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Increased Bandwidth Irrelevant?
halbert writes "ArsTechnica has a story about AT&T COO Randall Stephenson telling folks that there is 'no discernable difference' between AT&T's 1.5 Mbps service and Comcast's 6 Mbps, because the backbone is slowing everything down. The main argument from the article is that fiber to the home is not necessary. How about letting the consumer decide that?" From the article: "This is a direct response to the criticism that AT&T has suffered for deploying a fiber optic network that reaches only to the local node, not directly into a customer's home--which means that the 'last mile' connection is still copper wire. Verizon, by contrast, is deploying fiber directly into the home, making for much higher speeds. AT&T argues that its model is cheaper, faster to deploy, and just as capable as Verizon's, which currently uses much of its massive bandwidth to distribute RF TV channels."
So, the COO of company A who provide a worse service than company B says that there's no service-level difference in practice. Well, he *would*, wouldn't he ? It's always worth remembering the wisdom of ages... "cui bono"
IMHO (and it's only a single datapoint) it's certainly worth it for me... I have servers located in the UK on a 100mbit link, and at least 80% of the time I can download at ~500 kBytes/sec (sometimes more) from there to San Jose (CA). Since I transfer large numbers of multi-megapixel images, it's important to me that I have a fast link.
So, basically, picture me blowing a loud raspberry at Mr. Stephenson, thumb on the end of my nose, and waggling my fingers at him. I'll take the Comcast service, thanks.
Oh, BTW, you can get HDTV down the same wire too
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
and I sometimes get 3 - 4 Mbit / sec on sustained downloads. end of argument. AT&T, fix your slow shit.
...single-channel ISDN and 6Mbps cable except for the discernable slowness.
And I can tell a HUGE difference in the performance of the connection during normal browsing activities. When downloading a new distribution or flac files their DSL connections seem unusable to me.
Yes I have a 10Mbs/900Ks from a cable company in canada. And all my familly is converting to cable.
Because the bandwidth is king! Repeat after me: The bandwidth is King!!!
Did I have first post?
Yeah!!
assert(expired(knowldege)); core dump
I maxed my 5Mbps Cox cable modem connection the other day downloading some Linux iso's...
The main argument from the article is that fiber to the home is not necessary. How about letting the consumer decide that?
I'm sorry. I'm incapable of making important personal decisions.
Isn't there a government agency that could decide for everybody at once, including me?
Next you'll be asking me to choose a health-care provider!
I Don't know about Comcast, but with TimeWarner at 5mbs I tend to get the full speed or at least close to it. And it is defiantly faster then 1.5mbs. Especially using Bittorrent for large Linux ISOs, I can get up to 600 KiloBytes Per second which is 4.8mbs. I think it is AT&T just trying to Scam Us, and stop using faster Internet in which VoIP is clearer.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
AT&T's method is faster to deploy?
I live in a development constructed in 1999.
When I moved in, there was no consumer-level high-speed Internet access offered in the neighborhood.
Now, in 2006, Comcast has fiber to each and every home.
AT&T? "Sorry, DSL isn't offered in your area."
Faster to deploy? Right.
they can charge more when they roll out the tiered internet, right? :ugh:
I figured the summary was screwed up, but the article isn't any clearer about how one uses fibre to carry an RF signal.
-Peter
... the backbone is not the bottleneck. What if I want to serve up home videos of my kids to their grandparents? I can serve up more than 1.5mbps, my parents can consume it, and there aren't any heavily contested resources between us. As more and more people catch on to the fun factor of serving up their own content, and as tools to make that easy become more widely available, the demand for high bandwidth connections is going to go through the roof.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I have the 15Mb/s down 2Mb/s up package and it is fast as hell!!!! I routinely get 14.6Mb/s downstream when downloading from fast sites (like Microsoft.com). I'd say their backbone is working just fine.
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
If the backbone is too busy to provide the ultra-high speed service today, what about the future, when it's capable of handling more data at higher speeds?
At that point, people who already have the high-speed "last mile" connection can make full use of the new capabilities, while those who have the slower connection will have to lay new wiring.
Hey, so maybe you should... oh, I don't know... fix your backbones?
I've got 6Mb DSL from Speakeasy, and I'm pretty certain there's a huge difference between 1.5Mb and 6Mb. Apparently the backbone isn't a problem for Speakeasy, either, since I regularly get between 500 and 700K/s download speeds. (That's bytes, not bits.)
Sounds to me like AT&T is doing what they do best... absolutely nothing, while they sit on their ass.
I don't care if the pipe beyond my neighbourhood can't handle the extra bandwidth. If the last mile was rediculously fast we might see a serious change in what people are able to do with their PCs.
OK, so I can't download ISOs at 1GB/s, but I have speeds faster than most LANs between myself and other locals. This opens the door to all sorts of file sharing applications. Of course, the ISPs have NO interest in doing this, as they would rather install a fat pipe, tell you it's a skinny pipe, then sell you cable and voice service over said pipe..
If it were up to the consumers, we'd just take the fat pipe and use it among ourselves. Which totally fucks up the existing content distribution channels. Which means it won't happen.
Of course the difference is not very big right now, at least not to average Joe. Developers gear content towards what most of their customers will be able to use, if most people have a 1mbit connection, then it makes no sense to develop sites that require a 6mbit connection to look decent. Once more people have faster connections, developers can make their sites even more media-rich. Verizon appears to be planning for the future, while AT&T can only see whats going on right now.
There IS, however, a noticable difference between the 2Mbps upstream on FIOS, the 768Kbps upstream on (my) DSL, and the 256Kbps upstream on cable around here. At least, for anybody who has ever tried to email a digital camera picture to a friend, etc.
Morphing Software
How many active internet devices are in your home? Counting your console? How about VoIP phones? Kid's computers?
And then there's the upload bandwidth. More bandwidth = more upsteam bandwidth too, which *will* improve P2P swarms in a nice feedback loop.
But then I'm a turtle named Slowsky.
AT&Ts arguement is that it doesn't matter how fast your connection is, once your packets travel through the internet backbone, they're gonna get slowed down anyway. This has 2 major flaws:
1. Many many connections do not travel through the backbone. sure a connection from NY to LA will, but probably not from your house to your neighbors. AT&T only seems to be thinking about IPTV, but people are going to want fast connections for many other uses.
2. Eventually the backbone will be faster, and AT&T customers will be stuck with the slower connection.
I tend to agree with TFA. I used to work at a UUNET datacenter, and my desktop PC was literally two hops away from multiple OC48 connections. (My computer -> wiring closet switch -> department router -> ATM switch -> UUNET backbone.) Truthfully, the experience was not much different that browsing on my cable modem at home. Sure, if I wanted to download something from the university in my city (which was on the same sonnet ring) it was fast as hell, but other than that, it wasn't really that much different. Where you get an advantage with huge bandwidth like that is in aggregate connections. There were tens of thousands of servers and multiple circuits terminating in that building, and hardly any latency at all on anything. But for an individual user... not much difference.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
If you have a fast connection to your ISP, but a slow upstream it's still very usefull.
The ISP can mirror a lot of content on local servers from which you can download at full speed.
Peer-to-peer traffic between users on the same isp will work better, if your using bittorrent once one user of your isp becomes a seed your sorted and the strain on the backbone will decrease significantly.
The ISP can proxy http traffic, so that static things like the icons on slashdot only need to travel down the backbone once for thousands of users.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Utterly not true. We have plenty of measurements from video customers showing that the difference is huge.
Wha'dya expect from a publication named after the Arse?
Damn you and your high-speed, all I get is 45.2 Kbps. :-(
I'm wondering if there is any downside to this for the company that just said bandwidth to home doesn't matter.
They just pissed off every geek by saying bandwidth doesn't matter.
The average schmuck doesn't care or understand.
So all they did was piss off all the geeks. I'm thinking that can't be good.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
Ummm, just a thought, but in France we get 20Mbps adsl2+ that really is 20Mbps (well, when your phone line is good enough to get that high a rate), or at least most of the clients get a good 10Mbps, and get a stable download rate that's consistant with their synchronisation speed.
We have IPTV too. And the fiber only goes to the local node, not to the home. And you're talking about FTTH doing only 6Mbps? Did I read that wrong or are you really talking about a technology that is being used waaay below its real potential? AT&T's offer ought to be way above what it is, way above comcast's actual offer of 6Mbps (which should be at 100Mbps).
I'm afraid I still haven't gotten used to the turnaround with internet speed. We're all so used to looking at american connections and drooling it seems odd to hear you talking about connections we had a few years back...
Given a 3 GB movie, a consumer will download it all regardless of delivery speed. AT&T's model is that it is cheaper to sustain a very long connection with limited speed; Verizon's view is that the faster that connection is done, the better, and the more (burstable!) bandwidth for everyone.
AT&T's network also scales badly. When the entertainment industry begins to transition to secured P2P for transmission, Verizon's network will perform beautifully. If your neighbor is downloading the same movie as you, your effective speed from the distributor can double since you have a direct connection (practically) with your neighbor. The shared data never has to leave your neighborhood (it should get relayed at the first available router, e.g., within the local fibre system).
AT&T's system has to sustain two connections over a much longer period of time.
My apartment complex is slated to be one of the first bigger complexes to be fitted for FIOS this summer (Tampa, FL). From the info we've received from Verizon, it looks amazing.
I may only be a single consumer, and thus I am statistically insignificant, but I had the 4.0mb comcast cable until about November of 2005. I was getting download speeds of 3700Kbps or so to match, I was very pleased with the speed. Upload speeds left a lot to be desired, the most I saw was around 90kbps.
Now I am on Verizon DSL. I get 40kbps....DOWNLOAD. Sometimes as high as 100. Forget uploads, I can't serve anything.
As for discernable difference, I just discerned it. DSL 1.5MB is A). not 1.5MB and B). the limiting factor. Don't blame it on the backbone, you're slow!
Show me HDTV over IP that's at 1.5 mbps and I'll show you crappy HDTV. If AT&T thinks they can compete in the IPTV market at 1.5 or even 6 mbps, they're mistaken.
So I guess all those downloads where I routinely get 700kBytes/sec throughput on Comcast's service are a figment of my imagination?
I guess the COO has never tried downloading a DVD-sized ISO of a Linux distribution.
Cablevision if doing a brisk business with it's new premium Boost service (2 Mbps up, 25 Mbps down) so somebody must feel the need for speed.
I wonder if anyone would notice the difference between 1.5 Mbps and 25 Mbps?
Thats some real spin there.
I can say for certainly that with a 15mbit FIOS connection, you absolutely see a difference in everything. Downloads are consistently over a megabyte per second, often pushing 1.5-1.6. Downloading demos from XBox Live takes five or six minutes for 500-600 meg. Bittorrents scream, even normal web access cranks.
What a load of crap. I've had 10Mb full duplex for the last few months, and sure - I was quite happy with that. Do I really need more? No. Last week my ISP without any warning or notification decided to raise it to 100Mb. I'm not downloading (and seeding...) at around 9-11MB (yes, 11 MegaByte) per second. Do I need it? No. Do I want to go back to 10MB? No.
Also: "because the backbone is slowing everything down". Well, if the 6Mb is 6Mb only in theory, then it's not 6Mb, and the customers shouldn't pay for 6Mb. I understand that the situation is a bit different in the US than here (Sweden), but still - that sucks and is not acceptable.
Didn't they say no one could ever need any more than like 256kb of memory? No one can dispute that can they?
Warez ...
I have both ATT/SBC DSL and Comcast HSI at my home. Comcast runs at a constant 3-4 Mbps (advertised 6 Mbps). DSL is a steady 1.5 Mbps.
I can tell you from experience that Comcast is a lot faster. It's not the backbone that is the problem--it is the end mile from the local ISP to me. Whenever there is a problem it is 99.999% the problem of the last ISP to me.
The guy is just spinning because they want to save money right now. They figure (and probably rightly so) that they can deliver faster service by not going the last distance to the premises and save money. Later they can finish it off when they need more bandwidth, which will probably cost less since the technology will go down in price. They are probably doing this because they don't yet have the content to use all the bandwidth for pure fiber to the house, so why put it in?
Quality Hosting e3 Servers
"we're not constrained by bandwidth. You're not constrained by the size of the pipe anymore," Stephenson said, referring to the switched-video capacity of the network which delivers only one service to a single customer at a time."
So, he expects every home in America to have only 1 TV hooked to his TV network, and while that TV is on, nobody is using any computers in their house. It's this ignorant management and lack of innovation that makes most current telcos a dying breed. At least Verizon is taking a step forward with Fios and IPTV.
Can 1 HD channel even fit through a 15mbps pipe?
For games I'd rather see them decrease latency than increase bandwidth. Not sure to what extent that would be possible though
Unlike their crappy copper network, my FiOS connection has 2mbit upstream. I generally get 220KBps transfer rates between home and work. Latencies for gaming are practically non-existant. VPN usage is actually pleasent now.
Sure, DSL is fine compared to comcast, but compared to Verizon's FiOS, they're only telling half the story.
Everything on the fiber side is all fiber. So home-to-home connections will get full speed.
And that's a beautiful thing. Back when RoadRunner first came to our neighborhood and they didn't install the speed caps yet, it was fantastic. We'd run Quake servers and have LAN party speeds across the city.
The home-to-home applications of this kind of bandwidth are a thing of beauty.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
i have plenty of downstream bandwidth, more upstream bandwidth is what people want so they can publish their own content, but i guess that would get in the way of certain large corporation$
Sorry, AT&T. I've used 1.5mbps, 3mbps and 5mbps services in the last year. There very definitely is a discernable difference in speed. You won't notice it until you actually use the higher speeds, but once you have you won't want to go back.
Now, AT&T may be rigth that their backbone is limiting their customers to slower speeds, but that's a problem with their backbone they need to fix. Other providers don't have that problem.
What possible reason could he have for downplaying a competitors speed advantage?
..good luck getting dates though.
Along the same lines:
a '86 dodge omni is just as good as a brand new ferrari
rubbing alchohol is just as good as a bottle of wine
pressing hard on your eyeballs is just as good as going out to a movie
Just think of how much money you can save with this line of reasoning!
Starsucks
I live in near Boston, MA. I just switched from Speakeasy DSL (6Mb/768k) to Comcast 8Mb/768k service.
The primary reason I switched was cost. I was paying $128/month for Speakeasy's "Gamers" package. Aside from the nice 6 static IPs I got, it offered me nothing that Comcast didn't do.
