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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.
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.
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.
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.'"
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.
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.
a) Do you have a monopoly on your wife?
No. She can still go fuck whoever she wants and I could not stop her. Monopolies are about control.
b) What if the South had won the Civil War? We'd have an oligopoly of 50, instead of a monopoly of one.
Not that simple. The post-CW federal government was _nowhere close_ in size or scope to the one that has been created over the last hundred years, primarily by states (and the people in them) relinquishing more and more in favor of the federal money teat. I recently even had to remind someone on here that the federal government does not, and cannot, grant our basic freedoms to us. They were ready to give that up too, or already had in their heads anyway.
c) The government has a monopoly on money, you can't create your own, and yet you continue to spend it, without cause or care.
Yes I do care. It's the teeming, debt-laden masses who don't, as they've been duped into thinking that way by the federal government. Which is precisely why the founders were vehemently opposed to any sort of fiat system whatsoever. The US is just now entering the period of come-uppance for the last century worth of unfettered fiscal brigandry and charlatanism. History furnishes not one single example of a fiat system remaining uncorrupted by those entrusted with stewarding it.
How exactly are monopolies in any way good again?
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
Actually, the examples given are rather poor. Seeing as how a) That's a business deal. The wife agreed to buy exclusively from you. b) A government is a public institution, not a private institution. c) We do not purchase money. There is no product being exchanged. Besides, it's ours, and through Congress, we have decided that it's the gov't's responsibility to manufacture and distribute money. Really, it's a stretch to say they're monopolies. If you don't live the gov't, you can easily move to another country.
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
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'.
"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
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!