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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.
"What's holding up broadband in the world?"
Mostly last mile issues. Here in Germany DSL is available in larger cities, but little towns like mine will never get a taste for broadband since DSL is pretty much the only option for now.
Lets see ..
.. that is unless some person finds usenet / IRC for software / MP3s / video / anime / P2P usage.
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
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. .
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
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
It doesn't help that AT&T gambled and lost hugely by jumping into cable broadband with both feet. As a result of that experience, most providers are probably wary of getting into the game, and most consumers probably think that broadband internet is slow and unreliable.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Unfortunately, your broadband providers seem to be restricting content related to statistics and geography. You may want to check into that.
I've been on waiting lists for DSL or cable service for about years now. First @HOME, then Earthlink, and now also Comcast Cable. I live in a relatively higher-income area and every neighbor I've spoken with says that he or she would be interested in this service too.
But it's useless. Despite repeated phone calls, Comcast and Earthlink still say service in my area is "a year or two out". This is pathetic, truly.
They say it's "too expensive" to branch out into new areas -- but surely it's less expensive then not reaching new customers! I wish there were a solution. Europe's way ahead in wireless technology, too.
I'm buying one of those new iMacs. They're amazing. But you know what? I'll still only have a 56k modem to use with it. Something's not right with that.
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
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.
Try getting it someplace where bandwidth is mad expensive! Say.. Iowa? In a city of 30,000, we had 1 broadband provider, ATT@Home.. Mediacom bought them out... We really don't have much for broadband considering my dialup is faster than MediaCom is in this area.
Can all fish swim?
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
In case of fire, do not use elevator. Use water!
That said, some telcos are making the investment, particularly in new neighborhoods.
Looks like it's already /.'ed, so I'll punt.
If what is described is the case, then why is AOLTW selling broadband? Why isn't TW's Road Runner shutting down instead of expanding?
The problem is that phone lines have never really been built to handle DSL and the phone companies don't want to spend a lot of money to upgrade (see Robert X. Cringley's comments). The cable companies have only so many houses hooked up, and satellite has too much lag and often requires a phone line anyway.
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.
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.
You could've hired me.
I predict that in the not-too-distant future, broadband Internet access will be considered a utility like power and water, and will be treated by most governments as such. Hell, I *already* find it indispensible; there's no way I could go back to using a dial-up connection now. There's nothing better than an always-on, FAST cable modem :)
:)
Man, I'm glad I'm Canadian
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.
Yes. Or do you think that the Internet was built by McDonald's?
Consumers have been the victims of this unfortunate series of events. I don't know when things will change - we are looking at three companies - Verizon, Qwest, SBC, carving up most of the markets in the country in the next few years, and it seems they will be content to simply milk money from the services they currently offer instead of innovating.
Yes, the is a hold up! I live about 40 miles WSW of Washington, DC in a largely rural county and growing bedroom community. Except for a small radius within the local town, there is no option for DSL or cable modem nor will the local phone or cable companies tells us when they will provide these services. My only option is to pay for ISDN--a setup charge of about $500 and a monthly fee of $240/month for unlimited use.
Even in Fairfax County, the nation's richest, broadband is not univerally available. A friend of mine lives within walking distance to the Metro and still can't get DSL or cable modem.
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
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.
I hate to boast, but a broadband over cable only costs $CDN 29.95 per month up here in Frezzeyerassoffland. Since our dollar continues its slide against the mighty greenback, that works out to about $US 19.25 per month.
When you combine that with the fact that I don't have to put up with strip searches when I fly off to Moosejaw, it just proves the point that Canada is the best country in the world for high speed internet users that like to keep their clothes on in public places.
that most of the average users don't care. They are happy with their dial up AOL and don't see a reason to pay another $20 a month for broadband.
Sadly, the average person usually has to know a tech savvy person and hear the beenfits firsthand before honestly considering getting cable or DSL service. Sure the commercials are flashy, but consumers quickly do the math ($40 + 5 modem rental = $45 x 12 = too much $) and skip over it. They are paying AOL and they like it, and most don't know that AOL will still work over the cable modem.
It's too bad, really. Demand would be there if it was $20 a month, but until they get more subscribers there is little incentive to roll out the backbones quickly.
It will be a slow crawl until that magic $20 price point is hit and things start snowballing. Don't believe me? Think back to these devices and their magic price points. When these things got cheap enough, Joe Average ponyed up the cash:
CDR drives - $200
DVD Players - $125
------
Today's Top Deals
It's because of those horrible people who give away things that most people wouldn't pay for in the first place that we can't have nice things. Those pirates who "share" the quality musical works of "artists" like N(insert random punctuation here)Sync, Britney Spears, and whatever celebrity or his brother/sister/child/neighbor/dentist/etc. feels the need to shout at the general public... Pirates who have the nerve to try to watch movies from other parts of the world, use alternate DVD player software, or copy still images or audio or video clips from a movie... Pirates who can't be bothered to buy a new copy of a movie or audio CD in the event that the original is lost or damaged, or every time the version of the movie or CD won't work right with a player... Now it's their fault we can't get decent broadband access. The solution is clear - we can't allow the pirates to get access to this "broadband." We must thoroughly regulate it to make sure that no improper files are transferred and no protected materials are recorded, or even remembered. Only then will we be safe from overdue market corrections, um, I mean evil, naughty pirates.
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?
www.avacal.com -- the home page of pete shaw
They have far to many and too strict regulations. If they would loosen up a bit we all could have broadband.
If I understand correctly, broadband service is now a "commodity" - a product sold with faily low mark-up over cost.
Given that offering broadband services requires fairly substantial infrastructure upgrades (costing a pretty penny), why would any provider in their right minds jump into the market now?
I was part of a hole-in-the-wall company that was looking at getting into the ISP market shortly after it stabilized as a commodity (back in the days of 33.6 modems). Our conclusions were that we'd make very little money from offering Internet service, and that we'd only make money at all if the service we offered was lousy. And that was with our upstream connection mostly paid for by other means.
Could it be that there is no conspiracy?
[Disclaimer: I am not intimately familiar with the economics of offering broadband. If you have more detailed information, by all means post it.]
Broadband is not available everywhere in the US. I've noticed many people post stating that they have several broadband options available to them. I don't doubt that's the case, as where I currently live I have both cable and DSL options available for me. Of course, I also live in a major metropolitan area.
However, let's take the case of my parents that live in a small town in the Shenandoah Valley. They've been asking about broadband options for their house for several years now. They own a Bed and Breakfast, and a dedicated high-speed Internet connection would definitely be a benefit for them. Every time they inquire at the local Cable provider, they're told that "We're still testing it in the big town up north." Whenever they go to any DSL provider, they're told "We haven't upgraded the hardware in the area for that. However, we can offer this 64k ISDN line at 3x the going DSL price, or a fractional T-1 at 10x the going DSL price."
