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.
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!!!!
Monopolies are always a bad idea? Hmmmm, that get's me to thinking:
a) Do you have a monopoly on your wife?
b) What if the South had won the Civil War? We'd have an oligopoly of 50, instead of a monopoly of one.
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.
Monopolies have a place, history has shown, as government took over industries to provide the basic infrastructure until such time as they could be privatized. I'm sure others could think of more examples you live with everyday that constitutes to your high standard of living...
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
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.
>> 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.
The best rebuttal I've seen to this argument asks: if incumbents must sell at below their cost, why do we not see one RBOC go into another RBOC's territory and compete with the second as a CLEC since this would ostensibly be cheaper than expanding their own network?
83chrise.nuf
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.
They deregulated the power companies in California, where are we now?
What happened in California wasn't deregulation; it was something that the politicians called "deregulation" but had about as much to do with real deregulation as Bill Clinton had to do with protecting the honor of chaste young women.
Please don't blame California's power problems on deregulation. Deregulation of electric power has never been tried in California.
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll
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!
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