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.

Comments

Reasons for broadband slowdown

[satsuke]

Lets see ..

1. The Drought of VC money of late.
2. ILEC's / MSO cable operators not opening access lines easily
3. Cost - for smaller operators, the mantra of "stick new headends on either end of the fiber" is true, except those digipeaters are $$$$.
4. Incremental need, People are not making quantum shifts in usage, it grows over time .. that is unless some person finds usenet / IRC for software / MP3s / video / anime / P2P usage.
5. Virus threats are contained quickly anymore by most people, so the network crawling to a halt because of traffic is a temporal thing.

Here in Kansas city we actually have a company called everest-kc.com that has done a full overbuild of some of the cable infrastructure in the area. phone, Long distance, cable modem & television on a competing / seperate wire. Imagine that. .

Re:Reasons for broadband slowdown

[bricriu]

You know what the killer apps for broadband are? They're what are prohibited by my TOS.

I want to LAN my home, I want to use a VPN, I want to run an FTP server and a ShoutCast server and have a firewall and do my Morpheus thing and maybe a little httpd. But you know what? I'm not allowed.

A killer app is something that you're going to use. But broadband providers don't WANT us to use all our bandwidth. That's how they make their dough: promise 1500 kbps for each & every subscriber -- I'm talking cable here, folks -- and then damn you if you use it, because, surprise, there's not enough for us all.

If people found out how easy it is to run those apps named above, then maybe we WOULD have a quantum shift.

It blow my mind...

[RareHeintz]

It's just amazing to me that content control freaks can actually impede the progress of broadband network access in the U.S., yet people still oppose vigorous anti-trust enforcement (e.g., keeping the same people who collude to control content from colluding to control the pipes) and campaign finance reform (i.e., the outright purchase from legsliators of a desired regulatory environment).

BTW: I know the blurb above says that regulatory issues aren't the problem, but I don't buy it - not while content-control interests can buy something like the DMCA.

And of course, I can't get to the article at the post - likely because they can't get enough cheap, high-bandwidth connections. Who says irony is dead?

OK,
- B

Re:It blow my mind...

[ksheff]

$40 may be a lot of cash to some people, but they also need to examine the costs of dialup. In most areas a decent ISP is going to run about $20. If you don't want people griping that your phone is busy while you are on the internet, a 2nd phone line is needed. In my locality, this is about $12, but once all the taxes and other fees are tacked on, it runs about $20 or more. So we have about $40 for broadband and about the same for dialup. Other than being potentially less reliabile, if broadband costs the person about the same as dialup but is much faster, why wouldn't they choose it?

Personally, I don't care about entertainment content via the web. I just like not having to wait for sites with a lot of html and/or images per page (like slashdot). It makes downloading email and software nice too.

Wrong

[Kamel Jockey]

In the Western suburbs of Philadelphia (mainly Chester County), unless you live near the center of town, DSL is nonexistant. As for cable modems, Comcast has been saying they will be ready "Real Soon Now" for the past 3 years.

As for the DSL, I claim that its mainly cheapness on the part of Verizon as for the reason we cannot get it. Verizon is a Fortune 10 company, and as a result, we could have DSL tomorrow if they were willing to set it up here. What surprises me is that this is a fairly rich part of Penna., meaning that any DSL upgrade for the phone company here would result in an immediate ROI. But oh well

As for the cable modems though, that is a different story, prior to Comcast's buying out of the previous mom and pop cable company, there was no hope of getting cable modems here (the original company was saying 2006). It seems though, based on more and more of my friends in the county who are getting cable modems, that their availability is slowly spreading. As for me, I am near the bottom of the list for it. Not much to complain about, just sitting here waiting for Comcast to get going and deliver it... real soon now... hehehe

Datapoint: I have DSL in Allen, TX

[renehollan]

...and it is expensive and hard to get.

I pay around $80 a month for 768 kb/s downstream, 384 kb/s upstream to Internet America. $15 of that is for a dedicated pair they lease from SW Bell because, at 15.6 kft from the CO, ADSL is not guaranteed to work piggybacked on a POTS line.

But even at $65 a month, that's way too expensive for most people.

Now, it is true, that I can get SW Bell's offering for around $50/month, but it is PPPoE hell with lousy TOS (in my opinion) -- my neighbor suffers with this.

