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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."
Why is broadband access so expensive, so bad, or so innaccessible in the U.S. that it makes something like this necessary? It just seems like our broadband options are going from bad to worse, and I cringe at the idea of eventually having to do something like this just to get decent, affordable access. I'll be damned if I'm going to pay TW by the megabyte for broadband access for long like the expensive old days of AOL.
(So this isn't a comment about roll-your-own DSL, instead it's about saving money by rolling your own ISP and DSL sharing.)
Together our Condo Home Owner Association runs our own ISP/network. Every unit has 2 cat5 cable drops connected to our central server room. There we operate a simple mail/proxy/DNS/dhcp server for the residents of the building. In addition we now have wireless access on most floors of the building and are considering adding network attached security cameras so we can see how's at the front door.
About 20 people are sharing a 1.5/1.5Mbps SDSL connection for the paltry sum of $22/month/user. Each person saves around $30/month and gets the higher peak bandwidth. I would definitely recommend doing this, especially if you have the tech volunteers to implement it.
That sounds great, but you don't know what the hell you are talking about.
Cable providers do not purchase bandwidth in T1 size chunks. They buy OC-48's, OC-192's and split it through their own network (most of which was funded and built by the TV side of the business) In a mid sized market, broadband costs the cable company about $12-17 a month, while you are charged $40-70. Plus they are making money on the cable modem lease.
The cable companies biggest expense is depreciation on equipment purchased 3-5 years ago.
Your notion that bandwidth is so expensive is not really that accurate. Monopolistic telephone companies charge inflated rates for T1 service because they can. Broadband will be similar soon as the cable companies flex their monopoly muscles to the end-user's detriment.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
You can't get data to your house for nothing.
It's already pay for what you use on a larger scale. It's no different for broadband. Bandwidth itself costs money, infrastructures cost money, international sharing agreements cost time and money
Get real people. Having access to 2mbps is not the same as downloading at full speed all the time on it.
Internet always on != downloading all the time.
Here I pay a huge amount for 2mbps. But, I resell parts of it an calculate that I can cut costs because everyone is not using the bandwidth all the time.
Broadband users are generally bandwidth hogs and ISPs just got the pricing wrong. Live with it. The economic reality is that your real cost to your ISP is:
local loop + equipment (probably monthly fee + equipment depreciation) = not a lot
Actual KB transferred = a fixed, calculable cost to them.
So that's all there is to it.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
Read the article first, though. We all know bandwidth is artificially scarce. We all know the big phone companies ran their only competitors in the DSL market into the ground. This article affirms how much of a pain in the ass the CLEC will make it for anyone else to use their loops. Deregulation is bliss, isn't it?
If you didn't read the article, here is a choice quote:
"By far the biggest challenge faced by the Coop - a challenge that dwarfed any of the technical and financial challenges - was gaining access to subloops from Qwest under the Telecommunications Act of 1996," reads the homepage introduction. "The course of negotiations was such that the Coop found it necessary to file an informal complaint with the Federal Communications Commission and subsequently found it necessary to pursue arbitration before the Colorado Public Service Commission."
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.
We are in NYC and have co-op apartment in a 5 building complex with 400+ units. The co-op arangement means that the units are owned collectively by people who live here, so the decision was made by people live here and who have very much the interests of those who live here in mind. Our course, many of the people who live here are not taking full advantage of the bandwidth (there are many little old ladies who emigrated from Eastern Europe post WWII here.) In a sense, their maintenance is subsidizing the rest, but even those who do not use it or do not use it much are very pleased with what it has done for the resale value of the apartments. ("Free high-speed internet included with unit.")
Before we did this, we tried to figure out how much it would cost per unit, but that was hard to get a true cost since much of it was one-time costs like wiring and the firewalls and hardware, and since much of the setup and planning was done for free by people who live here. Even the most pessimistic estimates, though, put it at around than $10/mo /unit long-term, way less
than the $50/mo
cost of cable modem "service", which had been
the only previous option. Since around
one in five units already were paying for cable
modem service, with more people signing up
each month (that was two years ago), it was
cost-effecive and a significant improvement in
many respects.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
Anyway, his opinions on patents are not directly relevant to getting your own DSL coop running. Just understand that the guy behind this one is a high-powered, media-savvy lawyer who knows how to deal with his counterparts in government agencies and corporations. Given the kinds of cases he appears to have been involved in, I suspect money is no problem either. Somehow I think mere engineers like us have no realistic prayer of getting nearly as far.
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.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
No, our webserver is nowhere near to being busy. The bottleneck just now (see http://www.patents.com/mrtg/dillon3.html ) is our T1 line. You will see our T1 line, normally never anywhere near full, is quite full, I expect trying to keep up with all of the SlashDot visitors.
http://www.freenetworks.org/
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