Slashdot Mirror
Demand More From Your Copper
D3 wrote in with a submission about fiber to the home, or the lack of it, and the reasons behind this, and ways to work around the Bells to provide high-speed access despite them. A pretty decent article, which actually goes beyond the Baby Bell PR-speak that deregulation is the solution to everything. Maybe at some point state and Federal regulators will realize that the Bells are the problem, not the solution.
Does is seem that they have been more powerfull since the breakup to anyone else?
Monopolies are always a bad idea
Fiber may be cheap, but high-speed conversion to copper isn't.
Also, DSL cannot run over fiber, so the most common low-cost
solution is eliminated by fiber to the home.
when it was all AT&T I didn't get 10 calls a day asking if I'd like to switch long distance companies.
Vote Quimby!
Seriously, why would we want fiber in the home? I have a cable modem and I'm perfectly happy with it. I think what would drive something like that is an application that requires it. MP3's, Chatting, Games, always having a connection on, etc... That's what drove the popularity of Cable modems and DSL's. Other than a huge File Sharing Node, why would we want fiber?
So why not swap business models and become a service provider to the "competitors" instead of "end users." This gives you the incentive to build the infrastructure.
With all the bandwidth that can be squeezed out of copper, offered by fibre, 3G wireless, etc..
Will we ever see CD-quality (mono, but 44.1khz mono) phones?
Surely they could be introduced as a backwards-compatible upgrade.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The site's starting to get a bit sluggish - this link will help ease the load.
"Maybe at some point state and Federal regulators will realize that the Bells are the problem, not the solution."
Regulator: You know, the Bells might actually be the problem, it is in their best interest to make money after all. Maybe we should...ooo...lookit all that money! Thank you kind, sir!
its called a cable modem and i have a fibre optic cable coming right into my house, broadband,phone,interactive tv
Fiber to the home has never been a serious consideration and in fact only would re-establish the same monopolies we have now - a wire can only have one owner.
In other news, American computer geeks appeal to make the penny worth 10 cents.
For a minute, there, I thought this was going to be a set-up for a SNL commercial skit or a message from the Better Colon Health Foundation.
None of the telecom's are in the same sort of entrepreneurial mode as in the mid 90's. AT&T is sitting on a pile o' cash, and IIRC, Sprint is almost as liquid (is their 1-800 scam lawsuit still pending?). Given the new economy is in large part information driven, and given that the telcos are the information drivers at the base level, doesn't it make sense to get them to start spending some of that cash? That would not only make the current economy more liquid (not quite a concern, yet), but facilitate the creation of jobs, or at least mitigate more lay-offs in the related industries and eventually have a spill-over affect into the mainstream economy.
If it takes limited or even full-scale regulation to get them to cough-up, then ought not Congress to consider those options?
mark
Go to f...ing work. And work from there, The videos I augment and render are huge files and take forever to do from home....duh, that's why I go to work and sit on our 100 megabit network. Which by the way is going to be the fastest you can use right now, I know they sell gigabit cards but how many desktops can write, or read data at a gigabit a second. Optical to the home is dumb, 82% of the internet is still on dial up, why don't we get the cable modem technology to be cheaper first and maybe just get all of our ISPs on Fiber,then they can give us more bandwidth to our cable modems.
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
Why in the heck would you run DSL over fiber? DSL is an attempt to take an old-fashioned voice technology and jury-rig it for high-speed data transmission. Fiber-to-the-home is specifically designed for high-speed data transmission.
Is sticking with the old-fashioned solution cheaper in the short term? Absolutely. But I just don't understand your particular comment.
If the problem is a lack of rich payoffs, Monopolies are the solution to that. They have a greater incentive to keep things the way they are, and payments to a few regulators and legislators are cheaper than laying fiber or fatter copper.
It all depends on what your problem is....
Spending most of the last ten years in Taiwan, it's becoming very odd for me when I go back to the States and find even harcore nerds still using modems. Broadband has been cheaper than modem use here for almost four years now. Clearly something very ugly is going on in the US telecoms markets.
It is amusing to note that internationally if you look at where the cheap broadband is, you see very little correlation between deregulation and low rates with the US being the perfect example of where it just doesn't work. Perhaps unregulated competition isn't the panacea it's billed as. After all, what makes a mega corporate bureaucracy inherently more efficient than its government counterpart where this is at least some possibility of accountability.
I think the obvious answer in the States is what we're already beginning to see sprinkled around here and there which is broadband as a community utility like the highways or the water or the power. There are those who say that this is somehow a danger to freedoms of speech, but I don't quite follow the logic there when we have Verizon ratting out their users as it is.
This article brings to light the fact that fiber to the curb just isn't practical now. My wife works for a company that attempted a speculative fiber-to-the-curb (FTTC) build for a neighborhood in Colorado, and the project (among other factors) sent her employer into Chapter 11. FTTC is sexy, yes, but it's just not within economic reach yet.
I've said for a couple years now that cable companies truly have the broadband advantage, but they waste their bandwidth to the curb by competing for television subscriptions. The massive installed base of coax has a much greater bandwidth than your POTS copper pair, but rarely is it used to its full potential.
Owners of huge cable plants will eventually let television delivery fall to satellite deliver (high latency, high broadcast bandwidth) while your everyday coax cable will be more used for low-latency, highly interactive bandwidth like voice and data. Satellite for broadcast, cable for interactive voice/video/data services, and let the POTS pairs finish off their remaining useful life.
