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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?
...watch for the available content to become more and more dictated by the broadband providers. They had to sink a lot of money into building the networks (billions upon billions of dollar), and expect to recoup the cost somehow. One thing they can do is push their content (and thus the advertising space they sell) on you by limiting access to other sites via slowdowns or other disincentives. Imagine not being to access CBSNews.com or drudgereport.com, but having to get all online news from CNN.com if you're an AOL/Time-Warner company, of which CNN is a part.
This is essentially the argument that Lawrence Lessig makes in his latest book, but I suspect that if you see broadband growth progress slowing with falling profit margins and bigger expenditures to (slowly) expand the network, you'll begin to see this technique used a lot in the future.
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
I live outside Boston, MA where AT&T Cablevision and RCN compete for broadband and cable services. RCN, being #2, has been very competitive and they've provided me with great service.
Your town may not be able to have two cable wire systems running throughout, but there is an alternative: have your town own the wiring, and force your cable company to lease them on a yearly basis. This has worked for some MA communities.
Personally, I think one way to prevent problems like this from happening again would be to have DSL lines regulated by each state's Public Utility Commission, just like POTS and T1s are. With those lines being under their current regulations, getting disconnected suddenly will result in the ILEC landing in very hot water with the PUC. But when Northpoint decides to go belly-up and screw hundreds of thousands of people, they get away scott-free.
That's my $0.02, feel free to mod up or down as appropriate.
Here in Austria each Town has it's own private cable provider. They get their channels via sat and broadcast via cable only in their region. They choose if they wish to provide broadband to their customers.
Basically they have only a small network, a more or less fat uplink to our country's backbone. They do everything inhouse, with a small crew.
The logical consequence is that they kick the shit out of the big companies by making special agreements like
"We have #N Mbit to the backbone and #M customers, so the bandwidth for an individual is N/M Mbit. If the useres increase, we will upgrade our pipes. Fair use."
Sure it's a bit more expensive, but who gets 2Mbit down/512kup to his home for like 35$?
DSL services in my area would cost the same but would only provide me with 512d/64u/1GB traffic included...
So, I can't imagine that this works in a country where monopolism is more or less perfectly legal, but not in the states...
So, no small towns with small cable providers?
Sometimes they do, more frequently an oligarchy (small number of dominant players, like the "big 3" car makers in the USA). The phone company did not arise naturally, it was one of many competitors. It convinced the government that the many phone companies would never interconnect and the USA would be stuck with lawyers able to contact lawyers and doctors being able to contact doctors, but the lawyers not being able to call doctors. Oddly enough by the time it finally convinced the government to grant them a monopoly the existing phone companies were already interconnecting (after all lawyers frequently want to talk to doctors and the services that can do that makes more money...)
So in fact we had a government granted (aka unnatural) monopoly for about 100 years. Then AT&T was broken up and long distance was no longer a monopoly, however the RBOCs still were. They had all the hard to reproduce physical assets. There is some modest competition for local business service in very populated areas, but not much else...unless you count the woefully few cablecos who are providing local service.
So you have unnatural access to the wiring from one party...
Yeah, but it is widely asserted that the RBOCs provide the service cheaper because they don't charge themselves as much for access to the copper. It is widely asserted that their service is better because they control the line techs that check the problems, and keep their competitors at the end of the line. It is also widely asserted that in the greater DC area they strong arm their competitors into agreeing not to serve anyone more then 18k feet away.
To me that sounds a wee bit like:
At least if it is true.
I wish the big bells (and all the other DSL providers and ISPs) could get it through their heads that all I want is the connectivity, not all the extra services. Give me the wire and a static IP address, and no blocking of services. Give me the basics and throw out the fluff. I don't need them to provide DNS, mail, spam, news, a web portal, etc. I can provide or find all of that I want on my own. Offer me just that and for a reasonably low price, and I'll be happy. This would negate much of their costs, including tech support.
Edward Burr
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.