Airmail.net (Internet America) has no problem with me running an "smtp" server to sink my email (of course, they appreciate that I do not relay) or any other server as long as I do not have "excessive" upstream bandwidth. Other ISPs freak at the mere suggestion of doing something like that. On the PPPoE issue, "we looked at that and held our noses" was their unoffocial comment. SOLD!

In short, I am a satisfied customer.

Canada and the US

[puppetman]

I've been thinking about broadband (here in Canada - I'm Canadian). What most Americans don't know is that Canada's Confederation (in 1867) was based on the promise of a coast to coast railroad (that is, the Atlantic and Pacific coast).

In a country as large, unpopulated, and diverse (geographically, lingusitically, and culturally) that connection is very important. Recently, the Canadian government started rolling out a very fast fibre optic network that was put in the ground along the (surprise surprise) railroad.

Broadband is a tool to further our national identity.

In addition, thanks to near monopolies in telephone and cable, we have homogenous suppliers of DSL and Cable broadband. And, despite what most people think about monopolies, my DSL costs $25 US a month for 1.5 megabits, and my phone line costs $30 US a month for basic access and voice mail.

It almost seems that the extra competition in the US has ultimately led to the failure of broadband.

Re:It's Held Up?

[peteshaw]

I live less than 15 miles from AOL's Dulles VA headquarters. I am 1 mile from the telephone switch in the middle of town. I live in Northern Virginia, a hotbed of high-tech. I live less than 15 miles from Verisign, and 35 miles from Washington DC. I can't get a DSL line because in my new housing development Verizon saved a few bucks by "bundling" the phone lines on fiber. The cable provider has been promising high speed cable for three years with nothing yet. Because of the bundler I can get a limit 28K max connection, and the people on the phone company have told me repeatedly that 28K is all the bandwidth they are legally obligated to provide.

So, even though you and a friend have broadband, its not quite proof positive that universal access is here. Why do you think 802.11 NAN's are popping up all ovcer the place?

Actually, it's usually only another $8/month

[Da VinMan]

Because many, many people who use AOL also have a second phone line to support their AOL connection so the phone doesn't get tied up. At something like $15/month (YMMV) for the phone line too, you're actually talking about $23/month for AOL (correct?) + $15/month for the phone line = $38/month for just AOL. If broadband is $46 month for them, like it is for me, then that's just another $8/month.

Hell, that $8 will be more than made up for in the sheer number of other things I *don't* spend money on because I'm too busy online.

Lack of Choices

[medcalf]

Having been a cable modem customer, and now a DSL customer, I've had mixed experiences.

With cable, until the @Home debacle, I had 3 static IPs and ran my domain off the cable modem. I had decent performance, but the it was expensive, not as highly available as I would have liked, and I knew that I could lose access at any time for running a server.

Now I have DSL, albeit the consumer service. Soon, it will be set up with static IPs and my domain will be back up (grumble). It will be even more expensive, for probably less performance, but is supposed to be more reliable (certainly has been so far), and I won't have to worry about running the domain (plus I'll get another pair of static IPs).

Both cable and DSL share a common downfall, and it is the reason that most dial up customers I've talked to are slow to switch: no choice of ISPs. With a phone line, I can sign up for any ISP, and can leave for another if I don't like the service I'm getting. With DSL or cable modem, I get one ISP, and cannot switch providers and keep my connection otherwise. There is therefore no price or service incentive for the vendor to improve.

For me, I'd select no ISP. My wife would use AOL. My father-in-law would use his current local provider, and my Dad would be happy just to get broadband at all. The imposition of service has nothing to do with the architecture, and everything to do with decisions made by the broadband access providers. However, as a consumer, I am forced to pay for services I do not want and will never use.

Certainly, content should not be a problem: every web designer out there seems to assume that you are plugged into the server room judging by the amount of bloated Flash and Java pages out there.

-jeff

Population density

[Saeger]

Here's the obligatory post to note that a major reason broadband is slowed up in the US is due to population density. It's far easier to rollout and maintain a network in Canada or South Korea because they live packed together like sardines relative to the urban sprawl of the US.

--

I Trust Lessig and the WP About...

[istartedi]

I Trust Lessig and the WP About as far as I can throw them. Larry writing for the WP? That's like putting a red star on a red flag, if you catch my drift.

I live in NoVA. The reasons we don't have broadband are simple. We got analog cable before internet. Cox is struggling to upgrade all the analog stuff. Then of course DSL just sucks, but it sucks everywhere.