If more folks would get reasonable about the realistic uses for fiber (long haul, high bandwidth aggregation circuits) by reading salient articles like this one, we'd more quickly be able to enjoy true broadband in many forms of delivery. It's just going to take more people in decision-making positions that realize the appropriate use of the technologies we have at hand.
The article I read said no such thing. It said that the Bells were being less than honest about their reasons and pointed out significant promisses that had not been kept to get the regulatory environment that favors them today. Now, having not kept their promisses, they ask for more favors citing a few things they wish to change as reasons for their stuborness. Wake up, will you.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Quote from the article: "Less clear is what the FCC will decide in cases where fiber is driven deeper into neighborhoods before connecting with the copper wires that serve individual homes, or is strung to homes where copper service already exists." And: "State regulators, who set certain rules and rates and who oppose changes to the FCC's rules, worry that the former Bells are executing a well-honed strategy: Promise dazzling broadband networks in exchange for regulatory relief, then pull back." This has already occured in my town - Tacoma Washington. With the advent of Tacoma's Click! network (http://www.click-network.com) which is city-owned, it is amazing how much advertising of "low introductory rates" we've seen. The advantages: I can gleefully tell both my RBOC (Qwest) and ATT "Not in this - or any other - lifetime" The big dis-advantage: Because this is city-owned (meaning taxpayer-owned), guess who has permanent seating at each of the (required) public meetings ? QWEST & ATT Minor inconvienience: Only three ISPs are "blessed" to provide service
The FCC has ruined DSL by requiring that the telco be responsible for quality but third parties not. In other words, if covad DSL gives you poor performance, you have nothing to fall back on but your terms of service. If pacbell DSL gives you poor performance (lower than rated, or any significant downtime) then you can call the FCC and they'll fine SBC $500.
Regulation must be undertaken carefully, deregulation moreso. They deregulated the power companies in California, where are we now?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
>> the Baby Bell PR-speak that deregulation is the solution to everything
Say what? They THRIVE on regulation; the most significant of course, is their ongoing monopoly over the last mile.
Christmas, the FCC's response to deregulation is to write a bunch of regulations regulating how deregulation is supposed to happen. The article notes "the Federal Communications Commission [is] ready to revamp its competition rules in the next two weeks..." Good grief. Trying to manage "competition" is regulation, plain and simple. If we were really deregulating, we could dismantle 98% of the FCC. Which, of course, is why they interpret "deregulation" the way they do.
This kind of "deregulation" is a sham, it's just an invitation to the various players to ante up some campaign contributions and expensive lunches. As long as we have the last-mile monopolies and an FCC that thinks it knows how structure the industry, then we're going to get screwed by the telecom companies. If you side with the Baby Bells or the Long-Distance carriers, you're just choosing between missionary and doggy.
It's a relatively new technology being deployed by Bellsouth now. Digital Fiber in the Loop (DFITL) makes use of a new card that gets installed into your fiber pedestal (ONU), manufactured by Marconi. It essentially acts as a mini-DSLAM.
Then inside your house, you use a regular ADSL modem on your phone line, and you'll get maximum speed no matter how far you are from the CO.
The problem is that Marconi is the only company that manufacturers cards such as these and they are proprietary from what I understand. However, for those like me that were stranded on dialup for months before this was finally available, it's a wonderful thing to have.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
Sorry... that was a .org address, not a .net
Chicago CivicNet
I just watched fibre being installed at a friend's house last week in the Natomas area of Sacramento. According to the installation tech, the service is available over all of Sacramento; though not in the eastern suburbs yet. The provider is called SureWest. The beauty of the fibre is that the service is only $50, provides 10 MB connection, and you can also get your phone and cable through the same connection. I wanted to move there just to get the connection.
More justification why "The Phone Company" is at the top of my poop list.... If I ever lose my marbles and go Fight-Club-Tyler-Durden loonie, the phone companies are easily the first on my list of things to be eliminated. They go before the credit card companies, before the RIAA, before the SPAMMERS!
They peddle more (in volume AND quality) self-intoxicating raw sewage in the name of justifying their back-assed ridiculous business practices than all the other annoying people in the world combined. Anybody that's ever tried to decipher a phone bill knows what I'm talking about - FOR CRYING OUT LOUD! HAVE YOU SEEN TODAY'S DITHERATI?!?!
~~shudder~~
*DING*
Oh, time for my little blue pill again...
Anyway, the only reason we have to put up with these bastards is because we can't live without their stupid service and running new cables to every address in America would be prohibitively expensive. Just brainstorming here, but let's say wireless networking doesn't pan out as a alternative to replace copper and/or fiber for last-mile cable across-the-board. What would happen if congress authorized the FCC (eminent domain in the public interest) to forcibly take control of the copper from the phone companies? They do it with dirt where I live when they say, "We need to expand the airport next to your home. Here's fair market value for your house, now go away."
Sure, I got my doubts, (for one you have to assume the government can maintain that infrastructure better than the private sector) but at least the local telcos' exclusive position of control would be eliminated.
Them's a lot of hassles. Me? I'm pulling for wireless.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
I don't know about ntl's cable service, or British cable in general. However, one thing I should point out from my experience with US cable: a lot of that fiber is actually transmitting an analog signal, rather than a packet-switched digital one.