While some of you know and suffer from high-speed ISPs who cap your speed and limit your monthly downloads, you haven't heard the best one yet. What these ISP's, content providers, microsoft, and other software application people really want to do is to charge you per packet and per application for what you actually do. There is a consortium of companies, identified at www.ipdr.org, who are designing and developing the modifications to internet protocol, operational support systems, and billing mechanisms to facilitate this.
It might well be that communities of users like ourselves may want to do what it takes to build our own networks in our own communities and then expand further into a secondary nationwide network.
Cisco's new technology
9 21 8&mode=thread
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/01/03/203
http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/ts_122701.html
that provides 10MB/sec Ethernet over existing phone lines ought to make the entire broadband issue a done deal. What am I missing?
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
Had an op-ed a few days ago in the Post about this.
Best Slashdot Co
Checkout http://www.stillwater.org/extras/appa.htm
and http://stillwater.brightok.net
The former is a dated document, but the project is still ongoing. The fiber loops are complete and the city of Stillwater and it's tech partner, Chickasaw, are still rolling out fiber to each neighborhood, "one at a time." One of the sweeter things about it is that the Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier (SBC) is not a part of it and powerless to stop it. That's particularly interesting 'cause Stillwater's SBC office has such [phone] connectivity that Creative Lab's N. Am. Tech support is there.
DSL (and phone) service thru Chickasaw won't be in my 'hood for a while, but their wireless net is.
All this is really groovy to talk about, but the bottomline? The price is still too high.
The Bells are not finishing off the independent DSL providers. Some providers are going under because they are not making money!
If the problem is government sponsored monopolies, should we solve that by creating more government assisted businesses, or should we solve it by removing government sponsorship?
Sorry; I'm borderline libertarian. Does it show? ;)
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
I agree, get the GOVERNMENT out of BUSINESS. Let the "Invisible Hand" do the work.
The Government should NOT sponsor telcos to roll out new services, damn straight, and they shouldn'
t break up MICROSOFT either.
The government should maintain our armed forces, our interstate highways, conduct foreign policy and a few other things. Keep the governement OUT of business.
Any time in history where the government has interfered to artificially BOLSTER or BREAK UP a company, it's been ugly. AT&T doesn't even count because the Government was propping them up, then decided to break them up, then they re-consolidated and ended up stronger, but if the Government hadn't propped them up in the first place we'd have had $.05 long distance 15 years ago.
The problem with Government sticking their noses in private industry is that once they do, they cannot stop. Once they choose to support and industry, it becomes reliant on the Government to keep it afloat. If the government chooses to step in and break up a monopoly, it will have to police that sector forever, since it was MARKET CONDITIONS that allowed the monopoly to happen in the first place, and a forced breakup doesn't change that. It's like preventing Iceburgs by breaking them up with an icepick. As long as the weather/water conditions are there, there will be another iceburg forming to replace the one you broke up.
Get the Government OUT OF the public sector, period. Every $1 spent in the private sector returns $10 in a year to the economy, but every $1 spend in the government returns $.70. Taxes are a BAD investment. ANY company (the Government is simply a company, afterall) that has an UNLIMITED source of revenue (the Taxpayer) has NO incentive to become more efficient. The goverment is good, but the government doesn't need to be in everything we do. The government is NOT your MOMMY.
Armand28
"-LINUX was a good OS, before it became a religion."
I'm in Quebec and my cable provider is Videotron. The price hasn't moved since at least 2 years : $35 canadian (that's about $22 US). The service is great, unlimited download-upload; 16kB/s upload and I often reach 350kB/s sustained downloads.
Recently, the speeds were dropping and the pings going up. We called up videotron (we have 3 cable modems in the house) and they came in and replaced the whole wiring from the street, putting in a new solo cable for each modem and upping the signal, free of charge. The problem is fixed.
In Sweden, large apartment complexes can get 10 or 100Mbit ethernet (if upwards of 80% of the people want it) for $20US per month. Government subventions.
Why is the US in such a weird situation? I mean, lots of people want the product, the law of demand/offer states that the prices should go DOWN not up!
Imperium et libertas
Autocracy and freedom
What do you mean exactly?
