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

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...

[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.

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.