I doubt it has much to do with hardware or anything like that. It has more to do with the following lines of thought...
So long as the major broadband providers can get away with pushing around the local carriers, nothing's going to change. Even when the major broadband providers are responsible for delivering the product direct to the consumer, there's not much difference. Verizon has long waiting lists to get DSL in their service area's (Oh, and they don't allow smaller local carriers to gain access to their DSL lines. They pay the minor fines and screw the competition until it dies and Tauzin-Dingle passes/goes into effect.) Cox Communication is the monopoly Cable Internet provider for Fairfax County, VA. Their Road Runner service is notorious for outtages, high latency, dropped packets, etc. Do they care very much? Not really. So long as customers are willing to pay them $50/m for crappy service, they will continue to provide it and stuff their wallets with their massive profits.
When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.
If the local Bells didn't have a monopoly on the last mile of copper and cable companies didn't have monopolies on the last mile of, er, twisted copper, all of LL's concerns would be dealt with.
But the simple matter is that the Bells were allowed to drive out 3rd party DSL, Congress regulated internet service on cable INTO bigger monopolies (at least local cable companies had to compete with DSL).
Of all the reasons I've heard for people not going with "broadband" (and little since my inital experience on a cable modem has truly been "broadband"), I have never, not once, heard anything about content. In fact, I've wanted to do things for people with dialup access that I couldn't do because downloading that nifty new 13.4 MB program was just too long to tie up the phone line.
Lessig is an interesting writer, but he really pushes his arguments into places they just don't work.
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.
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
These experiments in innovation [refering to Napster and MP3.com] are now over. They have been stopped by lawyers working for the recording industry. Every form of innovation that they disapproved of they sued. And every suit they brought, they won. Innovation outside the control of the "majors" has stopped.
This is a subtle clue as to why broadband isn't being bought. Broadband is all about my having the resources to run my own web pages or FTP site or MP3 stream. If I can't do that without the fear of the RIAA (gotta pay royalties!), FBI (think Linux is warez) or whoever patented hyperlinks (whatever happened to "non-obvious"?)breaking down my bedroom door, then I sure don't have any reason to invest in that big a connection.
Come on, broadband isn't about how much I can suck down at once, it's about being able to produce my own content.
Do you like Japanese imports?
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).
Sounds more like a cop-out to say, "Phone lines are not up to it..." and that doesn't explain the death of @Home
Not really. If you're more than 3 mi from the CO (or other box with DSL equipment in it) you're stuck. I'm 10 mi outside Boston, but 3.5 mi from the CO. Thus, the only option for me is cable modem, which is going through the whole @Home problems. Given that this area already has cable service, will the phone company upgrade their local service to offer DSL and offer competition? Doubt it.
Speaking of @Home, companies fail. It happens. The idea was pretty stupid to begin with.
I think Broadband hasn't caught on because it's the fact that the U.S. has too many toys right now to pay for. Something's got to be cut out.
1. Cable TV $40
2. Car Note $250
3. Car Insurance $100
4. Regular Phone $30
5. Cell Phone $45
6. Tivo $10
7. Cable Modem $40
That's $515 a month and it's missing the cost of 2 little of things:
1. FOOD
2. SHELTER
It's easy to say something like:
"Well, I could get AOL for 20 bucks less, I don't use the internet that much anyway." --Quote from my Mother.
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
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
Reading some posts from people in the states made me think of how cheap broadband in Canada is.
Here in Toronto, cable (300KB/s max downstream, ~45KB/s max upstream) is only $40.00cdn a month.
That comes out to $25usd a month (assuming 1.6 exchange rate).
Maybe us canadian's are more likely to switch because it's so cheap. As for americans, is there a reason why you guys are paying 2-3 times what we pay?
I would just like to say I am very happy with the broadband services provided in Canada. I am in Vancouver, where I can get Cable or (A)DSL. Both services have become very stable over the last year, and their availabilities are almost limitless. A very affordable $40CDN a month is pretty cheap for 400kps cable service that I get now.
The Cable companies Shaw and Rogers support internet basically everywhere you can get regular cable tv. It is fast, and they have scaled reasonaby to meet customer demand. I used to find rogers (when they were in vancouver) a little flaky, but that has all gone away now..
I think adoption of canadian broadband has been sucessful because:
a: Cheap
b: Reasonable to Excellent Quality
c: Availability
Keep up the good work guys!
Bye!
i've watched a few interviews with lawrence lessig (stanford law professor) and have come away with mixed feelings. on the one hand, sometimes he seems to 'get it' as far as what open source and free software are about (the former about the business model, the latter about the freedom). on the other hand he seems (at least to me) to misrepresent the importance of napster at any opportunity (but then again, that is the only topic i've seen an interviewer ask him a question about).
all in all he actually does good things, and i like the thought of someone like him teaching at the best law school in the country. maybe the next generation of IP lawyers will know which side of the fence to stand on.
but then again, with stanford tuition being what it is, and the MPAA/RIAA paying what they do, don't count on it, i guess.
-sam
burn the computers. go back to the abacus.
First, as an AT&T Cable Internet subscriber, I don't see a holdup. Okay, I'm a "have" and you're a "have-not" so that twists my view on this a little. But only a LITTLE.
I'd rather have DSL service here. I liked it better. It was more reliable and I like the company who provided the service better. But when I moved a mere 3 miles from where I was, DSL was no longer available to me. Thankfully, however, Cable internet (which wasn't available to be at the previous location) was available when I moved. (Side note: "The grass is always greener...until you've visited both sides and you can tell the difference first-hand." I like DSL.)
Okay, that said, it SEEMS like the problem is area availability unless I am misunderstanding the article. The article does seem to confuse the matter by discussing "many channels with nothing on them." So are they talking about broadband cable TV or broadband internet? Or maybe I'm stupid enough not to realize they are one in the same..?
Now as far as that goes, I can MAYBE so some reason for the slowdown of progress and availability being made, but I don't believe it yet. I see matters progressing as the various providers have mapped them out. I once followed cable internet deployment in my local area when I didn't have it and now I follow DSL deployment. So far, both have remained adherant to their schedules.
Where is the PROOF or any indication that it's copyright holder issues slowing down the installation of DSL/Cable or other broadband internet technologies? I have read nothing about that... maybe I'm a bad reader.
Simply put, I don't see the connection between the slow-growth of broadband internet technologies available to consumers and copyright holder interests. What's the connection? Where are the stops being put into place? How are they being put into place?
Perhaps I am biased through my involvement in the I/T industry, but I find figures such as the one quoting Koreans having 4X greater access to broadband than Americans simply appalling...if not completely unbelievable!!!