Here in Australia, we have a large company named Telstra. The Government spun off Telstra as a private company a few yeara ago and plans to completely sell off its remaining 51% in the near future.
The question is - why didn't the Government swallow the national infrastructure of bandwidth through cables, phone copper lines, exchanges, the whole lot -- and just sell off the operational company? Such an arrangement would mean that the government could restrict the possibility of monopolistic or oligopolistic behaviour should it ever emerge, while leaving the market to decide how it was going to self-assemble when competitors were introduced?
Those companies could then fund the collective growth and maintenance of the underlying infrastructure through public works. Bandwidth supply and demand would truly then be controlled by the market and the general affluence of the population.
Trucking and other transport companies work this way by paying taxes to the Government that maintains roads. Nobody minds that. What's so bad about transport as an industry model, that corporations need to own their own permanent copper cabling?
I am not an economist, I warn you. ;)
"If you create user accounts, by default, they will have an account type of Administrator with no password." KB Q293834
As an interesting sidenote, Covad's stock price is back up to $2.75, from $0.34 earlier this year. They fell off the Nasdaq many months ago, they are on Nasdaq's Bulletin Board exchange. Most nasdaq quote services can still resove them (COVD).
They are not down for the count yet.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
In case anybody missed it, the folks you're complaining about are in the financial waste bucket. Their stocks on the tank, they're bloated with long term debt, and they have miles of dark fiber sitting useless in the ground. It'll take 2-3 years for them to get healthy again, at which time they'll start fighting for market share again.
Why? You can argue about the details, but the bottom line is that they spent a bunch of money hoping for a 2-3 year return (which is required by US investors), and it didn't quite work that way.
So, sit back for 2-3 years and enjoy what options you have.
I suspect a major issue is that bandwidth is not as cheap as people think/desire it to be. Look at all the places that advertised 'unlimited' usage, then went back and added usage caps -- look at the price to actually have 'unlimited' usage.
Up until this point 'unlimited' usage has worked because the statistical multiplexing of the traffic functioned to give the illusion of unlimited usage over the avaiable networks. As usage has increased and the need for consistancy of service, quality of service has increased, the illusion that the statistical multiplexing of the packet traffic in the network is failing.
Fast, good, cheap -- choose two.
If people want fast (broadband) and good (QoS, reliability of service, and not to be run into 50:1 broadband/last mile DSL concentrators feeding out into a single T1), it is not going to be cheap. What people have had so far is fast and cheap -- but no one noticed at first because having it at all was better than nothing.
You can get a T1 at home, I have three. Two upstream providers and one frame line for resale. Since T1s are "regulated" lines they have to provide them where you want them. You have to pay bell a healthy price, but you can get them to your house.
Also UUnet is/was offering a deal on a 1/2 T for one year. 635/mo depending on location (local loop charge). It is essntialy a full T1 that is regulated via the Frame Cloud. It is a good deal.
Check out the guys at bandwidth.com - No I have no finacial interest in this group. They seem to be on top of what is avaiable.
~Sean
having a totalitarian form of government does not necessarily mean a bad government
It may not lead to bad government, but it does lead to a bad economy. The problem is simply that centralized control is inefficient and subject to corruption.
Not that business is immune from corruption, but no business can survive in a truly free market unless it has customers who buy their products. That's the basic beauty of the system.
Actually, there is another ways to survive, and that is to obtain some government protection... They can be guaranteed customers through regulation (utilities and telecom monopolies are an example), they can obtain relief from competition (such as trade restrictions).
In the telecom sector, they're supposedly deregulating, but the FCC is so involved in making the process work smoothly and trying to direct the outcome that only an fool would call the current situation unregulated... I'm sure they're trying really hard, and their intentions are basically benevolent. But it's not immune to influence, either... since it's staffed largely by veterans from the industry, they inevitably think along the lines of the established companies, and they have friends who are still in the industry. Regulatory agencies always turn out this way... the only way to avoid it is to staff them with people who have no experience, and that wouldn't be much of an improvement, if any.
