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

You /. people really like the word "monopoly"

[skrowl]

don't you?

In a free market system, monopolies NATURALLY result from good business practices. Having a monopoly is NOT illegal. What is illegal is using unfair trade practices to keep others out of the market, thereby extending or maintaining a monopoly. The bell DSL providers are doing better because they provide the service at a lower cost to them, with higher quality service.

I'd also like to point out that rr.com is doing pretty well for itself, despite being national. Why was it not mentioned?

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.

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

[Bert Peers]

What is illegal is using unfair trade practices to keep others out of the market,

Well, yeah, but the problem is that an unfair trade practice is rather broadly defined. For example, patents are considered fair to have by a small business to protect its R but they become unfair once the owner company gets too big. So when the DoJ goes to trial over monopolies, licensing patents at a much lower price to competitors is often part of the deal when settling out of court. Another example is bundling, eg selling someone a piece of hardware, and including the software and service/maintenance as part of the deal. Again, that's a good business practice to win customers, but when you get to big the argument is reversed, and suddenly you find yourself "unfairly blocking people who want to compete on just the software".

I don't have a monopoly myself, I learned this by reading these :) Father, Son and Co (IBM's Watson biography), Barbarians led by Bill Gates (Basically Marlin Eller's story but also describing Bill's surprise at the case).

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

[Savage-Rabbit]

In a free market system, monopolies NATURALLY result from good business practices

And in a free market system technological innovation, development and low prices NATURALLY result from competition. You seem to be arguing that the one offering the best services will eventually triumph over the competition and be the only one left on the market. This is sometimes true, but it does not mean that monopolies are always the best thing for a free market system. Once a monopoly is achieved it causes stagnation because of the absence of competition. Monopolies are very profitable and the monopolist is better off jacking up prices and keeping production costs low at the expense of quality.

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

[stripes]

In a free market system, monopolies NATURALLY result from good business practices.

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...

The bell DSL providers are doing better because they provide the service at a lower cost to them, with higher quality service.

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:

unfair trade practices

At least if it is true.

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

[stripes]

Perhaps you meant an oligopoly.

D'oh! Yes, I did.

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

[mpe]

In a free market system, monopolies NATURALLY result from good business practices.
Rather they can result from good business practices. They can just as easily result from a variety of other things including very bad (i.e. criminal) business practices.

The bell DSL providers are doing better because they provide the service at a lower cost to them, with higher quality service.

Is this because their busines is more efficent or because they have the advantage of inheriting a system created by a state sponsored monopoly?

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

[mpe]

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.

Even when you get a benevolent dictator one thing dictatorships are very poor at is producing good sucessor candidates. So if a benevolent dictator dies or steps down the result can be chaos (even civil war.)
Similarly if you have a monopoly be it Microsoft or a public utility replacing it with a non monopoly which actually works is not at all easy.

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

[ZoneGray]

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.

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

[stripes]

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.

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)

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

[LipoB]

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.

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

[ch-chuck]

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.

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

[Wansu]

Unless there is a HUGE Natural barrier to entry, there will be HUNDREDS of competitors jumping in once price gouging occurs.

There is a HUGE natural barrier to entry. It's the phone lines, COs and cable infrastructure. That's why we have gouging without the prospect of competition.

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

[Savage-Rabbit]

In principle you are right but a monopoly can still maintain it self for a long time. Take a look at Microsoft and how it maintains its monopoly by killing of competitive efforts at birth. It does this with Lawsuits, by restricting other companies ability to compete by constantly changing fileformats, blatantly sabotaging threatening efforts like Java for example and so on and so on...... It is by no means a forgone conclusion that a monopoly will fall quickly beacuse of Creative Destruction. A monopoly can still causa a long period of total innovative stagnagtion. What is really ironic about Microsoft is that what will eventually make a major contribution to bringing that monopoly down is highly likely LINUX which is not a commercial product but rather a Popular movement. Which makes LINUX the proverbial square peg in Schumpeter's round mold because in all the years of trying the entire computer industry did not achieve what a bunch of hackers, geeks and yahoos did in their spare time with LINUX.

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

[stripes]

I thought that the AT&T monopoly was due to enforcement of patent laws against its competitors; in other words, the federal government did not "grant" AT&T a monopoly in the sense that it granted the Post Office a monopoly, but rather, allowed the monopoly to evolve naturally based on existing US patent law, as interpreted by the courts and legal system of the day.

No, a number of firms asserted they had telephones that worked without Bell's patent. I think most or all were found to be in violation, but by that time the patent had run out and they merely payed money. There may have been some that licensed the patent, but I'm not sure since Bell not only wanted a lot of money, but also control. Many more just waited for the patent to expire before they got into the market. The telephone didn't take off overnight, it took quite some time!

The monopoly was granted after the patents ran out (and I think it was actually granted to both AT&T and GTE, but my memory is hazy). The monopoly really was a Post Office style monopoly, it was an order that no one else could build a public phone system. In exchange things like universal service were demanded, and low "consumer" rates. So AT&T had high long distance and business rates and low consumer ones (which mostly was "corrected" in the late 80s), we still have universal access though (I assume in part because the RBOCs are still pretty much monopolies).

Note the ban was on public phone systems, so you did get things like internal railway telephones, like the Southern Pacific Railway INternal Telephone network, which later became SPRINT...look at their network map, a lot of their major fiber runs are still along railways...of corse same with many other LD telcos since railways are some of the few long haul right of ways...but with SPRINT a lot of that is historic.

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

[Sj0]

Monopolies are rarely such a good thing as you paint them. I know it's hard to believe, but competition kicks ass. Really. I know it's nice to think that every company with a monopoly got it through being by far better than the competition, but that's not how the market works.In reality, even good companies which have a monopoly end up screwing the consumer by their plodding nature or by greed.

Lets put it this way; no company with a monopoly is ethical enough to be trusted with one.

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

[Sj0]

IBM was so powerful at the time, perhaps we should just call it an "act of god". :)

Billions of IBM dollars went into microsoft, so the analogy breaks down. Any free enterprise system breaks down when stupid people do stupid things (like IBM subsidizing microsoft for so long, or choosing Microsofts company in the first place).

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

[Sj0]

Or rather, Bills company, Microsofts OS...damn ranting :)

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

[rho]

What government protection led to Microsoft's monopoly of the desktop OS market? Or the office suite?

The size of the government itself.

The government is the biggest employer in the US. Almost all of those employees are using Windows machines. The US Gov't has the money to pay for all those OS licenses, too, so MS gets a fat wallet from the government's largesse. That fat wallet goes a long, long way towards keeping MS on the top of the mountain.

Although the Gov't used to be exclusively Wordperfect, since Wordperfect imploded some years ago, they all use Word now. There's another fat wallet for MS, and a guaranteed customer.

If you turn those millions of Federal employees into just 535 members of Congress, 9 judges and 1 president, MS gets it in the shorts. Why don't we try that solution, rather than hiring another couple thousand Federal employees to manhandle the Evil Forces of Redmond.

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

[ZoneGray]

> The only thing I can think of is the normal copyright protections

Yup, that's it, copyrights and patents are pretty much the answer, really. Which is not to say that those things are bad (though I'm increasingly wary of patents). But they are at the root of the situation. Normally, they're fairly benign, but the software industry is so interdependent that the one who gets a head start has a bigger advantage than in most businesses. This magnifies the effects of copyrights and patents.

Think about it... what is the strategy for any major software company? To gain control of API's and other interfaces, including the user interface... and sure enough, that's what Microsoft leveraged to squish Netscape. They're not any more mean or greedy than Netscape was, just better at the game, and they started with a lot more weapons.

In any event, Microsoft is one extreme example, and they're in an extremely complex market.
In other markets, you'll rarely find a monopoly that isn't expressly protected by some form government action. I'm sure one can find examples where it happens, but in general the notion that freedom leads to monopoly is dangerous and needs to be rebutted.

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

[Ogerman]

In a free market system, monopolies NATURALLY result from good business practices. Having a monopoly is NOT illegal. What is illegal is using unfair trade practices to keep others out of the market, thereby extending or maintaining a monopoly. The bell DSL providers are doing better because they provide the service at a lower cost to them, with higher quality service.

The capitalist system works best when there are as many competing firms as possible such that prices are driven down and firms must be innovative to differentiate a fairly common product or service from that offered by someone else. With phone and cable, you have a problem with sharing the same physical lines. This is perhaps why wireless broadband is so exciting, as long as the spectrum is intelligently managed.

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

[Sj0]

I think any corp which breaks the law should be demonized. Really, just because someone is doing something unethical is no excuse for an entire system based on it. Yeah, I'm a bit too idealistic, but when you get entities which don't have to play by the rules, what justification is there for you to? Perhaps I should start doing really evil things to get my thrills? All the evil people are doing it, it's all the rage in paris, why not?

There must be a point where you can draw a proverbial line in the sand, where you can say to corporations "This far. No further.". Otherwise, the market is nothing but anarchy with money.

I personally have no problem with an OS shootout, just pick the OS(or two) which you think is(or are) the best. Sometimes you can get a toolkit which lets you develop across platforms, and that makes it less of a lottery, but risk is, and always has been, a part of developing software for the PC.

Perhaps something like Linux is just what the industry needs. The OS is truly standard, it's documented well, and it isn't controlled by a company who will break it just to get some market share (think Windows and DR-Dos). People talk about how Linux isn't there yet, but I bet that with a ton of developers pushing mainstream software, it would take about 18 months to get there. :)

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

[MrResistor]

The problem is simply that centralized control is inefficient and subject to corruption.