Experts will no doubt correct me on this, but what I believe happens is that the cable company's head-end (main office) generates a block of RF-frequencies, that we know as analog channels 1-n. Nowadays, many of those channels actually contain digitally-encoded data, but that's neither here nor there.
What then happens is that the entire 1Ghz (or so) block of spectrum is shifted up into the visible light frequencies and pumped out through a simple fiber network. Thus, there's no digital switching or anything complex on these nets; they simply shift the RF spectrum up into light at one end, get it out to the various neighborhoods, and then shift it back down into RF and pump that over Coax.
To extend most American cable companies to "real" fiber-to-the-home would ideally involve building out a real digital packet-switched network (no point in half-measures.) It might be ATM-based, to insure quality-of-service.
This is a big deal for US cable companies, who don't like to think about complex digital switches sitting far out in places where they can break down, be struck by lightning, etc. Plus, many cable companies are perversely experiencing a shortage of back-haul fiber as it is, so they might have to lay a lot more in order to upgrade the system.
Well, 100megabit works out to 12.5MB/s per second. My hard drive can both read and write considerably faster than that. Gigabit pushes the roof to about 128MB/s. Serial ATA is specced to go to 600MB/s, which is considerably more than 128MB/s. In my company I daily transfer massive collections of CAD drawings back and forth from office to office, and from office to home. When I have a huge project, I put in hours at home as well, and it would be much easier for me if I had that kind of connection speed. And fiber, by the way, is cheaper per megabit BY FAR then copper. The newly ratified 10gigabit standard (which is nowhere near full utilization of fiber, what with frequency multiplexing technology), allows 60gigabit/second to be transfered over 12-strand 50micron multimode cable, which comes in at about $.90/foot. What an end user needs is simply two strands (transmit/recieve pair), which can be scaled up to whatever bandwidth is necessary. It may seem expensive, but fiber has been here a long time, and it's here to stay, so we may as well utilize it rather than saying "100baseTX is good enough for me." Is 640K really enough for you?
Well there are other reasons to want to work from home as well. For instance when you work with a production system for any sort of data manipulation there are often access restrictions. This is starting to become a much bigger deal for me. The agency I work for is considering severely limiting outside access to any of our boxes from outside our network, even development boxes. However the precursor data for our processing is publicly available to me at home. If I could have the bandwidth to pull in the raw data I could run a local development box at home and continue development even when I can't get to work. (I work around DC and today for instance is a snow emergency day.) I'm not saying that fiber is for everyone, but there are those of us out there who are interested and aren't waiting for prices to drop to $50 a month. =)
"A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on." - Sir Winston Churchill
I'll state my position straight out by saying that I would love to have fiber to my house. There are a few reasons for and against it.
I know that unless the phone company can charge you alot more they won't run it to your house. And deregulation.... blah blah.... bells.... blah blah.....
But there are some advantages. The first is that some phone company should hook up with a cable company. This would give the phone company that owned the lines the ability to have a new market (cable tv.) Not only that, but they can offer the high res stuff on their fiber network only (and only have the lower res stuff on the legacy network of the cable company they bought.)
The other advantage of have just fiber is you reduce the # of lines to a house to 1 and always 1. (most houses nowadays have 6-pair ran to them with at least 1 pair bad.) Which means that your not maintaining multiple lines. (And you don't have to train your people on line shares and simular tech.)
But here's the problem: you only have 1 line, when it goes out everythings gone. Which means that they'd probally need to guarentee 1 day turn around for everyone. (which SBC does for businesses right now from what I understand.)
The other advantage is extreamly high speed I-net access, which can now be billed per GB transfered at a standard utility rate like your gas or electric. Or pay some ungodly unlimited fee or choke it back to what bandwidth the person pays for. But the first option seems the best for speeds like this.
I seem to recall a certain Billy G, or B Gates if you prefer, say we only needed 640k of ram a few years back. Now if I told you i had 640k of ram in my box, you'd cackle at me like I proclaimed Win3.1 better than Red Hat 8.0. Today we probably DONT need fiber, but tomorrow, who knows? I know if I could double my bandwidth I'd jump at the chance (cable modem currently, DSL really isnt an option at the moment).
Maybe instead of stifling technology with idiotic "its fast enough" thoughts you should think before you type.
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
i remember reading a few years ago that the still state owned telecommunications company were installing fibre to every door. Anybody got the lowdown on how it worked out?
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Although you can actually get fibre (100Mbs) very easily/cheaply in Japan due to the fact that most people live in large cities, ADSL is still the most popular connection to the Internet and looks to stay that way for a while.
Most ADSL connections in Japan now run at a very respectable 12Mbps over a normal phone line. And in fact ADSL is promoted much more than fibre these days, which is the reverse of a few years ago when NTT were saying that fibre was going to be the next step up from ISDN.
When ADSL first came out here it was 1.5Mbps and the speed has been doubling every 1-2 years, so I should imagine we`ll still see significant speed increases for a few years yet.
then finally, everyone - plebs and lusers alike - will understand what the internet is all about.
fast, streaming porn, on a 24/7 connection. yee-haw.
The wise follow a damned path, for to know is to be forsaken.
Having become far more intimately involved with the xDSL provisioning process than I'd ever wanted to become, having spent countless hours talking and working with ISPs, CLECs, ILECs, regulators and politicians, having spent untold hours reading analysis of the broadband market, I long ago came to this conclusion: the ILECs are undoubtedly the single greatest obstacle to broadband deployment and advances in broadband services to the customer.