But the real problem with regulation is that it preserves the status quo. This can be okay in some areas where there's not much change. Electric utilities work fairly well, they've been providing the same product for a hundred years or so, and they do that well. On the flip side, they cost more than they should and they're a haven of hack jobs for the nephews of politicians. But they do provide the service, and the extra costs aren't as high as they might be in other industries.
But in a dynamic market, no government agency can foresee the outcome... indeed, most investors can't. Technological progress is in many ways a process of trial and error. Venture capitalists try a number of different business models, and most fail. Some succeed, and those become the roadmap for the future. A couple of years ago, they tried building a bunch of dot-coms, it seemed like that was going to be the way of the future. It wasn't, but the beauty of the system is that they've all closed down now. If the government had started building dot-coms in 1998, they'd still be running them fifty years later.
The Internet highlights this process more than any phenomenon I've seen in my lifetime... there is so much that is new, so many possibilities. Nobody, no matter how smart, can foresee exactly what the most efficient way to organize it will be.... should we have small ISP's or big ones? Should we have a lot of wireless or a lot of wires? The market sorts these things out... often in a way that pleases no individual person, but in a way that compromises among the various desires of many people.
If you believe strongly in the free market system, you will, sooner or later, have to contend with the issue of monopolies.
Wrong. Monopolies are created by economic friction, by impediments to competition. If the myth were true, then why isn't there a single company that runs all the dry-cleaning shops in the country? Why aren't all the convenience stores run by one huge ConvenienceCo? Why are there 20 brands of VCR's on the shelves instead of one?
The myth that captalism leads to monopoly is utter and complete nonsense, and dangerous indeed. In every case, monopoly power can be traced to some form of govenrment protection. And what makes the "monopoly myth" so dangerous is that it is used to pass more of the same regulations that caused the problem in the first place. The FCC is a shining example of this... they have forbidden competition in some areas because they don't think it will work. They are so involved in regulating the process of deregulation that they've made a mockery of the process, and we see the results... there's some fairly simple and extrememely useful technology that can't get to consumers.
Capitalism doesn't lead to monopoly, nor does it prevent it. What government protection led to Microsoft's monopoly of the desktop OS market? Or the office suite?
The only thing I can think of is the normal copyright protections, and also the laws preventing us from storming Redmond and killing them all :-) (I have some friends there I do hope we really wouldn't take out our ire that way)
Here in Ireland we have no consumer broadband. If I want to connect to the Internet I can:
- Dialup at up to 56k for $0.6 - $2 per hour + $15 per month line rental
- ISDN 64k for $0.6 - $2 per hour + $35 per month line rental
- ISDN 128K for $1.2 - $4 per hour + $35 per month line rental + $25 per month IP connection
- Leased Line (about $10k per annum for 128k)
It's so bad the incumbent monolpoly telco launched it's Hi-Speed Internet service about 2 years agoSo now we have Ireland Offline trying to act as the voice of reason our politically appointed department of Telecommunications Regulations should be, but neither have any real teeth. Just to top it all off, after NTL bought Cablelink (cableTV) the next government sale came up, Telecom Eireann which was floated to the public with guaranteed share availability to each member of the public, and everyone encouraged (banks throwing money at them) to buy at the government set price. So Eircom was launched (of course they had to rebrand it) and proceeded to lose most of the country some of their hard earned cash (but not the country's "vice prime minister" who was/is on the board who claimed at the first agm/lynching after the floatation that "he had no money to buy with" HAHAHA (insider trading cough cough) HAHA). So after a failed floatition that lost most of their customers potential loyalty (most people even had to deal with a share split as the mobile division was sold off, so they ended up with some vodafone shares) the company went through an incredilby public bidding war resulting in the purchase of the fixed line division by a private group which now has a £2billion+ loan to cover .... so they are going to launch a cheaper service for anything .... I think not ... they will unbundle the local loop now (only 1 year after the EU deadline) and risk losing some analogue call revenue ... NO
To anyone in this thread who has complained in any way about price, quality of service or availability of service I suggest you thank your lucky stars you aren't stuck with 56k (I'm actually extremely lucky that I availed of an offer a few years ago to get unlimited free off-peak net access for $25 per month from one of their competitors who no longer allow people to sign up AND who kicked of many users for over using the unlimited service!) and go search google for errorcom to see just how popular eircom are! I think GPRS will be my first "broadband" connection .... Go 2002!!!
