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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."
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.
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
AtomFilms
IFilm
Where's the free music (not "pirated", but legitimate)?
MP3.com
iRATE
FreeMusic
EMusic (okay, not free, but flat-rate and dirt cheap)
Where's the *value*?
That's up to you to decide, of course. But there's plenty of legitimate big content out there.
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.
- Where's the content that requires it?
... this morning I d/loaded the new quakeworld 'all star' tribute video (300 megs) in a few minutes (qw was so much more fun than anything after it, for me Quake jumped the shark around threewave ctf for qw) if I was on dialup how long would I have had to leave the computer on? 27 -HOURS-, would I have done that? probably not.
...) in a few minutes without having to wait for 10 minutes for the group index to download, then selecting the articles and waiting another 10-30 minutes for them to be retrieved
I'm actually paying for a 'business' package (which is like $60/month, basically twice the 'residential' one) for a 2.5Mbps/640Ks DSL line because the quality of service is WAY higher (4 years on it, went down twice for a few hours: when they upgraded my local switch they moved me to a 'residential' port by mistake and it was down like every 2nd day + way worse latencies (routing was different) packet loss and so on)
There are tons of 'legal' reasons why I'd never willingly give up broadband:
- telecommuting: try an X session (heck, or even a remote desktop session, which is 10 times better) over a 28.8k line and you'll see... to decently run X (even lbx) you need at least 64-256kbit and less than 75ms latency, for remote desktop you need more bandwidth but it's very useable even over a 200ms link (why oh why can't X work as well as rdesktop?).
- games (these days if you have a ping higher than 50-60 you might as well not play)
- game demos/patches/maps... it gets really old really fast spending an hour or two d/loading a fan-made map only to find out that it sucks.
- movie trailers, game movies,
- email: this weekend I received a 10meg email from a friend with their vacation pictures, and I didn't have to wait AN HOUR for it to download.
- USENET. just skimming 20-30 high-volume newsgroups (not binary crap, I'm talking about comp. rec.
having broadband access is probably my #2 priority when deciding on a place to live in (#1 being location, location, location obviously).
-- the cake is a lie
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 pay $29 per month for DSL from Verizon.
Considering that a 2nd phone line costs about $25/month, there's no reason NOT to subscribe. It costs a bit more than half of what dial-up cost me, It's about 25 times as fast, I can buy a $40 router and network it, and it's always on. What's not to love?
Oddly enough, Verizon contacted me trying to sell it. I'm not sure why the phone rep was trying to sell me something which would be LESS profitable for them. such irony!
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Well, Charter Communications bought up Falcon about two years ago, and as of three weeks ago, we now have broadband! This in a little rural mountain hick community of 10,000 people. Verizon, meanwhile, says that they're testing various DSLAMs in a test market in New Jersey, and might bring us broadband in 2-3 more years.
I choice the middle tier (768/128) and have been happy as a clam. When you've been stuck with 24-28k speeds, even 768k is lightning fast!
The always-on connectivity is at least as important as the speed. In fact, if I had to choose between the two, I'd probably drop the speed first.
:) My ISP, Rednet, provides cable access in my part of the city (for about 20-30 apartment buildings with ~5000-10000 households covered). Since incoming traffic in St. Petersburg (just 200 km from Finland, the most wired and the most wireless country) costs 2 cents/Mb wholesale and 7 cents/Mb to me, it's impractical to have fast broadband. In fact, Rednet prices different connection options according to the speed. 128Kbit/sec costs 12$/month + traffic. Even without MP3/movie downloading (did enough of that during my studies in neighbouring Finland) I manage to download about 500Mb/month, which brings the total bill to about 35-40$/month.
Absolutely! I have "broadband" in Russia.
128K is definitely not very fast, but it's pretty comfortable for browsing, some downloading and stuff. Speed is not a big issue here. But the advantage of 24h connectivity is huge and I cannot imagine going back to dial-up access (although I still have a 2400baud modem in the closet).
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Do they use CAN electronics like pair-gain systems or RIMs? Those CAN electronics will stop you from getting DSL. A PGS splits one pair of copper into 2 or 4 phone lines. The older ones used an analogue splitting method (So max speed is either 28.8 or 9.6) whereas the newer ones are a bit like ISDN but you only get one of the two channels. A RIM does this on a larger scale (eg 480 lines from a set of fibres).
Here is Australia it used to be 2400bps minimum speeds by mandate, but now they've increased it to 19.2kpbs *throughput* (which means if the line can't handle it you can use compression to increase it - don't follow their logic really).
I use a 1.5M/256kbps ADSL and it costs $150/month (AUD, so ~$100US/month) but the speeds are not guarenteed if you download a lot (as in over 10GB/month). And this is considered one of the best deals in the country.
If you want cable you usually get 3GB/month *transfers* (uploads counted) for the most part, then either pay 14c/MB or get capped to 28k (depending on company, it's not a choice). There's a big thing about a woman who left p2p running accedentially and racked up a $10000 bill for 2 months!
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