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."

Comments

Re:If the cable bandwidth is shared

[fatman1683]

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.