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Next-Gen Broadband Primer
Aaron writes "Broadband Reports has a good read on the real deal behind next generation broadband deployments. In four years: half all Verizon DSL users should have fiber, half of all SBC subscribers should have 10-20Mbps DSL, and one tenth of all BellSouth customers should have 50Mbps DSL. At the same time cable companies should begin deploying DOCSIS 3.0 technology in 2006, eventually bringing 100Mbps speeds to end users."
BBR: While we're only starting to see DOCSIS 2.0 deployment, and the higher speeds it can bring (Adelphia & Cox 15Mbps), DOCSIS 3.0 should only be a few years behind. Do you see the cable industry having any trouble keeping up with these bell plans?
DB: The "15 meg" speeds Cox is offering where they compete with Verizon fiber are mostly advertising. It's really 38 meg shared among 100 or so users, the same speed as the current services advertised at as 3 and 7 meg. That's too much oversubscription to deliver 15 meg most of the time, if even 5 or 10 people are downloading on the node. To regularly get past today's 5 meg or so, you need to bond more channels, which is what DOCSIS 3.0 offers.
DOCSIS 3.0 is real, mostly agreed, and the key vendors have the details and are making equipment for 2006. It's a shared 160/120 or higher, easily expandable to a shared gigabit. Real speeds to users will often be 20-50 megabits. It was developed to compete with higher speed DSL in Asia. Early in 2005, the U.S. cable companies realized Verizon was serious about
fiber, and pushed CableLabs and suppliers (Cisco, Motorola, Arris, Broadcom) to get DOCSIS 3.0 ready for the U.S. ASAP, and 2006 is realistic
with some pricey gear.
I will believe it when I see it. Depending on your home area, overselling of bandwidth can be a real problem. I have seen both DSL and Cable
providers routinely claiming speeds "up to". 5mpbs but real speeds are usually in the 3mbps range. Of course, the cable/DSL providers claim that "few sites allow you to take full advantage of your maximum bandwidth", which is a pile of horseshit, plain and simple. 92% of their userbase will believe that while the 8% that don't the broadband companies don't
want on their networks anyway.
While highspeed connections are great, I want to know where this backend bandwidth is coming from and who's paying for it? T3+ downstream speeds for only a tiny fraction of the real cost? I will be that 30+ megabits is nothing more than a pipe dream/marketing ploy. The real speeds we will be seeing are in the 10 to 15 range for "premium" members and will likely come with heavy "unadvertised". monthly caps. They want you to see webpages come up lightning fast (which happens at 1mbit) but they don't want you to actually see 10GB of torrents come in a day. They will still be catering to the 92% of their userbase that is the "mom and pop e-mail
and CNN checkers". The people who would really be excited about paying higher fees and getting the advantages of the massive bandwidth will end up with ToS violation warnings and slower than expected speeds.
nothing like bandwidth better than most of the servers you connect too..... You would practically cause a DOS attack with prefetch alone.....
Rural America is fun fun fun.
I guess it really is time buy stock in the adult entertainment industry... mainly web sites ;)
We'll continue to make do with 50K/sec. upload speeds.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
With these speeds and wide accessibility, why is Google investing in Broadband over Powerline technology?
Judging by the tiny speed increases for broadband over the last few years, I'll believe this when it comes to fruition, which probably won't be for another 10 years or more.
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
... as they throw their shareholders money at broadband-over-power-line providers who are busy trying to force the 60-Hz powerline distribution network to carry broadband signals on the order of 1 MBPS.
For the money they are spending, the power companies could run fiber, scale their speeds up in the future to compete with these higher-speed providers, and not pollute the entire HF spectrum. Instead, they are going to trash a very real natural resource and end up with a hopelessly-uncompetitive system even if it does work.
I live in San Jose, CA and I have 768k DSL and that was just as of last year, before that I had 384K DSL and for a LONG time I had 144K IDSL (DSL over ISDN!). So yeah you rock for being in rural America :)
snif snif :-), and I'm typing this on a 56k dial up line .....
Google loads fast enough for me as it is. Make my internet cheaper in 4 years, then i'll be happy! ;)
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Broadband has been around for how long now? My provider still can't get the basic sevice right. Living in a lesser populated area of Canada, broadband providers seem to be able to get away with offering the bare bare minimum quality and still manage to charge more than the average good broadband provider. Maybe a switch to faster broadband around all of Northa America might help pressure them in to improving their service but I am not very hopeful.
The question is: At what cost? I would not want my provider to shovel DSL [and associated costs] down my throat when I do not need all that speed. I only do email, slashdot and online banking on the internet. My current service which is cable restricted to twice the speed of dial-up is more that adequate.
The purpose of advertising these speeds is to undercut each other in the marketing arena. I would love to see this come to light but with the cost of of DS-3 / OC3 lines this will never happen. They may offer 100mb download with a 256k upload and a 25gb limit for the month. Kinda makes the service worthless in my eyes
My Doom. The gift that keeps on giving
I am not talking about Slashdotters who will put spinners on their Cable Modems and will overclock the cpu to the limit, but about ordinary people who still only use their computer to look at web pages and write email. Will 100Mbps provide 50x better experience than 2Mbps? I would rather them lower the cost by at least by 50% that would be much better.
Older computers that run Windows 98 that a lot of people still use, probably can't even handle a consistent 100Mbps stream.
Now, what about latency and QoS?