Wanna lay fiber in DC? The city slapped a moratorium on digging because they couldn't coordinate digs properly. Before, company A would lay fiber, then a week later company B would tear up the same street that was just patched. Residents and businesses said "enough is enough" and justifiable so. Now they have to coordinate through the city, but that takes time. DC has some infrastructure that dates back to the Civil War, and a government that is just beginning to recover from being run by a mayor who smoked crack. Literally.

If you want to look for reasons why broadband isn't making it in the US I'm sure there are plenty of them, but this business of suggesting that "content providers" are totally to blame, or even partially to blame seems like a stretch. This just smacks of political posturing and disinformation from the radical Leftist AIP movement, of which Lessig is a leader.

Preventing *new* killer app development

[billstewart]

I strongly agree with bricriu's comment. But I'd extend it beyond that - the TOS-don't-provide-any-services rules prevent development of other interesting services as well as preventing development/delivery of interesting content. Some applications get developed anyway, particularly at universities that have ethernet-wired dorms, such as Napster and its clones and followons. Some get developed even in the dialup world, like Cu-SeeMe and ICQ. Some of them have been around since the beginning - it's silly to go through the complication of uploading your vacation pictures or pictures of your kids or cats to an advertising-run web server offering 20 meg of free space when you've got 20 GIG of space on your disk drive. Sure, the commercial service may have better bandwidth and reliability, and may be a good place for a front page pointing to your home system, but most pictures you'd want to serve will work just fine in a low-throughput environment, because most people's home sites don't get heavy use. (Obvious exceptions are music-sharing, but the systems that have sufficiently scalable indexing can put up with slow uploads.)

What kinds of applications would people develop if it only took creativity and technical skill and wasn't forbidden by usage policies? Most interesting applications include at least some kind of server somewhere - even an ICQ or IM "client" is technically a server, because it's sitting there on your system waiting for people to connect to it, and it's often advertising its presence using some kind of presence server (the ICQ login stuff or Napster index servers or whatever.) Some successful applications were carefully planned by a small or large group of people, but many of them just happened - somebody tried it, and a few people liked it, and it caught on. And the more opportunity you have for people to develop things that probably won't catch on, the more chance that somebody will develop things that DO succeed. Maybe it'll be a "neighborhood watch" or "home traffic/weather cam" application, or maybe cheap cameras and better PC audio will allow the ICQ-phone to replace large chunks of the phone company (so duhh, either team with a gateway company like Net2Phone or a long-distance phone company to profit from professionalizing it), or maybe simply getting $40/month instead of $80/month from people working at home over VPNs is enough to be happy with, or maybe you can provide a $5/month IP relay service an 802.11 client software so that wireless users will become paying customers instead of service-stealing evil leeches. Or maybe it won't come from home developers, it'll come from game developers, like the integration of networking, Dancepads, and Quake into Combat Aerobics, or the World Wide Rave Network, burning its 15 minutes of fame before something else takes over. Whatever. More likely, it'll be something I haven't thought of, and much more likely, it'll be something the cable companies haven't thought of, because it's a decentralized decision-making process, not central planning.

But if you're a cable modem company desperately needing enough customers to sign on to pay for growing your infrastructure, decreasing the chances of potential customers finding the killer-for-them app that makes *them* want to buy service from you is really, Darwinianly stupid.

Cablecos do have things they're legitimately afraid of, though it was worse in the past than today. Upstream bandwidth is still limited, and people running popular amateur porn or warez websites on their cable modems could dog down performance for their neighborhoods (unlike commercial sites, which need better performance than the typical 128kbps upstream of current cable modem.) And that gives them a bad reputation for performance, and encourages the local phone company to run "Web Hog" ads taunting them. And Napster and Movie-ripoff-ster and other copyright-violation-promoting services directly hurt the business of their major business partners, so they need some way to discourage them. And the band on "email servers" is partly driven by fear of spammers, though it's largely driven by the sheer corporate greed assumption that if it's a mail server, it's either a business that you'd be willing to pay more money for or that you're taking away potential cablemodem customers instead of encourage more people to get cable. But blanket "can't serve anything because we don't want to monitor your content or upgrade our hardware to meter" policies are just stupid.

Moore's commentary on Sturgeon's law says that the 90% of stuff out there that's crap keeps doubling every 18 months, and typical Freshmeat experience says that lots of projects will die out before they reach usable stages. But that's ok, and if we're lucky many of them would be in the 90% and not the 10%, or that the ideas in the good ones will get recycled by somebody else.