A DSL Co-op in Your Neighborhood?

Steve Hamlin writes "In reading on Slashdot about the increasing cost of cable broadband (and DSL is no cheaper), I ran across this article about a neighborhood that put together a co-op for DSL broadband. From a DSLAM housed in a barn to microwave relays, a frame relay T-1, and problems with Qwest, the whole deal."

Comments

fallacies and good info

[Lumpy]

First off broadband is NOT expensive. your cable modem and DSL is dirt cheap compared to what the bandwidth actually costs. Second broadband is a luxury.... yes kiddies the world doesn't end when you lose internet connectivity. As a luxury it is priced accordingly... what the market will bear and the market will bear up to $75.00 a month for cable speed broadband. Many bitch and moan that they have a reverse bandwidth cap. Well if you want to host a server do like the rest of us and buy a T-1. $1500.00 a month is what I pay for the right to have a server and a static ip. If you whine that your $50.00 a month cable modem doesnt give you what I have.... personally I'll tell you to piss off.

Broadband is dirt cheap here in the states.

Besides, look at cellular... back in 1986 it was horribly expensive.. now you can get 60bajillion minutes for $39.95 (nights between the hours of 3:00 and 3:15am and weekends during full moons and if the outside temperateure is above 59 degrees)
broadband is a spanking new technology.. and these grass roots attemptes are great! (I run a 802.11 open WIFI network in my city.. I give away some of my expensive bandwidth..)
But please get real people... Broadband at home is dirt cheap. and if you cant afford $50.00 a month then why the hell are you wasting your money on luxury items like broadband?

Re:fallacies and good info

[duffbeer703]

Wrong. Please get a clue about how busineses work.

Have you ever heard of something called "accounting"???

As a business, if you buy $2 million worth of equipment that has a life of 5 years, you charge $400,000 per year against your bottom line as a depreciation expense. Cable companies invested heavily in equipment for broadband service 1-5 years ago, so they are still feeling the pinch of depreciation expenses for capital equipment purchases.

If a line costs $12/month and you charge $40/month, you have a gross margin of 70%. That is incredibly high -- ripoff things like extended warranties and car undercoating usually run in the 50-80% margin range. Supermarkets run 2-5% margins, department stores run 8-15%, manufacturing companies run 5-20%. If you cannot make money with those margins, you are incompetent.

Your call center numbers are crazy too. At my last gig we had a call center with anywhere from 20-120 people working at any one time. These folks handled upwards of 2500 calls per hour peak and 75% of them made $8.50/hour or less.

Good argument for government intervention...

[fmaxwell]

The fact that people are forced to do things like this to get broadband access is why we need government intervention.

Because of their monopoly on broadband service in my area, I am a Cox Road Runner subscriber in Fairfax County, VA. The service has been so bad that the County has levied numerous fines against Cox. We have had multi-day outages, packet loss over 50% for days at a time, latency measured at 1/2 second or more, etc. Throughout this, they have said "wait until we get the fiber optic upgrade done." Well, it's just about done and our reward looks like it will be Terms of Service that prohibit VPNs, telecommuting more than one day per week, all servers regardless of the amount of traffic moved (even password-protected ones used only by the subscriber). And we get a $5 to $10 per month increase in service rates.

They don't care because they have a monopoly. DSL coverage is, at best, spotty. The phone company has installed multiplexers everywhere to avoid running more copper, which kills DSL for everyone on the multiplexers.

The Congress needs to issue mandates to the phone companies requiring that they make DSL available to all customers. They need to pass legislation preventing broadband providers from placing limitations on the mechanisms used by the customers to move data (e.g., no limitations on servers, P2P, VPN, etc). If the broadband providers have limits on bandwidth usage, they should be legally required to publish those limits in a clear, easy to read form.

The lack of broadband is beginning to have a real effect on the economy, quality of life, education, and even traffic and pollution (since telecommuting is often impractical with a dial-up line). To all of you anti-government people, I say "get a clue!" The current system is not working and the free market is, by and large, not solving the problem.

Re:Good argument for government intervention...

[SloppyElvis]

Bravo.

I'm with you fmaxwell, governments should invest in broadband as they do other types of infrastructure (roads, bridges, dams), because that's what broadband amounts to these days.

All politics aside, government contracts to build infrastructure aided public optimism that the Great Depression would end in the 1930's. Perhaps this country could use some extra jobs, paid for by Uncle Sam, right now. The people who get the jobs benefit, and the people who get the access benefit. To me, that's worth a few tax dollars.

Re:Good argument for government intervention...

[Anonymous Coward]

Because of their monopoly on broadband service in my area, I am a Cox Road Runner subscriber in Fairfax County, VA. The service has been so bad that the County has levied numerous fines against Cox.

...

The Congress needs to issue mandates to the phone companies requiring that they make DSL available to all customers.

Quibble. If your county has given Cox a monopoly on broadband service in your area (I'm assuming that your local county gave them the monopoly, but I'm certain it wasn't Congress), then your county should be taking it away.

It bothers me when everyone runs to Washington to pass new laws everytime someone gets a hangnail and then turn around and complain that Washington has too much power.

Re:Good argument for government intervention...

[renehollan]

The problem with your analysis is that it empowers the state to overcome "activation energy" at the taxpayer's expense so that a desirable steady-state is achieved sooner, rather than later.

Armed with this power, the state can then extend a monopoly status quo beyond the point where it has short-term bebefits.

Libertarians generally say that this is a poor trade. In those cases where many agree that the short-term expense would be worth the immediate benefit, you wouldn't need government intervention.

There are many industries where economies of scale are enormous. The PC industry is one: it costs an enormous amount of money to make the "first" new-fangled CPU. After that, they're cheap as dirt, almost literally. No government intervention was required for this industry to take off. And, while I would have liked to see cheaper PCs sooner, it would be wrong to tax my fellows to achieve this.

The record on government intervention to "jump-start" infrastructure is generally poor, the odd success notwithstanding extended scrutiny of the track record.

where is Moore's law

[hqm]

I paid $2000 / month for 1/4 T1 in 1995.
Since then, PC's have gone from 90 MhZ to 2 GHz.
RAM has dropped in price by a factor of 20 or more. Disk drives by a factor of 100. Bandwidth inside of CMOS chips is up by a factor of 100.

So ... the technology used for switching
digital signals is now cheaper than any
analog phone technology. Why should a T1 line be
any more expensive than a regular voice line?

The thing stinks of monopoly practices.