Benevolent Dictatorship is absolutely the best, most efficient form of government possible, because all decisions are made by a single person who has the common good in mind and there's no beauracracy or red tape. Benevolent Dictatorship is immune to corruption, else it ceases to be benevolent. Benevolent Dictatorship is also totally imaginary and will never exist, but that doesn't make your assesment of the concept any less wrong.

Not that business is immune from corruption

Debatable. Some would argue that business is inherently corrupt, since its focus is on making money rather than promoting the common good. These concepts aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, but modern business theory is certainly pushing in that direction.

Others might say that the concept of corruption is totally inapplicable to business. Corruption implies that something is other than it should be. Business is about financial gain, and any step taken in that direction, no matter how deplorable, is not corrupt.

I'm on the fence, myself.

Government, OTOH, should be primarily concerned with the common good of the governed and thus the idea of corruption is much more applicable.

They can be guaranteed customers through regulation (utilities and telecom monopolies are an example)

Telecom and Utilities are not guaranteed customers through regulation, nor have they ever been. Regulation of these industries started in order to force the already existing monopolies to make service available to customers who would otherwise be unprofitable (Universal Access). Ma Bell obtained their telecom monopoly because they invented the telephone! They invented it, patented it, and provided it as a service to the rest of us, which is exactly how Intellectual Property and Capitalism are supposed to work.

Notice I said Capitalism and not Free Market. I'll touch on this again.

Anyway, telecom regulation was expanded because Ma Bell abused her monopoly and was subsequently broken up into a bunch of little monopolies. Again, this is as it should be. Someone has to maintain the phone lines and operate the switches, and I think we can all agree that telecom is better off not being run by the same folks who run the Post Office. So the local telecoms were allowed to retain ownership of and responsibility for all the infrastructure necessary for the phone system to work, and then commanded, through regulation, to allow other companies access to that infrastructure at a reasonable price.

What happened here is equivalent to creating an easement through Imminent Domain. The government coming along and taking your property is wrong, and that's exactly what would have happened if the local telecoms were not allowed to retain ownership. They can force you to let others pass through your property if it is in the interests of the greater good, but they have to compensate you for the value that you've lost, which is exactly what happened here. Despite popular opinion, telecom in the US is not a government sponsored monopoly, it is a government limited monopoly.

Utilities are a slightly different issue, they grew as local monopolies and have continued relatively unchanged. Regulation of utilities is mainly focused on public safety. The fact is, you can hook up a phase matched invertor to some solar panels and become a power company (at least in CA). There may be some requirements for amount of power produced before you can legally be considered a power company, I don't really know, but even if you're just considered a private individual the utility is required to pay you for any power you feed into the grid, though it may not be at the same rate a company would get. So, in CA anyway, the utility company is not a monopoly at all.

The myth that captalism leads to monopoly is utter and complete nonsense, and dangerous indeed.

The goal of the Capitalist is to achieve a monopoly, since that is the most profitable position to be in and Capitalism is about profit above all else. That's why it's called Capitalism. Capitalism must be regulated in order to preserve the Free Market. I think we can agree that competition benefits us much more than monopoly, but you're deluding yourself if you think that the ideals of Capitalism will preserve competition. If you honestly believe that, than you don't know the meaning of the word.

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?

Because no one company in any of these industries has been able to gain enough competetive edge to overwhelm their competition. It's that simple. That doesn't mean they aren't trying, just that they haven't succeeded.

One final note, I agree that regulation in the US is generally done poorly, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have any. Americans are practical people, and no institution gets created here without a need for it. Check out the history of anti-trust and wellfare if you don't believe me. There are very good reasons why these were created and, despite popular rhetoric, there are very good reasons why they continue to exist. They could certainly benefit from some reform, especially wellfare, but when it comes down to it they do more good than harm.

The General Purpose computer, in all it's current implementations, is buggy and unstable. Does that mean we should get rid of them all?

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

[stripes]

When did Microsoft ever have a monopoly on the desktop market. The public schools here, have always run Apple. I guess the answer to your question is, the same government protection that led to McDonalds' monopoly on fast-food, and Walmart's monopoly on cheap retail stores.

The legal definition differs from the mathmatical one. Mathmatically if the entire USA used Microsoft, except you then there would be no monopoly (well there is no mathmatical definition that I know of, but this seems like how it would work). Legally Apple having a 5% market share (with no sign of rapid advance), and "all others" having about 1% seems to be close enough to "all the beans".

So if 94% is enough, what is safe? Beats me, and that's one of the lame things about anti-trust law, it is hard to know when it applys to you, so you don't know exactly when you by law must stop doing all manner of things that just a moment ago you were required by your contract with your shareholders to do.... (the non-lame thing about anti-trust law is it has vastly reduced the number of monopolies and effectave monopolies).

I guess the answer to your question is, the same government protection that led to McDonalds' monopoly on fast-food

McDonalds doesn't have a 95% lead, there are not 20 McDonald's for evey one Burger King, plus both BK and Wendy's have a lot of stores, maybe less McD's all by itself, but "close enough". I can't eat at any of those places, but if I could I would have 3 or 4 to pick from, all roughly the same distance.

Walmart's monopoly on cheap retail stores.

Something makes me think they don't have 95% of that market either. It's harder to tell which retail stores are cheap just by glancing, so I don't really know though.

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

[budgenator]

I thought that the Roman's also had dictatorships, it was a six month term or such. Not to far from our (US) war powers act, and was used in times of extreme emergency. The natural limiting factor was that the term was limited and it worked well until the term limit was ignored.

Like the broadband thing, give a limited term advantage to get the basic infrastucture installed. I think it would be ideal for a municiplity to ram-rod fiber instaltion then lease back bandwith and hire contractors to actualy operate it. That way the city or township could insure that even low-density area have coverage available.

No it's not!

[Perrin-GoldenEyes]

This is the "free market" in action (government-sponsored monopolies crushing independents)

No...it is not. The idea of a "government-sponsored monopoly is anathema to the free market. The whole idea of a free market is that the government keeps its dirty hands OUT of the market. No sponsoring business. No squashing it with excessive tax burden. This doesn't seem to difficult to understand.

Re:No it's not!

[Chris Feddern]

That's why he put the phrase "free market" in quotation marks. Can you say, "sarcasm"?

Re:No it's not!

[mpe]

The idea of a "government-sponsored monopoly is anathema to the free market. The whole idea of a free market is that the government keeps its dirty hands OUT of the market

The idea of a "free market" dosn't work very well for providing utilities. Especially since the capital investment required is huge.
The only way any kind of "free market" appears to work here is through resellers. Where there can be some very big problems too.

No sponsoring business.

The results of government sponsership can last a very long time. Especially where these are abstract things, such as wayleaves.

Re:No it's not!

[Perrin-GoldenEyes]

Ingeresting...I didn't really agree with this, but it doesn't look much more like flamebait than any other post expressing an opinion. Well, maybe meta-mod will get it...

Thing is, Enron didn't really get that much government protection. What they really wanted was a government bailout like the airlines got. And isn't it interesting that Tom Daschle's wife is a major lobyist for an airline? Just a thought. Anyway, Enron was going for the same thing. They didn't get it (sucks not to have Dasch-hole's wife on your side, doesn't it).

I do agree that there should be some sort of investigation into the fraud issue. I think there probably will be, though. That remains to be seen.

Re:No it's not!

[Def Mango Raygun]

No I'd rather have the wife of a Senator on my board, so he can tack a major deregulation law onto another bill.

ADSL Price rises in Australia

[toby]

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.

Re:ADSL Price rises in Australia

[redcliffe]

Did you realise that Telstra is losing money on ADSL. I'm currently in the process of setting up an ISP now, and all the prices are huge for bandwidth. You can't blame Telstra for trying to make a profit. At the moment they're making a huge loss on bandwidth, and I wouldn't be supprised to see them be the next corporate collapse.

Once the broadband growth issues are ironed out...

[InterruptDescriptorT]

...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.

Competition works in MA

[wayn3]

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.

Re:Competition works in MA

[dickens]

Also in Northern Worcester county...

Our development is fed by some sort of multiplexer that prevents them from rolling out DSL here even though the rest of the town has it. For Christ's sake the CO switch is only 10 years old here ! So Verizon is screwing us up and have no plans to do anything about it. I must be lucky, I still manage to get 45Kbps download speed usually. My neighber has had to yank their chains hard to get even that. He ordered a third and fourth line to his house to get them to pull new wire to his house, and then cancelled the unwanted lines. Then he sweet-talked the tech into switching the lines around until he got one that worked at 45Kbps.

And AT&T Broadband spent millions installing a fiber plant in the town 18 months ago, but hasn't rolled out ANY new services. In November they sent a card to every address in the town announcing the availability of Digital cable, but it was in error, you can't order it. Then they changed there web site so that our address appears eligble for Broadband. But if you push the order button you get "server error". If you call them, they tell you that it was in error, and that they *know* for sure that the web site has already been fixed and you couldn't possibly be getting that response. Noone at the local cable office knows anything, and Customer Service (after the 40-minute wait) tells you that they can't imagine what happened.. the town was scheduled for "conversion" last October. AT&T has their head planted *way* up there in the dark stinky place.

In both cases, AT&T and Verizon have through their own acts, prevented me from getting Broadband.