The fact that I now pay $45/month for a *full* 8Mb is icing on the cake. When I say full, I mean full... I actually get a hair *over* 8Mb. (8317 Kb on my last nyc.speakeasy.net speed test.) Up speeds hover around 716 Kb/sec.
My DSL line never topped 4Mb down, although it was consistantly 730K/s up.
Overall, I'm loving the extra $80 in my pocket, and the extra 4 Mb on my connection... but your results will certainly vary. It depends on where you are and who you are downloading from. Some times I get crap speeds, some sites I get great speeds.
One thing to keep in mind is that with the advent of bittorrent, it's much easier to maximize your connection since you're splitting up the download across many hosts... which, when aggregated, will almost certainly have greater bandwidth than you.
I have Comcast 8mb/sec service and I regularly get 8mb/sec downloads from torrents and good file servers (MS and other large business sites).
AT&T used to own Comcast back when it was 3mb/sec... they should have know this fact a long time ago, after all it was part of their advertizing!!
Having used both services and numerous others I can say 1.5Mbps is noticeably slower than the 6Mbps, and the FIOS is just way faster than both for pretty much everything. By "way" I mean usually double the download speed. And for me it's cheaper than cable was by $10/mo, which is wonderful. Obviously you can hit some bottlenecks outside anyone's control, but these are actually pretty rare. Also, it's probably not relevant, but I also have a much more consistent low latency connection to the World of Warcraft servers now. I think that's more of an issue with the shared-bandwidth nature of the cable connection I had though. Anyway, that AT&T guy is incorrect as far as I can tell about there being no discernable difference, the difference between 1.5 and 6 is noticeable and from 6 to 15 is huge.
VZ FiOS has to be better. It just has to be.
"Crude and slow, clansman. Your attack was no better than that of a clumsy child."
This all sounds just like the guy who argued about there being no discernable difference between MS Write and MS Word while typing - oh wait, no one ever said that because it would be stupid to say. -Mike
www.wildpad.com
""ArsTechnica has a story about AT&T COO Randall Stephenson telling folks that there is 'no discernable difference' between AT&T's 1.5 Mbps service and Comcast's 6 Mbps, because the backbone is slowing everything down."
Which is utterly irrelevent to the majority. I'm shopping for a new ISP and neither one is a good deal. Comcast just after Home broke up use to give good year-long deals. Now it' three months. SBC DSL is better but just like the cellular company you have to sign a year contract. And of course neither has a do it yourself option, even though comcast use to. So what would be relevent to the average consumer (all you geeks can sit down) is something that's between dial-up and all you can spend broadband that's just above dial-up costs, that doesn't involve a roll and wait installation.
AT&T argues that its model is cheaper, faster to deploy, and just as capable as Verizon's
AT&T should be told then fine and we'd like those tax breaks back that were givin for this very thing.
"640kbps ought to be enough for anybody" --AT&T COO Randall Stephenson
In Ontario, we have Rogers Cable internet service and Bell Canada's DSL service (plus many other highspeed Cable/Phone providers). The thing is - Bell claims it is faster because everybody isn't sharing the same line like the Cable providers. This is bullcrap. Eventually, all DSL lines meet at the pipeline - thus it's the same old story.
Just my rant for today.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
The main argument from the article is that fiber to the home is not necessary. How about letting the consumer decide that?
... get off my lawn.
How about letting those who read the article and wish to post a comment say that?
Between the recent submissions by editors who have trouble fashioning a simple sentence from words containing the requisite letters arranged in the correct order and this lame-assed rhetoric, I'm left wondering whether Slashdot is devolving into something that resembles a grade-school newspaper.
Maybe a Slashdot for Juniors site is in order.
Yeah, yeah, yeah
Randall Stephenson telling folks that there is 'no discernable difference' between AT&T's 1.5 Mbps service and Comcast's 6 Mbps
BZZZZT! Wrong answer.
I regulary get downloads in the 900 KBytes/sec range.
On occasion, I've see downloads in the 1100 KBytes/sec range. This is on comcast's 8 mbit service.
Works as advertised, for me.
AT&T, you suck. I can't wait to see the cable providers quoting your CEO on their advertising literature.
Oh, and I believe their service maxes out at one HD stream per residence.
Huh, you say?
I've got 3 HD boxes at my house right now. I can get 3 HD on demand streams at any given time. Project Lightspeed = already outdated.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Look, the speed is always limited at the slowest point. If could be the 1.5M/5M/15M at your house, or it could be heavily overworked atm and you having the lowest priority. With that said, I have been using comcast due to their having only a slightly better uptime than qwest. But I have noticed on several qwest DSLs, that they have about the same speed on uploading/downloading various softwares.
If qwest improves their service or comcast gets worse, then I will switch to them. Keep in mind that for years, I was on TCI who had an outage about 1 a year for maybe a few hours. Now, I have outages every month or so, with it lasting as long as a day. QWest, Comcast, you listening?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It is available in my area. I was initially exicted, but then after talking to the customer service reps I was really dissapointed. For one thing, you are forced to use their wireless D-LINK router. I have read that other routers may work, but they claim to have a special firmware on the D-LINK. I asked how dynamic the IP address is.. they told me it could change "every time I opened a new browser window". That makes it nearly impossible to connect to my network from other locations. I know there is dyndns.org, but come on, an IP changing every 5 minutes, or even 5 times a day is unacceptable for me.
Comcast's service uses a dynamic ip address too, but it has never changed unless I forced it to or updated the firmware on my router.
They terminated my service today for not restricting my downloads to 100G / month. This is in spite of their 'unlimited' sales pitch, and the conversation I had with pre-sales using a psuedonym: http://www.flickr.com/photos/clintjcl/tags/speakea sy (read in reverse order)
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
AT&tT pissing off customers isn't going to make a difference. In most areas they serve, they have a mandated monopoly, also, they own the phone lines in such areas. So, if they piss off a geek, who is currently an AT&T subscriber, all that will happen is that said geek will jump to $small_isp, who pays AT&T for the line. Sure, AT&T gets slightly less money, they are still making money off that geek.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
Admittingly yes, the average consumer does not need more then 1.5Mbs as you simply are not going to be viewing more content than that at any one time. Gamers obviously want more, as do downloaders. I'm still waiting for decent upload speed from anybody. Some commerical DSL providers provide decent upload speed, while comcasts commerical services cap out at 286K upload.
I'm just waiting to see what I can get after they light up the Project Lightspeed box down the street. I hear they'll be using VDSL2, which gives some really nice bidirectional bandwidth at less than 1000 wire feet. But I still don't want pay TV from them, or anybody else.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
all this bandwidth may windup being moot if the people that want to end network Neutrality and or switch to bandwidth used pricing models have their way.
why is it people in korea have like 20000000000Mbs connections for $10 a month (ok maybe i exaggerated slightly)
and in the US we will be lucky to keep only paying $50 a month of 3.0Mbs connections.
We in the US are getting Screwed on data pricing and speed.
actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
Yes, but are you tropical?
Lets pretend that you have virtually unlimited bandwidth to your house. What are you (as a consumer) going to do with it? Forget businesses and industrial use, what would a consumer do with it? Video is a good option for IPTV, but that's a hard financial sell against a deployed coaxial cable network. (not impossible, but hard) What else? Play quake with no lag? Seriously, there is a point of diminishing returns until the software has a valid reason to use that much bandwidth.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
It is important to note that the speed loss described in the article is in single point to single point communication. If you are downloading multiple pieces of a file coming from many different locations (read: bittorrent) you will be able to acheive much higher speeds on fibre as each individual incoming connection travels a seperate path through the connected networks.
