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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.
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.
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.
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.