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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."
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).
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?
Is it in fact a governmental responsibility to bring it to everyone?
NO!I don't want it. I have no use for it. 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.
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.
Course us geeks like it, but we're the minority.
Yeah.. my father-in-law called me the other day and was like, "I can get connected and pull up my start page but I can't get to any of my porn".
So I strolled over there to download and install the blaster patch only to find that he needed Win2k SP2 or greater. That's only 8 hours and 10 minutes over dial-up.
When you say, "minority", I hope that you are referring to anyone with Windows.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
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
Funny you should mention e-mail. Just last week I spent a good 45 minutes downloading a million copies of the SoBig.F worm so I could read three legitimate messages. Seems you need broadband to read e-mail now.
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?
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.
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.
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
Why shouldn't they bitch? The state of technology is such that (if I didn't have cable) I'd bitch about my dialup, too. I'm a geek. I have NO patience for slow connections. If anything, I expect them to be faster. I certainly understand why they're slow, but I also know why they should be faster than they are. I should also be able to fly my car to work in the morning, but what the hell.
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.
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.
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.
Whislt wireless (let's talk 802.11x here) is good for many application, it isnt the holy grail.
The equipment is getting cheaper, but the issue is spectrum. There's only so much data you can pump through the air at the moment - smarter equipment (eg Karlnet) or higher speed gear cost more money. Mesh networks are no better since all of those nodes have to share airtime/noise due to their omni antennas.
Give it a few years though, and things will certainly be looking better.