Not that I have anything against the Korean citizens or believe that they are any less entitled to fast internet access (as are we all...). I am simply in utter disbelief that a once war-ravaged, divided country whose population indulges primarily in farming is in such a position of dominance over the United States in this respective area. For all intents and purposes, any comparison in terms of technological and/or economical dynamics would be heavily weighed in the favor of the United States. And yet, the Korean government and industries have been able to provide this amazing level of availability of the Internet to it's citizenry.
IMHO, anyone whom can be presented this fact and not arrive at the simple conclusion that there are evil corporate powers at work hindering the acceptance of broadband within the U.S. is simply not trying to see the truth or being paid off by big corporate money!!!
-n2q
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. -- Benjamin Franklin
Broadband in many cases is both Cable TV and internet, as well as Voice over IP (telephone) and other services. Most of the time when people are talking about data and broadband, they mean internet service.
~ now you know
Same is true in the Columbus area. Heck, Time Warner is actually expanding their Road Runner service area by HUGE amounts. They have expanded roughly a full hour's driving distance north and west of my home (about 50 miles altogether). Around here, 50 miles in ANY direction puts you really far into the sticks.
On the other hand, DSL is dying around here. I don't know anyone actually using it; whereas everyone and his/her brother has a good RR connection and loves it. Granted, cable modems used to take heat for their perceived lack of service; but I can say that in over a year and a half I've only had an outage of about 6 hours (all at one time, for an unknown reason). That's pretty reliable service in my opinion, at least for a residential ISP.
Now, businesses around here all seem to have ISP service through Ameritech one way or another. A full or fractional T-1 seems to be the defacto standard, and whoever the provider is, it's going through Ma Bell. No way around that (yet).
I just can't see how broadband isn't taking off around here. If DSL is your only classification of what broadband is... then well, okay... I can see that being the case. It's just too gosh darn expensive and it's no faster than cable. Now, if only Time Warner could only put my phone service on cable, too....
Long, cute, or funny Sigs are just another form of over compensation, used by geeks, nerdz, etc.
I think Broadband companies may be waiting for the government to subsidize the cost of rolling out the infrastructure needed for service. The risk is too high for many of these companies right now especially, with people cutting back on spending across the board.
I Heart Sorting Networks
--
Power to the Peaceful
What's holding it up? Nothing, cheap-ass. Call up your phone or cable company and get it.
I'm happy that you and your brother both have broadband access. I'm also suspicious that the circle of people you speak with through the internet is rather small. If you'll step outside your front door for a little while, you'll quickly see that this is not the case for many Americans. (OK, maybe you'll have to go a little further than your front door. :) )
There are many reasons why people may not have broadband access, but the two prominant ones are cost and availability.
COST
Some people are forced to pay $50 per month for broadband, and they just can't afford that. It's a big jump compared to the $9 they are used to paying for dialup.
AVAILABILITY
I think this is the real big one. It's just plain not available everywhere. DSL has such extreme distance limits that many people living in suburbia are not close enough to a central office to take advantage of it. And the 128Kbps promised by iDSL (which works over longer distances) is not really what I'd refer to as high-speed. Plus, the huge monopolies possessed by companies like Verizon lead to very poor performance and customer service. I know quite a few people that have actually gone BACK to dialup in disgust because of problems with DSL and lack of customer service. I never thought I'd see that happen. I, like your brother, live in a small town. We have cable modem available. This is only because our cable company is small enough and progressive enough to be able to provide this service. Many people live in areas covered by such giants as Comcast. There has been no real incentive for these companies to hurry up their deployment because there is just no competition. If you look at where cable modem is most likely available, you'll find that it is in the same areas where DSL is available. The cable companies plan to compete with the telecomm companies first, then add other areas later. From a business standpoint, this makes sense, but it also leaves quite a few people without the broadband access they desire.
One final thought. Yes, I know that satellite is available to most people. However, be warned that satellite is nowhere near an optimal solution. The latency times caused by the amount of time it takes a signal to bounce off a satellite located outside our atmosphere are significant enough to discourage many from using it as a viable internet connection.
GreyPoopon
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Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
...I know whats holing it up in New England, its spelled V-e-r-i-z-o-n...
Amoung other interested companies, why provide high speed service to the customer, and better infrastructure, when you can turn enormous profit and treat the customer like shit,because well where else they gonna go. Even Broadband modem is just plain stupid, they can go much faster, and this game playing with TOS contracts, and you can do this but not that is rediculous. Stop protecting the entrenched old guard, give us high speed connections(fiber, they can do it they just don't want to) to the home, let us buy IP6 Schemes(more than enough space there) to put on them, nd get out of the way. I should be able to get 100mps to the home, cram all the data I want down that pipe, and support everything I want to do(Telephone, Servers, Video, etc) off the one line or a 39.95 flat rate. If the local Telco won't do it the Cable-Co should, hell they are putting fiber on the Poles to support Digital cable, just tkae it to the next step. 'nuff said.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
The reason Canadians are so likely to have it is the price! I used to pay CDN$40 (ca. USD$25) for a 1mbs connection. It's so cheap here, if want the internet, you might as well have broadband! For people who have dial-up and a dedicated phone line: it's a no-brainer!
Right now, I'm with IStop.com. If you own your own modem, they offer a 1184/160kbs DSL connection for CDN$30 (ca. USD$19). To put it into perspective, that's less than the price I payed for dial-up when I lived in the US! This company also offers 3mbs/800kbs (CDN$99), and if you have a business line, 6/1mbs (CDN$195).
For myself, I have their 1.2mbs service + ethernet modem rental + static IP, all for ca. CDN$40. I can run any server I like - it's unrestricted access. The HTTP proxy is optional. If I exceed their 20GB monthly limit, I get charged $3/GB for excess (apparently this will be dropping in the future to $2/GB). THE PRICE IS RIGHT!
Maybe I misinterpreted. The Infrastructure providers are holding it up. The content providers have nothing to do with it. Possibly the article was referring to the infrastructure and content providers as the same. If so, my apologies
I Heart Sorting Networks
... I can support the fact that broadband here is very available and fairly cheap. And it's been this way for about 3 years at least.
:)
I've had a broadband connection with Rogers Cable since early 1998. Granted, my neighbourhood was one of the test zones, and I was one of the first people who got it in my area. At that time it was not available in the entire Greater Toronto Area. But for quite a while it's been available pretty much anywhere Rogers has TV cables installed. The service is pretty good, although I've had more than my share of problems, it's fast but most of all, it's cheap.
