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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."
Sure, with government regulation your cable bills will be cheaper, and your service better. Great. But once the government has latched onto this industry it'll never let go. We could soon see cable TV channels with an anti-war bias get censored off the air 'for our own good', and copy protection built right into the cable system (protected by the DMCA, naturally). Say goodbye to having non-fritz chip enabled machines (like Linux boxen) working on broadband. I hope it doesn't come to this.
With the current DOCSIS 1.0 spec, 10/100 is impossible. And due to the fact that most cable providers only support DOCSIS 1.0 right now, the only way you are going to see 10/100 to the home is over fiber... And I don't think that is going to fit into the speakeasy price plan of 19.95 a month...
You'd think that maybe we all would have learned something after the DSL fallout earlier in the decade.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Not that I expect to have any more power to get local authorities to do as I wish than to get the federal government to do so. It'll still be about which rich guys are buddies with which other rich guys.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
uh...so what you are saying (without realizing it)
share the bandwidth nearby
or
share the bandwidth, just further upstream.
and if cables bandwidth is shared...there must be some huge headroom, because here in san antonio, sustained downloads of 375Kb/s is now possible(we had a recent speed bump)
that's just shy of 3Megabit....faster then a T1 on the download side.
on the other hand...DSL here, max sustained download is 140Kb/s
so what was your point again?
Who says prices are falling? In my experience they've been going up for the last couple years. Of course, comcast has moved in where I'm located.
plus-good, double-plus-good
"How exactly would one company be able to offer more bandwidth than another? There's still a limited amount of bandwidth available. With DSL, you can have the lines to yourself, connected to your backbone."
The bottleneck between cable and DSL isn't removed, just moved to a different point in the network. You still need a big pipe going in, and that pipe can be saturated. Doesn't really matter which service you use.
So why would cable based broadband benefit from other players? Service. An ambitious upstart might provide ISP service to me as well as video on demand because their server is a lot closer to me than somewhere out on the net.
I agree with you, though. It's not clear that it'd be all that big of deal. The real question is: Are they making things better by allowing other companies to come in and provide the service, or are they paving the way for an even bigger company (Time Warner?) to bully their way in, and take over the broadband service from the companies who put the investment into making the network? Frankly, I don't see the value in providing this on the grounds that it cheats the companies laying down the big fat pipes.
"Derp de derp."
Yea yea, not guilty, nothing to hide. There's nothing illegal about your girlfriend sending you naked pictures, or your porn subscription to youngfatfux.com, but lots of things we do/say day to day are potentially very embarassing. And what about that whole 'anonymity' thing? Why would they need to subpoena your emails or usenet postings when they can play man-in-the-middle and wait for you to give them the answers they're looking for?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
First off, cable companies are already regulated.
In fact, the broadband market should already be very well opened to competition through regulation. It's been many years since The Telecommunication Act of 1996 was passed to do open their markets. The question is why is it not working out like predicted? There are a few companies that are moving into very specific cable markets, like Knology. However, this act was supposed to open up all markets (telcomm, cable, wireless, satellite) to anyone who wanted to sell services over existing bandwidth.
The fact we aren't seeing more competition can only be explained (a) if there are no interested firms, (b) if existing customers are too apathetic to new/quality services, or (c) if the regulation of the act are not being enforced. Does anyone know how the regulations of this act have played out in the past eight years in corportate practice? The article seems to indicate that FCC has been dragging their feet enforcing at least the cable market.
As far as I can tell, the regulation of TA1996 should be more than adequate for competition, in theory. Maybe future regulation will be a federal push encouraging existing carriers to roll out broadband to rural locations, although most people have satellite out there.
Oh, and what bias do you want? Corporate or government? Are the networks fair and balanced now?
Sources, please? Explanation? Statement that you used to be a janitor for a cable company? Anything?
The boundary lines were drawn in all the wrong places.
After a promising start, competition in the DSL market has nearly dried up because the local telcos that own the wires in the streets have absolutely no incentive to cooperate in good faith with CLECs that compete with the telcos' own DSL services. Look at how they always phrase the subject in public. They get indignant and act as if the government is trying to make them give away their wires to their competitors for free when that is not the case at all! Every CLEC pays the local telco for the use of their wires, and no one has ever suggested that they not.
If the boundary lines had been drawn where they belong -- right at the ends of the wires that run along public streets -- things would have turned out differently. The wires would be owned by a fully regulated entity that would be barred from any business other than renting access to those wires to any service provider able to pay a standard tariff. While they would still have an incentive to inflate their costs in order to inflate their tariffs, regulators have a lot of experience in scrutinizing the books of common carriers. And since the only part of the path that would be regulated are the actual wires, regulatory overhead would be kept to an absolute minimum.
Everything but the wires themselves would be the province of competitive, unregulated carriers that would set up the DSLAMs and routers and market their services to customers.
It's a simple and obvious way to do things, but this is not what Congress in its wisdom decided to do in 1996. Why is anybody surprised at how things turned out?
"Cable providers' bandwidth limits are purely marketing-driven, and don't come anywhere near the physical limits of the cable connection."
Not entierly true (or at least it used to not be). I know there were places in the country (mostly California and New York with extremely high population density) where cable fell between dialup and ISDN - I knew a few people who claimed dialup speed. I do not know if that is still the case but do not think it is. Living in fairly rural east Tennessee I've pretty much always been about the only person in my area having cable. I used to get, and after some recent uncapping by the cable provider get again, insane downstream throughput.
Basically there was a certain amount of a shared resource.
I explained it as such: You have a highway running into your house. The speed limit is 600 mph but it only has one lane. If you have 10,000 cars wanting to go on it you may get 600 mph per car but you have to wait until your turn (latency kills you). If there is one car on the higway you get 600 mph all you want whenever you want.
DSL was a one line one car 400 mph highway, cable was a 600 mph as many cars as you want on the highway.
Is this still the case? Dunno, haven't really cared in quite a while. I suspect, based on the speed that I get, that it is no longer the case. If it is, then they have restructured the network to keep speeds up (though I still live in east tennessee so I don't know what Cali does now, I know I have not seen any of the complaints I used to constantly see back then). This was the mid/late 1990's when I was itnerested in the stuff.
I suspect the parent poster was using the same knowledge that I was above.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
"sustained downloads of 375Kb/s is now possible...that's just shy of 3Megabit..."
This I do not understand. If 375Kb/s = 375,000 b/s, then how can this be more than 3,000,000 b/s?
Define: Megabit: Approximately one million bits of data
The companies that started home broadband, put up huge money, and took huge risks. I don't know that any of them are in the black from their investments yet. Most are out of business: TCI, @home, AT&T broadband.
Now, 3rd parties just get to walk in, and take advantage of everything that's been done with no effort and no risk.
Doesn't seem fair, or maybe I'm missing something.
What if my provider allows me unlimited downloads or let's me run a commercial website for a really low rate. Won't that affect my neighbours? I'd imagine the cable providers negotiating a rate with the incumbent cable company, but what would be a fair rate. The incumbent cable company can't just say take this very high rate or leave it.
If I can't afford it.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy