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Do We Still Need Telcos (and ISPs)?
eraserewind asks: "Are telecom providers and ISPs going to continue to be necessary in the future? Why are we all paying subscriptions for communicating? What I want is a global extremely-high-speed ad-hoc wireless data & voice network, where the only entry cost is a mobile phone (or newtork card or whatever). Devices communicate peer to peer, or routed via other people's idle devices. Remember there is no subscriptions, so don't expect to piggy-back on someone's paid for DSL bandwidth. What are the technological barriers? What kind of protocols would you need? What hardware advances? How would you solve problems of geographic isolation? Are there theoretical, political or economic reasons it couldn't work?"
Agreed. I'm glad it's free to run giant fiber optic cables across the ocean. Can't see any costs there. Or fiber into your house. Digging up roads to run lines into peoples houses costs pennies. Or randio transmitters, those big towers are cheap. You can build 'em outta lincoln logs, I heard.
" Are there theoretical, political or economic reasons it couldn't work?"
Uhhhh, as long as the equipment to transmit wirelessly and the electricity to power out isn't free (not counting the multitude of people to roll it out and support it), you're always going to be paying something.
Hard to believe that a question devoid of basic Economics 101 would appear on Slashdot.
So, you want everybody to be restricted by the low-bandwith links common for last-mile today, no fast websites, and non-robust routing?
I don't think you understand the value of redundant OC48 backbones, BGP4 and IS-IS routing, and colocated servers on gigE links.
Your ad-hoc networks would be OK for MAN's (Metropolitan Area Networks), but are simply unusable for anykind of backbone.
"You've got an invalid haircut" -Warren Zevon - Life'll Kill Ya
The big problem with this is, that without some "authority" moderating use of the "common" bandwidth, manufacturers of comm hardware have every incentive to build devices that hog bandwith, and other common resources, until the whole system becomes unusable.
-- Rich
Free your mind and your Ass will follow -- George Clinton
1. freeloader problem--your privately designed cell phones will be replaced with bandwidth suckers that don't do replays. No controlling body, so can't stop it.
2. no "backbone"--hopping accross phones works around the city (maybe), but how many hops will it take to get to.. japan? and don't forget that there's some countable amount of milliseconds per transfer--to get accross the nation is a lot of cell-phone coverage sized hops. Plus, we have to go around the grand canyon.
You would have a long time with islands of well connected individuals. And these islands wouldn't be connected to each other. I.E. how would cities be connected? Through a series of wireless cards in some farmers computer? I don't think so.
Excessive forking causes un-wanted children.
With all due respect, this has to be the dumbest 'Ask Slashdot' topic I've ever read. Of course you don't NEED telco's or ISPs. Unless of course you want internet and phone service. Since the majority of people who have internet are still on dialup I think your are atleast 10 years to early for a global wireless solution where everyone peers off each other, if this ever happens at all.
what we need is a new moderation option for the original submission: "-1 Fucking Idiot"
Technical problems?
Yes. Wireless doesn't have the bandwidth to provide service everywhere everytime for everyone. Assuming the hardware was in place, there would be limits to how much traffic each node could pass and the aggregate bandwidth betweem all the nodes wouldn't be as great as that provided by fibre links.
Political problems?
ILECs, CLECs, Cable Co's, Govenments, etc., take your pick. It's an idyllic concept but too many people will want their piece of their pie.
Economic problems?
The system (were it technically workable) would require a large installed base before it would work AT ALL. Who's going to go out and buy new gear in the hopes the system will reach critical mass and become viable? Let's not forget the incumbants lobying the above point to keep from losing out on this point.
While the concept is certainly interesting, and could probably work on limited scales (p2p locally, then into a Supernode for long distance. I seem to remember Ricochet used something similar, with data hopping across subscriber nodes to reach the main towers) there's no way it'll work in the current social, economic, political, or technical climate.
Never attribute to malice what can as easily be the result of incompetence...
Let's not forget the satellites. They're not cheap either. And you would want a central regulatory agency to prevent jackasses (e.g., spammers) from hogging bandwidth for their own purposes. Basically what the guy wants is nationalization of all telcos, so that your taxes pay for everything. Except everywhere that's been tried, it's been a disaster (like waiting weeks to get a phone hookup).
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Criticisms about e. asking for a free lunch, or forgetting economics 101 are missing the point: can wireless technology evolve to a point where our dependency on land-lines is greatly reduced? And can technology be created that accomodates such a world, where every computer is both a transceiver and a relay for traffic?
