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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.
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.
Soooo, does this mean we are (in essence) taking all the wires that the cables companies have strung by eminent domain? Not that I'm opposed to nationalizing infrastructure, but I think we ought to pay them something for their trouble. Oh wait, I've already paid for that wire ten times over with my skyrocketing cable bill.
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.
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
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...
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
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."
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.
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
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?
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.