Unable to parse logical arguments? Can't find the subject or topic of a statement? Prone to making sweeping generalizations to support your point of view? You might be a typically ignorant /. poster!
"One thing to keep in mind is that with the advent of bittorrent, it's much easier to maximize your connection since you're splitting up the download across many hosts... which, when aggregated, will almost certainly have greater bandwidth than you."
The other is that all that P2P traffic kills the rest of the neighbourhood's connections. I realize that geeks aren't into thinking of others (unless they're in China), but think of the effect your activities have locally next time you go "unlimited".
Verizon isn't doing shit in my podunk town of Ridgecrest, CA. My second phone line is a split line and consequently I can't get Caller ID on it. And forget DSL! Verizon can't even tell me when I can expect anything better than 26k dial-up... And yet I'm paying the same price per line as someone in a larger city who can get DSL, so why should Verizon hurry up and get off their ass and run fiber to my house?
Average cost(USD) of healthcare costs / yeare r
s _of_tot
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/hea_spe_per_p
% of health spending on 'public' healthcare
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/hea_pub_spe_a
As you can see, the US spends an ass load of money on public health anyways (44%), so you can't really say thats its a totally private system anyways. That said, those that can afford -huge- healthcare costs can get adequate if not better service than plain public health can in most countries.
Bye!
If Verizon's backbone is the bottleneck then it doesn't matter how fat their pipe is over the last mile. Of course, that may be an entirely untrue statement by the AT&T guy. If true, though, he has a point. I'd rather have X Mbps to my door and be able to use all of it than pay twice as much for 4X Mbps and discover that the backbone limits me to X.
I max out my Roadrunner connection for hours at a time several times a week. 5 Mbit connection routinely delivering around 490 KBytes / second on sustained downloads. AT&T is going to be majorly up the creek when everybody but them can offer full telephone, internet, HDTV, and audio service over a single infrastructure.
ArsTechnica has a story about AT&T COO Randall Stephenson telling folks that there is 'no discernable difference' between AT&T's 1.5 Mbps service and Comcast's 6 Mbps, because the backbone is slowing everything down.
I often get 2-3 Mbps even when I'm communicating across the Atlantic, and moreso when I'm not on my 100 Mbps line. 3 Mbps is twice as fast as 1.5 Mbps alone. 'Nuff said about that statement.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Damn hippie.
I've got about a dozen 55 gallon drums full in my compound's basement.
Seriously though, I thought there was a lot of unused fiber around, and it's just not that expensive to add more bandwidth. Obviously there isn't enough for everyone to saturate a huge pipe 24/7 right now, but if demand spikes there are ways to increase supply. I'm doing my part by keeping my pipe flowing full blast with about 99.95% uptime, although upload saturates way before download. Yeah, I've got DSL.
Man, you really need that seminar!
I have a 8/1 and usually get over 800kB/s if the server is not in someones bedroom. Maybe it's something about the continent?
While there may be huge numbers of people doing these things in your social circle, I think over all Interweb users, it's actually a small number. To most people, the issue will be an increase in multimedia delivery over the internet such as subscription entertainment like movies and sporting events. And when it's increasingly obvious that the copper wire technology of the past is already starting to choke, it becomes obvious that fiber is the only reasonable choice of the two. It isn't even reasonable to think that internally, AT&T actually believes this. They will either have to make the investment, of die.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Ah yes, just like driving across the country takes the same amount of time when your average speed is 20mph or 60mph. Thats really funny since when I pull from say my giganews account at 8mbps I see a heck of a difference in speed over what I used to get with dsl.
If I could go back and delete my original comment I would... I just checked my speeds again, and they've gone up considerably from the first time I checked them back in December, and now they seem correct.
At the moment I'm getting ~180KB/s download, 16KB/s upload. 180KB/s is about the 1.5meg/s that is advertised, and 16KB/s upload is about 128k upload. Those numbers could very well be the advertised speed.
That being said, it's a whole lot slower than the 3 meg cable (I think they had upped it to either 4 or 6 by the time I moved) in both upload and download.
It all depends on the provider, in my opinion Comcast's network is so screwed up (routing problems, dropped packets, what have you) that, at least in this area, Qwest's 1.6m/768k dsl lines consistently deliver higher real throughput than Comcast's 6m/768k service. I haven't had any direct experience with Verizon's FIOS service, but given how crappy there data service usually is, I don't imagine it is much better. Now if somebody like Qwest or AT&T started deploying very high bandwidth it might make a difference, but then the reason they aren't is probably because that, unlike companies like Comcast and Verizon, they realize they don't have the backend infrastructure to support it.
I would prefer providers make sure their core infrastructure is upgraded first, before offering a gazillion megabit at the edge. Unfortunately the current system (economic and political) doesn't reward carriers for doing this.
my old sig is obsolete, and I haven't come up with a stupid enough new one yet
It's not. Not here at least, so blame the ISP itself instead. I've been with 2 cable ISPs in the last few months (I've moved), one 10mbit/1.5mbit and this one at 10mbit/0.9mbit, and the only downtime I experienced was because of a hurricane that left us without electricity for a week once (and once the old rusty cable plug on the phone pole behind the house at a previous place just fell right off). Other than those 2 incidents, it was pretty much 5 nines of reliability. And I'm routinely hitting download speeds around 6mbit.
Compared to my brother's DSL that works only half of the time, or my godfather's DSL that had to be turned down to dialup-like speeds before it was even half reliable for light use. His cable now works perfectly (and quite fast too), and my brother is doing the switch in a couple months (plain sick of crappy DSL).
I've got countless horror stories about DSL (loop problems - including accidental disconnections, line noise, some of the worst consumer service, slow speeds, ISPs that only give shared/private IPs, etc - the list is endless; and thankfully they were forced lately to offer DSL without a POTS line - only because court told them to...)
No such thing as fios here, but it's probably quite good too. Either ways I wouldn't be so interested in it (unless it's cheaper or something). The only thing I want is more upstream bandwidth.
Anyways. Cable isn't inherently unreliable, it's just your ISP.
should be enough for anybody.
My qualifier: I was a DSL installer in the heyday of 3rd party DSL providers.
The real problem with DSL anymore isn't the speed, it's the physical infrastructure that the signal is carried on. I'm sure I would be fine with 1.5Mb service instead of 6Mb, but I don't trust the dependability of the copper pair network, considering how it operates.
Coaxial cable internet is carried over a network of wire which is largely much newer than POTS copper, and a single piece of cable carries signal to multiple nodes. POTS copper is usually much older than cable, sometime by decades, and each pair of copper wires is dedicated to a node, following all the way back to the telco central office.
Where coax uses fewer sections of wire and fewer junction points, copper pair uses more. From the telco CO to the big cabinet on the corner that serves a large neighborhood - that's referred to as the "F1" pair. From that cabinet to the pole or pedestal behind your house, which serves six or eight residences - that's the "F2" pair. You'll have anywhere from one to six pair from the pole/pedestal to the box on the side of your house (demarc), depending on age. If your node is in a multi-tenant building, you've got another stretch of "communal" pairs (and I am here to tell you that some high-rises are complete freaking messes).