I would strongly contend the answer is yes. Why? Several trends contribute to the answer.
There's more that would suggest that ISPs and Telcos of the future will either not exist or be radically different, but I haven't eaten my supper yet, so I'm too tired to articulate more thoroughly. It's easy to see that telcos will consolidate around providing high-capacity long-distance links for businesses--wireless will lag beyond land-lines for a long time on both counts will win. And ISPs? In a pervasively networked world, where many nodes are mobile (and many users may switch among multiple, personal nodes), some things have to remain at fixed, well-known nodes--leaving ISPs to consolidate around various forms of hosting and co-location. It may be that in the future, that's what happens to telcos and ISPs: network providers that offer co-location and hosting services.
But, you've put your finger on a major problem. We'll still need long haul carriers, sattelite, cables under the ocean, big radio transmitters, etc., for the large distances between population concentrations.
Someone would have to pay these costs. Right now, the line costs are pretty much shared by all to some extent as so much traffic goes over the public networks, but this peer-to-peer system might bring about a scenario where those who access long haul services pay more. There couldn't be automated routing to the big long haul pipes from the peer devices without a good way to charge it back to the user.
Still, I could see where there could be less reliance on long haul lines than there is now. Local peer networks might bring about some economies. Right now, if you connect to a someone in your own town there's a good chance that your packets go through a dozen hops and travel thousands of miles, using lots of fiber. A system that really tried to route locally first might be more efficient and require less long haul infrastructure.
I don't see how it could be practical if everyone didn't kick in some for long haul access, though.
Because infrastructure and reliability costs money(no no, trust me, I get more insightful below. Well, maybe not insightful. It's hard to answer this story insightfully, I just point out the facts.) Communications mediums are WORTHLESS if they are unreliable, which is one of the reasons cell phones took decades to "take off"(realize that it's been at least 3 decades since the cell phone was invented, and only in the last 5-6 has there really been a cell phone boom, at least in the US. Realize that the # complaint with cell phones is still how unreliable they are.)
Devices communicate peer to peer, or routed via other people's idle devices.(snip) What are the technological barriers?
Well, you asked, so here goes:
There are also some hidden consequences, like "everyone's mobile device is no longer idle, it's processing someone else's packets, so its battery life goes into the toilet".
How would you solve problems of geographic isolation?
That's just it- you'd need wires/fiber/something...and that would cost money. But, reliability would be far better- so people would opt for wired connections they had to pay for. Oops, right back where you started.
Also related- the reason high-speed access costs so much money in the US is because of geographic isolation and population density. It's no surprise that several Asian countries have DSL service in the megabyte-per-second range to your door for $10-20/mo; after all, you're probably in a huge apartment complex, in a city.
If the population density isn't high enough to support pricing high speed access low enough, I doubt you'll have enough nodes to even occasionally get any kind of connectivity to anything else- much less guarantee it.
Back to the cell phone example- look at how many billions(if not trillions?) of dollars have been poured into the cellphone network(which in turn is reliant upon a larger wired network.) I don't care what network you're on, soon as you get a little bit beyond the suburbs, off a major highway- forget it, you're screwed.
Are there theoretical, political or economic reasons it couldn't work?
Well, for one, if you did telephone calls over this "system", I'd move to another country. When I pick up the phone, I damn well expect a dialtone, because, oh, say, my house could be on fire. There are no doubt thousands of o
Please help metamoderate.
Why does this statement remind me of that woman on the Donahue show who stood up and said something to the effect of "Why do they always want to make the taxpayer pay for things? The government should pay for them!"
Forget the whales - save the babies.
If metropolitan areas were linked by a peer system - where the "price" of having a telephone or a being able to view the popular media of that culture (in whatever form, whether written or not) were to buy a box for a couple hundred bucks and pay the energy bill on its use, then that would become the fair unit of exchange. We would no longer value "bandwidth" because it would no longer be a limited resource (just like the printing press - duh). And if these metro areas wanted to communicate with other areas at higher speed, they could pool resources (ie taxes) to a national agency that would maintain such a high speed infrastructure for their use.
Of course, that would put the individual metro areas at the mercy of this national organization - not a good thing. So the sensible thing would be to contract with many providers and let them compete with one another for their share of that aggregated bandwidth.
Which is really pretty much what we have - or could have - right now. Nothing at all preventing you from forming a community network and accepting a monthly fee to pool for the connection to the world. Individuals could even participate for free in the local community (ie local phone service and local TV) for nothing, but would contribute to the pool if they wanted to access the greater network.
What's most limiting this right now is the lack of standardized hardware that people feel comfortable with - ie a telephone, a radio receiver, a TV set. If we could buy an 802.xxx telephone at wal-mart for twenty bucks, or a radio, or a completely plug and play box that could act as a bridge to our existing telephones and TVs, then such community networks would likely explode in number.
Or perhaps I should say when and will...
Infrastructure costs money. It's easy to say "Let's just stick a bunch of wireless radios all over the world", but it's much more difficult to implement. Who is going to foot the costs of the radios, leasing land or roof space, maintaining connections, etc. etc.
This question has most definately come from someone with end-user only experience. Anyone who actually "makes the wires work" knows it isn't easy, and it's certainly not cheap. This is just the unchecked imagination of an idealistic DSL user fed up with paying for services. You don't get your electricity, water, gas, cable, or any of the other utilities free, why should communication services be any different?
A more reasonable question would be, why are we still paying such high prices for these services. The answer to that, however, is simple. The public infrastructure is owned by government sponsored monopolies.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
I agree. The information infrastructure (and the freedom thereof) is too important to leave to publically unaccountable entities. Before you respond, think about this: You already pay for your government to build the public freely accessible roads whether you drive on them or not. Isn't a free and open connection to the Internet at least as important as your roads?
Four fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if we would just sit down and keep still. -C. Coolidge
Ummmmmm. No. You're talking out of your ass.
And there's an obvious metaphor that's been with us for years: The highway system. In most of the world, it is "free", and all you have to buy out of your own money is a vehicle.
Its not free at all. It's existence might be 'free' in the sense that it came out of your taxes, but in most of the developed world you need to pay extra to use it. In the UK its Road Tax, in the US its a tax on your licence plates (i think, I'm not 100% about how US road tax works). You also pay taxes on the gas you use to run your car. So lets say that you're paying $150 a year in road taxes and petrol taxes. Wait! Thats almost the same as you would pay each year for dial-up access. Hardly free is it.
In all parts of the world, bandwidth is legally "public" property, i.e., owned by the government.
Do you actually know what bandwidth is? Bandwidth is a technical term which has come into common usage to mean the amount of data that can be transmitted over a communications channel in a set period of time. Its impossible to 'own' bandwidth - it isn't a real thing.
I think what you actually meant was radio spectrum. However, radio spectrum is less dominated by comercial interests than it is by military interests. So I guess the publics (goverments) 'property' is being used by the goverment (BTW there are plans to more some of the military spectrums around to make room for more unlicenced bands like are used for Wi-Fi).
A company spending millions of dollars laying fibre and installing equipment doesn't use up bandwidth, nor does it use up the public radio spectrum.
There is one very very big problem with this whole idea anyway. Bandwidth saturation. Since bandwidth is a function of the transmission method and medium, any given medium has an upper limit on its bandwidth. In the case of wireless transmitions its been shown that with the commonly available technologies we have at current (various Wi-Fi forms) it isn't very hard to saturate the available bandwidth. This is why you need those very very expensive fibre links with all the high speed switching equipment, along with all their expensive upkeep. Unless there is suddenly a cheap way to get around that then the question at the top was written by someone who was smoking crack.
BTW - given the inefficiency of a goverment, especially when it comes to contractors to the goverment, I reckon that we're getting our internet connections far cheaper now than if the gov. was to take over....
So your argument is that capitalism is bad because it doesn't do things until they're necessary?
When we feel the IP crunch, then we'll see the expense paid for a massive IPv6 rollout. It is not automatic, it is not easy, it is not mandatory, no matter what your networking 304 professor told you. Check out Dan Bernstein's rant on the subject sometime.
As for broadband in your area...if you think there's demand, fucking do it yourself. Go to your neighbors, get "preorders" and start community DSL. Or better still, get a loan and start your own hometown ISP. You should be able to get all sorts of tax write offs, and maybe get the state on your side to grease the way around the many, many regulators and contractors you'll have to shine. Out west (Colorado) lots of entrepeneurs have done this with mild success. Many of them have been since bought out at hefty payoffs by national telcos, who were thrilled to not have to build the infrastructure themselves.
Anybody who sees an unmet demand in a Capitalist society should jump on it. That's all it took to get Gates, Jobs, Walden and Case where they are today. That, and dorky haircuts.
Hey freaks: now you're ju