And there was way too much mention of IPTV and you-know-who, with their "the future may run through us alone" attitude, in that article for it to be palatable.
Just got my 7MB connection today ( 1MB up ).. yee ha
It takes longer than that for us to get what's new in club music and fashion from Europe so it's okay.
Ok...so even some parts of less-than-rural America are way behind the times too... All while we keep hearing stories of people in some Asian Countries with 90% penetration of 10Mbit+ broadband.
Err... here 20Mbps is already available for $30/mo + phone and dsl-tv. How is the DSL landscape in the US... I am going to study in the US in september. What connection speed can I expect ? Are there any geek-friendly provider ? (Mine for exemple provides a local mirror for almost all linux distro)
\u262D = \u5350
My prof last semester at grad school works for verizon where they have the FTTP in development. it's being tested and their only real problem right now is a battery they trust to work like they want it to for traditional phone service simulation.
Verizon isnt playing with BITS like everyone else. it's a BYTE rating for fiber. 50 MB capable. 15 MB base. like with DSL. they plan on switching all DSL over once it's running. they will pipe direct tv THROUGH the fiber. Unlike DSL this goes through repeaters and amplifiers. remember, DSL REQUIRES unbroken path. and maxes out at one-mile. Cable needs to start DOCSIS3 now if they want to keep ahead of verizon. after the 911 suing by attorney genereals, people dont have as much confidence in VoIP. Fiber from Verizon has already promised to mimic traditional or improve upon it. no lost features. that's what's cauing the battery problem
my broadband provider is a little phone company going balls-to-the-wall...they plan to have 50% fiber in their area and i'm about to get their fiber all in one service (phone, TV, internet). they're capping people pretty low for fiber, but the higher end is still cheaper than T1 for T1 speeds.
unless you're using the pc at 2 in the morning, you still won't get your full bandwidth potential.
One little mention of broadband over the power lines (BPL)?
Interesting since Google just made a huge investment in it.
Execute? [Y/N] _
I just can't wait until we all can have realistic mmorpgs that simulate life!
Anyone know how much bandwidth we needed to play in the metaverse?
I would gladly trade some of that extra bandwidth for better responsiveness.
...half all Verizon DSL users should have fiber, half of all SBC subscribers should have 10-20Mbps DSL, and one tenth of all BellSouth customers should have 50Mbps DSL.
And what will Qwest customers get?
Why, they get the shaft!
Qwests idea of fiber to the curb is to leave a bran muffin on your sidewalk every day for just $50 a month.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This high bandwidth sounds cool, but I'm betting it's all download ... what's the upstream like? It would be nice to have a little more bandwidth for my servers ... assuming these providers don't go the way of some current fascist providers like my current one. They block off vital TCP/IP ports. No incoming port 80 for my web server - no way do the corporations want us to turn into producers on the internet, the corporations only want us to be consumers of their own content. Blocked outgoing port 25, crippling my mail server - naturally, only corporations should be allowed to send e-mail ... we can't be trusted to communicate, and should place our trust in the corporations to "help" (read: censor) with our e-mail.
A long time ago in America, railroads used fluff pieces like this to justify to their investors that they needed more money to stay competitive.
Because everyone needs faster trains right? Well as history has shown, yes to a point in time when a disruptive technology comes along to do the job cheaper/better in one way or another.
Off-Topic:
I'd be interested to find some non-marketing stats on how many homes have computers in America and the breakdown of dialup/broadband.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
So will freakin' Verizon finally allow me to get "Naked DSL" if it's over fiber?
Right now I'm paying $20/mo for a dial tone. No features, no calling plan, nothing. ~ $9 for the dial tone, the rest taxes and [BS] fees. So my "more affordable" DSL costs the same as just getting Earthlink cable internet from TimeWarner.
As soon as I can get back to cable [or powerline, flying monkeys, whatever] I will...
the US market needs to get with the times regarding this gen's broadband before worrying about things to come.
What if I told you guys south of the 49th that personal Internet access in canada is almost exclusively broadband - either cable or adsl?
What if I told you that most common folk up here don't even know you can use a phone to access the net?
I looked over the mac mini when it came out, and sat there wondering who the hell would be using the included modem... but then I remembered that in the US, a lot of people would.
I have a friend who works for a major phone company on the engineering end of their fiberoptics division. It seems that they are laying the infastructure right now (in the chicago area at least) and are using a loop style of wiring (they make huge circles that interconnect to give redundancy). He quotes that fiberoptics will start being offered in 2006 and will become common by 2008/2009 (in the chicago area) ossus
Shaw recently increased their speeds and for only $15 more per month I could be getting much faster speeds. Of course they only increased the cap by about 10 gig/month so I'd be going from fast and able to blow my monthly transfer cap in 4 days to really fast and able to blow my cap in 3 days.
I don't care if I'm only getting 2 mbit instead of 30 mbit, let me max it out and leave it there forever without penalties and threats of kicking me off the network. Hell I'd pay the higher fees for a slower but truely unlimited connection.
And the cable companies will still only give you 32kb of upstream.
what sig?
My big question (if it was in the article, sorry, It's a lot to read word-by-word) is, is this going to be an upgrade to current services as a lot of ISPs have done over the past 10 years, or a new service that is going to cost $100/mo the first year or so? It'd be nice if it was a free upgrade to existing service, but pretty unlikely with the cost involved....
