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Broadband Obstacles
Strange Beer writes: "The Washington Post is running a story discussing many of the roadblocks and speedbumps that Telcoms and ISPs have encountered while trying to rollout broadband. Not surprisingly, most of the obstacles were built by them." The government approach is dysfunctional. Broadband prices are going up - 25% or more in the last six months. Simultaneously rollouts have stopped except in metropolitan areas, and the Bell monopolies are busy finishing off the last independent DSL providers. This is the "free market" in action (government-sponsored monopolies crushing independents), and therefore unquestionable in the US today, and it's also the reason why people aren't getting high-speed access. The only solution suggested in this article is to essentially browbeat citizens into overpaying for high-speed service that they don't want and probably isn't offered in their area, solely so that the MPAA can sell us movies on demand, if they ever decide to do so. What exactly is the thought process here?
I had to cancel my "unlimited" ADSL 1.5Mbit with iPrimus, in Melbourne, Australia, because I believe Telstra forces impossibly high data charges on the other carriers...
The effective price of the service jumped 400-800%, making it impossible for me, a programmer and web designer earning higher than average wage, to afford. Between Telstra and the Aust Govt, broadband is being prevented here.
you had me at #!
Having a monopoly is NOT illegal.
Quite so. And having a totalitarian form of government does not necessarily mean a bad government, either. Benevolent dictators are as possible an outcome as benevolent monopolists. But real world outcomes in either case are mostly different, and to the detriment either of the governed or of the marketplace.
If you believe strongly in the free market system, you will, sooner or later, have to contend with the issue of monopolies. And, I think most students of economics will tell you that markets dominated by a monopoly are imperfect, with all that such imperfection implies.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Unfortunately the government didn't keep their hands off of Enron...Enron's board of directors featured a number of quite large Republican supporters (where support==boatloads of money). Enron bought and paid for their government protection, and got it all the way til the end (and are still getting it today in the form of not going to jail for fraud).
If you think Verizon is providing good service, think again. I had to wait a month for them to put in a PHONE LINE. Not a DSL line, not ISDN, a simple phone line to an apartment in a well-populated part of New Jersey's 2nd biggest city.
And if you think it's low cost, sorry. With all options turned off, no long distance, the most basic of basic service, I was still paying $40 a month. Which is nuts.
Verizon sucks. No-one in NY/NJ will contend that. Their basic service makes people want to hit things, and their broadband TOS are unconcionable (as well as their 96 kBps upstream limit). And even if I were to go with Covad, I'd still have to deal with Verizon for the dual pair to my house... and they drag their feet to such an extent that they've been fined for it by the government... all to no effect.
So, to review: 100% monopoly on basic phone services + gov't deregulation in the 90's = high rates, shoddy service, illegal activity, and nowhere else to go.
AHHHHHHH! I'm burning with goodness again!
- Reakk, Sluggy Freelance
But, when the franchise for cable was given to Comcast, they had made all these promises that they would be a lot better than mediaone, provide better customer service, better actual service, etc, etc. Instead, it has been a disaster in terms of service, they've reduced the features you get with your service, and increased the price.
Frankly it would be nice for the city to be able to dictate certain reasonable conditions. And this would be negotiated when their contract expires in about a year. Here is an article.
Over here in Belgium, broadband is doing just fine. People generally pay $35 a month for a 10Mb cable-service with a 10GB monthly volume limit. ADSL users pay about the same, but they only get a 1Mbit line, which is technically dedicated to only them.
Before that, we had to pay about $1.50 an hour for the phone over 56K. I'd say we're pretty happy. Still, some lusers are still complaining about that 10gig limit though. But that's because all they do is share DivX files all day.