Broadband

[Heem]

We as the 'power user' community, ie, the 3% that the companies talk about that actually USE the product that they sell to us, need to be heard on the issue. If a company could provide us with and IP address, and a relatively high speed pipe, for a fair price, we could keep the cost to them down by not needing any of the BS that they waste so much money on. I don't need someone to sell me 'video email, only with this company' blah blah, i can do video email with any company, AOL if i wanted to. Rediculous. Put a wire in my house with an IP address. I'll pay what it is worth. The only reason I'm upset about paying $50 for the cable service I have now is that they whine and cry about every little thing I do. I'd easily pay $100 for something that was under my control, I could have control over the dns, etc. 4 sets of numbers. That's all I want/need to ever hear from the provider.

Re:Broadband

[Lysander Luddite]

Isn't this what a business account is for? What is it that the company is whining and crying about? Are you running P2P or servers? If so, then get a business account and put your money where your mouth is.

Not a personal slam, just quit whining about paying consumer prices and wanting a business plan (as defined by the provider)

What free market?

[stripes]

This is the "free market" in action (government-sponsored monopolies crushing independents)

How can it be a free market operation when it includes government-sponsored monopolies? This is pretty much not a free market, it involves those government-sponsored monopolies controlling most of the resources, and government regulations that in theory force them to share. (And I'll note that is mostly in theory, not practice)

This isn't a failure of the free market any more then Microsoft attempting to port the GIMP to MacOS and failing would be a failure of the open software community.

Waiting Period

[nzhavok]

I think one of the largest problems is the waiting period. Realistically people just don't want to have to wait so long to get up and running with a broadband service.

My personal experience was with satellite broadband, I had to wait 4 weeks before the dish can be installed and then the installer couldn't configure the card properly in my PC.

The second problem I've encountered has been bandwidth caps. I'm back to a 56K now since the satellite company put a download cap of 500MB/month (yes MB). which meant I could blow through the monthly cap in about, oh, 40 minutes!

The end result from this is that people who have had experiences like me will recommend that others don't get broadband because it's not worth the hassle right now.

Re:Waiting Period

[budgenator]

you're lucky, I'm 24,599 ft. from the CO, I can get 128K x 128K sDSL for US$ 89.00 a month. Comcast said we would have cable modem's by the end of Dec. or Jan, but the trucks owned by the fiber installer's company are still driving around town, so my guess is more like june or july.

Re:Cable

[isa-kuruption]

In my particular area (New Jersey), I have Comcast. Currently we are paying $45/mo for just extended cable service (no premium channels like HBO...) [NOT DIGITAL] and another $55/mo for cable internet. That's $100/mo! And it's another $15/mo if we want digital cable. Utterly rediculous... and you say you pay $25/mo for both?! Granted, I get more bandwidth than you on the downstream, but my upstream is limited to 128kbps.

And no, I don't have a DSL option and never will (C.O. is too far away) so I'm stuck getting raped by Comcast's crappy service.

Actually

[Alien54]

To borrow a line from an NPR car show, this is an example of public and private policy "unencumbered by the thought process". Which is a fairly common practice, now that I think of it.

unless of course, you look at places like this, and see just how much money people are getting. Either way, long term planning suffers, and the situation acts like a monkey trap

Free market

[sql*kitten]

This is the "free market" in action (government-sponsored monopolies crushing independents), and therefore unquestionable in the US today

It's not a free market. A free market would mean that government-sponsored monopolies would have been stripped of their protected status, and had to compete on equal terms with wholly-private enterprises. The matter is somewhat complicated by the fact that a lot of the existing infrastructure was created and is controlled by the state monopolies. There's no straightforward way to transfer that to the private sector, and no straightforward way to replace it, because that would mean that every operator would have to lay their own cable infrastructure. That's just not economically viable.

I suspect that the majority of the bad press free market capitalism gets is because people bandy the term about without understanding it. This isn't a problem of the free market, it's a problem of the government. But somehow, the free market gets blamed and the government called to intervene - again. And it's odd that the GPL-loving slashbots would oppose free - not as in speech or as in beer, but freedom to enter into business relationships - just as important.

What good is free speech, Mr Andersen, if you can't act on your words?

And did you really mean "unquestionable"?

Re:Free market

[fajoli]

I can understand your frustration with goverment sponsored monopolies. However, without government sponsored monopolies, how would these companies coerce landowners to allow these wires to cross their property? As a landowner, I would have a problem with the wires being handed to a private entity without compensation from the private entity for traversing my property.

As painful as state monopolies are sometimes, I don't think there are viable alternatives. Negotiating with millions of landowners would be prohibitively expensive. Griping about how state monopolies don't support free-markets does not provide an alternative to this situation.

Re:Free market

[Boiling_point_]

to transfer that [existing infrastructure] to the private sector...every operator would have to lay their own cable infrastructure.

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. ;)

Re:Free market

[sql*kitten]

In situations where economies of scale apply, the first company to grow big can beat out any smaller company.

That isn't what happened here. In this case, no-one could compete with the state-sponsored monopoly, because if they did, the state would forcibly prevent it. Your tax dollars at work.

Re:Free market

[mpe]

A free market would mean that government-sponsored monopolies would have been stripped of their protected status, and had to compete on equal terms with wholly-private enterprises. The matter is somewhat complicated by the fact that a lot of the existing infrastructure was created and is controlled by the state monopolies. There's no straightforward way to transfer that to the private sector, and no straightforward way to replace it, because that would mean that every operator would have to lay their own cable infrastructure. That's just not economically viable.

Even if there was a straightforward way to transfer it. It took around a century to set it up in the first place.
Transfering public utilities into private ownership has been tried in several parts of the world, using various means (some of which look wonderful in theory but just don't work in practice).

Re:Free market

[sql*kitten]

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?

You are correct; but I am operating on the assumption that the government would not be operating any sort of monopoly in the sector.

In some cases, taxes maintain roads, and in some cases there is a toll.

Re:Free market

[Boiling_point_]

I think we're coverging. I suggest that infrastructure isn't a sector -- that it is removed from the market and becomes a common entity, like weather.

Taxes and tolls are the same trick played at different speeds... Big cable rollouts for example, could be levied or taxed separately as and when required :)

It is about "demand"

[garoush]

The problem with Broadband is with the lack of demand and the lack of "killer" application to create the "demand".

When I am browsing at home I am not doing so for "entertainment" purpose -- for that I have the TV, DVD, Cable, Music, etc. and above all, I have my family to chat with.

So don't expect me sitting by myself all alone next to the monitor downloading movies. However, expect me (and my family) browsing the net for information gathering occasional chats and email reading from friends that I don't see very often.

In this scenario, do I need a Broadband? No, my house has been doing just fine with a 56K modem for years now and we find it fast.

PS: If you ever see AOL add on TV, you will see they are selling you two key things: email and chat. Do I need a broadband for that?!

Re:It is about "demand"

[nanojath]

Precisely! I was all ready to buy broadband when I decided to finally upgrade to a "real" computer. Then I saw how my brother's 56K dial-up service did just fine, at a fraction of the cost. I strongly suspect a lot of people upgraded their access and their computers at the same time and fail to realize that the processor improvements have as much to do with how much better their internet is as the broadband does. Media Kings have made it clear that the price of content online is going to be THEIR digital rights management on your machines, THEM calling the shots about how you can use - even within the non-commercial bounds of your own home - THEIR bought and paid for Congressional sorties against the Constitution. Why the hell should I encourage that?

Meanwhile, they're suing Napster (not that they didn't deserve it) but can't get it together to offer any comprehensive on-line music service that isn't a flat-out lousy deal. I'm supposed to cough up 50 (or even thirty - 3X a dial-up fee, plus the special equipment, plus the high potential for service hassles) in faith I'll be able to download movies "someday?" When I could basically bet a million dollars that they'll charge more than the video store, even though they're incurring minimal overhead shipping bits over a line I'M paying for - for the, ahem, convenience. I'm fat enough as it is, I think I can hoist my lazy ass off the sofa and waddle around the video store for half an hour, thank you very much. Plus I can pick up some tacos on my way back.

To me the idea of the internet was to make information - mostly text and music, although video and interactive environments seemed a burgeoning possibility - more accessible by overcoming the economies of scale of material production. Instead the best idea these yahoos can come up with is to feed us the same damn content we already have available with rotten economics forced by the artificial scarcity of intellectual property - and a ton of baggage from their piracy paranoia to boot!

Saving 4 or 5 hundred bucks a year is not insignificant. It can mean a serious computer upgrade, a serious upgrade to teevee service (with them premium movie channels where the movies are actually, like, available), a video game console and several games. I fail to see what broadband has to offer me of comparable value right now.

Re:It is about "demand"

[haruharaharu]

If you ever see AOL add on TV, you will see they are selling you two key things: email and chat. Do I need a broadband for that?!

No, you don't need broadband speed for that. The thing that you will want is the always-on nature. I personally would be fine with a 256k line that had 30ms latency and always worked for $30-40/month

Seriously, if I ran a server that needed any kind of reliability, I'd build a 1U box and ship it off to a hosting facility.

Re:It is about "demand"

[garoush]

"I personally would be fine with a 256k line that had 30ms latency and always worked for $30-40/month"

You are missing the home-user-factor and you are coming into this discussion from an office-environment.

A home user does NOT keep their PC on all the time -- heck, once the PC boots, connecting via the modem is only another 20sec and it can be automated if you like.

Home vs. Office you need to keep their use and needs in mind and than ask yourself the Broadband question.

Five roviders in 12 months!

[peter303]

Qwest ISDN, Northpoint, Rythms, Excite, then AT&T.
Two backrupcies, one buyout, and employer's
directive about service to use. The startup costs
themselves would pay for three years of service.

Re:Five roviders in 12 months!

[Enigma2175]

You can add Comcast to that list, since they bought AT&T Broadband (assuming you are still a subscriber.

