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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."
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 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