The other alternative in Toronto (and I guess the rest of Canada) is DSL. Bell Sympatico is the widest spread one, since they have the phone line monopoly. But they do lease the lines at decent prices, since there are at least 4 other companies offering DSL in my city. Again, a few years back DSL was not available everywhere, but now it is.
The funniest thing is that when I have on-going problems with my cable, I can threaten Rogers that I will move to DSL, and magically these problems get fixed. For example, I used to have a LanCity modem, which is very old and very sensitive to cable noise. I called them a couple of times, asking for a replacement from another manufacturer, but nothing happened. As soon as I mentioned Sympatico DSL, I had a Terayon modem installed by the next day.
I also mentioned the fact that broadband here is cheap. Well, on average it's about $60/month including the modem rental. That's Canadian funds, or about $40 USD. There are occasional promos, price wars, etc so you can get even better deals (sympatico had/has an offer for CAD$20/month for the first 6 months).
My point is that I enjoy my broadband connection.
DSL and cable TV Internet services are not worthy of the name "broadband". They are more aptly described as modem++.
Real broadband would be fast enough to bring in at least two stream of decent quality video (which I define as being at least 4:3 DVD quality and really ought to be 16:9 HDTV quality at full frame rates and resolutions - I'm talking rates on the order of 6 to 20+ megabits/second per stream.)
And a real "broadband" service, even if it has asymetrical bandwidth, ought to be at least capable of supporting things like servers for small businesses. The "mostly-in" paradigm of most of today's DSL and cable services just creates a caste system.
We really need fiber optics to every home and business. At a minimum cities ought to require that every time a trench is dug in a roadway or to a house, that an empty conduit be installed and connected. That way, over time, a conduit system would be created so that the conduit system would be there when we are ready to install the glass itself (after we've figured out the patching and packet routing mechanisms that need to go along with the actual fiber.)
I'm not sure that people are aware of the efforts of the Cable TV and telco industries to prevent the installation of municipial fiber optic utilities. There are efforts underway at the State level to enact laws to prevent cities from installing city-owned fiber optic cable plants because that would cut into the near-monopoly services of the phone and cable TV companies.
Also to blame are the stupid idiots who have no business using computers in the first place. Nimda, CodeRed, CodeRed II, Melissa, I_LOVE_YOU, Gone.scr and that one that sends out your My Documents files are a few other reasons.
Do we really want these people to have big connections?
Technology can be dangerous. Those with the ability to widely distribute broadband should be wary of putting it in the hands of irresponsible people. Perhaps there should be a clause in the service agreement that they protect their systems from trojans and such or else face losing their connection. Maybe there should even be a credit-report style tracking system in place to enable ISPs to know who is a menace and charge them more money for a connection.
At this point, i think that neither broadband nor end users are mature enough to cooperate. Slow connections for Joe Sixpack, fast connections for Joe Sysadmin.
Sorry about my vulgarity and intensity, but i just got the butt end of a DDoS attack. Someone did a big DDoS attack using my ip address as the spoofed source for all the packets. Not only did it flood my feeble 1.5 Mb/s connection with SYN/ACK packets, but it got my ISP really pissed off. They were getting all kinds of threats of legal action. There was nothing anyone could do.
Oh shit! I forgot to click "Post Anonymously"...
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!
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.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Someone already has. Qwest was founded to take advantage of this opportunity. The funny thing is that no one bothered to take note that the railroads only had the surface rights to the land- which means that all those lines are running through land that Qwest doesn't own. Now there's a liability that I bet they don't put on their balance sheet... I wonder if buying US West with their over-inflated stock gave them the assets needed to survive such a fiasco.
It's telcos, stupid!
All the Qwest and Verizons are neither skilled nor motivated enough to change the situation.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Before the investment bubble burst last year, an unbelievable amount of fiber optic telco cable was laid, and IIRC, a lot of these lines have not even been activated, and won't be. Company after company has gone bankrupt trying to provide broadband and make money, even though most of us want the service.
Trouble is the damn RBOCs have managed to not only keep their local service monopolies pretty much intact but to strangle the up-and-comers at the connection point --- which was supposed to have been opened up by the 1996 telecommunications reform bill. Some legislators at the time grumbled that they had been sold a lie by the big telcos about the reforms, and promised to revisit the issue in the very next Congress... So here we are five years later... these same politicians continue to feed on the lobbyist cash cow, the RBOCS continue to rake in the profits on their existing poor service, and we wonder why nothing changes?
While some of Mr. Lessig's points strike true, in my view more of the problem has to do with big money corrupting the U.S. political process than any stranglehold on content because many of us would provide the content if we could get fairly priced access through-out the whole telco system.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Also, the signal may start breaking up after 3.5km, but maybe the technology can give you DSL at reduced speads (but better than iDSL) at slightly greater distances.
GreyPoopon
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Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
All these ideas about cheap broadband for the entire country are great. I love them. Heck, I'd *love* to have inexpensive ($30/mo) broadband where I live (rural WI)...but I don't see it happening soon, unless a lot of unavailable tax dollars are thrown at it.
It's the same basic reason that broadband came to metro areas first: they can afford it and most of the neccesary infrastructure is already there. Now take an area like a town in the midwest with a population of around 15,000. Even better, a town that used to have a thriving industry at some point (be it a steel or paper mill or whatever). What reason does a cable company (or phone company to get the people just outside of town) have to offer broadband? The meager monthly charges coupled with the lower population density just cannot justify the huge costs of implementation.
Well, maybe it *could* justify the cost, if utility companies were willing to look 5 or 10 years ahead. Over that stretch of time, the costs could be recovered, but that's a *very* long term investment, especially with the bad case of the flu dealt to the US economy of late.
Again, I'd love to have cheap broadband everywhere, but let's get serious. It ain't gonna happen by some altruistic whim. Somebody in DC is going to have to get it into thier head that this is a Good Thing and push to see it happen. But then again, the FCC has been trying to get HDTV adopted as well for 5 years now, and it'll be surprising if we make *that* deadline 5 years from now.
I keep trying to pick fights, but I can't shake this Excellent karma.
I suggest it's something other than the Internet that prompts Frezzeyerassofflandians to keep their clothes on in public places.
Infuriate left and right
What we need is a good civil war to destroy all that infrastructure. Then we could start over with fibre all the way around. But what can we do to piss the south off this time? Maybe ban high school football?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Economies of scale & all that (you know the only Oz state that has had problems like California is Vicoria which just happens to be the only Oz state to have privatised it govt Electricity utility
Really you can't beat govt Telco monopolies - look at Nokia & Singapore Telecom.