It's the Last Mile.

[Masem]

IMO, it's that last mile, from the CO to your home, that's the most critical in the broadband arena. Right now, the problem is that that last mile is owned by the same people that want to sell you services over it, and thus are going to do as much in their power in order to make sure only their service is used over their wire.

What needs to be done is to force these phone companies to divest themselves of the last mile ownership, and instead treat that as a utility, thus which may be handled by a city, or by a small company or the like. Because it's a utility, the only care they have is to hook one end to your house, and provide several outlets at the other end (phone, cable, broadband, etc); you then simply sign up for the services at that other end, paying the phone or cable or broadband company for that service. This way, the last mile utility cannot control what goes in that pipe, only that you pay to maintain it, and that suddenly phone companies will find themselves in competition again with other service providers. That would clear up the pseudo-monopoly that phone co's have right now, *and* may be incentive enough to get fat pipe to every household in American by some means, including urban and rural areas. This could also mean the development of wide-area wireless communication hubs that might serve a small, rural city, since effectively that's much easier to get the last mile than wiring it.

Again, the key here is that the only service that the last mile utility can be concerned with is to make sure that what goes in one side of the last mile wire comes out the other. They cannot provide a service lest they give up their right to control that pipe, otherwise we're right back to square one.

Re:It's the Last Mile.

[mpe]

What needs to be done is to force these phone companies to divest themselves of the last mile ownership, and instead treat that as a utility, thus which may be handled by a city, or by a small company or the like. Because it's a utility, the only care they have is to hook one end to your house, and provide several outlets at the other end (phone, cable, broadband, etc); you then simply sign up for the services at that other end, paying the phone or cable or broadband company for that service.

This is one of the ideas which sounds good, but is complex to get to work.
The utility company would also need to operate all the telecoms hardware too. Otherwise you'd end up with all sorts of issues of duplicating kit and contractual issues over who has access to which kit.

Re:It's the Last Mile.

[scoove]

are going to do as much in their power in order to make sure only their service is used over their wire.

Not only is this very true, but the same people are making sure their wire is the only way to get any service to your home or business.

We've seen numerous legislative efforts pop up to block tower construction projects and were surprised at the apparently sudden interest in "protecting property values," "saving children from evil RF rays" (as claimed by a Missouri congressional fool) and "preserving the environment."
What seemed odd was that while communication towers of any height were targeted, high power transmission lines were not. If RF "evil waves", property values and environmental issues were the focus, you'd expect transmission lines to be at the front of the list.

Then we started to see an interesting parallel: the same congressional sponsors were receiving outstanding support from incumbant local telephone companies. In one case, research briefs used by the congresscritter were prepared by a southwestern bell staffer.

The conclusion? Incumbant telephone companies were attempting to kill cellular and fixed wireless broadband competition, while pushing legislation in various states claiming that there was no way they could upgrade their ancient network without taxpayer money.

Once a monopoly, always a monopoly, apparently. The best we can do is watch these corrupt pols and work to throw them out (or at least expose them) when we discover they're using their position to redirect our tax money for the protection of these incumbants.

*scoove*

Re:It's the Last Mile.

[Artagel]

Yes, but if the problem can be reduced to an engineering problem, we are home free.

Re:It's the Last Mile.

[Salsaman]

That's what was supposed to happen in the UK.

When the government sold off the company years ago, BT were allowed to keep their monopoly in certain areas, provided that after a certain time period elapsed, they open up all of their exchanges to co-locs, and unbundle the local loop.

Unfortunately for the consumer, BT dragged their heels so much on the unbundling, that all the other companies pretty much lost interest, and at the same time, BT started aggresively(ish) rolling out their own ADSL service, while trying every trick in the book to stop other companies from doing the same thing.

Thus in the UK, the situation is that BT *still* has a monopoly, only now it is a monopoly on ADSL.

I was one of the lucky ones, as I lived in an area with pretty good cable coverage, so I used that instead.

Re:It's the Last Mile.

[scoove]

...treat that as a utility, thus which may be handled by a city, or by a small company or the like

I'd be very cautious about the "handled by a city" part - this is often done via a municipal arrangement which sounds well intentioned, but ends up really mucking things up.

In my parts, there are a few municipals that were chartered initially to provide a utility (usually electrical and/or water). Because of the way municipals are managed, the lack of accountability to the city (you typically can't elect/fire them, you can't affect their budget, etc.), they tend to normalize as a mini-monopoly agency with no profit focus and no accountability.

Most in our parts have taken on service after service due to the eagerness for more revenues, power and control. They'll add natural gas service, propane delivery, fuel oil, then migrate into communications: cellular, telephone, cable TV and broadband Internet.

Unfortunately, as they're not market-driven entities, they don't have the natural correcting forces that ensure efficiency. They make up for inefficiency by subsidizing them in their other monopoly areas - e.g. electric rates.

One municipality in the area has hiked their electrical rates to about $0.12/kilowatt hour, whereas the electricity offered just outside town by a coop is $0.06 (with discount programs offering $0.03).

The impact to the town doesn't stop there, either. All of the municipal's services are lousy, but since they have such an established base and the ability to subsidize from their other products, competitors have simply stayed away. The result is quite comperable to the goals of socialism: everyone is equally miserable.

So... get yourself some competitors in your community. Make it easy for them to get in, and don't buy from them if they are lousy. But don't lock yourself into one solution either through the error of municipals or by denying entry via towers and right of ways.

*scoove*

Re:It's the Last Mile.

[Grendel Drago]

Even though This Is Slashdot, and such things are unheard of here...

... back up that "evil RF rays" quote with a reference. Was it a US senator or a state senator?

-grendel drago

Re:It's the Last Mile.

[scoove]

Even though This Is Slashdot, and such things are unheard of here...

Oh really? No mysticism on /.? Well, I guess it has been awhile since I've read a JonKatz post...

back up that "evil RF rays" quote with a reference. Was it a US senator or a state senator?

Sure thing: Missouri state rep. Denny Meridith, and Missouri House Bill 999 (2001, tabled).

Full text of the bill is available here. Here's a nice quote from the bill about saving children from death rays:

"It is the intent of the general assembly, due to possibly detrimental health effects, including neurological damage in children under twelve years of age and cancer, caused by the proximity of telecommunication siting towers for wireless telephone service and chronic exposure to electromagnetic fields and radio frequency (RF) emissions generated by such towers, to permit meaningful participation by adjacent landowners in the location of such towers."

He's seeking more sponsors for this year and apparently will focus more on the eyesore nature of towers since his "saving kids from evil RF rays" junk science ploy got trashed and his telephone incumbant backers were embarrassed.

*scoove*

Re:It's the Last Mile.

[King_TJ]

This bothers me, because while I can quite clearly see the problems - I also don't like begging govt. to step in once again, and strong-arm a company into giving up something that's rightfully theirs, just because it happens to be in the public interest.

Who paid for that "last mile" of wire and whose employees strung it? Who has been maintaining it ever since when it breaks? Yep - your local telco.

I think it's time we realize this: As soon as we were ready to concede that we didn't need the "Ma Bell" monopoly anymore, we also admitted that technology advanced enough to give us alternatives. Who says we need Bell's wire to provide us with high-speed Internet? Sure, DSL might be cool - but any company willing to invest the money could set up a wireless Internet service that was faster and more convenient. They sure did it for voice communications and were wildly successful, despite a huge initial investment building cell towers and infrastructure.

What I see is a lot of "little guys" whining because they'd like to make money using Bell's expensive cabling and equipment. Maybe they should face the facts, and realize it's just not a feasible business to be in unless you have more capital to invest?

Lack of reliability

[dmuth]

I think that part of the problem with the lack of consumer confidence in high speed Internet Access (especially DSL) is the lack of reliability with these services. DSL outages are something that many folks complain about, and in severe cases, such as when Northpoint went bankrupt, service was cut with little or no warning. Having to put up with things like this make me think twice before getting broadband to my place.

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.

Re:Lack of reliability

[underpaidISPtech]

What a fucking crock of shit. Whoever modded this as a troll is FUCKIN IDIOT. Fuck you.

Troll = Tacosnotting FAQ/pagefilling post/some comment about Katz and boys and Cowboy Neil.

It's ok for Mr.Man to say he has great DSL service, but it's a troll for someone in the friggin industry to relate his experience? FUCK YOU.

I watched as all the /. sheep complained about cable for the longest time, and about how great DSL was. Well, the opinions changed pretty fast. Canada has far better broadband prices and reliability than in the US. That's not a troll, its a godamn fact. Our providers arent going tits up left and right. My cable company had the forsight to get the hell outta business with Excite last year before the shit hit the fan, did yours?

BTW, I don't work for either of those comapnies I mentioned you close-minded twit, go fuck yourself. I have 46 Karma, do your worst you little punk, I post enough good comments to actually contribute, and I say what I want, when I want. I always mod up, never down, and any offtopic or flamebait mods will get metamodded as unfair.

+2 because I fucking CAN.

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.

Hmmm... no alternative cable providers?

[sluggie]

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?

All I want is the connection

[egburr]

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.

Re:All I want is the connection

[Troed]

Sounds like Bostream in Sweden. ADSL. 2.5mbit down, 0.75 up. static IP. no extra services.

~$25/month (a bit less)

Re:All I want is the connection

[verbatim]

That's a very good point and explains the downfall of @home: spending money on useless services that nobody wants/needs/uses.

An ISP should provide:
connectivity, POP/SMTP/NNTP/DNS (things that NORMAL people don't host themselves), and some form of customer support.

