Slashdot Mirror
Where Is The Broadband?
gouldtj writes "First Monday is running an article in its current issue entitled: The many paradoxes of broadband. It discusses some of the issues and ideas behind broadband, but seems to focus on: Where is it? There is also a really nice discussion on the telecom industry in general, along with the .com boom."
or .com *boom!*?
I find that the largest paradox of broadband is the difficulty finding pictures of Natalie Portman covered in hot grits....yumm
but my 14.4 modem is working fine...
...is "How do I shot broadband?"
The Human Cow - bringing you scrumtrelescence since 1995
i want fiber to my house! as cheap as 250$!
I've got broadband, my brother has it, my parents have it, my grandparents have it, my coworkers have it. Heck, everyone I know except those in rural places have broadband. The only people who don't, apparently, are the people hosting the article.
It's almost as if there's a virtual Third World of 'net access within our country - those oppressed by dial-up-only access. Is it in fact a governmental responsibility to bring it to everyone?
Isn't really needed by most people. Most people only use the net for email and some shopping. Paying $40 - $50 a month so your email gets sent a lot faster isn't very cost effective. Course us geeks like it, but we're the minority.
Aych tea tea pea colon slash slash slash dot dot org slash
I knew I should have submitted this story while I was reading it last night. That said, I do not think that the article really does say anything extraordinary. We all know the growth and development of the internet, and the article succeeds in putting forward just one kind of bias and quoting some news sources. I mean people expect more from a quality journal paper than almost 10 instances of saying that the USPS is a broadband provider.
Over here....
But seriously, they have it in my area, I don't get it. Why? $50 a month. That's for crappy service. Good service will cost you $80. Can't afford it. Make it $20 a month and it will become popular but right now? For most people it is simply too much.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
Honestly, the broadband sitution is not all that bad. You really can get broadband in nearly all semi-populated areas. Everyone whines that it's not everywhere, but this is a growing market...how long did it take before everyone had a telephone? And just recently, cell phone coverage (which is approaching ubiquitous at this point).
Hate to crush your fantasy, but it takes time to hook up wires, and it costs money to run them. It'll happen, and it's actually doing OK considering the massive land area we have to service in the U.S.
...
How about the shocking asymmetry of download vs. upload speeds? Time Warner Road Runner just lowered our upload cap to 10KB/sec. This more than 20x slower than our max download rate (~225KB/sec).
Most folks I talk to are still turned off by the price. While $40/mo for broadband certainly doesn't bankrupt me, it may still not be as attractive as many of the "$15/mo 56K access" deals that compete with it.
I dream of the day when my LAN is the bottleneck and not my net connection.
/* * pope1 */
- Four Non-Blondes
- The Go-Go's
- The Supremes
- The Donnas
- Creed
?There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
Yes, I do wonder where the broadband is. My friends 15 minutes away can get 3M/640K broadband and I'm stuck on dialup. Living in rural canada is not fun. (And yes, I am are that that article is talking particularly about the slow pace of broadband deployment in the USA.)
I just moved into a dorm in Tufnel Park in London. As a university student, paying thousands of pounds in tuition not to mention housing, I thought a broadband connection would be included in my room.
Apparently not.
Instead I get these jackasses who charge me 1.20 pounds/min (about $2) to use a modem connection. If I try to connect AOL (which I also hate but at least it's a flat rate) keysurf charges me 0.25 pounds a min to connect to AOL because they are a competing service. Shouldn't that be illegal? Shouldn't I have a choice in who provides my Internet and phone access? Do any Brits know if I can do something about this? I mean really, is Internet access a rare commodity in the UK?
I've had broadband for 4 years. I've paid, dutifully, each month, for broadband which I thought I needed. And last month, I killed my cable modem. Why?
Where's the content that requires it?
I got tired of downloading pr0n from newsgroups. I don't warez or play games. I don't download movies, music, or anything. Other than the occasional Linux distro download, there's really no reason for broadband. (and if you think about it, if I download 2 linux distros a year, I would save a hell of a lot of money just by buying the boxed set rather than forking out the $40/month I pay for cable) Where's the streaming movies? Where's the free music (not "pirated", but legitimate)? Where's the *value*? As far as I'm concerned, once I realized that copyright violation was still copyright violation and "wrong", I had nothing left that I would need broadband for. If I'm just hitting ebay, slashdot, and a few other news sites, then really, what's the point of broadband?
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
However, it does raise a good point: what do people want broadband for? So they can shop for stuff, read the news and download material without having to wait. Most of us that really want to can do the first two at work, and the third is not needed by everyone, and requires a certain level of technical adeptness that most people without a broadband don't have. So if they get it maybe they'll use it. And maybe they won't. Who knows? If broadband does become universal it's likely that the tech used will be different to the tech we know, ie not through the desktop PC.
What certainly is true is that the dot com boom was not a product of the failure to implement broadband quickly. It was a simple case of indiscriminate and desperate investment in a technology that couldn't generate cash quickly enough. www.petsmart.com anyone?
The various DSLs work by what is essentially an RF process, in the same way that cable modems, television channels, etc. do.
The opposite of broadband, baseband, is represented by things like 10BaseT (note the word 'base') and refers to a non-modulated signal.
As an aside, there was an early cable modem standard known as 10Broad36, from memory, which was 10 megabits with (I think) a 36 or 3.6GHz carrier signal. That's what the 'base' in 10BaseX, 100BaseX and 1000Base-XX means.
Anyone who argues that DSL isn't broadband is either ignorant of the meaning of the word, or ignorant of the technical details of DSL.
How did so many post before me? It took a long time to pretend to read.
Anyway, nice conglomeration of "stuff" about broadband. The post office being broadband is bunk. My postman does not show up at my door once/second. Whereas my broadband can deliver at least 200kb/s at any given second.