Dave
People keep forgetting that backbone bandwidth isn't cheap. Fiber is very expensive to run and all the high-end cisco gear is very expensive to buy/build/maintain. Right now, the cheapest I've seen bandwidth from a Tier-1 provider is $100/mb. So that is approx $77 for a 768kbps DSL customer. But no customer will pay $77 so DSL providers over commit the bandwidth to drop the price down. Then the DSL customers bitch that the service is too slow. This stuff is EXPENSIVE, thats why all the low rate DSL providers are dropping off like flies. It takes a HUGE investment and then HUGE numbers of customers to break even which requires HUGE money in advertising and HUGE money in additional network build out. The Internet is EXPENSIVE, not free no matter how many /.'ers whine about the price
>To date, roughly 80 percent of the country's homes have broadband service available to them -- via cable lines, satellite or souped-up telephone lines (known as digital subscriber lines, or DSL). Yet only about 10 percent, or 10 million homes, have signed up.
;P
I hate stats like this. 80% of homes have broadband access. So what? How many of the country's homes have a *computer*? Get that right, *then* tell me what % of those have broadband. Sheesh. I mean c'mon, there are still people that don't even own 1 computer, let alone 2 or more that need to be NAT'ed!
I would like to see the economy turn around just as much as the next person. Problem is, the PC market is saturated in North America. With no killer app(s) driving hardware and OS sales, the push for broadband appeals only to kernel geeks, warez kiddies, and pr0n lovers. Dial-up suits alot of peole fine. They get home and want to play with their kids, make love to the wife, watch a chop-socky movie, or have a nap. Most people dont even *like* computers <shock! gasp!> Personally, I would rather see a huge push for Linux in the Enterprise, (as in management discovers MS is expensive and a security liability) and an associated drive for linux admins and techies in the workplace. But that's me, I want a better job...
From what I can see, it's the UK and Europe that need broadband. The public there are asking for it, and it sounds like the market (yeah right, like the telcos are a market in any sense) could care less.
If there was a need for more broadband in NA, the public would pay for it. If $40/month isn't too much, you go for it, otherwise you stay on AOL. That's the other thing: for many people, AOL *is* the internet. I've actually dealt with a *lot* of people who tried out cable (Canadian cable is a helluva lot faster than its US counterpart btw) for FREE for a month, and then switched back to dial-up!!! wtf?
I (reluctantly) spent 2 months on dial-up after almost 3 straight years of fast-ass cable. Let me tell you, never again will I abuse myself like that again.
That's what? 2 buildings and a public outhouse?
Yes, it's a joke.
New Jersey statistics:
Area, 7,836 sq mi (20,295 sq km).
Pop. (1995 est.) 7,945,000;
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
To be honest, they don't want us using their service, but we're a necessary evil. We actually USE the product, and that's a problem, since it costs them money to provide it. They'd much rather have Joe Homeowner who pays $50 a month and uses it like a dialup account, going and visiting the provider's sites, etc, etc. (Think @Home's Excite pages). That's basically free money. No slowdowns due to overusage, no pesky NNTP servers needed, just a web site and a modicum of bandwidth. The geek community is a problem: we drive a lot of business their way, but we're also the most vocal about problems.
There's a lot more money to be made from the ignorant than from the informed.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
Some of these comments were very interesting, others were hype of the higest order.
/. users don't recognize -- the market leader is almost NEVER the best technology available. Market leading products are the best marketed, relatively easy to use, and nearly always appeal to the broadest segment of consumers, also known as the least common denominator.
Can a fair market include a monopoly? Absolutely. A monopoly simply means that a company has essentially an entire market segment to itself. That doesn't mean, however, that other companies can't try to compete in the same space. It's harder, to be sure, but in the end, consumers will vote with their dollars. If a product is better in the eyes of consumers, then it will eventually win against the established monopoly, as long as the monopoly is acting legally.
Now, has Microsoft, for example, used untoward means to maintain its monopoly? The courts have unequivocally said yes. However, bear in mind that, in general, it achieved it's OS monopoly fair and square. If Apple hadn't stumbled after Jobs left in the 80s, well, we might be bellyaching about the Beast from Cupertino instead of the Beast from Redmond.
My point is, monopolies are not bad, nor do they innately destabilize fair and free markets. It's when the company that has the monopoly takes illegal means to maintain it does the market suffer.
And one thing that, I think, most
Of course, that's my opinion. You may now set your flamethrowers to "high burn" and have at me.