The telco agrees to provide you a contiguous copper pair from the CO to your demarc - but they can and will change which specific F1 and F2 is carrying signal to your house depending on the needs of other customers in your area.
What that means is that your DSL may work wonderfully today, then someone down the street adds another phone line to their house, and your F1 or F2 (or both) get switched. You don't notice any difference in your voice telephone service, but suddenly your DSL service is slower, and seems to drop frequently. That's because the specific copper pairs you were originally using had low resistance - they were good quality wires. The ones you're using now have higher resistance - due to age, damage, incorrect termination at punch down blocks, wrong cross connections, additional equipment on those pairs - any number of reasons.
But all you see is "One day my DSL was fine and now it kind of sucks." If the problem is similar to what's described above, good luck trying to get anyone at the telco to work that out for you. When I was installing for Rhythms (remember them?), we would go back and forth with telcos all the time.
"But I have SBC/Yahoo DSL. They are the telco!" No they're not. There's some kind of ownership deal there, but as business operations, they're completely separate.
Can these kinds of infrastructure problems happen with coax? Sure. But they're way way less likely to occur. There's just not as many moving parts in a coax network, so to speak.
I was going to talk about pricing, try to make the point that in order to have DSL you also have to have local phone service from the telco that you're getting DSL from (since the telcos ran all the 3rd party carriers out of business, or since the 3rd party carriers mismanaged themselves out of business, however you want to look at it). Which means that you've got to pay $30/mo for DSL (non-promotional), and at least $25 for phone service you may not want. But then I realized that Comcast sells their internet service at different rates depending on whether you have TV service or not --
-- and then I decided that all the mashing together of telecommunications services is way too confusing, and I'm going to go live in a cave with some clay and a stick to write with instead.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
"In the foreseeable future, having a 15 Mbps Internet capability is irrelevant because the backbone doesn't transport at those speeds,"
Backbone dosent transport at those speeds? Is he reffering to his Backbone? IDK bout you guys. I have Optimum online with the basic 15Mbps d/l speed. I normally d/l at ~1mbyes/sec. Now im pretty sure that backbone for the US is the same. I experince Lag with some MMORPG's but im on High pop servers. What backbone is he talking about?
For a fact, you don't know what you're talking about.
I've lived in several countries with national health, and they're uniformly underfunded, overworked, and have deeper chasms than anything you'll find in the States. Go to one of the major hospitals in any city. Ask how many patients are foreign nationals. The number will shock you.
Canada's health system is laughable. The British NHS is far worse. Only in Sweden have I seen anything coming close to the quality of health care available in the USA. No, I'm not an anti-socialist, rather a realist.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Remember, in addition to the IP telephone, data, and on-demand viedeo being transmitted over the fiber, there's still plenty of bandwidth on the fiber for single direction "broadcast channels"...be they SD or HD. Not everything over the fiber has to be packet switched, you can provide seperate channels for packet switched traffic and passive one way traffic over the same fiber just through some simple modulation techniques. Remember, if you're not limited by the speed of switching, fiber bandwidth is still 10x that of coax.
-Chris
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--
How about letting the consumer decide that?
The supplier has to make a major capital investment in infrastructure to actually provide high bandwidth in the first place. If they're going to spend that much money, they're going to have to know whether it's worth it. That means thay have to guess what the consumer wants. They are not obliged to their customers to supply everything the customer wants. Only what they can make a profit on.
Hmmmn.. I have but a humble comment here, but remind me didn't we already pay millions if not billions in tax dollars to these extortionairy companies (at least the Bell companies) to get Fiber lines to our Houses?! At least they could deliver the fiber from the money we've already payed them, even if we wont get increased bandwidth until they make a firm decision on the HD iptv debacle. I realize that bandwidth is expensieve and that these companies have a priority to the stockholders, (IE why they cheaped out and cheated us out of our fiber) but all the same if they really did take those vast sums of money from us in order to get us Fiber to our houses, we should at least see some progress.
-Chris
There will always be room for more broadband (and cowbell). They said this about hard drive capacities way back when. "You'll never need more than X MB's." This is especially true with large movie downloads on the horizon (or right now in your face for some of us). I know there's nothing I hate more than streaming a movie from cinemanow.com and having to let it buffer. It's just as bad as a DVD skipping. Maybe this is just one remote example of a need for more broadband, but imagine if HD-DVDs start to get offered online not to mention I'm sure there's a plethora of other services I'm forgetting that could most likely benefit from this.
I will forever be a student.
Put these crooks in jail, before they kill the Internet completely. These guys really really hate innovation.
i.e. for putting this propaganda up as if it's a story?
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
I am a Comcast subscriber; I routinely fill the entire bandwidth of my 6Mb connection (768Kbps). I've filled this bandwidth from servers all over the world, I've also noted the connection is capable of going as high as FIOS (1.5MB down) though it is of course rate-limited. AT&T is quite frankly talking out of its collective ass on this one, as the other examples here have stated there are many options for this kind of bandwidth, Ever clean installed Windows then realized you need to do windows update, acquire drivers, acquire all the programs you had previously installed. How about a completely network based Linux install? How about downloading complete games over Valves Steam? What about streaming news. Beyond all this though we have to realize all of these connections regardless of service are fiber optic by nature up to the last mile. I for one welcome Verizon making in-roads that will force AT&T & Comcast into converting that last mile (or less in my case as I have fiber up to the curb). I do not enjoy paying the same price for 6Mb down / 384Kb up as someone with FIOS getting 15Mb down / 2Mb up and I doubt anyone else does either.
I do agree that the backbone is lagging behind, but don't butcher the users' capabilities simply because the telecos can't get their fingers out. Especially as it seems to be the telecos who are complaining. Doubly so, when it is the lack of multicast at the home that prevents users from making better use of what backbone there is.
A gigabit to the home is about the most that can usefully be used using current technology. None of the providers listed do full-duplex gigabit. Until that time, everything is excuses. If home computers can push/pull ten gig before even a single gig is on tap, then that would be the new minimum before excuses can possibly be acceptable.
When the providers don't provide, don't blame the users if they don't use. They can't, whatever their choice might be, even if they knew what that choice would be.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I have 30Mb/5Mb Verizon Fios (Fiber optics to the house) and i absolutely love it. To say there is no difference is absolutely retarded. You cant pull 30Mb/s from easynews.com with AT&T's 1.5Mb or comcasts 6Mb service, but you can with Fiber.
You not only can upload faster, but you also do not get capped for using your service. Try that with a cable broadband provider. Sure they may advertise 6/1, 10/1, even 15/1 and 30/2 now (optonline) But if you use that upload bandwidth for even an hour straight, you will get capped down to ridiculous levels and your bill will not reflect it. Nothing is worse than having Optonilne's 30Mb/2Mb service and realizing you've been capped down to 6Mb/15KB/s AND you're bill is still the same $60 a month price.
For some reason cable broadband providers love to charge you full price even though they've capped your service down to near 56k speeds.
Fiber is the future. Anyone claiming other wise is not up to par and is affraid of it. They cant deliver the speeds the market demands. Frankly the market demanded it years ago, and only a few have stepped up just recently. Verizon being the major player. Bravo Verizon.
Coax can do a lot of things but everyone should laugh at these companies when they tell us that we dont need speed.
The net would be so much more if we had faster speeds.