Fiber to the house, a single machine or TV per coax, all laid new. If you are lucky enough to live in their service area they are EXCELLENT. Their service makes comcast, and at&t look STOOPID. We take phone, cable, and web from them at a very reasonable rate with a nice discount for multiple services. Our cable rate is 20% lower than at&t and 17% below comcast. There is absolutely NO COMPARISON between net services...ASTOUND wins in all measurable categories.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
We live in a rural area too far for cable to reach. Perfect, I installed a 1 ft square antenna under the eaves and pointed it to my nearby wireless ISP service. If we wanted to get broadcast TV, we would just hook up the satellite dish that the previous owners left. Cell phones work fine for us(at least AT&T does). I think a community based ISP service using wireless technology is the future. Another example of corporations shooting themselves in the foot...
Waa waa waa. You sound just like my boss.
I suppose that when I get there you'll want me to actaully _do_ work, too...
Yep, that's what I thought...
Okay I know that I am going to get flamed by this but. . .
It seems like we expect our government to provide us with the infrastructure we need to operate our society: we expect there to be some way to solve disputes(the courts), we expect that we will have someone to protect our interests(police at home, military abroad), and we expect to have streets to drive on, water to drink, and sewers to take things away that we don't want to see anymore. I know that some of these things are privatized in various parts of our nation but it seems to me that we should just come to some agreement as to what society needs to operate and have our government provide those things. There I said it let the flames begin.
Would it be so bad if, like streets, the government made sure that there was an information feed to our homes?
Just a thought
Extra bandwidth is not the universal pancea.
If I browse a website that runs on a T1 link, there is no point me having greater bandwidth than a T1 link.
So say Joe Public gets 10Mb ethernet to his home - is it really going to improve things if the server bandwidth is not upgraded?
Why is there this persistan assumption that the last mile is the ONLY problem?
The current economics of ISPs works because they can share an expensive guarenteed rate pipe amongst a number of customers.
If the bandwidth to the customer becomes comparable to the bandwidth to the ISP, and the customer demands the use of that bandwidth 24/7, then the dynamics change and the price rises.
Over in the UK we are already seeing bandwidth restrictions on DSL ISPs, because 24/7 users are saturating the ISP's pipe.
Its only going to work if the backhaul services used by ISPs also increase at the same capacity\cost ratio.
"Maybe at some point state and Federal regulators will realize that the Bells are the problem, not the solution."
OK, I don't know enough about the phone situation in the US to comment on the subject, but is this line REALLY necessary? I mean it's flat out incitement and misdirection--personal opinion masquerading as factual content.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Obviousally none of you have ever had to work with fiber.
Ever splice a fiber? if you are lucky enough to have a fusion splicer (Only $80,000.00USD) it's easy. how about adding a connector to it?
Quit wishing for something that is a complete and utter bitch to work with. Besides, The telco's and even the internet backbone it's self isnt using the full capacity of the fiber they have, why would anyone want 10,000 base T internet acces only to stop at the POP location and drop back to the ultra slow backbones or worse yet T1 only for most sites, T3 if you are lucky. and many more even slower than the T1.
fiber into the home is a waste of time, money and resources. do you really want your cable modem to go up in cost from a paltry $130.00 to $1300.00 because of the added costs of the laser, splitter/combiner/ etc?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Who needs to run cables, copper, fiber, whatever, when all this can be done through wireless. A mesh grid of 802.11(g) connections are super cheap, super fast and can be implemented in the next 10 years without billions of investment in infrastructure. face it. the wired phone companies as we know them are dead. they just haven't realized it yet
in the Japan, already exists access broadband for home, what get 100Mbps of download,You dont believed??? Ok, but this is the very true.Best regards. Blueice88
Why not simply break up the costs? In a large city or even suburbia, start by getting fiber out to an area, then once you're close enough to make it a reasonable one-time installation fee, (or perhaps payable in installments over a given time frame, like most telephone installs are now), have the people who want fibre to their house get it.
This kind of thing is *exactly* an example of technology that the high-paying bleeding edge early adopters can viably support, since their big bucks will bring the fibre closer and therefore cheaper to install to the common people. Aim at the gamers first. You could probably convince the people who pay hundreds of dollars on video cards, cooling gear, and their existing bandwidth to spend, say $2000 over the course of a year plus bandwidth costs (I already pay $100/month for my overpriced 1.5mbit dsl with a subnet of static IPs and phone service, I'd pay $250/mo for the first year if the bandwidth actually lived up to its promise).
Of course, all of this requires the expectation of actually making money off of the venture in the end, once everyone has fibre in their homes. And that seems to be the key issue in this article, that if they build this, in the end they have to essentially give it away because of the regulations.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Instead of paying the Baby Bells would you accept a moderate increase in your local taxes?
My hometown of Knoxville needed more high tech businesses in order to increase it's job market and keep up with the number of people moving into the area, so the mayor ( as a person he sucks, but as a city admin he rules) went to California during it's power troubles and handed out flashlights asking companies like Cisco what Knoxville could do to get them to move there.
