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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."
Flame me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't that be de-regulation?
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.
This makes it much easier for the good old Department of Justice to put wiretaps on these lines. This may mean that bigger authorities than the RIAA may throw their hat into the ring for fighting P2P networks, among other things.
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Thank you.
Well technically you could offer faster service. If you alter your cable modem's firmware you could get much higher speeds... But the company has tools to detect that and ban your modem from the network, and send you a nice letter. But since it's shared bandwith you can't really do that anyway.
If your ISP is different than the company that maintains the wires, they always point fingers at each other when there's an outage. People have discovered this over and over with DSL, and there's no reason to think it would be any different with cable.
In Austin there are three cable "ISPs": RoadRunner, Earthlink, and a local one whose name I forgot. Since they all use RR's physical plant, I choose RR since there's only one company to call and one company to blame.
The only solution to this appears to be structural separation (where the company that owns the wires is not allowed to be an ISP), but this has its own problems (like it would probably be more expensive).
I was talking to a friend of mine earlier and it sounded like the Cable Broadband was about ready to do what Phone companies had to do years ago. Is it feasible, or even proper for each phone company to have it's own phone lines for it to use? If that were true, then every house would have 3 or more phone lines for the different companies your phones are on. That is worse than the current state where we have more phone numbers than people in the house. So, there was one phone company that owned all the phone lines, and then the government saw this as a monopoly and opened it up so we could afford to have more phones than people. Broadband, there has been one company that made all physical wiring, and only uses 10% of it and chokes out any competition. So the government will have to intervene and make it possible for companies to compete.
Ultimately, everyone will be better served by competition in this market. The main reason I wanted comcast was to receive the local cable access channel. Small producers like myself are budding every day. With fast data pipes, channels could proliferate. Companies like Atom Films, Project Greenlight and the like could offer premium subscription services.
In case the benefits of this aren't immediately obvious, let me add one feature the /. crowd can surely appreiciate -- cable porn. (yeah, yeah I know there's Spice and the like but this way, there could be an Indie Nudes or Suicide Girls Channel)
Ultimately, producers of content could market directly to consumers. Aggregators (like current channels) could make the process easier. Expect an explosion of creativity . . .
harmonious design
...cable companies already had to share their lines? Isn't this how I'm able to get Earthlink Cable in my area (Rochester, NY) through Time Warner? (Earthlink is actually a couple dollars cheaper for us than Road Runner, since we don't have cable TV...)
~ Aero
Cablecos are notorious for being cheapskates. They brought us the $50 throw-away box, are unwilling to change, and charge an arm and a leg for any minor improvement. You can be sure that if they are to surrender their pipeline, that they will do the bare minimum to support any 3rd party. Sure, it may be good to have the ability to pick and choose between vendors, but ultimately someone is going to have to do maintenance on the pipe if it breaks. Hidden infrastructure and support charges will quickly kill any small service provider. They don't have the domain over the pipe, and they don't have the expertees. We tried this years back with ADSL. It was a total failure. How many of those companies are still around? None except Earthlink and a few others. The rest are.. you guessed it.. the telcos.
Get educated. By the laws of eminent domain the governemnt (through taxes) will have to pay an acceptable price for those lines.
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
I would rather that the justice allow the companies to keep their lines to themselves, but simply disallow them a local monopoly beyond a 5-10 year period.
I am sure that more than a few would say that is silly, but we already grant the baby bells a monopoly to guarentee 2-way communication. They are also regulated and pay heavy taxes. For tv, well, 2 major satellites systems are in place (echo and direct). By disallowing monopolies in cable, it will encourage a great deal more competition. I would like to see disney or warner take on Comcast (comcast makes Qwest look good; very hard to do).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
yea, just how the government tells us who we can call on the phone... or where we can drive to...
the government controls alot and we still have freedom to do what we like, just quit with the stupid idea that the government is there to censor. In reality the government dosen't care much about anything we do, as long as we go to war when they need us and we pay our taxes they could care less what we do.
Police and other authorities are only there so that everyone will feel safe. Freedom to do what you like will allways be around in the US, we've never been told what to think or what to do. They may try to influence us but it is allways our choice. Anyway, enough of my stupid rant that is completely off topic.
As my post will surely demonstrate, I'm not that familiar with how cable/DSL networks work.