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
Is there any consumer broadband provider out there who doesn't use the qualifier "up to" in advertising their speeds? DSL providers (in the past at least) were notorious for claiming that, but still throttling connections, while cable companies have often oversold their lines so that the theoretical limit is almost never likely to be hit, or even approached.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Broadband was available where i ws living back in 1994 as a pilot project and it quickly became the standard against which everything else was judged. Through various moves I have changed broadband suppliers many times and found the service to be at least acceptable in all cases. Now I have moved to a rural area where the phone lines are so poor that my max speed is 28.8 and it is frequently 14.4. I have had to set up my primary online-box in a friends basement in town so I can get online without pulling my hair out. It would be nice to see some badly needed infrastructure upgrades in rural parts of the country so we can all enjoy what the net has to offer.
...and there will be 31% as opposed to 30% market penetration? How about we focus on making broadband universally available rather than making it faster for a select few.
Will the next generation of BroadBand enable massive increase in pay-per-view programming? At those speeds you could download live or recorded TV and movies from anywhere, not just your local cable co. So content producers could sell directly to customers, and bypass their current distribution networks.
What does this mean for broadcast TV, movie houses, and the local cable monopolies?
Would I love saying I get 30+Mbit to my house? Sure...am I even happier that SBC dropped DSL to $14.99/month (1.5Mbit) and $24.99/month (3.0Mbit)? Crap yeah. More is better...but cost is a big factor, and SBC has the winner for that right now.
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
Has anyone considered the implications of a DDoS involving a zombie army of machines with 100 mbit uplinks? This could spell disaster for just about everybody except those with the absolute fattest pipes. It takes an awful lot of hosts to swamp an OC3 now, but that's with hosts that rarely have a half megabit uplink, if that. It would be frighteningly easy to swamp the heavy links with a few 100 mbit links.
That is, of course, unless the bigger pipes grow at a rate proportional to the smaller ones. That also assumes symmetrical links for the home connections. Oh the irony of a 100 mbit / 128 kbit connection.
I don't like Verizon fiber. I prefer Metamucil.
First, cable systems are already on the edge of capability across the country at the current 256QAM/6Mhz slot format. At the high end and low end ingress and leakage are problems and I've seen no widespread deployment of new actives and passives that change that. The biggest problem is signal security and prompt termination of any line allowing ingress/leakage. Most cable users are blissfully unaware of the basics and will still buy Rat Shack crap, still splice with a carpet knife and electrical tape, still hook to bad devices, etc. The cable industry needs intelligent taps which are not only addressable, but monitor the signals for ingress and terminate if they go above a certain threshold.
In most systems, addressable taps end up being useless because the field workers refuse to follow the rules and keep port assignments in line with records so the wrong people get terminated all the time, lockboxes are broken into so people splice into active lines, etc.
I don't see any systems I've ever worked as being able to adopt the newer standards without a huge amount of capital investment into infrastructure improvement. There's rumblings of wanting to save bandwidth by going to 8, 12, or even larger slots to reduce guardband loss and be able to more stably use 1024QAM which works better with larger slots (IIRC, at 6Mhz, 1024QAM gives maybe a 25% increase or so in the lab, is disasterously unfit for any system I know in practice). Such a change involves a lot more than just DOCSIS standards and would have had to begin five to ten years ago to be anywhere near to deployment today.
Second, most DSL providers have at most two DS-3 backhauls from each DSL colocation. The phone company tends to own major amounts of backbone to start with themselves so they can roll out bigger services than CLECs, but the ILECs are talking about rolling out aggregate bandwidth of thousands of gigabits per second across a region and their existing backhauls are nowhere near that size. Oversubscription will be an issue, the connections wil not be unlimited and all you can eat.
Then there is the matter of CLECs and whether those fiber rollouts must be open to them and if so, how will that work and if not, how will that affect the end-users' price structures?
This seems to be putting us into a new broadband age where we have our own LAN at home, wired and/or wireless, and a sort of community LAN (Metropolitan Area Network) in the form of this LAN-speed connection, and then we are hobbled once again the way we were when we simply had an Ethernet LAN but our Internet access was across at most a T1 but more usually dial-up or ISDN.
Area Bittorrent sort of thinking might work. By having caching through each others' machines we could better make use of the MAN and reduce duplication of information transmitted from the ILEC/cable network's backhaul to the Internet at large. Granted, a lot of security work would be needed to create a good stable and secure distributed proxy that didn't personally identify anyone and merely distributed the data without regard to who originally downloaded it. But until the backhaul pipes rise to the level of reducing the problem of logjams due to overusage and oversubscription, which may be never since the last mile capacity is outstripping the backhaul now, it's something we could use.
BTW, if anyone wants to write such a distributed proxy system, they may feel free to call it Area Bittorrent. Just so we're clear on the IP angle. ; )
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
I recently had an ask slashdot question about rolling out fiber via a co-op. While thinking about this I realised the hardest part of running a network with huge pipe available to every john h. windowsuser, is the end user themselves. A botnet with 10 to 30 megabit upstream per drone is nothing to sneeze at considering the hard time data centers are already having with less than one meg up on most home connections. (at least here in the bible belt one meg up at most is the norm =P) I sincerly hope that Verizon keeps good logs and they as well as anyone rolling out DOCSIS 3 will contact users whos machines are behaving in an abusive fashion or to much of a good thing might well lead to the self destruction of the net. As to the fibre project I have a meeting with the local electrical company the are interested in backing the project. I will let you all know as it progresses.