The answer he recieved was rather simple, cheaper bandwidth. They already had huge tax breaaks for companies moving to their area, land was cheap as is power, so he got a small tax increase on properties ( 0.3%) and just spent $11 million on Fiber for the entire industrial area. Now the best part of his plan was this, the city owned the fiber so it set the prices, local ISP's could very cheaply tap into, and for a larger increase in the business tax they would string it towards neighborhoods, and smaller more commercial businesses.
I have no idea how things are going to work out, they are laying the cables right now using interstate and highway construction to build their backbone (if you've ever been to Knoxvegas you understand that that is the best way, they haven't stopped working on the freakin' interstate since '76). And it's hard to tell how the local ISP's are going to go considering that if the tap into it their taxes will go up, but they won't have to lease off of BellSouth.
So my question is simple, would you pay you city government to do it for you?
TANSTAAFL
One of the things often overlooked in the last mile debate is the effects that laying large amounts of Copper/Fiber/Etc in a local area. Not only are there cost associated with physically laying the cable but also longterm cost carried by the municipalities.
.Com boom from laying cable. In essence all the road paches are breaking up and roads built to last 10 to 20 years are failing after only 3-7.
One of the biggest problems here in Atlanta is the condition of the roads and the sewer system. Now, on the surface this may seem to not correlate to the laying cable but quite the opposite is true. Recently our new Mayor/ Admin team hired several consultants to review the condidtions of the roads (which anyone here can tell you are horrible) and to find out why our sewer upgade project is so far behind. The reason... the massive amount of incorrectly laid, documented or bad road repair work done during the
The sewer and water project are held up by many problems, but a major one is the fact that as they go to lay new pipe they are find cable bundles that are unlabled and even if they do find out who owns them they dont know who controlls them any longer as many companies are bankrupt or in reorganization.
The question becomes who has to bear the burden of cost of resolving the problems and questions? Do the taxpayers of a given town have to carry the cost of Big Business run amok laying miles of Fiber and Copper all over towns with little the local goverments can do to stop them?
One of the little known provisions of the Telco Act of 1996 was that local goverments HAD TO give access/ right of way to new cable runs. For months the streets here in Atlanta were torn up and traffic was snarled- and there was nothing the City/ State could really do because each time they took action the FCC or courts would stop them. In fact several cable pull sites were left abandoned after the patron companies had long gone bankrupt, leaving the city/ taxpayers with the burden of doing road repair and close up work.
So, while there are many options out there for the last mile, and Fiber or anyother may seem good often overlooked is the cost to the local infrastructure and municipalites.
Just my 2 cents on a big topic with little results!
Huh?
I build a house in a new neighborhood, which was outfitted by Qwest with pure fiber to every home. At first I thought this was cool... but four years later, nobody's offering any type of service on it (other than dial-tone) and I can't get DSL because my line's not copper.
Fortunately, some local guys (about a mile away) have set up a 802.11b service, so I can get my Mbps... otherwise I'd be screwed!
That DSL is not availalbe in my area because at some point in the past my area was swithed to Fiber. I live within distance but am just not able to get. When I lived 1.5 miles down the road I had it...
Also the local Cable company AT&T doesn't have Cable access in my area yet, all around my area, just not my area.
So I am stuck with a satellite connection. Which SUCKS compared to DSL. Well everything sucks comared to DSL. I have had ISDN, 2 different DSL providers, and 3 different cable providers in the past 5-6 years. Now that I bought a house I get stuck, go figure.
The phone company DSL tech told me to call and complain over, and over, and over about my line. He said they will test, and test, and test, and eventually I can get them to switch me to copper and then tadda! I can get DSL. Any truth to that?
Ok here is a plan. We have to realize that plain-old-telephone services (POTS) is the bread and butter of the telecoms. Only when this is threatened will they get off their butts to deploy broadband. Require the telecoms to provide broadband availibilty to all new construction/new customers. If they say they can't do it, then forbid them from providing retail POTS to the *NEW* customers in that area and require them to lease out the trunk connections and let somebody else service the new customers. As there is more and more turn-over of customers/new construction, the stodgy old telecoms will either have to start providing broadband or go extinct for lack of new customers to replace the old ones. Meanwhile, the up-and-coming telecoms will be able to get a foot in the door with POTS at least. This will be especially dramitic in new subdivisions as it would completely exclude the monopolies unless they provide broadband. With the critical mass of a entire subdivsion (some of which are small cities in themselves), the newer companies might be able to get enough customers to cover the cost of deploying broadband.
Why go to work? There are many reason to stay home.
I takes about a gallon of gas to get to work, and another back home. I have a compuer at home that I can run for far less energy than that. Enviormental concerns make staying home often a big win.
I live in Minnesota where we have to deal with snow. In most cases you can drive to work, while it is snowing, but it is not safe. The less people on the road when the weather turns bad, the better for those who must drive (emergency services). We get bad weather often enough up here that no company can afford to tell everyone to stay home everytime it gets a little dangerious. If instead we have a choice, the company can just cancle all on-site meetings, declare it a work day where work from home is prefered, they can get all the work done without potentialy killing someone.
When support calls at 3am for help with a serious problem they don't want to wait for me to get up and drive to the office (an hour) when I could go to the computer and start solving the problem in minutes. Okay, this shouldn't happen often, but if your not willing to get up at 3am to solve a critical customer problem in your area of expertise, then you are worthless - just don't let it get out of hand.