Just look at what verizon is doing. They're delivering HD TV through Fiber to the house at a much cheaper package price than cable providers.
The sooner we get faster speeds, the sooner we have a more advanced civilization with new developing markets and utilities that make our lives far better than yesteryear.
Anyone holding us back, should be left to die like the peice of shit company they are. No hand outs. You suck. Build up your infrastructure or find a different market.
Capacities of internet bandwith now are limited not by last mile users, but by the bandwith between nodes that are in place between users and the servers. And it is a lot more expencive to fix, than to give home access to fiber optics.
An end to end solution is not the way to go.
Cost coverage is all you need.. hospitals should remain private, as should nurses and doctors.
besides that, you just need a system to cover kids for any illness, and adults for normal doctor visits hospitalization and illnesses taht effect 90% of teh people... if they want better coverage.. they can buy it.
I'm glad AT&T has pointed out for me that every speed test that tells me I'm getting 3 megabits/second is lying to me. I'm glad they have pointed out that my browser lies to me when I download large files from fast sites. I'm glad AT&T has pointed at that either my hard drive directory listing is lying to me, or that I was drugged by my ISP to somehow feel like time is passing differently- because when I use a stopwatch and measure how long it takes to download an ISO of 650 megabytes, it shows me that I am indeed getting 3 megabits/second.
So in reality, I'm only getting 1.5!! I must have been so naive to believe basic physics...
The only thing more satisfying that laughing at ignorant statements by Chief Executives is the sound of their stock price taking a dive over such ignorant statements.
Well, i guess thats one more nail in their coffin. Jobs is setout to wreck the company and make a few bucks along the way. Hes still pissed he was ousted and wants revenge.
Grr..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Server hosting is big business which in many ways is protected by the throttled, meager upload speeds most US customers get with their 40$ broadband connection. Imagine what would happen to ISPs across the country if every consumer had direct, cheap access to 30mbit uploads like Japan or Korean consumers enjoy. Why bother spending monthly costs paying your ISP to manage or co-locate your web servers or other services when you could just hook it up to your home network.
Runesabre
Enspira Online
Oh.. and in REALITY,
we have a system that is failing due to companies not providing health plans.
frankly, we are left with bankrupting people or having the government cover health care costs for people. I think that the second option is the best option... unless you are a social Darwinist.
This goes way offtopic.
I'm absolutely in favor of covering all. To do so requires a different way of thinking, and personal responsibility that doesn't exist in the US. High costs are tough. The indigent or barely financially functional need a safety net that's better than what we have today.
Still, the Canadian/British models are uniformly awful. Ask them. They'll tell you all about it.
We need something other than what we have now.... but we have the most corrupt Congress in history to deal with, bought off by every lobbyist that walks by. Nothing will be done soon.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
We found the same thing at AOL, in testing speed with our various Broadband partners. The average time to COMPLETE a pageload across a wide test suite of webpages basically doesn't change once you get over 1.5Mbps.
HOWEVER, (1) the median time does shift slightly (i.e. the perception of load) up to 3-ish Mbps, though latency clearly starts becomes the dominant factor and (2) downloads and multimedia still scale pretty linearly.
Still, B3! makes this irrelevant.
--
graphicallyspeaking
graphically speaking
We found the same thing at AOL, in testing speed with our various Broadband partners. The average time to COMPLETE a pageload across a wide test suite of webpages basically doesn't change once you get over 1.5Mbps.
HOWEVER, (1) the median time does shift slightly (i.e. the perception of load) up to 3-ish Mbps, though latency clearly starts becomes the dominant factor and (2) downloads and multimedia still scale pretty linearly.
Still, B3! makes this irrelevant.
--
graphicallyspeaking
graphically speaking
See the other post on this topic.
The gaps in the safety net are horrid. Insurance company ethics (an oxymoron) are rife with abuse. Once the gap in safety nets are closed, it's a better system-- but without the huge problems in Canada Health and the NHS, as examples.
I've lived with both, and both uniformly stink. They're worse than none at all... as their quality is awful and in no way incentivised.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
We found the same thing at AOL, in testing speed with our various Broadband partners. The average time to COMPLETE a pageload across a wide test suite of webpages basically doesn't change once you get over 1.5Mbps.
HOWEVER, (1) the median time does shift slightly (i.e. the perception of load) up to 3-ish Mbps, though latency clearly starts becomes the dominant factor and (2) downloads and multimedia still scale pretty linearly.
Still, B3! makes this irrelevant.
--
graphicallyspeaking
graphically speaking
...and the current backbone will be what it is forever? Shortsightedness makes for dead corporations. Thank god, because otherwise the buggers are REALLY hard to kill.
-- No Sig is a Good Sig
So true... maybe not the "white elephant in the living room," but definitely something that's often ignored.
For people who download a lot, these big bandwidth numbers matter, but not for people just browsing or even playing most online video games. A 100 kB webpage can theoretically load in half a second at 1.5 Mbps. It's a whopping 3/8 of a second faster at 6 Mbps.
Of course, you never really get your peak speed, but the improvement is still slight under most circumstances. In fact, I've noticed no real difference in ordinary browsing on 768 kbps Qwest DSL compared to 3 Mbps Comcast cable or even 45 Mbps on the T3 when I was in school...except the cable connection was pretty slow in the evenings when everyone else on the block was online using the same daisy-chained connection. As long as it's not dial-up, I'm pretty happy to shop based on price. And since the only options in my area are Qwe$t and Comca$t, I'm pretty happy to just check my email at work.
Uhh.. 1.5mb/s is plenty fast for VoIP to run cleanly, up to about 15 lines of it at a relatively low compression setting. How do I know? The company I work for does this specifically, over T1's to buisness class customers. A T1 is 1.5mbs by design (both directions), and we use all 28 timeslots for data with voice traffic sent as VoIP (T1's are also used for POTs lines by the ILECs, each timeslot (DS0) is one voice line carying PCM style voice data, its what they were originally designed for). We can successfully transmit 15 lines of VoIP and maintain some internet bandwidth (though we recommend upgrading to a second T1 at 12 lines). Not saying I agree with AT&T's comment (The backbone better be faster than 6mbs, not to mention allowing an easier upgrade path without the copper to deal with), just that your VoIP logic doesnt work here.
tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
I can't speak for AT&T or Comcast service but when I lived in Ballard (Seattle) I had Speakeasy 6Mbps service and life was good. Then I moved to Northgate (some 30 blocks North) and the best I can get is 1.5Mbps (because of distance from wire center) but worse is that I can't do OneLink, I have to have service with Qwest to have Speakeasy at all (wire center has so little copper that Qwest won't allow anybody else in) :p
Anyway, when you have a house full of several people who all use "the internets" all day (work, gaming, VOIP) 1.5 sucks balls.
verizon is going around trying to get in peoples heads that coax is a thing of the past and can't even touch the same speeds. meanwhile my isp (cablevision) is deleivering the same speeds as verizons all fiber network. There are new technologies that allow coax to get the same speeds as fiber as long as the backbone is fiber. FTTN. At$t is different though because they uses even less quality wire then coax.
I agree with him. 1.5MBPS is way more than enough bandwidth. I also agree with Bill Gates, nobody will ever need more than 640k of RAM. At that speed, it will only take a few minutes to fill up my 20MB hard drive.
Well here in west-northern Germany we usually don't have the problems At&T seems to have.