Panel F, Relay #70
I remember the 14K BBS days and downloading 300MB files with a 56K modem. 1Mbit is the minimum I really want to have, although I need less. Truth is, most sites can't keep up with my 8mbit anyway, I usualy download big files at 100/200 kb/s, it's rare that I can download at 500kb/s or faster.
I wouldn't stand in line for anything faster. But I would like something cheaper or have the upload speed go up instead.
'For we walk by faith, not by sight.' II Corinthians 5:7
Dad, is that you?
we will be forced to use voogle.com
But, for families with more than one box hooked up to the otside world through a router, a big speed boost would be great. The kids can play games, do homework, etc, and still not slow down mom and dad.
antipaucity
What the heck is FTTN? Fiber To The... Nerds? Is that like Power To The People??
And I'm sure that P2P users can't barely wait.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
It would be nice if more companies realized that the internet is not one-way communications, and that its real strength lies in allowing everyone to both create and share content. Of course, considering that Time Warner is a media company at its core, they have a bit of conflict of interest with providing lots of upstream bandwidth as long as they continue to fear file-sharing.
If the public has a big increase in bandwidth, that'll afford the content producers to create bigger and bigger forms of content. That's great. However, if these increased pipelines don't result in cheaper costs as well, it's going to be a bummer to have all this massive content, but with me still paying the same cost per gb as before. Video files used to satisfy at 30-50mb per episode. Now I'm seeing 100-300mb episodes, great quality. Lots of growth in DVD-quality files getting passed around, 4gigs-ish. Dual-layer DVDs'll or one of the new HD-DVD formats'll become commonplace in the future(or something bigger). If each gb doesn't get cheaper along with the simultaneous growth in bandwidth and filesize, my wallet is going to be doing all the shrinking in return. Already living in fear of Optimum's Online secret bandwidth caps which they are deathly afraid of disclosing.
These stats are bogus! They aren't taking into account the number of Apple wireless subscribers there will surely be in a few years! /Read it on slashdot, so it has to be true
need more love than internet bandwidth does right now.
You could have a 10 terabit connection, but if your HD writes are 8-12mb/s it's kinda pointless.
All your base are belong to Google.
If it weren't for the ground-level sonic boom, we'd've had supersonic transport from LA to NY decades ago.
If the Concord's replacement is only porportionately more expensive per hour of travel time including in-airport delays than subsonic first class and provides first-class space and amenities, it will make a lot of money. The Concord was simply too expensive to operate.
Now, when human-capable matter transporters come online to disrupt things, air travel will have to adjust. Ditto, for some purposes, real-time holograms a la Star Wars. The airlines have already had to adjust to video conferencing cutting down on the need for face-to-face meetings. Oh, before someone mentions suborbital flights, I view it as merely an extension of air travel in the same way that jets are an extension to pre-jet-age air travel. Or at least it will be if the airlines choose to invest in that technology.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I hear you, man...I'm stuck on 56k. Broadband has only become available here recently... with Comcast :(
I'll be upgraded when I move out of this place.
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Come on, nobody's ever going to need more than 64 K/second of bandwidth.
I just bumped up to Verizon fibre to the home (FIOS) yesterday. Smokes my cable modem and it's cheaper! I don't have to rent or buy my own modem... and it shouldn't be affected by things like lighting or nuclear bomb radiation.
30 bran muffins a month for $50? Beats what I'm paying at Starbucks!
Be thankful that you even have DSL. Real rural Americans have no broadband options available at all. To us, hopping in the car, going into work, downloading to CD/Flash, and driving back home is the closest we get to broadband.
I'm seeing some improvement, but not much because most servers out there are bandwidth throttled for a single connection anyway - they aren't serving at 3Mbps per connection, so you won't get anything faster from a single download point.
And I think most people aren't downloading from multiple sources most of the time. I was downloading a half dozen Corrs videos from Yousendit and another file download site the other day and still saw a maximum of only 162KBps being used according to Firefox download box. And I normally get 150Kbps since I'm less than a couple miles from the CO.
I switched mostly because I was paying the old $49.95/month rate for 1.5Mbps and the new rate is twenty bucks less for twice the speed. So even if I don't get the full 3Mbps, I'm still saving.
When I did so, the rep told me within a year SBC would be offering 20Mbps. I'm not sure how many users are going to even come close to filling that pipe just doing Web surfing, email, etc. You'd have to be downloading a lot of Bittorrent movies or every Linux distro CD/DVD at the same time to be able to eat up that much. I'm sure it will happen once services are launched to provide more and larger content, but for the next three to five years I think it will be overkill for most people.
I do know a lot of people are going to switch to DSL now that it's $14.95 for 1.5Mbps. At that price, it's ridiculous to stay with dialup unless you just can't get DSL in your neighborhood. And the rep told me SBC was laying fiber all over the place to extend the reach of DSL, so unless you're really rural, odds are it will be available at some point (I omit places like the middle of Montana, or the Mendocino forest, or whatever.)
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
The heck with download speeds, I want more upstream speed. I'm in an SBC area very close to a Remote Terminal, but in an older neighborhood with no alleys and lots of wooden fences which is unlikely to get fiber. Right now I get 512K up out of a possible (with regular ADSL technology) 640K. If they use VDSL, that can go as high as 2.3M up. I think I'll be happy if I can get 1.5M (esentially a full T1) up.