An ISP should not provide:
Portal services (there are enough out there as it is), custom browsers (that they either won't support or require FOR support), and anything that is a useless extension that can be found elsewhere. Don't bloat the bill.

But these big companies are used to being a one-stop-wh0ring... umm... shopping place for all your Internet needs. In fact, they'd probably ship the Internet to you on CD or DVD if you asked nicely enough.

Re:All I want is the connection

[arkanes]

Hehe. I had someone tell me today that he couldn't use a certain shoppings site (custom system setup at a computer vendor, done with JS) because "my ISP [AOL] doesn't translate Java". Giggle. Made my day :)

Re:All I want is the connection

[garcia]

yeah but the problem here is that it seems like most people want the "fluff". They see DSL as AOL w/a fast connection.

Working in customer service for a broadband ISP I see plenty of people who never have gotten off their homepage (portal) other than what links are on the page.

When a certain large provider went out and it changed hands one customer complained about no longer having the "Internet" and now only having "MSN".

He said, "I am not an MSN customer, how did I get their Internet".

As far as blocking of services. Again, another bit of fluff for you but not for most.

DSL and Cable are low cost already. 768k is about 1/2 of a T1 which costs $500+ I don't see you paying $250/mo for your DSL and in my case w/DSL I have used in the past 75 - 80k/s is worth the $50/mo I was paying. Now I use RR which even though the ping response really sucks the downloads are wicked fast. 200 to 350k/s is nice for $50/mo.

Stop whining.

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.

Re:All I want is the connection

[egburr]

It may be easier, but Southwestern Bell Internet Services needs to find someone who knows what they're doing to run it for them. SBIS's news server is a joke. There are plenty of open and/or for-pay news servers/feeds out there. I don't use my ISP's news server (because it's worthless); why should my rates stay high for them to be able to say they are providing a news server? If they would do it right, and allocates the resources needed to do it right (such as more drive space), then maybe it would be worth it.

Re:All I want is the connection

[medcalf]

An ISP should provide:
connectivity, POP/SMTP/NNTP/DNS (things that NORMAL people don't host themselves), and some form of customer support.

No, an ISP should not provide connectivity. That should be handled by any one of several competing entities (the phone company(s), cable company, satellite, wireless - whatever), while the ISP provides services. Then I, as a consumer, can select connectivity from the best provider of connectivity and services (if I need them) from the best provider of services.

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.

Re:All I want is the connection

[egburr]

If my current ISPs name servers worked reliably and regularly, I would never have bothered to setup my own. If my current ISPs news servers worked (over half the articles were corrupted, and the rest expired after only a day or two), I wouldn't be paying for a subscription to a commercial news feed. As for email, I setup my own server (and bought my own domain) because I got tired of announcing email address changes every 6 months as ISPs went out of business or were bought out.

I went for over a year trying to get my ISP to fix their services before I gave up and setup my own. Talking to support over email or web forms only resulted in form letters which usually had no relevance to the questions or problems I submitted. Talking to support over the phone only confirmed that my settings were correct and prompted a lot of unnecessary reboots which didn't resolve anything. It's really hard to get them to fix a problem when they won't even admit there is a problem.

Since I have to provide my own services in order to get working and reliables services, why should my rates reflect the fact that they are (supposedly) providing these services?

No Real Broadband

[Detritus]

To me, "real broadband" has the following characteristics:

• symmetric bandwidth
• static IP numbers
• no restrictions on servers, services, VPNs

In other words, IP dialtone. Transport the bits from point A to point B. Everything that I have seen that is marketed to the "consumer" is crippled in one or more ways. The only way that I can get IP dialtone is to buy a T1, for more than I pay in rent for my home.

Availability and reliability are also needed for a broadband service that can be part of the national infrastructure. If I order telephone service, the telephone company does not say "too bad, you are too far away from the central office, and besides, we don't market telephone service in your (scummy) neighborhood." If my telephone service goes out, which is a rare event, it gets fixed in a day or two.

Re:No Real Broadband

[Greyfox]

Speakeasy pretty much gives me an IP Dialtone and was able to get DSL to my house with Covad (US West'd been jerking me around for over a year.) About the only restrictions they have on the service are you can't run porn servers and you ostensibly must keep your system secure. As to the porn servers bit, if you're running one of those you should be bringing in enough to affort a T1 anyway. As for keeping your system secure, we're all trying to do that right? Though I do get a lot of cmd.exe scans from within Speakeasy's address range, so I can't imagine they enforce it too tightly.

They'll sell you a T1, too. Their web page says those start at $399. At that price you could drop a T1 in, network to a few friends (Hang ethernet out the Window or use dry copper) and split the cost down to something reasonable. I don't know if you can run a T1 to your house, though.

Re:No Real Broadband

[warpSpeed]

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

A monopoly by definition is not a free market

[Martin Spamer]

Firstly, a monopoly by definition is not a free market. In free market I can buy/trade with anybody, in a monopoly I don't have that choice, therefore it's not free.

Having a monopoly is NOT illegal.

Perhaps this is true in the land of corporate greed, but monopolies are illegal in nearly every civilised/developed country.

Re:A monopoly by definition is not a free market

[stripes]

Perhaps this is true in the land of corporate greed, but monopolies are illegal in nearly every civilised/developed country.

Unless you are trying to imply that the USA is uncivilized it may come to a shock to hear that monopolies are legal in the USA.

It is legal to have almost all of a market. What's illegal is to act in anti-competitive ways after you are a monopoly, but not before. It is legal for a small player to try to keep other out of a market, but if you are almost the only player it is illegal to do most things that keep others out of the market.

It would be hard to make having 95% of the market illegal, after all the first company in any market has 100% of that market! Also it shouldn't be illegal for a company to beat other inept companies, right?

Re:A monopoly by definition is not a free market

[stripes]

Define inept. Did you read the post about the guy who runs a small ISP providing DSL service, and is going under because the monopoly on local phone service prevents him from getting lines installed into his customer's house? (hint: no, you didn't. Go back and read it.) Is this guy just running a rinky-dink ISP that takes forever in getting service up - and is therefore inept? But what if the telco drags their feet installing local phone lines for non-telco ISPs, thereby putting them out of business, while providing service lickety-split for their own ISP service? Isn't that an abuse of the free-market system? (hint: yes, it is.) And furthermore, it's an abuse that only a monopoly can employ. Which brings us back on-topic: are monopolies a good thing - despite the fact that they are technically legal, as you so cluefully have already mentioned.

Let me clear something up, I'm not saying the RBOCs beat the DSL providers because the DSL providers are inept. I'm saying monopoly is not in and of itself illegal because there are many benign ways they can come about.

In fact if you read some of my other posts on this very thread you will see me asserting many of the things the RBOCs do are illegal for a monopoly to do.

This post is just about why I think monopolies are and should continue to be legal (which I didn't say anyone clearly state), which is different from what they should be prohibited from doing, and why.

Are monopolies a good thing? Not very frequently, and not here. I would like to see one company in charge of the monopoly installed wiring and central office space, and other companies paying it for access and providing services over it. Not one company that owns that, and uses it to make money, and rents it out when forced. Congress didn't ask me, nor did they pay much attention to the letters I wrote them.

Gee, glad I don't live in the US

[GroovBird]

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

Re:Gee, glad I don't live in the US

[arkanes]

That seems kinda wierd - you get a 10Mbit connection, but only 10 Gig a month? (I know, 10 gig is alot, but it goes kinda fast when you're downloading ISOs) - That's only about 3 hours download time, assuming max speeds. Why bother providing 10Mbit if you can only DL 10 gig a month?

It's not a real free market in action

[SocietyoftheFist]

One of the parts of the equation for a free market is that you have a fully informed consumer. Most consumers buy based on advertising and don't really know anything about the product and it's competitors.

... about "demand"

[Martin Spamer]

... about "demand"

Perhaps in more ways than you realise, since I feel pretty confident that Content on Demand systems like this (www.kitv.co.uk) are the Killer App you are talking about.

If you think it's bad now, just look ahead.

[emes]

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 "last mile technology" makes this moot?

[stankulp]

Cisco's new technology

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/01/03/2039 21 8&mode=thread

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?

Re:Cisco's "last mile technology" makes this moot?

[kindbud]

You're missing a fat, expensive pipe to hook them all up to (or, up to which them all to hook, for the non-terminal-preposition crowd). You're missing a help desk. You're missing a staff of engineers. You're missing a billing department.

Lawrence Lessig

[wiredog]

Had an op-ed a few days ago in the Post about this.

10% of who?

[underpaidISPtech]

>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.

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! ;P

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.

Re:Cable

[arkanes]

I got a little footnote on my cable bill saying they were gonna raise prices on the next billing cycle. No notice of how much, and the little note was the only notice, no email, no special card, nothing.

Here's a US town being proactive for Broadband...

[RatOmeter]

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.

Re:Once the broadband growth issues are ironed out

[mpe]

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.

Part of the point with the likes of ADSL is that the difficult bit of building the network "piggybacks" on to an already existing network. (Similarly with cable modems).

Different point of view

[jdavidb]

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? ;)

New Jersey's 2nd biggest city?

[Hektor_Troy]

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;

I don't get it.

[SevenTowers]

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!

Re:I don't get it.

[duffbeer703]

There are probaly more fruitcakes like yourself downloading 100mb pr0n movies, warez and mp3s on newsgroups instead of using them legitimately.

The problem with this picture is that you are paying $40-45 alot of bandwith. Your previous provider, @Home used a stock market bubble and fraud to enable them to sell their product at a loss.

Re:I don't get it.