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
In a free market system, monopolies NATURALLY result from good business practices.
No they don't - look at any number of industries: gasoline, groceries, pharmaceuticals, etc - in all of these sectors consumers benefit from healthy competition between several major players using good business practices, with room for many minor local businesses. Even in media you have a choice of radio, tv stations, isp's, movie studios. What the big difference is in 'technology' markets that makes them so suceptible to monopolization is the ability to obfuscate your techniques so that people can no longer distinguish "good business practices" from "unfair trade practices". If the Exxon corp. put some special secret ingredient in their gas so that once you used it you could never use a competitors product without major engine damage (or forced you to change to an Exxon gas tank that only works on Exxon pumps) it would clearly be a case of "unfair trade practices", yet the major technology businesses do this all the time, make heaps, and it's suddenly (according to employees, stockholders and their lawyers) "good business practice".
Have you ever delt with a telco? They're full of people who resort to tachnobabble at the drop of a hat to get out of work, knowing full well that they can never lose business to any competitor.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I have to admit, I feel the same way. When Northpoint went /dev/null our small biz went to modems...it was hellish. Working for a firm in the the web development biz, having no broadband is akin to having no electricty. We are back on DSL now with a provider that is too costly: ~$250/month for 384K. Today, I signed with a 'monopoly' for $140/month for sDSL @ 512K here in NYC. I'm praying they don't follow Enron's accounting practices. ;-)
;-)
I live just outside Manhattan in the 'burbs and pay $29.95/month for cable modem access. I think if they doubled that, I would still pay. It's very reliable and fast enough for my purposes. My local mom & pop dial-up ISP, with whom I've been for 5 years, is getting killed by the cable company. It's sad to see but I can't go back to a 56K dial up. I'm moving to Hew Hampshire in a few months....besides good schools for the kids, my top priority is finding a community with reliable broadband. Oh yeh, that house better have Cat5 or better strung throughtout the walls too.
Cheap fast internet is not a God given right to all the world.
No, perhaps not. Given that, it seems logical that it should be affordable at least. In the simple case where one has existing telephone service and wishes to get DSL(residential) from the same provider, the infrastructure is already in place. I.E., they already have the copper to the POS. They are effectively making money on top of something that they're already getting paid for! I understand there is a cost to supplying the bandwidth and switching hardware, but they *own* the bandwidth, and it goes unused otherwise. Correct me if I'm wrong... I don't think it's asking too much for 1.5M/384K D/U for ~$40-50/month. Tech costs trend down with time(given like equipment), and in May, 1999 I paid $39.99/mo for reliable 165KB/S down, static IP, always on DSL from Pac Bell. I moved shortly thereafter and have regretted losing that sweetheart of a deal ever since.
They're a little melty, but damn are they exquisite!
As a developer, I doubt if my internet use, mostly CVS commits and web-browsing sites that are mainly text, is any more than a fraction of that of the 'average' user, who's likely downloading megabytes of MP3's and porn.
Ive yet to hear what the ISP's have to say about all this wrangling, finagling, draggin their feet and hedging on why they have not been able to install, operate, or maintain their systems to a high level of standard.
As i recall in the early days of the 'net, AT&T reps came to visit one of the early DARPA nodes and to watch a demostration of the equipment and the network.. But unfortunately the router decided to take a holiday and crashed. The kicker of this story is when the router broke the reps seemed to be relieved that this was not going to be competion to their system.
This mentality seems to have carried over to today with the general attitude of the bells and the cable monopolies.
I want to hear it from the suits, the managers, the men in the back rooms, the straight story why this is and how we can work together to rectify or resolve the situation.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.