Fibre to home is as good as unavailable (there may be some companies who have some kind of expensive link to their ISP), but good ol' DSL via the normal telefon copper wire goes up to 6Mb/s in Hamburg, and in Gütersloh (a mid-sized town) eg ISPs offer speeds up to 20Mbit/s via copper.
(in former eastern Germany DSL is unavailable in some (few) areas dueto the fact that in the early 1990's, when the reunion of Germany was in progress, the Telekom decided to get fibre up to the OVZ (Ortsverteilerzentralen, the 1m x 20 cm x 60cm boxes at every street corner) prohibiting cheap DSL in central CIXes)
So what problem does AT&T have? using old infrastructure, avoiding investions into recent routers? Cisco's expensive, but why should you care if your costumers change their ISP because of your slowness.
I guess the same way Pennzoil does with their coolant made for all cars. You see, ALL to Pennzoil means ALL cars except Volkswagen's (in my case). Not sure what other cars are not compatible.
Maybe if I start a company, I can change the meaning of copyright infringement.
Remember when POTS was good enough for everyone?
Why would you want a colored phone when plain black was what they made?
They killed the PicturePhone because no one would ever want to look at the person they were calling.
Ever get caught hooking a modem up to "their" phone line?
The list goes on and on.
Now that it's being resurrected as a company, it sounds like some of their old monopolistic attitudes are resurfacing.
OT but @ your sig: unzip;strip;touch;finger;mount;fsck;more;yes;unmou nt;sleep
You're using the sequential separator there instead of a conditional... so what happens if any of the above fail? Could lead to some interesting situations for several of those in particular to fail...
I was on Ameritech/SBC/AT&T DSL for 5 years and the speed was okay. But I finally decided to switch because the service became extremely unreliable after they attempted to increase the speed to 2Mbps. And over the last 5 years, there are more and more things I want to do on the net where DSL speeds are just insufficient. Still, the unreliability and the likelihood that SBC was not going to do anything to address my complaints, pushed me over to Comcast. So far Comcast is working great with the only slowdowns coming during peak usage in the early evening. Those slowdowns though beat the heck out of the outright disconnects I was getting on DSL. Oh, best of all, the Comcast regular rate is lower than I was being charged for DSL by SBC! More speed, less money? Oh of course that's irrelevant, silly me!
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Let the suppliers decide what they want to supply that will make them most money, and the consumers decide what service level is right for them, individually, and for their specific application. A farrari and a dodge is just as good if I have a thousand 50lb bags of sand to move 500 miles. Pressing on eye balls is better than going to the movies if you are blind. If AT&T is not planning to pump movies down their network, they don't make more money by increasing the increasing speed of the last mile. If a cable company is planning to pump movies on demand down their cable, they would increase that line speed. So, let the game begin and may the best supplier win.
Big
Yes and no. Governments suck at running hospitals because there is no competition, and thus it gets mired in bureaucracy. Private enterprise, however, sees the government as free money, and has no qualms about stealing from the public as a whole to fill their stockholders' pocketbooks.
The solution, IMHO, is a two stage transition. The first stage is national cost coverage, with a law that makes it illegal for a hospital to refuse to honor the government-provided insurance. The second stage is phased in over ten years, and mandates that the health providers (hospitals, clinics, etc.) transition from a for-profit business to a not-for-profit business, i.e. any revenue must be rolled back into capital investments such as expansion, or into things like R&D. This would continue to provide the incentive for these organizations to innovate by providing a vehicle for benevolent research, while ensuring that money made by health care -stays- in health care, improving the quality of run-down area hospitals instead of putting money in the pockets of rich fat cats.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that anything that qualifies as an essential service---basic communications, electricity, water, gas, etc.---should be required to be a 501(c)3 nonprofit. Socialized essential services don't work, but neither do corporate-controlled essential services. Just look at the California electrical crisis of a few years back or the thread of a home heating crisis this past winter for examples of the public's needs not being met adequately by corporate-controlled providers of essential services. Mandatory non-profit status for these key services is a happy medium between two extremes, protecting the public interest against corporate greed while realizing that government control is incompetent and failure-prone....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
This'll be about as effective as Apple's Megahertz Don't Matter campaign a couple of years ago. Consumers will see Comcast's 6 vs. AT&T's 1.5, do the math and, rightly or wrongly, conclude that Comcast is faster. It's all marketing, folks.
It's a very dark ride.
You *can* get what he described.
I have the business fios version of his package. the same 15 down, 2 up, but I also get 5 static ips and the ability to run whatever services I want. So I have a mail server, dns server, a few webservers, and it runs great.
the cost? $99/mo.
SearchIRC - Now with live chat directory!
and you seem to be a nice guy. But you're an asshat.
That's what I have. (It's supposed to be 24Mb/s, but that's my de facto top speed downstream right now.) Just saying, you don't need fiber to go a lot quicker than 1.4Mb. Otherwise, if the backbone actually makes communication at the speed that you have between your personal gateway and the router station impossible, this is highly relevant information to customers, and if they decide they don't care and want the useless extra bandwidth anyway they are dumb.
Wow. Cleverly outwitted.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
It sounds like a good idea, but think of all of the money that would leave the health care system entirely if you remove the profit motive.
This is one of those things where having the intention to do the right thing may end up being counterproductive. I'm not saying you're wrong, just that fixing things might not be that simple.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
even with videoconferencing thrown in?
I think what you watch is not the volume of the bits, but the ip's connected to, and the volume of the bits..
I'll bet the spiderweb of trades that is bittorrent looks a lot different than the connections that are voip.
most voip connections are two way, one ip to one other ip.
most bittorrent connections are from you, to me, to him, to you to another guy, and all around back again.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I have a speed meter that measures page loads and other things and when I download something across my Verizon FIOS connection 15/2 I get 1500k downloads not 150k downloads.
This guy is definately smoking crack.
OK, Mr. Stephenson, you got us. April fools. For a second there I thought you were serious.
that's from the old "haxor shiat" page...
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
So it really had nothing to do with the "peace" levels of D.C...
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Or they could be simply letting Comcast waste their resources building out fiber to the home, then announce a wireless high speed connection to anywhere in the home using a PAN from the outside at more than twice the rate. If,say, they put little caching miniservers/Tivo's at the HFC connection, they could serve 20-200 or so houses at a LOT less cost than what it cost Comcast to put in a more limited fiber connection....and COmcast will have all that money invested in outdated physical plant
Don't count AT&T out just yet, guys.
They're selling their 3Mbps service to people too far from the CO to get it.
And now they're talking about 20Mbps service - to whom? People five feet from the CO?
ASI explicitly told me that I was 12,000 feet from the CO and 3Mbps service simply is not functional for people that far. The tech said they could set my service for that, but I would experience increasing numbers of dropped lines and eventually the line would go down and stay down.
But the SBC (now AT&T) sales office was happy to sell me that 3Mbps service even though they should have known that I couldn't get more than the 1.5-1.6Mbps I'd been getting.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Note that I am -not- including the pharmaceutical industry in this, as the profit motive actually drives innovation to some degree in that field.
I'm not even slightly convinced that it drives innovation in the rest of the health care field, though. All it does is lead to San Jose, CA (at the heart of Silicon Valley) losing its only downtown hospital because it serviced a poorer section of the Bay Area, many of whom were uninsured or underinsured, creating a cascade of trauma center overloads that threatens the emergency care for hundreds of thousands of people.... So much for "do no harm."