I don't see this guys point. Broadband is a simple demand/supply problem. Very well understood problem. What broadband needs is better applications if it wants to be taken up. RIAA is the single biggest enemy of broadband because most demand for broadband (that I know of, though not me) is for file sharing/stealing.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
What is the deal with comparison of broadband to cellphones? Dial up competes with broadband and DSL , but nothing competes with cell phones. There is not a mobile alternative. People don't favor cellphones over broadband. The favor dial up, because it is cheaper. Most people are probably happy with dial up and don't see the need to pay more for something they don't think they need.
Price became no object, when I signed up for broadband, figuring I'd spend much more time on the 'net, I nerfed my cable TV down to basic. Sure, some folks aren't in my position, but it worked well for me.
I saved the $20 a month on my dialup and cable TV nerfing to more than pay for cable internet access I enjoy daily.
The Pigloo
I don't know anyone that doesn't have broadband, or who doesn't have broadband and can't get it.
There is one exception, a friend of mine who's moving to a very very rural area, I don't even think he can get cable TV. You don't see "Where is the cable TV?" articles.
My parents have broadband, I have broadband both at home and work, my grandfather has broadband, all of my friends (around 20 or so) except the above forementioned one has broadband, all my coworkers have broadband.
Where is all the broadband indeed. The article should be renamed "I'm too cheap to get broadband, why can't they take food stamps in exchange for broadband?"
Get bent.
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
Here being a craggy part of the English countryside. I don't think it's worth BT's or some cable company's time and money to enable rural areas. Whoever offers Wi-Fi or home user satellite first should have a sizeable demand for their service, though.
"The number of Unix installations has grown to ten, with more expected." (Unix Programmer's Manual, 2nd ed.; june 1972)
Most people?
Most people trade files, send those stupid picture joke emails, stream media, watch those stupid Flash cartoons...
If you're an IRC/email user, dial up is fine. But put someone on dial up and listen to them bitch about how slow it is. New users, especially, have NO patience for slow connections, becuase they're not geeks.
But seriously, they have Lexus' in my area, I don't buy them. Why? . $40,000. That's for crappy Lexus. Good Lexus will cost you $80,000. Can't afford it. Make it $8,000 a month and it will become popular but right now? For most people it is simply too much.
Bandwidth makes zero differences when determining if a system is "broadband" or not.
;)
Broadband only refers to the transmission method, not the throughput. All that "broadband" means is that multiple, independant network carriers are multiplexed onto a single wire. That's the definition of "broadband". Your other option is "baseband".
Broadband != fast. 56K dialup modem is broadband.
It is expensive enough to live here.
1. At home, cooking dinner
1. Working
2. Not working
3. Reloading Slashdot
4. I don't know a broad, you insensitive clod!
5. Making out with CowBoyNeal
ooh...broadBand....
never mind.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
The author suggests three ways to stimulate the growth of broadband:
1) Make music free
2) Encourage people to use wireless phone more
3) Encourage more competition in the "first mile" internet access market, utilizing wireless technologies across an increased spectrum (gov. intervention needed).
Now my question is this: I have read tons of articles (including this one) explaining why broadband should grow, but I have also read quite a few opinions to the contrary. There are facts that suggest that in some cases, broadband may actually *decrease* productivity. What is the general concensus here?
Celebrate Steak and a Blowjob Day!
Perhaps the most ironic ancedotes of all is the fact that most residents of loudoun county, Virginia -- home to major WorldCom, AOL, Covad operation centres, as well as many other high tech companies -- have little choice with regards to broadband... IF they are lucky enough to have it at all! With DSL unavailable in most areas of the county due to fibre loops, and Adelphia years late on its cablemodem rollout to most of the region, there are tonnes of high-tech employees in the area who are virtually tied to narrowband.
Read the (my) Washington Post editorial letter regarding the situation.
Broadband for downloads, upload capped at dial up speeds.
right here!
that metric is - anywhere but the USA...
Real broadband is a 10Base-T line to your house. It's been tried in Texas with magnificent results. It's cheaper to install, support, andpay for. Why isn't everyone doing this?!
broadband...Where is it?
It's in Canada. Canada far outpaces the US for broadband connectivity for home users, but I'm not sure why. Currently about 64% of Canadians with internet access have a broadband connection, around double the figure in the US. Welcome to Canada, the new home of the free.
broadband stats
I live in a suburb of Washington DC, in one of the fastest growing counties (re: population) of the US. Indeed, it is (arguably) the heart of telecommunication networking on the east coast. ...And yet there is no broadband for many, MANY of the residents in the area, due to a combination of many things, most of which touch on misregulation and poor political decisions.
"Not really that bad"? That "last mile" connectivity isn't at all just chicken coops and cardboard boxes.
A serious question to those who have it, and those who don't. Why do you feel the need for broadband? Why is it useful to you, or why do you wish you had it?
Here's my little list. Btw, I have broadband.
-Porn.
-Occasional MP3 downloads
-Driver downloads, software updates, etc
-remote GUI sessions (both as host and server)
(also, with X11 and also Windows Remote Desktop)
-serving files/website from home.
-browsing faster
-Instant Messenger (24/7 useful - not so much the speed. I use IM more than my phone by far)
no comment
that's what the Base stands for, actually.
... was more to do with the frequencies used than the speed of it all. It seems this article is all about high speed internet, not broadband. Damn marketers.
Speaking of "where is it?" Anybody else out there use Adelphia for cable? Anybody else out there having problems? Anybody else out there being told (lied to) that its "the virus crashing their (Adelphia's) systems"? Seems kind of odd that they'd take a week and a half to fix this crap...
ANSWER: BROADBAND IS ON TEH SPOKE
Don't use so many caps, it's like YELLING. (Just who the fuck are you to tell me when I may or may not yell?)
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
but it's free to me, so why not?
You'll never see it because it will canniblize all those 15$ phone lines people have for their modems.
love is just extroverted narcissism
For a long time, I swore I'd never get broadband at home. It's at least $30 more than a dial-up connection, and if I really need to download a huge file, I could generally do so at school or work. For checking email, or basic web surfing, the 50k speeds I was getting were fine, it took a minute for some websites to load, but it wasn't bad.
