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?

Comments

Re:You /. people really like the word "monopoly"

[4of12]

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.

Re:You /. people really like the word "monopoly"

[bricriu]

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.

Municipal utility?

[truesaer]

After the chaos that Comcast has caused by switching from Mediaone's network (who they bought out, at least in this area) to theirs, my city (Ann Arbor Michigan) has begun to consider regulating them as if they were an essential utility like electric or phone. They seem to understand that this would be something that may never have been attempted before, and could be tough considering the FCC does regulation of them.

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.

They don't want us

[mbourgon]

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.

The economics of monopolies

[Mike@AP]

Some of these comments were very interesting, others were hype of the higest order.

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 /. 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.

Of course, that's my opinion. You may now set your flamethrowers to "high burn" and have at me.

Glasgow KY

[DontCallMeShirley]

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.

Re:All I want is the connection

[Genom]

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.

UK has plenty providers

[larien]

Here in the UK we have several providers of ADSL, quite happily competing. In fact, I get my ADSL connection from a comparitively small firm, Nildram. This is despite the incumbent telco monopoly of BT doing its best to screw it up and Oftel largely being a wet fish.

Availability is less than stellar, but it's getting better.

NB: UK users should check ADSLGuide for info on ADSL in the UK.

Re:All I want is the connection

[Sloppy]

I don't need them to provide DNS, mail, spam, news, a web portal, etc.

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.