Mike
Anyone heard of Glasgow KY? Probably not unless you happened to see a story about them years ago on one of those Dateline - 20/20 type shows. Glasgow is a small farming town, so you wouldn't think they would be on the forefront of technology. But back around 1995 (maybe even earlier) their local Utility company, that had already started up their own cable tv division because of complaints about the local cable company and already had fiber run throughout the town, made broadband internet access available to virtually the entire town. And what's more, they didn't look to profit from it, instead they offered it at "cost" because they saw the benefits to their town by everyone being able to afford access. I believe the rate was $22 a month back then, and is probably still pretty close to that even now. So i guess my point is, there is no excuse for it to not be available to everyone in every town at this point, if a small town like Glasgow has had broadband widely available for 6+ years.
Speakeasy. Sysadmin package. Around $100 a month for 1.5/384 ADSL, 3 static IPs, no filtering, and unlimited dialup (in case the DSL line goes down). They've done right by me, and until they go out of business, they're the way to go, IMHO. They've only been down for any signifigant period of time once in the 8 months we've had them (they were down for 12 hours due to a cable cut in/near DC) - all other downtime was planned, short, and during off-hours. They never had a problem with servers being run, never gave me a hassle about running an alternative OS, and have always had a response time of a couple hours by email, or a couple minutes(!!) by phone. The install itself took less than 2 weeks from my order to the IPs becoming active.
Contrast this with the shoddy service the local cable monopoly (AT&T) has given us - took them 3 months (!!) to even get a cable line to our apartment building, after which the connection suffered random, intermittant packet loss past the 2nd hop to anywhere. Spent over 2 hours on hold on the phone twice before getting to someone who would acknowledge that there was a problem that didn't lie with my network settings. (Let's not mention the fact that if you so much as breathe the word "Linux" they will hang up on you) They refised to send someone to the apartment to diagnose the problem - always claimed it was "maintenance in your area" (basically a copout to get you off the phone) - claimed that they would call me back, and never did. Gave me fake names and useless "Ticket numbers" that were, of course, never in the system. We cancelled our cable modem service with them once we got DSL, yet every month, they try to bill us for it, and every month I have to spend another hour on the phone arguing with them over whether the service was cancelled or not.
The problem also manifests itself in out digital cable as 1/2-1 second "blackouts", which again, they refuse to acknowledge.
If another cable company offered cable service on our area of MA, we would gladly ditch AT&T altogether. As it stands, in order to have cable, we have to go through them. The city won't even entertain the prospect of allowing another company to sell cable - they're that far in AT&T's pocket.
Telcos don't want to provide good service - they want to take your money, and provide you with as little service as possible.
Availability is less than stellar, but it's getting better.
NB: UK users should check ADSLGuide for info on ADSL in the UK.
I'm a small ISP offering DSL, and have to agree that most telco's pretty much suck. While the DSL service is our product, we have to rely on the telco's for the lines to be installed. Unfortunately the two telephone companies in our area (Verizon and Ameritech) drag their feet so much that the customers finally give up waiting and switch to another provider, usually the telco, who can magically get the line installed within a couple of days. Tell me how it's a good thing when "monopolies" are taking away our choices by forcing small business like mine to close up shop, especially when we can offer as good or better customer service.
The maximum range on that is 5000 feet. This is not far enough to fix the last mile problem. Regular DSL has at least 3 times the range (more if it's IDSL), and that still isn't enough in most cases. All the backbone lines go to the COs, which is why you need to be within ~15000 wire-feet of one if you want DSL. For ethernet-over-phoneline, there'd have to be a LOT more COs. Combine that with the cost of bandwidth, and you could probably get a T1 cheaper.
:(
Until they start installing fiber to every streetcorner, ethernet-over-phone is just as useful as IP-over-avian.
No I'd rather have the wife of a Senator on my board, so he can tack a major deregulation law onto another bill.
I agree with you on mail and web portal, but not on dns and news.
One of the problems facing the 'Net is congestion, and one the easiest solutions to this, is to have as much nearby caching as possible.