Then I moved to a place where I got free broadband with my rent (a rarity I'm sure) and have really grown accustomed to it. It's nice to be able to instantly check on a website whenever your computer is on. I always know right away when I have new email, and bittorrent is actually viable for me.
When I move, it will be a much harder decision than I would have guessed whether or not to get broadband in my new place. I just hope that the companies in the area have decent terms of service.
Yeah, I have a webcomic...
I don't have broadband at home because I'm a grad student and I have it free at work (ie, right now). However, when I do get on the old modem at home,it's excruciatingly and increasingly slow (and I have a solid 40+ kbps from the university "ISP"). Why? Because web pages these days are more and more bloated. It seems that the only people who still know how to design a web page are Google.
I don't want to sound like a curmudgeony old fart, but I recall when web page design etiquette meant that pages were kept under 25KB. These days, average pages bloat well into the hundreds of KB. What do you get for the extra? Occasionally excess graphics at higher resolutions than are required, and more likely a bunch of junk code in the html because someone coded in frontpage. Needless scripts too.
So that's what I think will ultimately drive broadband - when people get sick to death of 30 second load times at 56k.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
I have it in London (0.5/0.25 Mbit/s), but I expect to be in Sweden soon where I will be using this instead (8/1 Mbit/s to 26/26 Mbit/s). All for a paltry $40/month.
:)
What do I use it for? Mainly always-on internet access, FTP server, always-on Evercrack, etc. But this is the most fun actually: video telephone. I just hang up on a call to a friend in San Francisco, 30 minutes, not a penny spent.
Akvo.org - the open source for water and sanitation
It poses no greater good, so I don't want my tax money going to pay for people to download porn and MP3's. No fucking way.
--
Geek Girls Naked! [ccbill.com]
Heh.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
I remember reading about how all of the ISPs figure out how they bill each other whenever they "peer" (i.e., connect) to another network. Lots of these contracts are apparently very complicated, but the primary metric that stuck with me was this: most companies pay for the number of packets injected into (not received from) a peer network .
Now obviously, not ALL contracts are the same, but there are some important ramifications from this concept. There are two ends of the "spectrum" of ISP's, those that are net information sources (inject more packets than they receive), and those that are net information sinks (receive more than they inject) at any peering point. End-user ISP's are therefore usually better off when their users are primarily downloading information. When home users' computers start serving more packets, the end-user ISP is forced to pay more to its provider because it has injected more packets into the adjacent network(s) at the peering point. Hosting company ISPs (hosting web servers, for instance) pay significantly more because they are net information sources, and inject far more packets into the network than they receive.
Granted, this is a vast oversimplification of what is a very complex topic that not many people are familiar with, but in my opinion, it explains why it has traditionally always been cheaper to obtain download bandwidth than upload bandwidth: peering points generally "charge" based on packets sent. Anyone who knows differently can correct me... I'm still looking for the paper on BGP peering that I read that brought this all to my attention.
I've got high speed internet access via DSL, but I don't have "broadband". I'm not even sure I can get genuine "broadband" in my high-tech metropolitan area without paying out the nose for it.
I wish the media would stop redefining words because they're too lazy to look them up.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Ok.
"Where are the flying cars?!!!
I was promised flying cars!"
I also worked for a local council (who shall remain nameless) who had a run in with British Telecom (BT) in trying out broadband in the area for a six month trial. First BT wanted the council to share the costs equally. That was fine.
Then BT wanted only businesses to register and use it for the six months. Then they wanted over 300 businesses to sign up for it before they install. Thing is there are not even 10 businesses in the area who would find broadband useful enough to operate.
The kick in the teeth is that the council made the signup for both public and businesses. There are over 200 interested non-business homes wanting broadband. Yet BT ignores them. Probably because they can charge businesses ten times as much for the same lines.
End result? No broadband, BT sitting on their asses waiting for 290 non-existant businesses to sign up, and hundreds of the public cursing them. Fuck you BT.
PS. a department within the council uses BT satellite broadband. It cost something like 1000 to install and 90 a month to keep. One day we connected the computers there over the standard phonelines to the web server 2 miles away at the main council site. We found out it was many times faster than the damn satellite!!! Double fuck you BT.
PPS. BT spent 30 million on an ad campaign for broadband last year. How many exchanges could they have upgraded for that amount of money?
I love the RIAA. I really do. Thanks for your time.
At least there, the government should rty to ensure that always-on connection is reasonably cheap and available. The speed doesn't have to be fantastic, but pay-per-minute dial-up majorly sucks for being online. In the US, where you mostly have free local calls to ISP (don't you?) I didn't think that was that much of an issue...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
A decent paper discussing the theory behind ISP to ISP peering is linked through Citeseer here. To download a copy of the paper, you click on the appropriate cached format in the top right corner of the page.
I was looking at potential providers for our unviersity. Connxion has a deal where they'll not charge you for a line, provided you upload a minimum of 1/5 what you download. Pity they aren't in our state as we are about 1:1 upload/download and so would be able to sustain a big link with them.
Where I live 40% of the people can't get cable or ADSL. A majority of people are on 56K or less modems. I live in the UK. We are now offically becoming a techincal backwater
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
There's a site with comparisons with varius broadbands in the world ?
:(, but the internal network is full of p2p servers :) :) But, upgrading debian at 1Mbyte/s is awesome!
For me, here in outer milan (italy) i have 10mbits/fiber with voip and vod.
The only problem is : we're under NAT
Too much!!
It discusses some of the issues and ideas behind broadband, but seems to focus on: Where is it?
Well, let's see. It's everywhere except back-woods rural areas. I don't see the big deal with this issue.
Broadband is just about everywhere in urban areas. You know, those areas where most IT people work and live.
If you are in a rural area and have no land-based broadband options, perhaps you should consider that Directv broadband service. Yeah, I know it sucks, but it's 'broadband' in the sense that P2P, webpages, and email will download quicker.
I think Earthlink (EarthStink) re-sells this deal, too. But they are outsourcing all their tech support to India, so I'd avoid them.
...once you have it, that is...
They sell you a service based on T1-like speeds, but then complain if you actually use it as advertised.
