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Court Ruling Points Way To Broadband Regulation
DarkHelmet writes "An article on CNET News indicates: 'A U.S. appeals court has rejected the Federal Communications Commission's request to rehear a case, in a move that could prompt local governments to regulate the cable industry.' The piece explains: 'The rejection could pave the way for municipalities to force cable companies to share their broadband Internet lines with third parties.' I personally can't wait for companies like Speakeasy to branch into the Cable Internet market and provide 10-100mbps service."
Don't knock competition. I'd love competition in the local loop, and you guys really have no idea just how lucky you are to even have a choice of cable or DSL.
But, on the other hand, you have a ruling which allows in the thugs of the Department of Justice. And that is a huge down side. We're all familiar with the stories of the various barely-legal taps that FBI have been indulging in under the Patriot Act. I'd be terrified at the idea that they could use that same bullshit legislation to place sniffers onto a shared medium with my 'net traffic on it.
Still, that's a good market - Start a cable ISP that does customer-to-company encryption. That way the Fibbies can't sniff the traffic off the wire, they have to go to the trouble of getting a warrant and sniffing off a switch at your office.
Of course, if Shrub gets elected again you can be sure that such an ISP model would be out-lawed - Entirely on the grounds of fighting terrorism, obviously.
"God, root, what is difference?" - Pitr, userfriendly
Mostly, it's a matter of giving the public only as much as they want, without having to go above and beyond the call.
If there are more than one cable internet provider within the area, companies are going to be more willing to compete for service plans with higher bandwidth. In turn, if the node ends up becoming saturated, the cable company will then be forced to upgrade the fiber running to the node.
The primary difference in this respect between DSL and Cable is that DSL is limiting speed based on technology. Cable is capping downloader's speeds based on demand.
I could be wrong, though.
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Currently there's no incentive whatsoever for the existing cable company (say, Time Warner) to provide quality service. There's no incentive for Time Warner not to terminate users who happen to exceed some arbitrary bandwidth usage pattern. There's no incentive for Time Warner to provide good customer service.
If you open the cable to other providers, you can have Time Warner offering 350KB/s down for $49.95, Competitor A offering 500KB/s down for $49.95, and Competitor B offering 150KB/s down for $29.95. That gives us, the people, a choice. If enough people start moving to the competition, Time Warner has to either reduce its price, raise its bandwidth caps, or do something else to retain its customers and win new ones.
There's a marked difference between the bandwidth a given line is physically capable of supporting, and the bandwidth your provider is actually prepared to give you.
With DSL, the closer you are to the CO, the higher your theoretical maximum bandwidth. But, in order to maintain consistency of service, DSL providers give everyone a speed that is determined to work all the way up to the maximum theoretical distance limit for DSL.
Cable doesn't quite work this way, for a few reasons. First, the cable TV system in the US is a fairly new network, meaning that the infrastructure itself is generally of higher quality. This is what allows cable to offer speeds superior to DSL. Second, a cable signal, being a much more powerful signal than DSL, and nearly always running on shielded lines, doesn't deteriorate near as badly over distance. Cable providers' bandwidth limits are purely marketing-driven, and don't come anywhere near the physical limits of the cable connection.
Presumably any government regulation would require the cable provider to sell the third-party ISPs as much bandwidth as they wanted, meaning that if you were willing to foot the bill, you could max out the physical capabilities of the cable network, which is probably somewhere close to LAN speed in most places.
Look, defenseless babies!
There is a chance it might work if the regulatory penalties for non-compliance by the monopolies were so stiff that they would decide to comply. This is why it hasn't really worked out in the phone markets. SBC in Illinois has just been paying FCC fines for the last few years as a cost of doing business. Its worth it to them to prevent any competitor from really having a shot at serving the area. Only Verizon and MCI can even afford to try, and I doubt they make money on just the local service.
DOCSIS will support speeds up to 45mb, but right now, with the current use of DOCSIS 1.0 or DOCSIS 1.1 and if the cable provider is using 16-QAM on the Upstream Interfaces of the CMTS it is possible to achieve 10.24mb. But keep in mind that most MSO's run 500+ nodes/homes per Upstream. With 500 people it can be hard to get the full 10.24mb to your self. Just because someone offers a service doesn't mean they can delivery. remember you are talking to sales people when you are getting there service offerings.
Now with DOCSIS 2.0, it will offer 64-QAM which will allow a much greater Upstream bandwidth.
For more answers to your wonderful little learning minds... http://www.cablemodem.com/specifications/
Even if bandwidth were an issue (which it isn't) it would be fairly easy to give multiple ISP's access to the infrastructure without impacting each other's bandwidth. The cable that runs into a subscribers house is divided into a bunch of channels. In my home town, channel 3 is ABC, 6 is NBC, 11 is Fox, etc. To get cable modem to work over the cable plant you need two things to happen:
- You need to ensure that the cable plant can transmit signals in two directions, and
- You need to allocate a single channel for download and a single channel for upload.
Basically, a single ISP on the cable infrastructure needs two channels. If you want to give competitive access to the cable infrastructure, you could run the competing ISP on those same two channels, or you could allocate two completely new channels.Where I live, there are three ISP's running on the local cable plant. They are all running on the same two channels because there's more than enough bandwidth to accomodate them. But if there weren't it would be an easy matter to allocate a couple of unused channels to one or more ISPs and effectively double the total available bandwidth on the system.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
DSL and Cable can have similar ammounts of bandwidth available to the user... If you think your DSL is all yours think again... your DSL is shared just like cable is once it hits a concentrator after that there is no difference between that and cable... I see too many cable companies under engineer there systems.. That is why some people see cable as slow (that or poor installations or .. the end user.. Yes the end user can destory his speeds by goofing with the wiring)... most Cable companies in Canada have speeds on cable that DSL has a hard time keeping up with (Well they could keep up with it but they have DSL throttled down or they are engineered to be faster or what ever reason they chose not to keep on par with speed).
DSL does have slightly lower Latency over all from my experience (But not by Much.. 5ms or ) but again that also depends on many many factors... that is just the average I have noticed in my city.
Who needs WiFi when we can have Packet Over Sheep! http://datacomm.org/PoS-InternetDraft.txt
What's in a Name? that which we call a Rose,
By any other name would smell as sweet.
-W. Shakespeare
Just because it has a name like 'regulation' or 'deregulation' doesn't mean bull.
By the way, I am against this. Not because I don't like cheap broadband, but because I hate the idea that instead of people running more wires, they want to force people to share wires. In my old town of Arlington, Mass, RCN and Comcast competed, but RCN ran its own infrastructure on the poles just like comcast did. Having its own infrastructure meant that RCN didn't have to work on whacky contracting rules or hire union or whatever. They worked on their own terms and had a superfast net connection/kickass cable/etc...
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
Typical Downstream of 256 QAM = 37 Mbps after overhead, and Upstream is QAM16 = 8 Mbps after overhead. Typically you don't see those results, because you have to add in the factor of noise and losses due to distance and node combination. That downstream will typically be shared between 1000-1500 customers and the upstreams are shared from 0-300 customers.
This I do not understand. If 375Kb/s = 375,000 b/s, then how can this be more than 3,000,000 b/s?
375KB/s would require more than a 3Mb/s connection, since 375,000*8=3,000,000 and that does not account for any overhead.
The grandparent probably just mistyped b for bit instead of B for Byte. Download speeds are customarily measured in Bytes, and connection speeds in bits.