When you access the DNS roots yourself (I admit I'm guilty of this as well) instead of using a nearby caching resolver that your neighbors also use (e.g. the ISP's resolver), or when you access a news server 20 hops away, not only do you get degraded performance, but you're also causing a little more performance degradation for everyone else who uses the networks in between. Now, it's not a big deal that you're doing it, but when everybody does it, it all adds up. There was a story on Slashdot a few days ago about what happens at universities when thousands of people run filesharing/piracy apps that all use the outside link instead of having a cache inside the university's network.
I know there are always gotchas (e.g. your ISP's DNS resolver doesn't do the namespaces that you want, their news server doesn't carry the groups that you want), but those gotchas are what need to be addressed or partially worked-around, instead of just giving up. (e.g. run nntpcache and configure it to use your ISP for the groups they carry, and a further away news server for the groups that the ISP doesn't carry.) (And then share your nntpcache with your neighbors, please. :-)
Having certain services within just a couple of hops (BTW, I think caching web proxies should be included in this too) isn't just an ISP control-freak thing. It is also just good sense and the Right Thing to do.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
And if you think it's low cost, sorry. With all options turned off, no long distance, the most basic of basic service, I was still paying $40 a month. Which is nuts.
Taxes tend to add a lot to the cost of a phone bill. For example, down here near Philadelphia (on the PA side of the river), the phone book lists the going rate for an unlimited local calling phone line w/ touch tone for about $15 (or some other unbelievably low price). However, they don't mention the taxes, regulatory fees, bullshit fees, etc., etc. which really drive up that cost. My own real life story was when I had my own line in State College, PA. The base price of the line (unlimited local calling, etc.) was about $11 a month, but all the taxes and other government surcharges drove that up to about $18 a month.
But that was the middle of nowhere, I'm sure that where you are (in civilization) the base price of the phone line might be more (simply because people are willing to pay more, etc.), but you might want to look at the amount of money that taxes raise your bill.
New Jersey is a famously high-tax state. I wouldn't be surprised if they taxed the shit out of the phone bill.
In case of fire, do not use elevator. Use water!
- ILEC landline
- CLEC landline
- Several wireless providers
- Cable phone (I think)
I have the following broadband data choices:- ILEC ISDN/DSL/T1
- CLEC ISDN/DSL/T1
- Cable modem
- Satellite
- City fiber network
And I have the following video choices:True competition, range of services, and price of service are excellent, and seem to only be getting better. Your claims that the oppressive US government is colluding with megacorporations to exploit me is patently ludicrous. If you do actually have local problems, then fine, you have identified a golden business opportunity in your own back yard, and I suggest you get off your ass and start a CLEC instead of whining about how there's no competition. Remember that free markets are created by selling.
-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.
I'm proud to say that us British can claim to be shafted in so far as physically possible when it comes to broadband. Let's see... what do we get for our $60/month ADSL? We get 512k downstream and 256k upstream, a 50:1 contention ratio, a telco that really really doesn't have _any_ clue what's going on and periods where you really wish you were back on a modem, and thats _IF_ you're lucky to live in an area where your exchange has been activated.
(Yes, we do have cable modems but one of the large cable telco's [Cable & Wireless] managed to shaft all of our cable network, which means NTL can't even give us a timeline for when we'll have cable access)
I have a cousin living in Tanzania who get's wireless broadband at a megabit, for less than $30/month. That's got to be taking the piss abit.
I saw a guy earlier who was complaining that a T1 cost $600 a month. Do you have any idea how much a 64k leased line costs over here? You'd be lucky to get a 128k leased line for $600 a month from BT.
Don't complain. Whatever services you've got, be happy with. If you're like me and still sitting on a 56k modem because the cachement area for the local ADSL-enabled exchange stops 3 doors down [and your's isn't enabled], THEN you have something to complain with.
Sorry if i'm just ranting, but you've got to be happy with what you've got, you don't know how much better off you have it, compared to other places.
- Sadiq Jaffer
Toao.com
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