--
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Too bad the following "code" occurs:
10: Notice no bran muffin on sidewalk
20: Call Qwest wondering where your order is
30: Quest will claim the order is lost and that it's your fault
40: Quest will claim the new order has been entered
50: GOTO 10
my provider offer up to 2MBit down and 256k up; my modem is connected at 2272k down and 288k up, and occasionally gets data transfer speeds to match, even with TCP overhead :-)
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
Anyone have any idea if Shaw is doing anything similary in Canada? I live in the Vancouver area, any ideas on if its coming there?
So basically they will all have what the Swiss are already enjoying?
What I'd like to see is better utilization of bandwidth within the cable/DSL network infrastructure. It costs cable/DSL providers MUCH less to provide high speed connections between customers in the same local topology.
If you had 100Mb/s to everybody within your local area it would make things like high speed videoconferencing or sharing of high bandwidth content between friends and family VERY fast.
Problem is that current caps on cable/DSL lines dont' descriminate between transfers between two people on the same cable/fiber segment and going out beyond the border router and down that T3/OC-3 or whatever out to the commercial internet up provider. As a result you are capped at communicating with the person accross the street when you really could communicate with them at blazing speeds.
Customers won't demand a huge increase in the growth rate, they'll assume growth will be similar to past growth rates.
Here's some dates for "home"-grade telecommunications common in the USA. If anyone has exact approval dates for modem standards, that would be useful.
1960s - 300 bps
Early/mid '80s - 1200
Mid'80s - 2400
Mid/late '80s - 9600
Around 1990 - 14,400 symmetric
Early/mid-1990s - 19.2, 22.8, 33.6
late-'90s - 53Kbps/down 33.6/up
2003 - 3MB/sec over Cable
2005 - 6MB/sec over Cable
From the days of 1200 being popular in the early/mid '80s to the days of 53K being popular in the late 1990s was about 15 years. In that time speeds went up 44x. That's about 5 and a half doublings. Moore's Law would suggest 10 doublings, so growth in the dialup era lagged. Hardware-based modems did get a lot cheaper though. I don't count "softmodems" because it's an apples-to-oranges comparison.
It's a bit too soon to tell what the growth rate will be with broadband, as we've been at it for less than 10 years in most areas. However, my cable maximum speed is only about 4x what it was at initial rollout 5-7 years ago, which indicates a doubling every 2.5-3.5 years. Copper-DSL rates haven't grown all that much - if you lived next to the central office when your telco first started offering DSL and you bought their top-tier package, you are probably still getting similar speeds, on the order of 1-2Mb/sec. However, more customers are provisioned for higher grades of service than 10 years ago, thanks to more fiber-to-the-neighborhood or similar in-the-field infrastructure improvements. Both cable and DSL subscribers are paying a lot less than they were though.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Where are you? In western Canada most if not all DSL providers as far as I know don't enforce caps. I've never heard of anyone getting warning letters from Telus or Sasktel. Though I have know idea about Manatoba east.
I consistently get at least the 3 Mbps down that I'm paying for with my cable company, and sometimes I even get slightly more speed than that(!)
9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
...and it works great. I've had it for just over two months now, and I haven't had a single problem with it. $49/mo is pretty nice, too.
The actual installation took about four hours, so I had quite a bit of time to talk to the installer. He said that they do two installs a day, and that they're booked pretty solid for the next few months doing installs. This is in Huntington Beach, CA, one of the first areas that they're rolling out their FTTP services.
So i'm not trying to plug anything, but there is a swet company in San Francisco that offers connectivity to at least apartment building across the city (if the owner or home owners association decides to light up the building).
http://www.vvdcommunications.com/
They use high speed wireless links to light up a building and then use the existing wiring infrastruvture to distribute the connectivity to the apartments or condos.
It's not SBC, not DSL and not Cable, so that alone makes it superior. It's really quite sweet.
The problem is obviously the refusal of the US government to level the playing field. This was commented on before regarding the DSL rollout and subsequent speed boosts in Japan. They has such high penetration at very high speeds 20Mbps+ at very reasonable prices ($25/month?) and it's absolutely shameful that we don't do more to keep our populous up to speed.
"It's all sort of cute, but there's one problem. Australia never, in fact, got a regular newsfeed by mag tape."
If you're on the continent, you can always get satellite ;)
Rural America is fun fun fun.
Don't complain - I moved from 'Rural America' (Actually, 1.05 miles outside the city limits) to the city just under a year ago.
I went from 26400bps dial-up modem speeds (And this was achieved with one of those old USRobotics 56k V.90 hardware controlled ISA card modems, so it was as good as it was going to get) to 1.5mbit DSL.
The price went from $4.95/mo to $14.95/mo, but I'd call that a heck of a deal.
It would be nice if they put 100Mbit to the end user -- but my personal experience with SBC and Verizon warns me to not believe all the hype. They regularly throttle connections -- and hosting any kind of service is typically a NO-NO. Thus they lost me as a customer (both residential and business grade).
:)
... at home no less. They're towers used to be at 45Mbit and were since upgraded to 100Mbit (or better I believe) with the option to upgrade my antenna coming next month (to 45Mbit -- at my expense for the equipment, but I *own* it then :).
:).
:). I can think of the last time my Internet went down -- it was about a week ago with golf ball sized hail falling from the sky. I was out for I believe 3 minutes, probably while a bunch of routers had to re-sync for whatever reason. Previous to that I can't remember.