I am an about-to-graduate college student at Appalachian State, a universty of meager endowment and funds (due to the NC state budget crunch). I and millions like me are absolutely spoiled rotten by the 100 Mbps campus networks hooked up to gargantuan pipes, not to mention the cheap 802.11b access that floats around in many college towns for those who want to live in apartments. We exist on our peer-to-peer apps and our gratutious bandwidth consumption - personnally, I'd rather stream the headlines from CNN or MSNBC with my PC than have to reach 3ft. for a remote control.
My point is that in the next 10 years, a huge hunk of the workforce will have attended schools with broadband. Broadband is like crack. If I ever have to dial pu with a 33.6 modem again like I did last summer I am gonna go nuts. That huge hunk of workforce is going to be a major part of the constituency of our democracy, and if broadband isn't cheap and available, we will demand it be so (just like cable TV, which operates under heavy price controls in many places).
I predict the Internet will become like the roads and sewers of the nation - it will become public infrastructure. See Chicago MAN project article.
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for $69 I can get a 384/384 synchronous ADSL, and it gets installed in less than ten days...
384Kbps down/128Kbps up was the best Verizon, known as GTE back then, (with Flashcom as ISP) could give me, and I was less than a mile from the CO.
Now I have Adelphia PowerLink, and 384Kbps down is just about the worst it gets. Usually I get T1 speeds down. Yeah, bandwidth is capped at 128Kbps upstream, but c'est la vie. I got the same with DSL. They're trying to prevent people from running servers, that's all. I'm cool with that...I have a hosting provider for that. Let them deal with the minutiae of running a web server.
Before cable, I had two phone lines, one for voice, the other for fax/data/DSL. When my cable modem stabilized, I was able to shut down my second phone line. Cable modem costs $43/mo. That's about how much my second phone line costs. When Adelphia switches us from the proprietary setup we're on and onto DOCSIS, I'll buy my own modem and save $10/mo on renting this POS Terayon TeraPro. And hey, for the past three months I've been getting my cable modem service for $20/mo.
The only thing I should warn y'all about...don't get rid of your backup dialup ISP. And make sure your network is behind a firewall box...I have a SMC Barricade that has been working beautifully and has a serial port for a failover v90 modem. The only reason the cable companies don't like these boxen is that the clueless have been known to plug them in backwards, letting a rogue DHCP server loose on their network. Remember which port is the WAN port and which ports are the LAN ports and everyone will be happy.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I gave up submitting this broadband-related stories to Slashdot along the lines of Lessig's article when I realized that the prevailing ideological hegemony against government regulation was causing people to become blinkered.
We have all this dark fibre running between cities. We have all these consumers. We have intransigent telco ILECs and monopoly coax cable companies blocking consumer access to the dark fibre.
One way around this would be for regulatory agencies to step in, ala great public works projects of the past such as the Hoover Dam or universal dialtone access, and seize control of the last mile to mandate real broadband, fibre, connections between consumers. If this means appropriating incumbent's assets, then so be it. They have proved themselves to be a liability and are now impeding economic and social progress.
If the current state of lethargy is allowed to continue, then within a generation the global centres of broadband usage and economic development will not be within the US. They'll be in Canada, Singapore, Holland, Sweden, Korea, and so on.
Da Blog
Why does everyone expect to receive a T-1 in their home for less than $50/month? It costs MONEY to deliver bandwidth. It costs money to lay fiber and copper. The technicians earn a wage to install the fiber and copper. The wages they earn is what it is because they have to be trained and have to learn how to install telecommunications equipment. This is why local loop charges can end up in the thousands of dollars range. Port charges for a T-1 are about the same between providers. If a broadband provider pays $1500/month for a T-1 and then resells that for $50/month there has to be a limit somewhere or one person could hog the entire pipe and end up causing the provider to spend $1450/month to server one customer. $50 per month for a 768kbps pipe with 5GB of monthly transfer is more than fair. NONE of our current subscribers use even 1GB in a month and most of them are businesses with multiple computers. Sure, I could sell less bandwidth with unlimited transfer but people want a fat pipe. You sell the fat pipe with unlimited transfer and a couple people can monopolize the entire pipe. Clauses in contracts stating that people who abuse the bandwidth will be charged extra are futile. Get with an attorney and draw up a contract stating they get X amount of bandwidth for X amount of dollars per month. DSL and Cable aren't going to cut it either, you have to include wireless and I don't mean these community FREEnets. ISPs are in business to make money, not to convenience people. Until this is realized by more people broadband access will be limited to certain markets where a provider is guaranteed to make money.
...has tended to throttle the rapid development of broadband.
To wit, the last mile of wire to the house is owned by a heavily regulated monopoly.
Hence, said owners of last mile wire can do weasily things to anyone that wants to put boxes in the central office.
Hence, said owners of last mile wire, when attempting to offer service themselves, are subject to all kinds of litigous cries of unfair advantage, have they provided comparable service in high cost rural areas, etc.
The net result is higher costs and slower roll-outs of new technology.
It's a mess.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Man, that stinks...$110 for cable, with $55 going to cable modem? Jeez...really, really bad. We had to give up Encore, and Cinemax was going bye-bye anyway thanks to it being bumped up to digital, but between cable modem and digital tier cable TV we are only paying $80/mo. $43 of that, as I mentioned last post, is cable modem charges, so basically we're getting the rest for $37. Which is a price drop from what we paid monthly for analog cable plus Encore and Cinemax...$42/mo.
So I gave up a couple of movie channels. I got Sci-Fi, TechTV, Independent Film Channel, Sundance Channel, 8 different Discovery channels, BBC America and commercial free music channels in return. Actually I wish I had done this sooner.
And if I'm feeling flush, $20 more/mo gets me ALL the movie channels. Every single one.
You should complain to your Public Utilities Commission about how AT&T is gouging you. You shouldn't have to pay that. Eew.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
My Bell Canada basic phone service (a line, call display, and call answer/VM) is 41 a month. My cable modem service is 50. That ain't bad.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Since when Has Laurence Lessig or the Washington Post ever claimed to be communist sympathizers? Or even members of the communist party? What the hell is it with all this red baiting? Why don't you argue his points with articulate counterpoints instead of calling them names? As for the difficulties in laying fiber in Washington DC, I can't speak to that. It would have been nice if you provided a link to the issue instead of just taking a jab at the Mayor (who has little to no real power in DC).
...and precisely how much access to it did a McDonald's worker have to that Internet before it was taken out of gubmint hands?
It's just not that big a deal, in the grand scheme of things, to get broadband happening in the USA.
Canada recognised the value of communications about 5 minutes after Bell's patent, and has never put it "on the back burner". It is considered strategically critical; in the US the Interstate is the "strategically critial highway".
The Russians launched the first communications satellite, but it couldn't communicate, really; it just beeped to ham radios.Canada launched the world's first telecomm bird (Anik 1) in the early 60's, and telephone/TV has been over sat for nearly 40 years.