Go figure.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Homestar Runner.
Do not read this sig.
I haven't seen anyone mention gaming or multiple users yet, and have seen a lot about prices. Broadband prices make sense if you are sharing a connection between a few users. Sure broadband is overpriced a lot, but it is a must for anyone playing a game online, be it counter-strike or tetris.
"Again, if I want something, I'll pay for it. I simply expect others to do the same."
Riiight.
I'll bet you feel that way for the street in front of your house, or schooling ("Hey, if those poor kids can't afford to readin' or cipherin, then that's their problem").
I'm as free market as the next person, but there are certain fundamental things that are paid for in common because there is a great benefit for using them in common.
Some things to think about;
1) Schools
2) Roads
3) Libraries
4) Universal access to telephone and electricity.
ANd if you sat down and thought about it, you'd come up with a dozen more.
Why does government provide those things? Because it makes more sense, is more economical, provides greater value if they are universally available.
But you'll understand that in about 2 more decades.
very sloppy journalism. Cell phones have been around a lot longer than even the internet. and you can bet that in their first 6 years they weren't pulling in the numbers they are now. and they were charging more for the privilege at that time, My father got his first cell phone back in '88, before internet was even an option, he was an early adopter of cell phone technology remember those old motorola "Brick" cell phones... To compare "Broadband" (highspeed) internet connectivity to current cell phone usage is downright silly. give it a few more years or compare it to when cell phones were 6 years old. I'm sure it didn't have as good of a userbase at that time either. They aren't "voting" for mobility over speed, They're waiting for broadband to be "proven". and to see which is better DSL or Cable. a debate which will continue from now til the end of time. or something better than both comes out.
I'm 45 minutes away from downtown Chicago and have no broadband options whatsoever.
And my apartment's phone lines run through a crappy old mux, so I can't even manage V.34 connections. The FCC in the US mandates minimum data rates of 9600bps for data commnuication by telephone line, by the way. I've used lines that can't handle 9600bps. They're essentially unusable for voice communication (think really bad cell signal), too, so that mandate might as well be meaningless.
I suspect that most of those in the article who are in the 3% still using 14.4kbps are stuck not because of their modem, but because of poor line conditions.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
... watching a live 3D Hologram of the Super Bowl on your living room floor!
The thing I always wondered about broadband was the focus. For me, the benefit was two things: (1)a dedicated, always-on connection and (2) a fast connection. The speed is all you here about in the commercials and from people like us. I want the speed a lot and I am willing to pay more for it, but I always thought the part that would change the world was the dedicated connection (as long as there was also access to it all the time, i.e. computer always on or an appliance ready to use all the time).
I'm thinking as soon as the 'net is as quick and easy to get to as turning on the TV, we'll have a revolution with the masses. Any one else think like that?! Or is it just me...
I don't want to sound like a curmudgeony old fart, but I recall when web page design etiquette meant that pages were kept under 25KB. These days, average pages bloat well into the hundreds of KB.
I totally agree. All web pages should be no bigger than 2KB, text only, but with the occasional ansi graphics for broadband users (if they are lucky). Music should be stored in a 1 bit number ("0" will represent "Big Pimpin" by Jay-Z, and "1" will represent "Baby One More Time" by Britney Spears). All vowels should be removed from the English Language. And the internet should be downloadable in under 5MB (at the most). This will enable access to underdeveloped countries without a reliable connection.
I will respond only by saying that I don't take messages incorporating ad hominem attacks seriously. You should change your argumentation style to avoid logical fallacies, and then come back and try again.
[ home ]
It's not just content that justifies broadband:
* Always on connection - no dialup time or busy signals
* Doesn't tie up the line / don't need a second line
* Lower latency than modem (for some)
and the increased bandwidth has benefits beyond just download times:
* SSH connection still responsive while downloading
* Multiple simultaneous downloads practical, since single
downloads no longer saturate the connection
* Can stream music from my computer at work
* One connection can feasibly serve multiple computers
My $35/month 256k DSL is only about 5x faster than my old modem. For big downloads (e.g. Mozilla nightlies), I still have to wait for a fair while, but staying online with DSL doesn't tie up the phone, so it's not an inconvenience.
Hello? This "redundant" comment was posted four minutes *before* the apparent duplicate. For some reason, this one was modded down as redundant while the true dupe has risen to +5 funny!
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
I know some people who live in a rural area, where they have no cell phone service. They can't get cable either. Have to get satellite television. Broadband is pretty much out of the question.
Eh, NineNine;)
I'd think you'd want it to be easier to reach a few more customers.
Read, L
"it is the USA that has problems"
Not really, comcast gives 1.5Mb download, 128K upload unlimited bandwidth AFAIK (I probably download 400M/day from binary newsgroups).
That's for $40 (do the conversion, but something like 30 pounds).
That's damned fine.
I agree, if all you do on the web is check email, look at a few websites, maybe IM a bit then hey, you don't need broadband.
getting sucked through my cable modem :)
SIGFAULT
"As far as I'm concerned, once I realized that copyright violation was still copyright violation and "wrong", "
Wrong according to Time/Life/Warner/Sony/Vivendi/et al.
But if you want to buy into the big media control myth, its a free country. Or at least it used to be.
... you are only just a "subject" and not a citizen. Over here on the left side of the Atlantic, a "subject" is someone who is a person of interest to law enforcement as heard over the police radio.
So tell said bozo you are using windows.
What if said bozo tells you to "Please run our diagnostic software and read me the code it reports"?
Will I retire or break 10K?
As many posters have pointed out, broadband hasn't spread because content just isn't there to entice most people. If someone asks you why they should fork out a considerable amount of money to get broadband over the dial-up that they currently have, there are four common answers: web pages load faster, porn, music downloading, and gaming.
For most, faster surfing doesn't warrant the extra expense. Most people aren't gamers. Is porn worth an extra $30/month (don't answer that).