When the problems get really hard I get more done at home. At the office there are distractions, people coming by to ask questions. Sure I can blow them off, but I loose my train of thought. At home there are no distractions to deal with. (Not true for everyone of course)
Illness is a problem. Sure I have sick leave, but I'd prefer to avoid using it (Extra vacation). When I can't get out of bed fine. When I'm contagious, but feel up to moving, then I'd prefer to do something. I've went to work somewhat sick, because I didn't feel like staying home that day. I've worked from home many of those days and not spread whatever I had. When you consider that many people have children who get sick while the parent is perfectly able to work, and it makes more sense to have the ability to work from home.
And last, if insperation strikes in the middle of the night, I want to get it down then, not hope I remember in the morning. This is a two edged sword, some middle of the night insperations are worthless, but if you use version control you can just back them out. (Though I don't recomend making a habit of these ideas unless you can take the night hours off your normal day shift, otherwise you loose)
In 2000, at the high point of the .com thing, my company moved into a brand new building. First tenants and all that. I personally fought with BellSouth and lost - the assholes pulled 200 sets of twisted pair copper into this brand new building.
I was 40 meters away from the long haul fiber running down the rail road right of way. Look, but don't touch.
I explained to them that it cost them more to pull copper (labor same, fiber cheaper). They said they've always done it this way. I explained to them that they haven't always done it this way - that T1s were invented in the 1960s and that they've only been doing it "this way" since the late 1960s. Blank stares.
The bottom line is, the BBells have a monopoly on the last mile. As long as they have it, ain't nothing gonna change. And that moroon (thank's Bugs) Powell (ain't he the spittin' image of his daddy) is in the BBells' collective pocket.
Boys and Girls, you're going to retire without fiber to your homes. Either get mad, or get used to it.
When DirectvDSL died, I tried switching to Speakeasy. In this area, DirectvDSL was on Bell South's hardware, but Speakeasy was on Covad's stuff. Either way, the loop belongs to BellSouth, but it meant switching my DSL line to a different CO.
...which is exactly what I did. Hard to fault the player when the real problem is the game...
I had line problems on the Covad end-- the distance meant I should have easily been able to get 768k, maybe even a megabit, but I couldn't guarantee even 256k, sometimes I couldn't get a signal at all.
Since the loop's owned by Bellsouth, Covad can't fix it, nor can they require Bellsouth to do so as long as it carries voice traffic "acceptibly".
Now, it's easy to say, "Damn Bellsouth for giving Covad crappy lines and then not fixing them!" But then, given that Bellsouth's being forced by deregulation (now how's that for a misnomer?) to sell that line to Covad at below what it actually costs them to operate phone lines, it's no wonder they have no desire to make Covad's life easier, especially when it's quite likely that if it sucks I'll switch back to some ISP that's using BellSouth hardware.
You spelled "pursuing" wrong on your resume.
www.utopianet.org
i happen to live in one of the founding member city's and cant wait for this thing to start rolling out. funny part is its not that expensive (from a goverment point of view) the way they are rolling the bonds to build it they will be able to pay the bonds off without raising tax's but by using the revenue from the network itself and in 20years the city's will be able to applie this revenue to other things. also due to federal/state regulation the city's themselves can not roll out services on this fiber they have to lease the fiber at wholesale to other providers so anyone can get on this system and cheaply
I'm Brian Fellows!!
I dont like the phone company.
The phone comapny is big and scary.
If I say bad things about the phone company, people will think I'm smart.
I'm Brian Fellows!!
You are comparing apples to oranges. In Taiwan, you have a large population packed into a very small area. The population density is just unheard of here in the United States. The United States has 270 million (thereabouts) of people spread out across half a continent.
The article talks about using existing copper more efficiently. It also goes on to say how Congress seems to ignore these innovations. If just laying tons of fiber was the solution, why is there all this dark fiber in the ground?
The "last mile" (the connection from the home to the central office) is always the most expensive to upgrade. Many connections are old and in rural areas won't support more than 28.8kbps. The question the article poses is simple...is fiber to the home the solution?
In my area at least, the cable company does not have a monopoly. I live in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where SBC and Cox cable have been duking it out for about 2 years now.
Cox is winning, for the most part, because SBC is more heavily regulated. SBC has offered some nice all-in-one packages (local phone, long distance with 1000 free minutes 7 cents a min after, wireless, dsl, and voicemail) for about $100.
Also you say that highways are the same as water and power. This isn't true in the USA. Highways are the sole responsibilty of the government. Water and power are regulated as natural monopolies (in the vast majority of the country this is a better setup than having 3 water companies to choose from.) Depending on your state, these could be heavily regulated or regulated little. In my state, Oklahoma, we have a very tough Corporation Commission (read: PUC.) Just recently they forced both SBC and Oklahoma Natural Gas to give refunds for overcharging (from not buying at the lowest rate possible.)
Yes, something very ugly is going on the the US telecom market. Here we call it the killing fields. (WorldCom's largest headquarters is in Tulsa.) We also recently lost Williams Communications and dozens of small startup firms. There was an article posted on slashdot about 6 months ago how the telecoms overbuilt drastically over demand (Worldcom spreading lies about how much demand there actually was, and the telecoms buying into it.)
Right now we are in an adjustment. Things are shaking down. Recessions are good for this because it makes companies be more responsible and more profitable. It is painful (I can't find a job now) but has to happen from time to time.
Lots of people are concentrating on the physical cable and its associated costs to install. What about the switching infrastrucure costs?