My home province (pop 1 million, area the size of Texas, and biggest city 220K) finished the fibre install 21 years ago. We'd been watching cable for 6 years at that point.
10 years ago, a company started up (in a town of 20K) and began providing wireless TV over microwaves; you could be 40 miles from the nearest hick town and pull in your share of channels; the same ones cable offered. They offer net access now, and it's hispeed. No wires, no infastructure except towers that the phone company built 20-40 years earlier.
None of this stuff is impossible in the US; but nobody in Congress has stood up and said "We will make comm a national priority, and do what we can to remove the red tape. The providers had better step up and do their part, or get left behind".
Does AOL want broadband? You bet they don't; and with 10 million US dialup subscribers, why would they?
Some people have mentioned population density re: Canada vs USA. Certainly it plays a role.
But low-density western Canada has much higher broadband penetration than the urban beltways of southern Ontairo (which pretty much look like any fairly urban area of America).
I've been all over America. When I was in Arkansas (pop 2.5million; Little Rock is the same size as the biggest city in my province, but the surrounding area was much denser) one of the biggest things I noticed was how dense the rural area was compared to home. The average rural resident here owns 8 sections (sq miles) of land, and they get access if they want it.
Obviously there is something else going on.
Maybe the hardwired providers have decided the "easy" customers are already online, and they're waiting for a wireless technology to finish the job. Or maybe they aren't interested but at the same time, want to protect their territory so they promise "soon, soon".
I don't really know; but I suspect it's just a little more complicated than the RIAA, as nasty as they are, conspiring to keep the content offline.
Well, it only has an airport when the lake is frozen over... the other three months, well, it just has a port ;)
Stupid decisions like paying 6 billion dollars for a portal company. 6 billion bucks would buy a helluva lot of decent systems engineers, phone techs, and backbone.
(Speaking of @home, if anyone is that clueless)
I can't buy the fact that piracy fears is what holds back broadband.
Among the plenty of other problems posted above, lack of real, non-pirate content is the problem. Up until Napster and the open piracy market there was no way for John User to get movies or music online.
Sure there was a few things, like real video - but it is still somewhat limited. If we all could get commercial paid video, or some sort of system - broadband would explode.
Only haxor elite such as myself have a use for broadband. I download linux iso's at least once a week [depending on if I used a CDRW or not]. How many newbies are going to use that?
But alas, the video content provided [legally] is growing. I love netbroadcaster.com, for example because I can watch full movies - only at the price of a few pop-ups.
Get rid of the bullshit, commercial type video clips and we'd be happy. Don't dangle the hook, give us the worm!
I'm a TW-RoadRunner customer and they are showing some promise on thier own. Although, here in Cincinnati the DSL service offers WB over the net... we are on the right track.
But where are cool things for people on the straight and narrow?
Well, here is one I've been watching all day. Full screen too, amazing... I can actually see the camera focus before I get the video!
Get your Unix fortune now!
Sigh, poor Lawrence Lessig. He is so blinkered by his obsession with legal issues related to content control that he sees every problem as a content control problem. I'm sure Lessig sees the U.S. Civil War, crop circles, and infant acne as content control issues too.
But once again, he is wrong. The difference between Canada, the U.S., and Korea has nada to do with content control, but everything to do with network structure. Canada and Korea have, until recently, had monolithic telecom marketplaces dominated by an oligopoly of mufti monopolists.
And say what you will about monopolies, but when it comes to pushing a standard into the marketplace, monopolies can do it better than anyone.
But will they innovate? No way. I'm betting that five years from now Canada and Korean will be relegated to the always-on slow lane at current speeds, while the U.S. will have caught up and passed both countries, with a competitive market offering variety of wireline and wireless solutions at myriad speeds.
Lessig is as adrift as ever. Silly academic.
Cable Companies are also in many cases "content creators"...(Well, distributors is more accurate). When you have a situation like AOL/Time Warner who in addition to owning online services also owns several hundred record and video companies - you see an obvious conflict of interest.
There is another conflict of interest that is not so obvious. That is that major media, and many major corporations also want to keep control over the total content that is available online. IE: Censorship of views contrary to their position. There is a great deal of port blocking, companies (DSL/Cable providers) from having static IP's - all in the hopes of preventing them from being able to host content. ISP's look at it as reducing utilization. Corporates look at it as keeping out public participation.
To the degree with which the news media is censored and self censored (fear of lawsuits, food disparagement laws ) is in the view of corporates a positive thing. Keeps information out of the public debate, out of public participation. They don't want to have to track down 1000 web site owners with their servers all over the world, and potentially in jurisdictions not covered by disparagement laws. Media companies also have an interest in keeping out competition, and the maintainance of the status quo is good for keeping advertising revenues(their real source of income) at a constant. They don't want societal upheaval, nor do they want anybody potentially tapping in to their revenue streams by siphoning away viewers (or even potentially advertising revenues).
The US is, afterall, the corporate megacenter of the world. If you seriously don't believe big business interest don't get higher billing than John Q Public... The last president to attempt to reign in corporate power in the US was Wilson.
What I expect to see: Further consolidation in the broadband market, restrictive controls placed on it where content providers are in charge of it, and an economic domino effect of pushing out smaller providers who don't follow the restrictions, provided by active disruption of their services where ISP's compete directly with major telco's but are still dependant on the major telco for any part of the process. This has been the trend. Don't expect government regulators to do anything but turn a blind eye to it either.
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
It's customer support dummy.
And I don't just mean people answering phones (though that is a problem too) It also has to do with actually getting the product to the household. I know way too many people who would be hungry to pick up broadband services - if it only reached out to their place. The next level of dissatisfied customers has to do with technical incompetence, technicians who are dispatched who know less than the customer, and telephone answering droids who know even less.
If we heard raving reviews from everyone who had it, and everyone could get it - we'd be wired to the gills. It would be like having telephone service where it's an emergency if you lose your connection.
- passion
More like "surprise!" your broadband provider goes out of business.
- 1640 Kbps Down
- 640 Kbps Up
- 5 E-mail addresses
- Two dynamic IP addresses
- A VERY cool TOS/AUP
Guess how much I pay? $35.99/month CAD. That is $22.30/month USD. For Shaw High-speed Internet (Cable), it comes with a higher speed and costs about $5 more ($40.99 CAD which is $25.40 USD).After seeing some people pay $49.99 ($79 CAD) for Cable Internet, and about 10 bucks less for dial-up, I am sure as hell not going to move to the Internet with Internet rates THAT high. Hell, you can get 56.6 Kbps Dial-up for $6.30 USD/m.
You Americans are getting ripped off or we're getting a pretty impressive deal.
