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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.
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!!!!
"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!
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"
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.
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
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.
Thanks for these intriguing comments Mr. Gates:)
Worst. Sig. Ever.
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
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
No wife sorry.. But I do have 52 different time share girlfriends.. Different girl every week!
The maintenance fees sure do add up though..
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!
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)
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
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
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
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!