A typical voice conversation requires around 64k/s of bandwidth. Now consider what type of switching infrastructure would be required if everyone had 100Mbps fiber at their house. Do you think that Verizon is going to canabalize their T1 buisinesses? At $400/mo. for a local loop, I don't think so.
Recap:
1. Consumer/small business grade high-bandwidth fiber costs alot to install.
2. It requires that the telcos spend mega-bucks to upgrade their switching gear (possibly to photonic switching gear...$cha-ching$)
3. It will canabalize their high-margin T1 business. (No there really isn't a viable competitor to this if you want static IP).
4. And to top it all off, they've got to charge $40-$80/mo, or no consumers will buy it. (Some businesses will, but they are already spedning $800/mo. for T1s.)
Higher costs and lower revenue. Now, explain why Verizon would WANT to do this?
-ted
This is not just a grrl thing...there have been lots of consumer studies about this which have basically made the various and sundry phone companies give up on the idea, even though the meme has been propagated in Sci-Fi even beyond the point where the phone companies all decided it wouldn't fly.
People want their privacy when they use the phone. Voice-only provides a measure of privacy that voice plus picture doesn't.
If you want to be able to send cute pix of baby to Grandma, or do video phone sex or whatever, that's why Goddess made the webcam and various pieces of software like NetMeeting, CUSeeMe and whatever GNU flavor of the month that does that sort of thing. This is as it should be. If you want to create "Return of the Daughter of Jennicam" so be it...it's not my cup of joe.
"But you've already got a DVD. It lasts forever....In the digital world, we don't need back-ups..."
-- Jack Valenti
Actually cities aren't allowed to limit Which I pointed out in this "ask slashdot". Laws do change you know.
try mlview and you will be a happy man.
http://www.medialogic.it/projects/mlview/
... copper is owned by you!, 56365, 00.html
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282
From the article:
"Industry giant Verizon Communications Inc., the dominant local phone provider from Maine to Virginia, has run engineering tests in which DSL speeds were increased from a maximum of 1.5 megabits per second to 7 megabits per second, without additional fiber."
Now, can someone explain to me why Verizon told me personally that they would NEVER be able to get faster than 384/384 to my house. They told me that they could not offer any higher BECAUSE of the 26gauge wire between myself and the C.O., and they they NEVER plan to upgrade that wire.
So, if Verizon is so sure that they can not offer faster than 384k, why are they saying they can offer 7Meg without upgrading the infrastructure?
Malachi
http://www.google.com/profiles/malachid
I think that one of the big questions that underlies the problems we're having with the RBOCs (and in other areas) is: who owns infrastructure that a private company built while they were operating under a government granted monopoly?
If we can clearly answer that question, then the other issues clear up a bit.
If you think "well, a private company built it, so they own it", then the FCC and everyone else should just get the hell out.
But if you think "well, that government granted monopoly was equivalent to a government subsidy, so the people are at least part owners of the resulting infrastructure", then the FCC has every right to step in and mandate the cost of accessing that infrastructure.
You know what sucks about fiber to the desktop? Moving your computer and *SNAP* $15 for a new patch cable.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Really? I'm amazed that in 6 months of complaining Bellsouth could never get my DSL connection stable enough to play online games. And I could throw a rock from my backdoor and hit the local switch.
My Comcast Cable modem, OTOH....
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
I was interested to read in the article that FTTH is utterly impossible now, and may be impossible for the next 100 years. While it may be impossible for today's commercial telecom providers, which have to satisfy Wall Street's ultra-short-term financial perspective, municipal utilities can afford to take a longer view.
FTTH is real, and it is growing. Although it is near the cutting edge of technology now, that edge is moving forward at light speed (sorry, I couldn't resist). There are dozens of FTTH systems in the USA right now, and many more being considered. In Concord, MA, a new system is being proposed for a vote in April. Although the question of FTTH vs. HFC (copper) is still a close one, the long-term view must favor FTTH as an almost "future-proof" technology.
[BTW, if you live in Concord, go to Town Meeting in April and vote YES on Article 26!]
As I mentioned above, I already have a cable modem, though not all cable services are equal.
For instance, my service is 768k/128k, for about $40/month.
Then there's the fact that they filter inbound port 80 traffic, which blows goats.
Also, if you'd bothered to read any of the other posts in the thread, you'd have discovered that Internet delivered over the fiber need not consist of DSL service... It could be raw ethernet, in either 10 or 100 mbps flavor.
Besides, this thread is laden with the benefits of COMPETITION. Right now, I have none. Cable is the only high-speed Internet access available to me. If the cable company decides that I'm going to start paying $100/month, where then shall I turn?
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
No, it's not tied to inflation, it's tied to the fluctuating prices of gold and silver.
Telcos in the U.S. have always been 20+ years behind the rest of the world. In Europe, they had ISDN in the mid 1970's. It wasn't available widely here until the late 90's (and it still has all the problems of a 'new' service here). Up until ten years ago, the central office in my town used a Strowger step switch. That's right, technology from the late 1800s. Modeming through it was a nightmare! Most large cities had crossbar exchanges until at least the mid 1980's while they were pretty much gone in most european cities ten years earlier. Phone service in Europe is pretty much a government thing, while here in the U.S. it's corporate, and those corporations are going to squeeze every last dime out of the old equipment until the cost of maintaining, repairing it etc. is higher then replacing it. Only then do they open the wallet. An attitude like that is based on 'old yankee thrift', which while it worked great 100 years ago, is outdated in today's world.