Really, the thing that would have caused mass pick-up of broadband was if consumers had access to music and movies online. I know many people that had broadband during the Napster days but killed it shortly after Napster went away (not knowing any better about alternatives). But, thanks to the efforts of the RIAA and the MPAA, music and movie downloading hasn't been legitimized until very recently (iTunes) in a way that's consumer friendly.
Rather than embracing the internet and expanding their control, RIAA/MPAA member companies fought everything tooth and nail. Maybe as services such as iTunes increase their presence (think iTunes for movies) people will find a reason to turn to broadband again.
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
It's funny all these people complaining about 1-10mbps broadband while here in Pakistan a 64k link is considered "broadband". hell a modem with a somewhat clear line is "almost broadband"! We need more bandwidth! and cheap wireless is the only way to provide it, with major nodes on fibre and the rest wireless. Ideally a mesh network would be wonderfull! People add nodes, network extends, a central authority keeps an eye on it and if a certain area is getting congested it adds a fibre optic mother node there.
Here's my list:
I am on the net far too much for my own good. If I tied up the phone via modem, nobody would be able to reach me.
Work. Sending 50 - 100mb graphics files on a weekly basis pays for itself after the first couple uploads / downloads. That would take hours via modem, and a day if shipped even UPS. Also, updating web sites, uploading files, backing up entire websites, would take forever.
Music files. Sending mp3s is great for low quality. Try doing a mutitrack session with AIFF files to a collaborator ... yep, 100mb +. Broadband essential.
Always on connection: priceless. More and more stuff installed on my desktop is taking advantage of the always on broadband ... little weather checkers, time servers, mp3 album covers being pulled down on the fly, none of this stuff would be half as cool if one had to wait 30 seconds for the modem to dial up each time info was needed.
Games. Battle Net sucks on modem.
Software updates. Takes too long to download via modem.
I just don't have time for a modem.
My neighbors are all stuck behind 28.8k modems. I've tried to get the local cable company Comcast to bring their cable down the street but they are unwilling. There is no choice for DSL or anything else due to our "remote" location.
This is after they (comcast) have moved their technical support out here (scio township). I'm still lobbying them to be required to provide service (I'd rather have cable so I can receive CBC and watch HNIC instead of the worse ESPN coverage and back myself up with a cable modem... I feel for my neighbors.
don't forget personal video chat tools like CuSeeme (the grandfather), Yahoo, iVisit, etc. Oh wait, i guess you already listed these under "porn".
For most Europeans the question is: Should I change from a pay-per-minute phone line to a fixed price broadband connection? The answer is yes from a large percentage, since the cost will be the same and the service is better.
Of course, that incentive isn't there for Americans, since they don't pay anything for their Internet access in the first place. It is a bit ironic that free local calls, the very thing that made the Internet take off early in the US, is preventing broadband from spreading.
Getting out of the rut is difficult, since you obviously can't charge your customers for local calls when your competitors offer it for free. Guess we'll have to wait until broadband cost drops.
I make up three percent of the internet?! Dude!
In Minneapolis Comcast is doing a 6 month half off deal, and AOHell/TimeWarner is doing a 3 month half off deal (both of those are normally $45-$50) a month. As for DSL, the rates aren't that good but I suppose you get a slighly more reliable connection. I absolutely hate Qwest though so I wouldn't go that route.
Comcast and Timewarner I have first hand experience, both are fine, and I've heard Cox is excellent from my friends. Really if you live in a city I don't see what the problem is. Usually rural ISPs aren't that bad either. I lived in a small town of less than 200 people and the cable service was great and again only $40 a month for broadband... no specials though.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
I seem to remember reading here that in some cities in Japan they are rolling out 100Mbit/sec connections for something like $40 U.S. The kicker was that you could get a gigabit connection for $400
U.S.
The definition, by the FCC, of 'broadband' is, as mentioned, a connection with at least 200 kbits of one-way bandwidth.
By comparison, the Canadian government defines 'broadband' as (paraphrasing) 'an internet connection capable of sustaining real-time two-way streaming multimedia'.
I found that quite interesting when I found it out. Broadband in Canada isn't what broadband in the US is, and I can't really figure out why, but I have some ideas.
First of all, Shaw Cable, one of the largest broadband providers in Canada, owns Fiberlink, Canada's largest coast-to-coast optical data network. Since people they peer with use them for traffic as much as they do, they don't have to worry about capping customer bandwidth - resulting in me being able to get 600kbytes/sec sustained download on 200+ meg compressed binary archives. Real transfer people, not magic numbers. I knew someone who colocated a server in Vancouver and ran an IRCd for an IRC network, and I, an hour and a half drive away, had (I kid you not) 6 millisecond pings to his server, 8 hops away. I've gotten 450kbyte/s from kernel.org, ftp.de.debian.org, and the University of Tokyo. It's all very well done.
Secondly, the networks in Canada aren't owned by many people at all. Shaw's one (Fibrelink), then there's Telus, BCE, and Aliant, Videotron, Rogers, and a few others that own the broadband scheme, but really, that's not much. Compare this to the US - how many companies are there? Well, less now, since they all went around buying each other up, but the ones that do exist aren't healthy companies anymore.
And thirdly, a backbone in Canada really only requires going from Vancouver to Montreal with stops in Calgary, Winnipeg, and Toronto. Handy. But that only counts for Canadian sites though...
Factor in that Canada is too cold to do anything in for half the year (not that that stops anyone), and you have more of a hint, but it's not really until you look at some of the other initiatives that people are coming up with that things become interesting.
First of all, you can go to the CBC or CTV websites and watch news clips and listen to live radio. You used to be able to even watch CTV Newsnet online and interactive, watching the regular feed or picking stories that interest you. You know the weather and headline tickers at the bottom and sides of the CNN channels? Click on them, and get new clips about weather or the election. It was truly interactive video, and it was great.
CBC has always had a Radio One and Radio Two, but online, you can visit CBC Radio Three, an online-only magazine about... well, all kinds of stuff. Not everyone's bag, but well-done nonetheless, with a background soundtrack and interactive stories that you can help yourself to.
This month's isn't interesting, but it's neat.