:]. Of course there is the cell phone -- and honestly it is in my head to go for the cell in an emergency. If both VoIP and cell fail then there may be bigger issues at hand -- and running down the street naked yelling "FIRE!, FIRE!" will certainly bring help. :)
The sad thing is that they're just _now_ getting to this. I've had 10Mbit (symmetrical) for many, many years now ($50/mo) through a wireless connection. Yes, that is a solid 10Mbit and I regularly see 800-900K/sec (up or down) if the remote site can handle it. A good test has always been downloading something from Apple.
Yeah, I said upload. My ISP has no issue with me hosting my own website, email server, heck camera video feeds too
Why are the bells lagging to badly? Sure, the wireless connection (being shared) doesn't *always* give 100% throughput as many others may be tapping it hard at the same time; 8pm isn't a good download time, but gaming isn't a issue... (~10-12 ping on Quake or better -- yeah, that's me you love to hate
I will say that it is rock solid enough to have taken the POTS then ISDN line away from the Bells too -- all VoIP over here (through the ISP no less
Yes, 911 works as expected [tested, thank you
That's nice. I only got 1.5M DSL into my neighborhood six months ago. Before that my options were a modem or satellite- the cable company didn't even bother running cable out to our development until a year ago, and they still don't have cable modem service.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
In four years: half all Verizon DSL users should have fiber
It seems high speed internet is causing a sharp increase in incontinence.
While its not being offered on their web site, depending on where you live, you can get 7M down / 1M up (technically 876k) speeds for 50$ a month. For me, it was only 10$ more than my 1.5M service. Mind you, its a basic service. No email, no newsgroups, no web hosting.
While 7M speeds arnt as good as the fiber service, its much better than what Comcast is offering in Seattle, which I believe is 4 meg down and 40k up for 45$ a month.
Call them up.
And if history is any indication, Verizon will *still* limit you to 96kbps upstream.
I'm tellin' ya, these carriers won't be happy until we have gigabit capacity downstream, and just enough upsream to handle mouse clicks, completing the Internet's conversion into interactive television.
Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make them all yourself.
DNS has been extremely slow for the last six months and they don't do anything about it... bastards!
I'm all for this AS LONG AS...
the ISPs adequately keep their eyes peeled for infestations in their network. It wouldn't take but a handful of infected machines on 100mb networks to DoS even the healthiest of networks.
Given the HORRRRRRIBLE track record of even some VERY large, notable ISPs in cutting off members who have spam-bot / zombie / worm-infested machines, this increase in bandwith makes me both excited at the good possibilites and shudder at the possible bad, too.
Running 'Nix is like owning a Lightsaber. It's "a more elegant weapon for a more civilized time."
apparently people seem to lake any humor whatsoever... either that, or they hate mazda comercials... oh well...
I love to slaughter the english language.
Read this 1999 article about SBC's 'Project Pronto'. " According to SBC, when the expanded deployment program is completed [in three years] customers will be able to receive minimum downstream connection speedsof 1.5 megabits per second, with more than 60 percent eligible to receive guaranteed speeds of 6 megabits a second." Right.
SBC's new "Project Lightspeed" isn't about the Internet at all. It's just cable TV, implemented using Windows Media 9 over DSL using Scientific-Atlanta set-top boxes. The system doesn't use the Internet at all. It has its own infrastructure, which is a Microsoft-implemented multicast implementation.
It's not about Internet access at all. All you can get is what they want to send you. Lightspeed will block access to Internet video.
There was a Next-Gen story yesterday, too. I guess we're all getting outdated and the new kids are moving in... *sigh*
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
What are ordinary people going to do with 100Mpbs next year that they have such a difficulty doing now?
...
Older computers that run Windows 98 that a lot of people still use, probably can't even handle a consistent 100Mbps stream.
You're missing the point (as is probably most everyone else here) on why the TelCos are doing this buildout. Once they hit 25 Mbps, they can start offering full quality HDTV service over the lines and compete with cable like never before. They will be able to supply Phone, Internet and Video on one service. That is their main reason. 20 Mbps for TV, 5 mbps for internet and ~11Kb for phone. If they really want to have fun, they can start doing Video Phones on their networks for about 1Mbit total.
Chanel Changing times for the TV will be a little bit longer than with DTV, but that is because it is using the multicast on the network and has to tell the router/central server to send it the bits. However, this will mean a third competitor in the Cable/Satelite market. It will also mean a second proper competitor in the broadband market.
Once they get above 25Mbps, then they can start increasing the quality of the TV they offer. 15-20 Mbps is really the minimum you need for HDTV. ~45 Mbps will pretty much garuntee you great quality no matter what is on the screen.
One final comment on the prices of OC-3s. The TelCos are generally some of the companies that own various backbones that the internet here in the US is made of. They can charge themselves whatever they want for access.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
What would be the best for me to leech off my neighbor.
And is it available in St. Petersburg Florida?
Have wifi will travel.
Have you priced bran muffins at your local coffee shop lately? $50/month for curbside delivery might be a better deal than you think it is...
you can get dsl and cable in nunavut:
http://www.thelist.com/areacode/867/broadband/
and the Northwest Territories:
http://www.theedge.ca/internet/index.html
THat argument doens't wash.
Powerline in rural areas will get nowhere because of the EM noise. Note it is still perfectly usable as a last mile technology for areas where power is underground. Satellite is expensive, and has a huge lag. WIMAX is an option, but if there is enough $$ to be made, it should be possible to make a long-distance version of ADSL, with perhaps less speed. This could be combined with fat-client compression: All ZIP files carry their own dictionary. If you instal 30 huge dictionaries for different media types (HTML, email,...) on the client, you could compress to a fraction of what is possible today. Re-encode all graphics as JPEG2000, etc... Of course this would require a lot of CPU cycles at the ISP. I think AOL is experimenting with something like that, no?