[haruharaharu]

I mean, lots of people want the product, the law of demand/offer states that the prices should go DOWN not up!

No, if demand goes up, so do prices. If supply goes up, prices go down. If they both go up, prices pay go up or down

Re:I don't get it.

[Nos.]

Yes, in essence we do have monopolies. Both cable and DSL. DSL is from the local telco, in my case, SaskTel. I'm about to switch from ADSL to cable, but only due to the upstream. Currently I'm paying ~$60/month for a 1.5M/128K connection with 2 static IPs which I've had no complaints with.

However, I'm going to switch to cable modem because here, I can get 1M/1M for $45/month, which is much better for hosting various services. I had bad experiences with cable earlier, frequent outages and such, but a couple of years ago, a member of our local LUG took over the sys admin position, and according to other users, the reliability has since skyroceted :).

Re:I don't get it.

[Diabolical]

It isn't just the US. In the Netherlands we just had a 23% raise of the fees for ADSL. The reason in this case is that the service is losing money instead of making money for the price they previously had. Or so they claim....

I think it has alot to do with the auction of frequencies they had to enter in. It has cost our national telco (KPN) billions. That money needs to come back as quickly as possible so they just raise the prices for their other services...

In my opinion governements need to regulate the frequencies and infrastructure at a non-profit basis. This would allow more and better services (if of course research at those is done) for less money from different competitors. For ADSL in the Netherlands there is little competition. I for one can not choose any other broadband solution because in my town there simply is none to choose from. The reason for that is that all infrastructure is owned by the same company that also has the same kind of services to offer as their competitors. So for a competitor to penetrate the same market it's alot more difficult then if the infrastructure was owned by the government.. or at least, that's how i see it.

I guess that in the US it's fairly the same. The companies owning the infrastructure decides who, and who not, have access to their infrastructure.. creating basicly a monopoly. They can do as they see fit within reasonable boundaries of course. If there is no real competition prices can be set as high as they want.. and since they have shareholders to satisfy...

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.

Re:They don't want us

[DrCode]

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.

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.

Re:The economics of monopolies

[mpe]

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

It may well be impossible for a startup utility to compete against an already existing utility. Not only do they have to make a huge investment before they have anything to sell they also have to convince land owners (and government) to let them install pipes, cables, etc. When they are likely to get the response "there already is electricity, gas, drinking water, telephone,etc there".

Re:The economics of monopolies

[Artagel]

Parallel distribution systems for natural gas and electricity make little sense. However, multiple sources of natural gas and electricity make a lot of sense. Where a monopoly is the only practical solution, you need to minimize the monopoly to solve the problem required.

In telecom, that should be "the last mile" so to speak. We aren't even close to there yet. There are a whole lot of problems which will not be solved until we let people make a lot of money from solving the problem.

Re:The economics of monopolies

[MindStalker]

Not as long as there is sufficent regulation to allow compition, you can currently set up solar panels to generate more electricity than you need, and you will get paid for the extra electricity that gets pumped into the system. Anyone, and I mean Anyone can start their own long distance company, there are even a few competitors in local phone service. There is absolutly no reason there can't be compitition in broadband markets, sharing the same lines. But the regulations to force the big providers to open up their lines don't exist yet.
"there already is electricity (been done), gas (been done), drinking water (could be done, but why?), telephone (been done),etc (working on it) there".

Re:The economics of monopolies

[mpe]

you can currently set up solar panels to generate more electricity than you need, and you will get paid for the extra electricity that gets pumped into the system.

Multiple sources of power generation (natural gas, drinking water, etc) make sense. But that isn't the case of multiple delivery

Anyone, and I mean Anyone can start their own long distance company,

You need several magnitudes less kit to run a long distance (even spanning the globe) telephone network compared with even wiring up a decent sized city. You need even less if you resell someone elses telephone servicethere are even a few competitors in local phone service.

Wonder how many of these there are once you eliminate cable companies which also provide telephones and overlapping edges.

There is absolutly no reason there can't be compitition in broadband markets, sharing the same lines. But the regulations to force the big providers to open up their lines don't exist yet.

This would be most likely competition through resellers. However in order to make this work you cannot have one company which is both providing and maintaining the service and also selling the service. Otherwise the company which actaully operates the lines will always be able to sideline the other providers.

Re:The economics of monopolies

[King Babar]

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.

This is actually not true. In the 80s and early 90s, MS "negotiated" many kinds of bundling deals with manufacturers of computers that had the effect of requiring licensing fees to be paid for each computer sold, not each copy of the OS shipped. This practice, which is illegal in the US, was the subject of the original DOJ anti-trust complaint against MS that was (*stupidly*) settled for basically nothing but a wrist slap of a consent decree right after Clinton took office. This turned out to be unfortunate, since the original case against MS was overwhelmingly strong (not that the second one wasn't strong enough), and a meaningful resolution of that one would have probably done something useful in at least some market sectors.

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.

Funny you should mention Apple, since they have had their own history of anti-competitive actions (e.g., when they used to forcibly control prices on their hardware back in the day). But the only way that Apple could have gotten a monopoly on PCs would have been to displace the IBM PC completely, and that was really not going to happen, at least on my planet. :-)

Re:The economics of monopolies

[Eloquence]

I agree with you that monopolies are not necessarily bad. But this is only a theoretical assumption: In history, there have been few if any monopolies rising through the well-known mechanisms of capital accumulation which have not abused their market power in order to suppress competition. And, from a market theory standpoint, a company that wouldn't lobby politicians, kill competition with patents and trademarks and create manipulative contracts would not act correctly: It can be expected to do anything to expand its monopoly that it can get away with. To realize this, companies should have to become ever more transparent as their market share increases.

That's why regulation is necsesary, and much more than is currently the case. A monopoly should not necessarily be split up just because it's a monopoly, but a market situation should be created where competition becomes much easier for everyone involved -- if the monopolist can still retain its monopoly after increased competitive pressure, than that may not only be desirable, but the only way to distribute the goods in question. Therefore, monopolies should be absolutely transparent: They should essentially leave their doors open to anyone who cares what they do and share all their data. They should not be able to keep anything they do secret, not their strategies, their presentations, their data, their scientific discoveries. If all this knowledge doesn't help others make better products, then let the monopoly persist (but under the continued guidelines).

Free marketers need to finally accept that much of market theory is pseudoscience, and only a regulated market economy (not a planned one) produces a fair distribution of wealth in nations of the industrial age (the information age may need yet different models).

Covad

[peterdaly]

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

Lassaiz-Faire Capitalism as bad as Communism

[FreeUser]

In a free market system, monopolies NATURALLY result from good business practices

And in a free market system technological innovation, development and low prices NATURALLY result from competition. You seem to be arguing that the one offering the best services will eventually triumph over the competition and be the only one left on the market. This is sometimes true, but it does not mean that monopolies are always the best thing for a free market system.

This is why completely unfettered, unregulated capitalism (lassaiz-faire capatilism a la the 19th century) is as contradictory and self-destructive as communism: the inherent dichotomy of the free market system requiring competition to work properly but yielding monopolies comes to the fore, short circuiting and ultimately destroying the very market that spawned it.

Capitalism only works over the long term in a situation where its most destructive positive feedbacks (of which the "natural" formation of monopolies from previously free markets is but one example) are mitigated through regulation.

There was a time, up through about the 1940, when western capitalism, particularly in the United States, was on a routine boom-bust cycle punctuated not by recessions, but by multi-year depressions. Note the plural. We grow concerned when growth slows and joblessness rises to the point where we have to endure up to 16 months of recession (usually lasting much shorter than 16 months). Our great-grandparents in the 19th century routinely suffered through multiple depressions, an effective "rebooting" of the economy reminiscent of a Windows NT server. This was a natural consiquence of lassaiz-faire capitalism's inherent internal contradictions and resulting instability.

As much as we like to bitch about government regulation (and it is true that bad regulation can be as bad or worse than no regulation, and that regulation is not needed in many circumstances, but certainly required in many others), ever since the government (and the Federal Reserve) have been proactively regulating the market through both legislation and control of the money supply, our boom-bust cycles have diminished to minor fluxuations, where the worst we have to fear is a few months of slowdown.

Unfortunately, with the government's reluctance to enforce anti-trust regulation (while zealously enforcing mandated monopoly rights such as copyrights and patents) this balance is shifting, with all the potential for economic havoc that implies. This sort of thing happens when you have legalized bribery and a voice in politics defined by and limited to the depths of your pockets, of which a living human's will never be so deep as even a relatively impoverished corporation's, and as such regulations are ever more weakened in the persuit of next quarter's profits the long term stability of our economy, and our society, becomes ever more fragil, and ever more ignored in the rush of cheaply-purchased politicians to quid-pro-quo that last campaign contribution into another law designed to prop up an outdated business model, to deregulate another area of business in the name of short term profits at the expense of long term stability or, in some cases, consumer protection (which arguably amounts to the same thing), or even to simply bail out an entire industry for having chosen, years earlier, to ignore its customers safety and pocket the change saved by not implimenting the kind of security their fudiciary responsibilities to both their stockholders and their customers required.

Complain when somebody is making money

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Bandwidth Costs Are Not Understood

[Bookwyrm]

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.

Re:Bandwidth Costs Are Not Understood

[Detritus]

What is the true cost of bandwidth? Not the price, but the actual cost. It used to be very expensive to provision a T1 over copper. It took a lot of manpower and equipment. Bridge taps and loading coils had to be removed, repeaters had to be installed, and it required two high-quality copper pairs. Modern technology (HDSL2) can do the same job, on a single pair, without line conditioning, and without repeaters for many spans. The cost of providing a T1 circuit is much lower. At the termination point, the data can be muxed on high-capacity fiber for transport to the Network Service Provider. I don't know what the costs are for transporting data over fiber, but I think it is safe to assume that improvements in technology have also reduced those costs.