It's all about interactive media, and that's what people are interested in. Aliant is now starting to offer online digital radio and TV channels to its customers for ten bucks a month - and they're good channels, that people will pay for.
Broadband isn't taking off in the US because people aren't being told what to do with it - because there's nothing to do with it. In Canada, people are saying to themselves, hey, look, I can do things, I can make things, I can watch TV online, and the companies are realizing that it doesn't cost them bandwidth to deliver to their own customers, and they can spur development onward. In Canada, there's a reason, so people sign up.
--Dan
And the reason given by the state for this is that you are property of the state. If you only belong to yourself, there can be no prohibition of suicide.
As it stands, suicide is seen as a detriment to the health of society as a whole -- therefore illegal.
Ergo in the U.S., you are owned by the state. Don't like it? Change the laws. As it stands right now, you are the government's chattle if you live in the U.S.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
DSL has been in Boston for a while, but I know first hand that you could not get a cable modem in the some sections of the city of Boston (yes, actually in the city proper - suffolk county) until at most two months ago.
Just goes to show that even in urban areas if there's scary old infrastructure you might still be out of luck. Any experience with this in NYC?
Keep in mind that this is the neighborhood where every five years a transformer within a 3 block radius explodes. Very exciting.
A few years ago Slashdot's title would have been: Hacking Broadband.
If it was up your ass you'd know where it was! ha
Most people I know have broadband but some don't. Here's some observations as to why and some suggestions as to what needs to happen for broadband to become more widely accepted:
Needs to have a clear value. Content is part of this. There simply isn't any broadband equivalent of "Sex in the City" for many people to think it's worth paying more than what they already pay for a modem. So either the price needs to come way down, where it's no big deal, or there has to be more compelling content. Yeah, I know, there's lots of music and video out there, but for the average joe user who is not into pirating there's too much of a learning curve to get into piracy compared to just switching on a TV. Also related to this are the people who don't use the internet much in any case. All they do is email and look at a few websites, maybe once or twice a week if that. These people have no use for broadband and need to get into something the web has to offer before they'd consider it.
Ease of set up. You buy a computer and they all have a modem bundled with and an AOL plan for software. There are a lot of people out there who simply won't consider broadband until it's bundled with the computer. I know you do not believe me, but there are people who's eyes glaze over with the thought of installing a cable / DSL modem. Don't even scare them with the network idea. Wireless would blow their minds and curdle their spinal fluid.
Availability. There are parts of the country that still don't get cellphone service. Fat chance getting any reasonable broadband dial up.
I can think of some possibly evil solutions to these problems. First off, if web designers could band together and be assholes, they could just design sites with broadband in mind. Eventually people with modems will get sick of the long download times and be forced to upgrade. I mean, hey, software developers do that all the time, right? When a program runs slow, people just have to upgrade their computers. Maybe this upgrade cycle needs to be forced on web bandwidth.
Next, compelling content: one of the most compelling I've seen recently is iChat AV. Open this up to AOL IM users, and let the jealousy factor kick in. How fast do you think some of these stick in the mud users would upgrade if they realize, they aren't being included in the videophone conferences with toddler cousin junior because their web connection is too slow?
Watch the ISP's dial software and diagnostic software make several dozen calls to functions that Wine has Not Yet Implemented(tm), especially to undocumented functions.
Such is the case with MSN or AOL broadband in areas where MSN or AOL broadband's only residential-priced competition is dial-up.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Yup! Live here, can't get DSL for love nor money.
I'm guessing less than about 1/3 of homes can get any kind of hardwired broadband here in this low-tech "back-woods" region.
Oh, sure, DLS has been promised Real Soon Now (tm) every time I ask. But, after a year of that, I broke down and got StarBand -- that was four years ago.
So glad I moved from the little seaside town where the phone company was a family business and I'd had a megabit up and down since '95.
I define broadband in terms of the total round-trip latency to fetch all bytes of a given object and the number of such given objects that can be pushed through the pipe. For the World Wide Web, my standard object is one 10 KB HTTP download followed by five possibly-simultaneous 10 KB HTTP downloads followed by two possibly-simultaneous 10 KB HTTP downloads (e.g. HTML -> CSS -> page background images, or frameset -> HTML -> images), and because of the round-trip latency inherent in communication with geostationary satellites, v.90 can be as good as or better than satellite Internet access.
For downloading an operating system, on the other hand, the standard object is a 640 MB HTTP download, quantity one to three. Because of the high volume of each object, latency is affected by total throughput more than by first-byte latency. Downloading three 640 MB .iso files through v.90 up USPS down can be much faster than downloading them through v.90 up and down because USPS parallelizes more efficiently.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Have you ever thought of producing your own content? I compose songs
A song typically won't be bigger than a megabyte in mid, mod, s3m, or xm format. But the bigger issue here is can you prove in court that the songs you write are in fact original musical works?
Will I retire or break 10K?
It seems that a lot of slashdotters, when talking about dialup, complain about the connection quality.
Currently, with a run-of-the-mill local ISP, I tend to stay online for days at a time without a problem. With my previous ISP, I also had connections that lasted for days.
Now, I realize that 2 ISPs aren't a comprehensive data set, but I had a rather illuminating experience about a year ago.
After about a year without using my old ISA 56k modem, I found that it no longer worked. Since I wanted to switch everything over from a windows server to a linux server anyways, I ordered a new USR PCI Hardware modem online for a reasonable price (about $50 with S&H)
Being internet deprived, and wanting a backup anyways, I went over to a local computer store and bought the cheapest winmodem I could find - a no-name brand based on an intel chipset.
With the no-name winmodem, my connection quality was horrible - random disconnects, frequent `I seem to be sending but not receiving' connection problems, etc.
When my USR hardware modem arrived, I stuck it into an old pentium, set up NAT, and noticed that my connection greatly improved.
What I was blaming on my ISP seems to have been the fault of a cheap, crappy modem.
A casual search around the web has found more bands then I can count. Beatallica, Machinae Supremacy, and Persone are just the ones that I have on my hard drive.