I don't thi9nk you hit the nail on the head with your third point, though the first two were pretty good. Say you have your own website hosted on your symmetric cable modem service. It becomes popular (to make it interesting lets say you have a streaming mp3 broadcast) and you're constantly hitting your upload cap of say 1mbps. That 30,40,50 dollars you're being charged for a 1mbps link is ALOT less than the actual cost of a 1mbps link to the internet. You're basically paying for a high speed link to your CO which may or may not give you that fast of a connection to the rest of the world. If you are getting 1mbps to the rest of the world you're costing the cable company a pretty penny in transfer fees from whoever they've leased their trunk line to the internet from. Unless they charge you for that extra cost (like hosting and colocation companies do for transfer rates in excess of a monthly quota) they're going to lose money and it becomes impossible for them NOT to cap your upstreamd bandwidth to something reasonable.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Perhaps you will want to re-read Road Runner's Acceptable Use Policy. Nothing in there states that you can't use a router. Heck, I have a router and about 10 machines behind it. Time Warner doesn't care. Road Runner doesn't care. My neighbor's don't care.
Now, on the other hand, Time Warner does care if you're picking up extra IP addresses without the use of their DHCP server. That's a given. They also don't "support" routers. So if you call in for tech support, you had better know your own hardware well. In my case, I've got a Linux box (soon to be BSD, I think). The guys in support tiers 1 and 2 won't be able to help. The guys in tier 3, though, understand Linux quite well.
That said, I don't care if Time Warner "supports" my hardware. I only had to call them because of my outage and it started something like this: "Hi, my name is Ryan Clark. My phone number is XXX-XXXX. How can you help me? Well, it seems that I can't connect to the DHCP server in my area." Sometimes there's some info on their screens that states what the problem is, and that helps. In my case, I was the first one calling in--and so I had to go to tier 3 support. At no time, though, did any representative say that I was violating the terms of service by running a Linux router. In fact, the tier 3 guys seemed quite fine with it--like that's what they do at home themselves.
Long, cute, or funny Sigs are just another form of over compensation, used by geeks, nerdz, etc.
PacBell did the same thing to me in my old apartment. I had to wait a month just to get my self install kit, then I had to wait another month for them to answer my calls because the DSL signal wasn't turned on for my apartment. Then two more months for them to figure out they screwed up my phone line (it was lovely getting a 24kbps connection all the time where I had been getting 48kbps regardless of whether or not I used the high pass filter on the line) and two months after that for them to stop billing me for DSL service that never worked. Then PacBell accused me of stealing the self install kit because they didn't realize they had gotten it back and it had been signed for by the warehouse manager. And that was how I spent my summer vacation.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
... stupid.
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The content creators are to blame, because they have decided not to create a market? Yeah, that's the ticket: let's blame them for something they have not done.
The real reason broadband isn't taking off, is that people don't want to pay what it actually costs.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Every time there is some issue like this someone generally regarded as a pundit steps up to tell why said issue either is a problem or a boon to humanity. I remember two years ago economists at big and famous business schools were explaining why the economy was going to support continuous growth for the next decade and how we were entering a bull market boom period. Funny looking back on that now.
Same goes for broadband. I don't think it is content that is keeping people from getting broadband rolled out. Shit I got broadband just because it was impractical reading slashdot at -1 whenever Windows or Linux is mentioned in a story. The fact I can now download decent looking Star Wars trailers and keep my systems up to date is just an added bonus. For some people it's games. A number of kids playing Q3A or Counter-Strike don't know what the fuck a ping means but they know when their ping is below 30ms they can kick the shit out of the other kids with a 100ms or higher ping. Non-tech savvy AOL users also know that with a cable modem they don't get hung up on and they can download all the shareware they want without having to wait for it. Their kids know they can log onto (insert P2P file sharing client here) and get all the new singles from (insert popular bandname here). Everybody knows that porn downloads better with broadband than with a modem. Ergo content is not the problem.
It costs alot of money for a cable company to add digital services to users, same for phone companies adding DSL service. It costs the companies alot more to make service available than what they charge users monthly. This used to work well with dial-up access because connections weren't persistant and unless you were selling business accounts you didn't have to promise anybody any particular amount of service. However moving this business model to persistant connections that can easily max out your trunk line's bandwidth makes for out of business cable and DSL providers. Saying anybody needs more content just leads to even more problems. As you add content to an already taxed infrastructure means the infrastructure only gets MORE taxed as users are added. The nothing on argument is just ridiculous. I think poor Lawrence just sees everything as a content problem nowadays. Broadband is an expensive proposition because it requires an overhaul of equipment and a more efficient business model and the companies providing it can't or at least don't rely on their traditional revenue model of advertising. Phone companies made the money back on residential lines by charging more for business services. Now however more residences are getting DSL and cable companies haven't been able to interupt data services to add advertising so both providers are losing money. Content shmontent, broadband or a lack thereof is about the mula.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
That doesn't explain why I live in Union City California (where a large # of tech workers from San Fran, San Jose, and Palo Alto live yet a large part of the city has NO broadband options (cept 144/144 IDSL for $90 a month) This is Silicon valley I'm talking about... but all I can get is 24K dialup.
The hold up on broadband is because of incompitence in the market... Pac Bell told us we could get DSL, then on our install date moved our date to next month... then on our second install date we were told we were too far away. It took them 2 months to figure that out? And neither time did they bother to call us, we called them to check up. Funny thing was when we got the phone lines the tech told us we had fiber to the corner, I'm trying to figure out who is right.
Another friend tried to get ATT Broadband Cable, He was told his street was not wired... after checking with the neibors he found out the house 3 down had Cable, so he called and it turns out someone had forgot to tell the system when the nieborhood was upgraded. Then after his install it took 2 weeks of tech support calls to find out he had not been put in the network system only the billing system, this took 4 level 3 support techs a week to figure out.. and then that the server that finalizes installs had been moved and its adress had changed... that one my friends figured out on there own and told ATT. Everytime he got sent to level three they gave him a direct number to call back.. but that number had a message that it had been changed.
Companies not knowing what they have installed, level 3 techs who don't know there own phone # has been changed, and servers moved with no one being told... these are the problems with broadband today.
iRepairIT - iPhone, Mac, & PC Repair
Imagine a broadband company that provides not only the line and the modem, but also an integrated firewall/server appliance, which sits on your home network. This way you can easily access/edit your web pages etc, from any home machine.
Besides the wire and the hardware such a company could provide services like: name serving, remote backups etc.
However, the first fan web site for a popular movie or TV show created by some teenager would attract a horde of lawyers sent by the "intellectual property" owners. When will these "content providers" realize that we don't want their content...
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Then, how do Canadians get broadband for so cheap?