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Great! Now I can download all of my Microsoft patches that much faster...
I must say that I am always amazed at how many people think the average user already has enough bandwidth. I believe this is only because the services current bandwidth can provide are so limited. But talking to "average users", people in my family and friends who are not necessarily computer literate, convinces me that demand is there if the services are commensurate, and that there is already demand there for current services. Examples of services that require greater bandwidth today, or will likely in the future (for the average user): 1. Uploading photos. I and others in my family regularly fill an entire memory card then attempt to upload it all at once to our favorite photo services. Impatience is a virtue in our family and even waiting a couple minutes, let alone the typical hour, can be too long. [Indeed, for some of the computer-challenged in my family, such waits typically cause them to think they broke something on the computer! I've had to reassure them that this is just the normal thing.] 2. Sharing home videos. Similar to the photo service. 3. Video phone. Friends of mine (we're graduate students) doing research abroad often use such services to communicate with people back home. These are not necessarily computer literate people. But the quality can be much improved. And such improvements, I believe, are linked to improved bandwidth. 4. Movies and television. Cable and satellite tv netoworks are already trying to increase on-demand options. I think that consumers will increasingly want such services and that the internet will be the way to provide them. And forget netflix or blockbuster mail services. I want my movie now! (Once again, the impatience virtue.) And why not be able to rent a high-quality download, streamed from the computer to the TV (or a box already with the TV), and get it instantaneously. Similar services are already available, but bandwidth is still a major issue. 5. And what if multiple members of my family want to do all of these things and more at once, using the same internet connection? So I sincerely hope that some of the predictions about increased bandwidth in the near future are true!
The following line from the article really got me:
They stopped the DSL build at 80% or so to concentrate on fiber, but I believe are now going back to reach 90%+. Because they were considering selling rural lines, they didn't invest, leaving half of Maine unserved.
As a Maine resident among the 20% without DSL, you can understand my frustration after reading this. The phone lines are so bad in my neighborhood the fastest dialup connection I can get is 28.8. If it rains, that can drop way down, or not work at all due to line static.
I live 40 north minutes of Maine's largest city, and 20 minutes south of the capital. Though a few farms and wood lots still remain, Southern Maine is by no means rural. To think that Verizon would stop in the middle of deploying broadband to the remainder of it's service area, and then pursue deploying FASTER broadband to service areas that already have DSL, is beyond me.
It appears to me that profit has once again taken precedence over providing a resonable level of service to customers. Thanks to FCC regulation, I can purchase my DSL from any number of local service providers once Verizon does deliver a line. It's always nice to give the proverbial middle finger to a company that's treated you poorly :)
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-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
A 100 node zombie net can be blocked pretty easily, but your 10k node network will require a many more nodes to be blocked if they are all/mostly running at 10 or 100Mbit links.
A 10k node network @ 256Kbit requires a much lower percentage of hosts blocked to mitigate the attack.
But it's like the phone/cable cos are ever gonna give us 100Mbit uplink anyway.
This comment makes me think you've never touched or seen Satellite in action.
Having supported it, I wouldn't even use a dish for a bird feeder - thats how far away from it I'm staying.
If you think about it SATA hardrive data speeds are about 150 MBps, and if you can get a 100MBps line to your house, you're able to access files on the internet almost about as fast as you are locally. To me that's kinda mind boggling. Your gonan run outta stuff to download real fast.
640Kbps ought to be enough for anybody.
They already have this!/ index.html
http://bbpromo.yahoo.co.jp/promotion/adsl/regular
I think it equates to around $40/month for the 50mbps connection. Doubt we'll ever get that good of a deal here.
People still hire out horse-drawn carraiges.
In a world where teleporters are the norm, I'd make a vacation of flying or driving cross-country.
Shipping would only continue as-is as long as it was cheaper than teleporter. Most things hauled by ship these days COULD be hauled by air, but it's just not cost-effective.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
maybe if I could spell, I wouldnt get the troll marker... heh
I love to slaughter the english language.
That's the catch, I live in this 50-year-old neighborhood in Denver (i.e. not out in the 'burbs by any stretch of imagination) and Qwest still hasn't deployed DSL of any sort.
There will for a very long time be rural areas that won't get broadband access. Their options will be wireless, satallite, or powerline.
It sucks to be me. I live at the end of two telephone trunks (The last pedestal for one remote c/o is in my front yard, the last pedestal from another remote c/o is in my next door neighbor's yard) meaning of course I have no hope in hell of ever getting DSL. I remember when the Bellsouth guy came to hook up my home for service he had to schedule a line repair crew to come by and patch up enough lines so that I could even get a dial-tone (all other good pairs in the pedestal having been already taken.) Cable won't ever be run to my place b/c I am on the the county line; Comcast has agreements with the county which is not even 100 feet from my front door, but nothing with the county I actually live in; there is no right-of-way coming the other direction to recieve a cable trunk from my home county at all (power comes from a right-of-way originating from the other county.) So satellite is the only reasonable choice for broadband, but I'll be damned if I'll pay $600 install, $80 a month for FAP'ped, hi-latency service. So until some new technology comes out, or Bellsouth decides for whatever reason to build a new remote c/o closer to my house, (New subdivision might do the trick,) I have no realistic options. Should I move? No, the no-broadband thing is a welcome trade-off to live in an area where the neighbors are friendly, no need to lock the doors type area, with acres and acres of woods behind my house for privacy. There are hundreds of thousands of people like me who lust for broadband but b/c we don't happen to live within 2 miles from a major metropolis will likely never taste the sweet fruit of broadband.