How do unsigned bands pay their songwriters? If they write their own songs, how do they pay the forensic musicologist to testify in a court of law that the songs they wrote are in fact original musical works?
I repeat this because so many other Slashdot users seem to be under a delusion that it's possible to write a song without being sued and without relying on "it's not illegal if you don't get caught". I would write songs, but I'm afraid of being made an example of.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I only got broadband just so I can load up Slashdot faster.
!@#$% whole-grain cereal. When I want fiber, I eat some wicker furniture. - G. Carlin
Its all in the universities man!
i know what you mean about the internet radio stations
i listen regularly to a program you have have heard of called Coast to Coast am (http://www.coasttocoastam.com) that has 10 million or so listeners and is the #1 rated talk show; anyway you used to be able to listen to various radio station's online that carried the show until they decided they want to create their own show archive and charge for access at which point clear channel went around and threatened to sue every radio station on the affiliate list (if you look you will see quite a few) and virtually all of them pulled their radio streams, the ones that didn't pull their streams played something different during the show.
now the only place i can listen to the show (as the only local affiliate here in indianapolis dropped it) is from a canadian internet radio stream and it is probably a matter of time bfeore that one is shut down (like the did the one in virgin islands i was listening to before that)
anyway i thought you might be interested to know that heavy handed tactics aren't hte exclusive domain of RIAA/MPAA and their puppet senators
Where is the broadband? Let me ask the guys in my high-school gym class.
"Mah Nutz!"
There you have it. It appears to be stuck under the testicles of a man who is most likely pumping gas or mopping up semen at this moment.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
years for my current apartment complex to get DSL (baby Bell needed to upgrade stuff in the area). A year later I switched to cable at twice the speed for half the price. I don't take it for granted, but I can't say I know very many people who don't have it now. Northeast Ohio went from a drought of broadband to a glut it seems.
This is something that bugs me. Everyone thinks that broadband = fast. It doesn't. Its a form of analog transmission/receiving. Technically dial-up is a form of broadband.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
I love broadband, but I hate the constant systematic IP port attacks from IP addresses all around the globe. I get about 3 a second that the firewall reject. And while I don't know how big the packets are, I know that it is in a little way affecting my download speed, buring my MB usage limit and costing me money.
And apart from that, it's like a dripping tap: f*#king annoying!
You expect logic from our crack-head moderators? I'm still trying to figure out who let the asshole moderate that waits a couple days to make sure no other moderaters will mark it up again, then marks all my +5 funny posts as "overrated". Turns out the +4 funny doesn't increase your karma, but the -1 overrated does decrease it...
Where's my friggin broadband? The Brighthouse dimwits yanked my cable again so we're on hour 10 of downtime. Nice. That's what we get for being a commercial customer in a residential area. And they best they can do is a "sometime tomorrow" appointment. In the past that's apparently meant "5 minutes after you give up and leave".
I believe it is poor usage of links to chose "here" or "click here" as link text. It is highly undescriptive as a link. It is the equivalent of "mystery meat" links. No one enjoys mystery meat when links are images, and I don't enjoy it anymore even when the links are text.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
You wrote it...you own it.
Tell that to the estate of George Harrison.
If you happen to write the same lyrics as another songwriter has and you don't realize
Lyrics are not the problem as much as the melody. Please read my analysis of music theory as it relates to copyright law. The gist is that judges have interpreted "substantial similarity" so broadly that chance is almost as likely to produce infringements as flagrant copying.
I believe you have the right to revise your own material to be non-infringing.
The average member of an unsigned band probably doesn't have enough money to hire an expensive attorney to represent him. And without an expensive attorney, how can he assert this alleged right in court? What if the mistake isn't found until CDs have been sold to end listeners?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Considering that a broken pelvis will put you in the hospital for 6 months and criple your lower extrimities you for life, there's NO reason not to go for a broken neck.
You are comparing one rip off to another, both from the same monopoly provider. Here's what's not to love about either: you have already paid for those lines many times over. The money just fed fat cat executives and stock market scammers.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The point of the essay seemed to be that IF broadband is ever to become ubiquitous in the US, it is wireless technology that will drive this, since the economics of providing customers service work against broad participation from both the phone companies and the cable companies. Wireless changes the framework for the cost of service since many customers can be served by a single installation. I think this is an interesting and valuable point. The comparison with 19th century railroads and postal services was illuminating. It is also helpful to see the thoughtful posts people have made about why broadband is or is not attractive to them. I would warrant that if broadband does become ubiquitous it will be provided in some fashion through a wireless system, and it will not be primarliy experienced through a browser interface but through something else. The big radio pipes will be giving us video portals, mobile internet, new media channels, art/culture community interfaces of a different kind than we have seen. I predict something like this will take off in the late years of this decade if Bush is defeated and someone with a sense of technological optimism, grasp, and creativity is elected.
A big problem with broadband is that there is no real competition with cable as the nation is primarly suburban. DSL remains a much more difficult install than cable, and even though DSL vendors themselves tend to throw in more niceties like fixed ips, the normal networking nature of cable seems superior to the oft employed PPPOE of DSL.
I would love to have fixed IP for cable modems, and even a business level cable service, and then I would be one happy camper. But you'll never get that in my territory (former Bell Atlantic), because there is no real way the COs are distributed well enough to effectively deploy DSL. Sans that incentive, the cable modem is a defacto monopoly, and, thus, broadband stagnates.
2 way satellite internet fails for gamers because of latency.
This is my sig.
Well there goes the movement. It was fun while it lasted.
Someone once suggested a system were you would get taxed, but you could designate were the money went.
Participatory government at it's finest. Bet it would however drive a bit of commonsense into the head of a certain poster who can only think about himself.
I just wrote this journal last night: http://slashdot.org/~fractaltiger/journal/44603
because I feel trapped by getting slammed every time I go on the web with my modem. I can't really download it since my connection has become suckier every year. I used to be able to download the 50 Meg Java SDKs in a couple days, but now I just get disconnected too much on this computer. I will have to go to a friend's to get the win2k service pack and hope like heck that nothing like this strikes down my current win98 system. Sorry, I'm rambling.