Is it possible for cable companies to use some sort of demand based throttling ie., allow me to use as much bandwidth as my line/modem will allow until others begin to do the same? If the maximum possible bandwidth for my run is something like 45mb/s, allow me to use 20 of that until other people begin to use up the remaining 25.
Another example might be when I download ISOs. The first one d/l at ~345KB/s, when I go after the second one (different server), the first one drops down and the two seem to share the ~345KB/s, d/l at 165 and 180. When I went for the third one, they went down to ~115 each.
Could the cable companies set minimum thresholds to determine when to throttle high b/w users?
Not that I saw in here anyway. Lets see how these things operate, shall we?
First off, your downstream is going to be in a 6mhz channel bandwidth (thats the size of a tv channel, bandwidth wise.) Typical downstream is going to use 64 QAM, which is ~5 bits per hz. Basically ~27-28 megabits in 1 - 6mhz space. Now, if you use 256 QAM, this increases, probably around the ballpark of ~38mhz (its late, I'm tired)
Now onto upstream. Docsis dictates either 16qam or QPSK (4 qam) for upstream rates. 16qam = 3.5 bits per hz, qpsk = 1.5 bits per hz. Keep in mind, distance can be a factor in this as well. (yes, its not just dsl anymore for distance limitations, never has been when its comes down to modulation.) So you're probably figuring, great. we have 9 megabits to play with right? Well, in transport, yes, but not with a cable modem system.
In Docsis 1.0, most you could have for an upstream channel size is 1.6 Mhz. 1.6 Mhz * 1.5 bits/hz is going to leave you with about ~2.5 megabits.
In Docsis 1.1, you get 16qam and ability for 3.2 mhz channel sizes, so that'll leave you with about ~8-10 megabits. Since you can only cram so-many channels into a 6mhz block for upstream, you end up being fairly limited. The only way this will substantially increase will be if Docsis 2.0 is deployed around. Docsis 1.1 and Docsis 2.0 are more fun creatures, crypto signed firmware files by manufacturers.
Now, if you can co-lo your own CMTS(s) you can do docsis 2. Otherwise, you'll be waiting for cox/comcast/rr/whoever to upgrade their gear. I think also starting with docsis 1.1, they can make provisions in the cable modem for what vlan you'll fall into in the config file, but guess what? It won't matter what provider you have at that point if they can't co-lo their own CMTS. We'll use cox for an example. If I just have bandwidth running to them and they setup config with specifics and I'm their competition, but we're using same wire, unless its allocated different frequencies, you'll be sharing your preferred ISP w/ everyone else who uses their own ISPs. The only thing you'll really see with is maybe some dropped prices (which I'd hope) and possibly more downstream speeds. Otherwise, there just isn't the bandwidth to support it unless theres a massive upgrade to docsis 2.0, good luck seeing that in the near future. Also, if you are a cable co and maintain a cable plant + head end, you probably don't want someone else to bring their equipment in that knows nothing about the cable network, much like telco, all this needs to be engineered correctly.
we are also forgetting one important thing. These "local Governments" are the ones that give the monoply franchise agreements to the cable company to keep competition out. The Cable company has to pay a kickback to the city to keep it that way or even in business. NO OTHER BUSINESS is required to pay a kickback to the city... the local Menards doesn't have to pay a franchise fee directly to the city.
Thisw is very typical in many large to small towns.... Metro areas like detroit and chicago that have more than 1 cable company can't charge these kickbacks as they know that the fed's would be all over them.
many times a cable rate increase is attached to the city increasing their kickback amount demanded from the calbe company. but most times It's trying to increase profitability.
The first step in making things better is to fight any franchise kickbacks your local community is getting out of the cable company and any unfair laws that allow them to have a monoply and not allow competition to come in.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Open access (ISP competition) would be good but regulation cannot create this competition. Rents for pipes will either get set too low or too high, and either the pipe or the ISP's will eventually die. The chance of government bureaucrats getting prices right are very poor. Having structural separation can create ISP competition, but there will still be finger pointing and a monopoly pipe.
Once you have pipe competition, then there is a market, and no government regulation is needed. The pipes can then partner with competitive ISP's to better compete against the other pipes without a need for open access regulation.
The chance of the 9th circuit getting anything right are also very poor.