Re:Bandwidth Costs Are Not Understood

[Bookwyrm]

You are only considering the equipment cost. You are not considering the operational costs -- maintaining a NOC 24x7 with people who have half a clue, who know how to run an IP network more or less, can mostly manage BGP4 routing, field techs to replace equipment, spare router blades, router service contract costs, electricity, management, etc. And that is only for a half-way able staffing. Staffing a NOC + field support with really good people who know what they are doing 24x7/oncall, full network redundancy (never mind just doubling the cost of the lines and the routers, *managing* the redundancy is expensive in terms of manpower), spares for all equipment, etc. is a huge operational, recurring cost.

Depending on how you handle the business model for a dial-up ISP, the business model gets *less* profitable the larger you get, due to the management overhead. Suppose you need to have 100 paying customers per month to support one tech support person answering the phones for that month (arbitrary number) -- at some point, you have so many tech support people working, you need to hire a manager to handle them -- but to pay that manager's salary, you need another 500 paying customers. The ratio of customers:tech support just went up. If you get so large that you have multiple managers and now need a senior manager... etc. The 'pyramid' of management that grows on top of the service base eats into the profit margin per customer. If this was a manufacturing system, this might not be an issue as as the business grows larger you could leverage economies of scale, but this is a *service* (i.e. tech support) issue, where you must have a certain number of tech support personnel per customer.

The network costs have a similar issue. When you have little traffic, a topology where all remote points talk to a central hub works fine and is fairly easy to manage, but as network traffic grows and you try to add links between more and more points in a many-to-many connected network, the number of links to manage starts going up very quickly (i.e. n!, or possibly n!/(n-m)! where m is the number of links per n end points). Managing all those links is an increasing cost that does not match the subscriber base. (i.e. the subscriber base grows linearly, the network management/complexity exponentially) -- eventually the costs exceed the revenue.

At that point, either quality goes down, or costs go up. Every one wants 'cheap' broadband, though, so... quality goes down, or the providers have to tie people into some other service to stay profitable. If people don't want the content providers to control how bandwidth is used, then they are going to have to be willing to pay *full* price for the bandwidth so that the bandwidth providers have no subsidies from the content providers to listen to, and only are interested in listening to their customer base.

Bandwidth costs are not well understood -- things are changing very rapidly, but it's neither as simple or as cheap as $ per month.

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:Glasgow KY

[Sabalon]

Small towns are wonderful. Like you said - the local utility company. Probably folks that live in Glasgow, work there, shop there, etc...

It makes sense for them to support their local community, before the town becomes another wasteland.

But I think there is a small difference between Glasgow and Louisville - though 15,000 is a respectable size for something like this so there must be some support overhead, but not nearly as big as in a big city area.

Anyway, found this: http://www.glasgow-ky.com/lan/
Not bad.

Re:Law of Demand

[SevenTowers]

Sorry, I didn't explain my idea correctly. The prices will go up, you are right, but usually the production will follow and the prices will stabilise then drop. Now all they do is go up, up, up... My error, sorry.

This is probably good news for Canada...

[LordZardoz]

Canada is generally better off when it comes to Broadband access. All of my friends have access to broadband by way of DSL or Cable, and at a cost of $40.00. As in Forty Canadian Dollars.

It seems that every reasonably well off country has better consumer BroadBand service then the US with the exception of Australia. For many businesses, it might be easier to start up in Vancouver or Toronto then in LA or New York. The only obstacle I can see is the tendency for such businesses to want to be nearer other similar established businesses.

END COMMUNICATION

Ireland Offline

[bfree]

Here in Ireland we have no consumer broadband. If I want to connect to the Internet I can:

1. Dialup at up to 56k for $0.6 - $2 per hour + $15 per month line rental
2. ISDN 64k for $0.6 - $2 per hour + $35 per month line rental
3. ISDN 128K for $1.2 - $4 per hour + $35 per month line rental + $25 per month IP connection
4. 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 ago ... ISDN (with a reduced installation charge)!! Then they annouced I-Stream (ADSL) with a launch of October 2nd 2001 ... HOWEVER they knew full well they would not actually be allowed to launch at that time, and simply announced the date (and pricing, but NO conditions and STILL no conditions) so as to ensure the service would be stopped and dragged through litigation by it's competitors and the regulators. In the meantime the jokers are raking in the cash while soiling the market for any other potential competitors (the main candidate being ntl who paid (at the time) the highest price per subscriber ever worldwide for the largest Irish cable tv network (which was semi-state at the time and had hyped it's price by talking about cable modem trials which were very small) and who are completly cash strapped having rolled out (allegedly) maybe a POTENTIAL couple of thousand nodes for cable modems (I have yet to find a single person I know who could actually avail of it).

So 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!!!

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.

Why doesn't anyone want high-speed Internet?

[Adam Wiggins]

I have to admit, I find the attitudes of the people described in this article hard to swallow. I can't imagine life without broadband; I consider it as vital as electricity. $40-$50 is expensive?! No way! If consumer broadband went away, I'd probably give some thought to getting a ~$500/mo T1.

When Northpoint went out of business I was stuck with a modem for about three weeks. It was absolute and total hell; I have no idea how anyone uses the Internet with just a modem.

While I agree that the stuff that's been going on (phone company monopolies, little guys going out of business left and right) are not good for consumers, some broadband is certainly better than no broadband. The situation is not nearly as grim as this article seems to imply.

The thought process? "Make em pay to breathe."

[Moderation abuser]

Basically they want money for nothing. You can see the mentality as companies divest themselves of pretty much everything physical and become "Intellectual property owners" with multiple levels of subcontractors, each taking a cut.

I believe it's to do with the rise of the MBA. People who know nothing but the theory of business but not real business, just, the way they wish it could be.

Anyway, why aren't people buying broadband? Because it's too fucking expensive with the telcos trying to force their blended, homogenised crap "content" which they think is so wonderful down our throats.

I want a fast line to everything. I don't want to be forced to an ISP, I don't want "premium entertainment", video on demand but only from the tel/cable co. I don't give a flying fuck about 500 TV channels. Give me the fucking line and then get out of my way.

Basically, I want infrastructure. All the rest is frothy shit on top. Unfortunately, commercial organisations aren't very good at providing infrastructure. All they can think of is the frothy shit.

80% have service: How many are wired?

[erpbridge]

The article states that 80% of the US is served broadband acrosss the US. However, that 80% is mostly the sattelite broadband, I'd wager.

I'd like to know how much percentage is wired. Sattelite broadband (I'm talking 2 way here) is usually costing the customer upwards of $500 for initial equipment (versus $150 for other services) and $60/month (versus $40 for other services). Installer prices are about the same, if not slightly higher.

With these differences, it's no wonder people choose wired over sattelite.

Re:80% have service: How many are wired?

[erpbridge]

I was just giving the benefit of a doubt (Is that the right way it goes?) that web traffic over 2-way satellite is bearable. I know that the latency for gaming and any kind of instant live connection is unusable (there's only so fast light can travel... then slow that down by conversions on each end and satelite conversion in the middle, and you get much slower).

The thing is, they'll sell it as faster than modem, and that it may be... I know in my area, I was almost about to go with it, because I was JUST out of reach of DSL, and the local cable company is dragging its heels about putting in cable modem.

Stop thinking string. Start thinking air.

[evilandi]

Every time people talk about broadband, it's the bloody same. Cable this, copper that, fibre optic whatnot, local loop blah blah, last mile blah.

Stop it! We do NOT need more string.

The people stopping the rollout of broadband aren't the string companies (telcos, cablecos).

The people stopping the rollout of broadband are those who limit the use of the airwaves (FCC USA / Radio Authority UK). Open up more radio spectrum and then everyone can have broadband, with no last mile, no local loop and no silly string.

Have a look at "Broadband Cowboy" in the January 2002 issue of Wired.

Re:Cable

[FasterThanLight]

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.

Consider taxes on your phone bill

[Kamel Jockey]

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.

Balkanization of the market

[cryptochrome]

The competitive aspects of the market are generally a great way to drive innovation and ensure that individual companies within an industry offer good value for the price. But at the same time, if such companies have any sort of monopoly (and in the telcom business they most certainly do have local ones) they always overcharge, and that same competitiveness can cause balkanization of the market where those monopolies are granted, and thus holding back innovation and usefullness of the industry. Therefore, the government should always consider setting standards where monopolies are granted. And they out to step in now and take action. The US has fallen embarrassingly far behind other countries in the usefullness of high tech.

The broadband market is a good example - companies were allowed to merge with wild abandon, and the quality of service only went down. Users have little or no choice of service, and it's expensive. The other key example is the mobile, wireless, and broadcasting markets - several companies with incompatible systems (so that even SMS won't work together), including legacy systems that are no longer desirable but are kept around for backwards compatibility, using up the fundamentally limited resource of EM bandwidth with gross inefficiency. It would be far more efficient might actually be CHEAPER if the government were to step in, set up a couple of modern standards for local and long-range one-way and two-way communication (perhaps using 802.11 or UWB, and satellites, Metropolitan Area Networks, and ad-hoc adaptive wireless networks using directional antenna), and subsidize the transition for all households. Just think how much bandwidth you could free up for communication if you eliminated the TV and radio bands and delivered those via satellite instead.

Must...have...government...intervention...

[sigwinch]

What the hell is up with the big-business-killed-my-dog whining?

This is the free market in action... , and therefore unquestionable in the US today, and it's also the reason why people aren't getting high-speed access.

I can't speak to your apparently-unfortunate *local* experience, but here in a smallish city in Oklahoma, I have the following choices for telephone service:

• 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:

• Cable
• Broadcast TV
• Satellite

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.

$100/month? Funny you should mention power.

[Erris]

I'd easily pay $100 for something that was under my control, I could have control over the dns, etc. 4 sets of numbers. That's all I want/need to ever hear from the provider.

I agree, but you seem to be off by an order of magnitude. Let's look at some other wires that come into your house.

How about the phone line? It can be argued that it took more equipment and more cost to set up the smart network that was the phone system that it will take to set up the dumb wires that is the internet. How much does it cost to support the phone system? Basic subscription, $12/month.

What is your electric bill each month? $100? Wow, I feel for you, but at least you get something out of it. You don't think it costs more to run co-ax and a few routers than it does to run power plants and all really fat lines all around do you?

It moves me, really it does. Telco is a rape.

It's not about what they want

[Erris]

It's about what we want. As long as the greed heads have to use the public right of way, they owe us. Money, what, they want my money? So what's new? They can behave or have their bankrupt asses nationalized. The telcos are going under as their services are becoming desperatly obsolete. Nothing could be more public than telco networks and roads. Fight for what is yours.

We owe it to Joe Homeowner to keep the bastards from raping us all. If we don't Joe is going to ask where his leaders were and why they failed him.

The ISP's side of the story?

[TheHawke]

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.

An economic problem, economic solution

[William Tanksley]

The problem with broadband (and the Internet in general) is that there's no economic feedback between supply and demand. The value of bandwidth, and of all the other services and 'goods' online, isn't clear, and it's hard to price it correctly.

I believe that there are good solutions. The one I'm watching closest right now is Mojonation; by providing a currency, they make it possible to track demand and allow "the market" to adapt supply to meet it. This will become really useful once some backbones sell and accept 'mojo' for their transport services (whatever method is used to account for the backbones will become a true currency).

-Billy

Re:History of monopoly

[Archfeld]

BINGO, look back in US history...Who OWNED the Tea that went into Boston Harbor...Not the King, it was a chartered company (read corporation) that was abusing its' protected position.

You think you're being ripped off? Pah!

[Sadiq]

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

Scared Shitless

[Anne Thwacks]

Not only they don't want us, they don't want to provide broadband one little bit.

Broadband means people can use internet phones, and internet phone means never having to pay long distance again

Basically, they are all f***ed if they deliver broadband that works, and they know it.

I predict No telco will ever deliver a cheap, broadband service that works properly It would be commercial suicide.

I also cant see video over a phone wire working either. After all, satellite just has to be 1,000,000 times cheaper if everyone is watching the same thing, and if they are watching TV, they are obviously totally indiscriminate.

Most people have the box on as bg noise, and don't care what the program is. They ain't going to pay big bucks for that.

PAYV sports has already started to crash. People would rather kick the ball themselves than pay $15 to watch someone else kick it ON THEIR TV they already paid for.

Watch as reality bites.

Speakeasy 1.5/384 is no more (128 only on ADSL)

[Dr. Zowie]

I left Speakeasy in November because they no longer offer any ADSL options with more than 128kb uplink.

I had been using ADSL for a 640k/128k (ISTR) connection and wanted to upgrade to 1.5/384.

The ADSL/SDSL switch is a price point for them now: SDSL costs you significantly more per kbps per month than does ADSL.

I currently use Peak to Peak Internet in Boulder. They're a regional provider and very friendly.

Lack of compelling broadband content.

[Restil]

This is probably the biggest issue. People aren't eating up broadband in droves because simply there just aren't that many legitimate needs for it.

Note I point out "legitimate". I know of plenty illegitimate uses for broadband which would be difficult if not impossible without it. Excessive mp3 downloading, movies, tv shows, software. Broadband makes these activities simple.

The problem is, because of the RIAA and MPAA and others' stalling, these services simply aren't offered in a way that makes any sense, and those of us who have the means would rather do it our own way, even if that means that the feetdraggers miss out on the opportunity.

Granted, not everyone who has broadband is using it illegally. A lot of people like the always-on capability. A lot of people like their webpages loading super fast. But fact of the matter is, most of those people don't NEED it. Its merely a convienence, and they wouldn't hesitate to move somewhere that it isn't available, where thats the first question I ask after "how much does it cost?"

-Restil

Roll your own

[Ogerman]

So, when are we going to start seeing more wireless P2P neighborhood networks? Yeah, I know.. somebody's got to provide the fat pipe out to the world. But maybe not. With enough transmission range and enough stations connected to adjacent neighborhoods / municipalities, perhaps the internet could lose it's star-like topography and become truly web-like. So who's up for inventing a new routing protocol? (-:

Broadband just isn't particularly profitable

[jratcliffe]

Broadband is, at best, a breakeven service, even at current higher prices. The cost of building out the network just doesn't make sense, given the cost of providing the service, and the revenue it can generate. The only reason that the cable TV operators offer cable modem service is that, by having it, they can offer a package that keeps people from cancelling cable TV and getting satellite service. Folks, if we want cheap, universal broadband, we're going to have to suck it up and pay more in taxes to subsidize the deployment. That doesn't really seem fair, though, since there's no particular reason that a bunch of folks without PCs should have to pay more in taxes so that technophiles like us can have high speed net access. We've got to remember that the vast majority of America (or anywhere else, for that matter) is NOT like Slashdot - we're a small minority, with very specific needs, and just because we want something, and think it would be worthwhile, doesn't mean the rest of the world should either agree with us or subsidize us.

Re:Thanks!

[scoove]

Glad to share... I get a bit wound up when I hear the "saving children" stuff too. I've got a couple myself and they're the most important things in the world to me, but it just offends me to no end when people use them for their own political/economic gain.

*scoove*

Damn the man, save the Empire

[Graymalkin]

I think the real problem solver in terms of broadband will eventually be municipalities. What if the streets in your city were privately controlled? Rather than streets that went everywhere you'd only have streets leading to businesses and housing tracts whose owners have some affiliation with the street's ownership. Weird sort of like Snow Crash. Municipalities though can put fiber anywhere they want cheaper than private organizations because they don't have to pay the same sort of fees because they'd only be paying it to themselves. Once the fiber is layed they can lease it out to whomever wants to put some equipment on it and do some data transfer. The local muni can also form an agency to handle data services and offer service as a utility. There is plenty of room for competition because each city can lease their fiber to whoever they want. The second benefit of municipally owned fiber is responsibility on the part of the leasee. They can't gouge their customers on lines leased to them by the muni, any attempt to do so would result in their lease being revoked and they'd be screwed. Additionally since it is a muni to muni situation, people in one city aren't paying the marginalized cost of high bandwdith being added in another city like what happens when your ILEC or cable company operates over a broad area. They get to pay for what they get.

This provides plenty of bandwidth in a city or county and since it probably wouldn't be too difficult to get these fiber networked hooked up to MAEs or NAPs they'd be on the internet with everybody else. I don't think it would be a violation of any of the telcom acts of the past 20 years since the ILECs can still provide their access and all with their own lines, but they can also lease the city's lines to provide their services. They could say "you could use our regular services using the city's lines OR you could use out dedicated high speed high QoS privately owned lines". This saves ILECs beaucoup cash running lines used by the public at large.

Re:But 2-way broadband has never been cheap!

[King_TJ]

The whole idea of giving you 2-way broadband inexpensively causes a major shift in the way bandwidth is priced and sold. They aren't in a position to even consider doing that yet!

The fact is, it still costs more to provide reliable high-speed Internet access than what the average person thinks it should cost. To offset this, they sell you a fast downlink but a slow uplink for a relatively low price (DSL, satellite, cable modem). Those that want to provide the content can be charged much more for a fast uplink, because they're (typically) trying to do it for either a business purpose. The bandwidth providers count on their costs being subsidized by those running the web sites and ftp servers, because right now - they're the only ones who *might* lay out the serious cash ($1000 a month for an Internet T1, let's say).

Essential? It's *television*!

[billstewart]

Ok, in some places it's also cable modems, but as much as I like it, that's also a luxury. Folks, we're not talking about something that's an essential utility like electricity or water which requires a large expensive infrastructure that's (according to all the economists the monopolies hired to tell us why we need them) not efficient to operate competitively. This is TELEVISION. If you don't like it, go rent a video tape, or get Gamez, or go read a book, or listen to the radio, or if you don't think the TV channels your cable service carries are worth the extra $50, use an ANTENNA and complain about the lack of diversity that the 1930s FCC nationalization of the airwaves has brought us. If you don't like the radio's limited content, start your own community station (the FCC's harassment of Free Radio Berkeley notwithstanding). If you don't like the news, go make some of your own.

Re:AMEN!!! FINALLY someone gets it!!

[djweis]

I agree that Netscape was initially better, but they sat on their asses for too long instead of improving their own browser. Arguing about what caused what is hard, because Netscape was giving it up themselves. How long did it take them to get from 4.x to anything? Rendering on IE was so much smoother and didn't cause your machine to completely stall before the appearance of a page. I still like Netscape 4.75 more than mozilla because it "feels" better to me, the back arrow always works, etc, but I don't like the feeling of nervousness when loading big pages while waiting to see if it will actually draw, or stall forever and take my other windows with it.
The browser war was Netscape's to lose, and they did, but it was more their fault than anyone will admit.