Back in ancient times, there was ISDN (It Still Does Nothing). ISDN was deployed extensively in Europe, but there was a very slow rollout in the US. In the beginning, it was overpriced and offered speed that most people didn't need. Back in those days, people used terminal emulation, and 9600 bps was just fine. By the time anyone wanted 128K bps, ISDN was STILL overpriced, and dialup speed eventually hit 56K for a fraction of the cost & hassle.
Twenty years later, the telecom companies are only a little smarter. This time they know broadband has to be priced right to avoid "ISDN syndrome", but they will only commit the capital to deploy it where there is (1) a sizeable market, and (2) lack of competition. This leaves out huge sections of the country. As an added bonus, many of the prime customers live in areas with a low population density.
Here in the US, the government doesn't make the telecom companies do anything they don't want to do. That means broadband is only going to be delivered in the most lucrative markets. None of this has anything to do with copyright issues.
The concept isn't efficiency. That stick has beaten govmint's head enuf already, thanks.
The idea isn't to make it efficient. Enron was efficient, @Home was, Amazon was, and they took it betwwen the eyes.
Guvmint projects and funds created the telephone. Railroad. It created at the cost of (adjusted for inflation) trillions the road system that even today requires hundreds of billions yearly, at all guvmint levels, to maintain, and I don't see anyone paying monthly payments for using it.
Cost accounting, and efficiency, are entirely subjective. It depends on what you want to deem a cost.
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.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Go walk along a railroad track sometime, especially near bridges over rivers or the crossings with big highways. You'll often see multiple "Telco A - Don't dig here" "Telco B - Don't Dig Here" signs, which should give you some idea of how much redundancy you actually get by buying service from multiple companies...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
But a major problem is that Roosevelt's New Deal FCC quasi-nationalized the radio spectrum, giving broadcasting rights to big broadcasting businesses (most of the Roosevelt anti-trust activity was really trading around which big powers got market control, unlike their rhetoric about supporting the little guys) to prevent competition in return for regulation of content, and limiting most other spectrum use to business-speech-verboten applications such as "ham radio", which also wasn't allowed to use privacy protections and limited access to highly technically skilled people. By limiting the number of stations allowed to broadcast, there's an inherent push toward central powers buying them up. But also, by preventing widespread free-speech radio deployment except for the ubergeeks of the day, they prevented the use of radio as a common home telephony substitute, which slowed the development of radio systems as well as limiting telephony to capital-intensive wired systems which are often a bad economic choice for rural areas. There were exceptions - CB Radio was the AOL of the 70s, especially as truckers discovered that ham radio equipment could be used to give them kilowatt CB instead of the legal-maximum 5 watts - but most of them weren't generally usable.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
In most of the country, there are only a few DSL layer-2 providers (at most the telco, Covad, and the late lamented Northpoint, Rhythms, Jato, etc., and maybe a few upstarts), and often only the telco, but they'll provide PVCs from your house to any ISP that wants to buy a T3 line (or sometimes a T1 line) to deliver the PVCs to them, and those ISPs offer a range of services from simple IP packet forwarding to email to web hosting to shell accounts to whatever. Some DSL providers may do IP routing down at the DSLAM, or with a small amount of ATM-based regional concentration, though many of them use evil technologies like PPPoE or PPPoATM to retain lots of control over the packets they deliver to the ISPs. But for regulatory reasons, most telcos do pretend to offer service to multiple ISPs, and Covad and the other CLECs did it for business reasons.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The FCC limits dialup modem speeds to 56k even though we know the copper pair can deliver substantially more bandwidth than that. At a minimum we should all be using dial up DSL. But the FCC is a cash cow and they will not allow communications speeds higher than that unless they can sell a licence for the higher speeds.
FCC applies a tax to you through your phone company, cable, cellphone, television and emergency services. When the government mandates that cash leaves your pocket, that is a tax.
Insurance.
Communications.
Property Restrictions.
F@cking Cash Cow
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And how many people had computers with 1200 baud (or whatever) modems back then? And what would they have done with it? There was no www.
A lot. A mere 300 baud modem on a C-64 was a beautiful thing. As to the WWW, e-mail was and is the killer app of the Internet. I would have gotten on in the mid-eighties just to get Gibraltar, the progressive rock discussion list.
But I couldn't--only my friend at a government contractor could do so.
When I finally got an account at a University (and mind you, even my PhD dad at a Major American Corporation still couldn't get Internet e-mail) in the early Nineties, I would spend hours browsing gopher holes, the Web before the Web.
I'm sure lots of average citizens would have been interested in reading personal accounts of the war in Yugoslavia, unedited by the major government press agencies or American infotainment, but they couldn't. Because Al Gore and Newt Gingrich hadn't gotten around to Inventing it yet.
Plenty of McDonald's workers had computers, plenty had modems, but their tax money was too busy entertaining government contractors to actually give them something in return.
The reason you're stuck with low-speed Internet access is because your last mile is fiber, not copper.
Wow.
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs
That's probably just a typo, but how fitting :)
Online music is the best example of this potential. Five years ago the market saw online music as the next great Internet application. A dozen companies competed to find new and innovative ways to deliver and produce music using the technologies of the Internet. Napster was the most famous of these companies, but it was not the only or even the most important example. A company called MP3.COM, for example, had not only developed new ways to deliver content but had also enabled new artists to develop and distribute their content outside the control of the existing labels.
These experiments in innovation are now over. They have been stopped by lawyers working for the recording industry. Every form of innovation that they disapproved of they sued. And every suit they brought, they won. Innovation outside the control of the "majors" has stopped.
Whether or not these courts were right as a matter of substantive copyright law, what is important is the consequence of this regulation: innovation and growth in broadband have been stifled as courts have given control over the future to the creators of the past. The only architecture for distribution that these creators will allow is one that preserves their power within a highly concentrated market.
Surely the laws that govern publishing can be considered "regulation". They limit who can do what and how. These laws have now been abused, and the silence of our elected officials is all that is needed for these decisions to continue to have the force of law.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
True, but $18 a month (bare minimum) is enough for someone to say "no way." Again, it comes down to usage. Why pay $18 a month more if you're basically going to get the same usage out of it? That's like me saying "hey, I'm going to pay $18 more dollars a month to get premium cable channels I'm not going to watch." Just because $18 a month isn't that much in the grand scheme of things means I'm going to waste it on something I'm not going to use. For folks like me that saturate bandwidth its worth it and then some, I contend for most folks it just isn't.
Check out ZDNet News today. Dvorak (sp) has a good editorial about why broadband hasn't taken off. Some of the blame goes to pisspoor rollout from providers, but a fair chunk (in his opinion) can be blamed on the fact that for most folks dialup does what they need.
Ahh... good point about the $40. I should have said "save ~$20".