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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."
or .com *boom!*?
but my 14.4 modem is working fine...
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.
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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.
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?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?
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.
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?
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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...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
... 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.
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...
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 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?
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.
...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
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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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!
--
no sig for you. come back one year.
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.