Verizon told me that my company qualified for 7100/768 service, because we were only 6000 feet from the C.O. When it was installed, I was getting about half that. They came and tested and said "Well, there's too much 'hot stuff' (T-1's, etc.) in the lines that run down the street, and all you can get is 1.5/386". When I reminded them that that was what I was UPGRADING FROM, their response was 'oh'.
What in the hell good is it to have fiber running to your door when nobody's doing anything with it!? Here in Boston's North End, we've had to deal with this crap since 1998, when they lavished us with fiber, exhaulting its benefits over traditional copper.
/me takes a pill
Now, 5 years later (5 goddamned years!), with this whole "internet" thing in full swing, and I still can't get high-speed internet access. Sorry, doesn't work without good-ol' fashioned copper cables, even if I am just a few hundred feet from the CO. FUCK.
And naturally, our one-and-only monopoly on cable, AT&T, isn't offering it's much-touted Broadband package, either. If I see one more advertisement for AT&T Broadband I'm gonna throw down, I swear it. How can they advertise a service that's not even available to me? Isn't that false advertising?
"Maybe at some point state and Federal regulators will realize that the Bells are the problem, not the solution."
State and federal regulators gave ma bell the exclusive right to run phone cable in the first place. They gave the Bells their monopoly. The made the Bells what they are today. The quoted statement therefore is completely stupid. Regulators need to realize that THEY are the problem, not the solution.
Vote for Pedro
Even now, there should be some kind of controls in place to protect against worms and trojans from home users - it's in everyones best interest (ISPs, web hosts, carriers), even if Joe Home user that's infected with the trojan doesn't know or care to know. What's going to happen when DDoS attackers get 5 times as much bandwidth to play with?
Speak before you think
Perhaps your knowledge of Motown got scrambled by those singing raisins.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
On the other hand, perhaps you have confused the Temptations with the more obscure 60's group, Red Glow and the Filaments.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Someone asks why people would want fiber to the home, someone answers why he would want it, then you flame him for not representing the average Joe. Chill out!
SBC Negotiating to Buy DirecTV From General Motors ( NYTimes )
It is indeed looking like telecomm is eyeing tele-entertainment, just as other have suggested here already.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
It was a bad idea for the money system to be tied to gold and silver.
Brilliant comment!
I mean who cares if you've got fiber if they're just going to throttle you to death like they do now? At home in NY I'm lucky, I can get 1m up 10m down (real world) cable. Out at school in SF, lucky is getting better than 144k/144k IDSL for $99/month. You might get 128/1.5 of which you see about 90/400. It's not that they can't deliver the bandwidth, you can pay ridiculous amounts for "business class" DSL which uses the same line and same modem from the same providers, just without speed locking. Why do we need a faster medium when they won't even let the existing medium run at full potential?
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
*Grin* Yeah, I know, but that's if you're using a VF-45 type connector and don't have to pay $40 for it. I was actually envisioning more of a (at least in the short term) conversion to RJ-45 copper of some type, kind of like a cable modem with conversion from Coax to CatX.
Damn man, I'm an amateur/hobbiest at this stuff, and I canNOT stand 100mbit in full duplex moving my PVR (I own 2, my stuff, I don't share, blah blah) stuff to my editing machine. I'm looking to use firewire but heard that isn't much of a boost and from what I've seen on another's setup that is getting annoying; I'll probably look into firewire800 when the PC cards start coming out in a few more months, but more likely, I'm going to get 1000mbit over copper or going for the yank and pull 5.25" 3.5" drive cases.
And my stuff isn't even RAID'd yet, and I compare the *actual* network copy times to copying over a UDMA133 bus. There is a rather big difference, more than likely due to the overhead of networking (and probably some OS cruft in there). If I RAID my drives, the network bottleneck is going to become more apparant.
We all would love shitfast connections to the internet right out of our bedrooms, there's no denying it.. however I believe that you should pay for the line, you should pay for the size of allocated bandwidth, but there should be no way you pay traffic costs.
Here in Australia, competition between small Telstra wholesale reselling DSL ISP's has brought the amount of "included traffic" to a bearable state. I have always thought it ridiculous that traffic should be metered. Energy, yes. Water, yes. There's nothing actually being consumed on the delivery of the traffic, so it should -not- be chargeable.
What, do I need to explain more?
Naturally, SBC and its ilk would rather keep all of this business for themselves, rather than just get a little piece of everyone's. In the latter scenario, they're assuming the risk of keeping everyone's networks up, but only getting a little piece of the action. In the former scenario, they're only responisible for a fraction of the network, but getting a huge markup on it. So it's technically more profitable, which looks better on a balance sheet.
What are you crazy? I use Cowboy Neal to get my data:)!
"Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet." General James Mattis
What you really need to consider is your 33mhz PCI bus, which your running those "1000 Mbit" cards through, if you get a gigabit network. Do the math, I don't want to do it for you. Take the speed of your PCI bus, not your FSB, your actual PCI bus, then do the math at 32 bits and see why I say Gigabit is currently a waste of money.
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
If the automobile had followed the same development as the computer, a
Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per per gallon,
and explode once a year killing everyone inside.
-- Robert Cringely, InfoWorld
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...