"Wireless : LAN
Actually I find the whole issue amusing, because there's a purpose for ubiquitous broadband sitting right under our very nose. Remember this and this, and more specifically this. The "content" is US! There's posts floating around this discussion concerning Telework, but most are from a numbers standpoint, small. It didn't have to be that way, but everyone's(1) so laser focused on what's in their own perceived interest, as opposed to stepping outside themselves for once in their lives and thinking of the big picture, and the greater good. Ubiquitous broadband is the level that can raise everyone's ships (Sounds like the argument for Linux.)
BTW To the poster. Good for your company, but it kind of pulls you out of the ubiquitous broadband loop. Why? Well because that would be letting businesses make the decision of how little or much broadband spreads, and what directions. Two problems with that:
1-Businesses historically make poor social decisions.
2-It may go in directions not desirable (A DRM controlled pipe).
A decision that affects everyone should be made by everyone, as free from influence as possible.
(1) Yes, I mean everyone.
If you have a digital camera, and many people now do, you kind of need broadband. For example when you want to have your pictures printed. It's not exactly efficient to send a few dozen 2MB pics at 33kbps.
Crikey, are you sure? Have you checked again recently?
Here in the UK, where we usually complain about the high price of everything compared to the bargains in the USA, you can get all-inclusive 128K ISDN for less than 50 (US$75) per month. 25 quid a month for ISDN line rental (includes regular telephone line rental) and 25-35 quid for a reasonable inclusive-hours ISDN plan (I recommend SurfAnyTime who are a bit pricier than the others but have multiple redundant freephone numbers and the support is second to none).
Townies, governments and companies all seem to have forgotten about ISDN, to the point that it is very difficult to spread the word:
IF YOU LIVE OUTSIDE BROADBAND, ISDN IS PROBABLY AVAILABLE AND WILL DO MOST OF WHAT YOU WANT
Pseudo always-on: less than 2 seconds to connect
Low ping times, in the region of 40-80ms
Decent bandwidth, 128kbps is half the speed of entry-level broadband- more than sufficient for all but the most hardened downloaders.
Usually less than twice the cost of broadband
You can make telephone calls at the same time as connecting to the Internet (although the speed drops to 64k- you can use Windows/Linux or router built-in Bandwidth On Demand feature to control this).
Admittedly what I'm basically saying is that ISDN is half the speed for twice the cost, but- IT IS AVAILABLE VIRTUALLY EVERYWHERE, IT'S ALMOST AS GOOD AS BROADBAND, IT'S WAY BETTER THAN A MODEM AND IT WORKS.
ISDN will even do fancy stuff like remote ringback connections. I've got mine set up so that when I ring my 3rd number from my mobile phone (with ISDN you get 3 telephone numbers), it automatically dials up and updates its dynamic DNS so I can VNC/FTP in to my home machine from anywhere in the world.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
Actually, I agree with you that it is not the government's responsibility to provide broadband access to the masses, even though I feel that the same arguments that led to the governments subsidizing cable tv and telephone infrastructure development do apply to broadband (probably moreso than in tv or telecom).
Read, L
I'm stuck with ISDN here in the UK because I live in the middle of nowhere.
For me ISDN is fast enough. To be honest, I don't know what I would do with loads more bandwidth anyway - there just isn't enough content out there (or enough disk space on my PC) to make use of it ! There is only so much software you can download and make use of at once, and I certainly don't have time to download and watch endless films etc.
What would be far more useful would be an 'always on' and fixed IP connection via my ISDN. That way, I could use my own mail server, and do all those other things I want to do that otherwise need an ISP.
Yep. That's probably why DSL is rolling out so slowly -- they don't really want to replace $200 per month ISDN accounts with $30-$40 per month DSL accounts, even though they'd get a lot more of them. That $200 per month is almost pure profit; the capital outlay for the ISDN stuff was long ago recovered while installing DSL would cost money they probably wouldn't recoup for a couple of years at least.
If I were a betting man I'd bet that Comcast will get their crap together first and we'll have cable access within a year or so, although at $70 per month it's on the expensive side. Verizon will probably provide DSL soon after, at about half the price.
One interesting point: neither Comcast nor Verizon will quote a connection speed. Two years ago, one year ago, they did and Verizon even tiered their service price based on speed but now they won't mention speed at all. Just "high speed internet access". My guess is that they're throttling it 'way down, into the 128k-256k range, but until they make it available I won't know for sure. Why is it I feel that they're trying to sell me a boat with holes in the bottom? :)
Rocketboy
Thanks to the static IP:
- Host my development shit
- Host my imode services for access with my crappy imode phone
- Subscribe to a few hundred mailing lists
- Webcam with family and friends
- Free phone on the modem w/o going through weird VoIP shit
- Fast browsing
- Always on
- Only 30 / mo
- emerge -up world
- I don't watch TV but a few friends happen to record on their PC, and send me clips sometimes. Quite nice.
Some of the mods smoke crack. I've listed totally legit things on subject with links to support my view and modded to troll while the link below me says "microsoft sucks" and was modded to informative.
I load it up, and I can only get to Section 12 of it. I search on Google, and find it in the Google cache; but, this only gets me into Section 13 of it.
/. effect, but I don't see either of these as mattering.
... how can I do it?
Why can't I view the entire article? I'm on a dialup modem, and the site might still be experiencing a mild
I want to read the article, in its entirety
I got ADSL in the UK because it was pretty much the same price as paying for 2 phone lines and a flat-rate dial-up isp. Also the isps here dont quite understand the all-you-can-eat principle - they ristrict the ammount of hours a month you have to such an extent that its not much cheaper than paying the call charges.
P2P file sharing and streaming media are the big broadband killer apps. Hopefully ISPs will understand that and will protect their file sharing customers from copyright lawsuits.
The governments, corporations, RIAA/MPAA etc. are contradicting themselves if they promote broadband but at the same time go against file-sharing.
--
I assume no responsibility for spelling mistakes or damage caused by them.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
http://directv.direcway.com/
#6495ED - cornflower blue