Or just move to Korea or Japan and get it right now.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
"Qwests idea of fiber to the curb is to leave a bran muffin on your sidewalk every day for just $50 a month."
Cheaper than Starbucks. And delivered!
I'm just picturing bandwidth of that caliber getting into the hands of the unwashed (read: unpatched) Windows-using masses. *shudders*
Working in a DevOps shop is like playing in a band made up entirely of keytarists.
Heh. That's why we started our broadband wireless coop. 3 meg up/down, We can go to 6 with the current equipment. $40 per month. And we think that's too expensive, so it will probably go to $30 RSN. And people who have a hard time getting POTS can get it. Bottom line: be creative and don't rely on others for your bits. Well yeah, luck and hard work helps too.
What do you really expect? Qwest got shafted when it came time to draw for geographic regions.. Keeping phone lines running to every hamlet in Montana, South Dakota, and Wyoming has got to be a gigantic cash-sink. And for big cities they've got... Minneapolis. Not exactly the case of Ameritech (now SBC) which had the ChicagoSt Louis corridor, or Verizon who has the whole dense east-coast thing going on.
If there's a fight between the merging mega-baby bells about who gets Qwest, it's because nobody wants them!
Of course their plans for FTTP are way behind- they just don't have the densities to take advantage of that the other bells do.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
$14.95/mo for 1.5mbit is better than a heck of a deal..that's just about unheard of. Someone from your DSL company needs to talk to someone from mine about pricing.
Well DSL has always been that way. All I know is that Qwest is offering 7M/1M service now, and its only a matter of weeks before they start advertising it. All Comcast can do is offer a higher download speed, but they really need to work on their upstreams.
When's the last time an air cargo plane hit an iceberg or sand bar at 30,000 feet? They usually do their damage at about 0 feet.
On the other hand, it would make a very tempting target for terrorists.
I live in Denver, one of the larger areas they support.
While it's true they have a huge region to cover, they do have some dense areas they could at least try fiber in. But Qwest has been terrible for a long time now at doing any infrastructure upgrades. I live right in the middle of denver and I can't get DSL because of a residential splitter.
I gew up in a rural area and don't really understand why it's considered an expense for Qwest to service those areas since basically they do nothing whatsoever - if you get any kind of dialtone at all, they are done. Not to mention there's a tax levied on eveyone's phone bill to subsidize these regions anyway, which in theory should negate the pain of having to service them. I can understand and support my phone bill being a bit higher to support these regions; I cannot condone the terrible attitude towards network upgrades Qwest seems to have.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Have you priced bran muffins at your local coffee shop lately? $50/month for curbside delivery might be a better deal than you think it is...
Would you honestly be willing to put anything Qwest made in your mouth? *Shudder*
Three words for you - preprocessed fiber muffin, if you get my drift.
Perhaps us people that live West ascribe a few more different meanings to the word "Muffin" than just Starbucks related.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
One thing that higher bandwidth can do for people is allow for real home monitoring - so you can keep an eye on your pets or perhaps check out the house if you have a remote alarm.
Basically, more bandwith everywhere will allow for more things like home webcams or other media sharing.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
But the price point for the rural area that I live in will still probably not be good enough to for the telco's to care, and I'll still have dialup.
Opportunities multiply as they are seized. --Sun-Tzu
The plan is for _selective_ high speed upload.
The credit card slot on your DSL modem will upload payment information at the hightest possible rate, and the company will make a micro-profit on the float.
You've got to think small, fast and predatory to understand business ethics these days.
Weasels.
I just peed my pants imagining service like you describe. What ISP? Where?
thank you for making people think that Montreal, which is a great city, is filled with morons like yourself.
Remember that often, the company that produces movies/tv content, is the same company that delivers it to your home via cable tv/interet. This company has no interest in allowing you to compete with them in the content production business.
The major fault in trying to put broadband over power lines into major use is the abount of noise it puts out and the total havoc it plays with anything near those frequencies. The power grid wasn't designed for this use and it seems like a total hack job to me. I've seen it kill ham radio reception not to mention other public systems.
My advice is to stick to wireless or the evolution and expansion of the cell networks.
until it actually happens, I'm gonna say, it's just blowing hot air up someone's rear end.
You have broadband at work?!? That ain't rural.
In my last house, I was lucky even to have phone service. This is rural south-east USA, in a 100 year old house, with a phone line that at varying times has static, depending on the weather, or no dial tone at all, if a drunk took out the pole down the road. No DSL, no cable TV, not even local dial-up. I'd find bear tracks in my driveway and not even think it was odd.
I really loved living there, too. None of the suburban bull shit so many people have to deal with.
I'm in BC. Telus is not available at my current location so I'm on shaw. Shaw calls at 30 gb/month total. telus I had no issues with at my old house doing 80+ gb/month but their service was brutal and they where starting to have outages.
Quit your bitching. Rural Australia only gets 56k [sik].
I wasn't "bitching', I said "I wish"... I'm glad for what I do have. Get your facts straight.