estimation of demand or usage can leave people drastically short on bandwidth. (DSLReports again for horror stories).
Finally, consider the population layout in the US, as compared to elsewhere. If you have population-dense cities, surrounded by low-density farmland, you can provide access to most of the population simply by providing short-range access in the cities. In the US, most of the demand is in the suburbs, which involve much longer distances and are, therefore, much harder to provide for. (This is especially true in my home state of Massachusetts, where economics are such that the demand and the money is all in the suburbs).
Cable companies don't want to merely be the last mile for unconstrained flat-rate video streams. They want to be in the pay-per-view business. Telcos don't want to be merely the last mile for third-party DSL providers. And content owners are terrified of systems that let anyone pass video around.
The game industry wants a general-purpose wire with low latency and high bandwidth, but doesn't have the clout to get cable and telco plants rebuilt to support it. Web advertisers play a lesser role than they did two years ago, and the pressure for high bandwidth ad delivery is down. So the pure-Internet mass market applications don't really need much beyond minimal DSL bandwidths.
And finally, if a new infrastructure is to be deployed, it should have the capacity for real HDTV, or it will be obsolete by 2006.
That's closer to the real problem than what Lessig says.
Establishes a direct connection from your wallet to our bank account!