The very fact that the lives of people in the South Bay---arguably one of the richest areas in the country---are being put in jeopardy by a greedy health care provider should give us pause, as it means that no part of the country is safe from the potential for complete health care collapse. What's to stop HCA from closing down their hospitals in rural areas, resulting in people simply not being able to get health care at all?
The current system is failing miserably, largely because of a handful of companies that care more about protecting profits than the lives of the people they care for. As far as I'm concerned, any money that would be lost by forcing hospital operations to be nonprofit and more highly regulated (e.g. preventing hospital closures or moves of more than a mile in metro areas/five miles in rural areas) would be totally worth it. Columbia/HCA can keep their blood money.
Yeah. Profit works really well in the public interest....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
wait, this isn't pink anymore - holy crap, this isn't an April Fools post??!
ôó
This reminds me of a print ad I saw awhile ago. It as for a US Robotics modem and it showed some guy in this horrible, rusted, smoke spewing husk of a car, the tagline was something along the lines of, "Saying any modem can get you on the internet is like saying any car can get you on the freeway."
Chicken fried butter sticks? Do
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
It's a shame when something good gets tainted.
Ironically, it is now one day past my termination date, and I still have a connection.
I think they gave me until midnight the final night, which fell on a weekend, so looks like I'm going to finish that torrent after all :)
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Blaming de-regulation for California's electrical problems is like blaming Capitalism for Russia post-Communism economic problems.
Sorry, the state of health care in Canada is much better than you think.
What are you trying to get done that you had a bad experience? Plastic surgery?
I would not want things to be as desperate as they are in the US.
Well....
It actually is to blame for Russia's post-communism economic problems.
The sudden move to capitalism that Yeltsin decided on removed so many regulations and opened up the floodgates that corruption moved in and was not policed at all (why do you think China has taken a much slower approach?)
California's Deregulation on a much less extreme scale did in fact contribute to the electrical problems because fewer regulations meant fewer rules to protect the public and the market... thus leading to the electric companies screwing up and getting caught with their hand in the cookie jar.
Deregulation was the direct cause of California's power crisis. Anyone who says differently is kidding themselves. The California power crisis is the perfect example of why essential utilities should have mandatory nonprofit status. As with almost all essential services, consumers rarely have any choice about who provides them, and thus competition will never be able to prevent a small number of companies from causing public harm.
For another example, PG&E is running commercials claiming that they have no control over the cost of natural gas and encouraging people to conserve. In the same commercial, they give a very large (25%, I think) discount if you reduce your usage. If they were truly running at a low operating margin like they imply, they wouldn't be able to offer such large discounts....
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There's very little question about it. Certain generator companies, in an attempt to make higher profits, manipulated the levels of power available to the grid to reduce supply, and thus increase the amount that they could charge. They deliberately kept power plants offline for unnecessarily long period of time, etc. Then, PG&E demanded a government bailout claiming that they were going bankrupt (which the government promptly provided) while hiding millions (billions?) of dollars in overpayments to their generator company subsidiaries.
All of which could be done because of years of mismanaged regulation.
Deregulation was the direct cause of California's power crisis.
Absolutely. Just as the hard floor is the direct cause of a dish breaking after I've dropped it.
Anyone who says differently is kidding themselves.
Agreed, I'm just willing to look a little deeper.
The California power crisis is the perfect example of why essential utilities should have mandatory nonprofit status.
The first statement does not provide support to this one. The fact that I've dropped a dish onto the hard floor and it broke is not a perfect example of why all flooring should be padded.
As with almost all essential services, consumers rarely have any choice about who provides them, and thus competition will never be able to prevent a small number of companies from causing public harm.
Again, I agree absolutely there is often a point at which consumers do not have a very good choice about providers. Where we disagree is that I believe that point often passes naturally without government intervention and whether power is essential enough to warrant a legislated government monopoly. That is what pre-regulation California was. I am against monopolies both private and public.
And though I am against monopolies, I do accept them for truly essential things such as fire and police protection, despite the ultimate corruption and reduction in quality those monopolies create. I do so in order to ensure continuous protection and because I believe those services are relatively mature therefore the damage created by monopoly at the end of a muzzle is outweighed.
For another example, PG&E is running commercials claiming that they have no control over the cost of natural gas and encouraging people to conserve. In the same commercial, they give a very large (25%, I think) discount if you reduce your usage. If they were truly running at a low operating margin like they imply, they wouldn't be able to offer such large discounts....
Perfect example indeed. The operating margins are most likely dictated by a state committee who then further dictates incentives for reducing usage, thus ultimately retarding alternative power development. Also, you cannot point to the behavior of a regulated entity and use it as an example of the behavior of a deregulated entity.
So, I'm not arguing that essential services should be deregulated. I like my local police and fire protection (among others). I'm arguing that government regulation ultimately retards progress and are, at a very minimum, often pointless. Ma Bell was broken up less than a decade before Cellular techonology, followed immediately by the internet, made the company a dinasaur.
Keep in mind that most government regulation is simply enforced monopoly. It is big-business... with guns. I want the corporations to sweat. I believe that ultimately the best way to make them sweat is with other corporations. I believe the government will make them sweat... for about ten minutes before it jumps into bed with them and starts working to maintain/build it's own fiefdoms.
You are welcome to disagree. But keep in mind that using government to enforce this type of thing is enforcing morality at gunpoint.
Anti-abortion and anti-gay-marriage advocates believe they are providing the same public benefit. And that it must be done at gunpoint.
I am simply very careful what I would suggest shooting someone to enforce.
It is an indication of something wrong---properly made dishes should not shatter---and I have yet to hear you put forth any alternate solution that can actually work.
Again, I agree absolutely there is often a point at which consumers do not have a very good choice about providers. Where we disagree is that I believe that point often passes naturally without government intervention and whether power is essential enough to warrant a legislated government monopoly. That is what pre-regulation California was. I am against monopolies both private and public.
That's just silly. Your argument is that if they become abusive enough, people will eventually come up with alternatives. Where are the alternatives to gasoline? And no, biodiesel doesn't count---it isn't widely available, requires special mods to your vehicle, and still isn't any cheaper even though farmers have used it for decades. The first major oil crisis was in 1973. Are we supposed to wait 33 years for power monopolies to magically get replaced by competition? These two energy mechanisms both have the same fundamental problems: a very high cost of entry to produce the power, a very high cost of distribution to limit the potential for competition, and a long history of corporate abuse.
The cost of maintaining a power grid makes it completely impractical to have competition in the space, at least where the last mile is concerned. Short of some fundamental change in the laws of physics (e.g. superconductors at room temperature, spacial folding, etc.), this will always be the case as long as distribution is a requisite part of power delivery (silly schemes like trucks delivering batteries notwithstanding).
And if the last mile is allowed to be a for-profit corporation, that corporation will exploit that natural monopoly position. No amount of government regulation short of requiring that company to be a nonprofit corporation will prevent that corporation from doing what it naturally does---try to make as much profit as it possibly can through whatever alternative accounting it can come up with. And in a situation where a monopoly is unavoidable (and it -is- unavoidable), this is a real problem.
Now if you can come up with an alternative power system that does not require distribution, you can have businesses competing. However, to do so would basically mean that there would not be competition in providing power, but rather in providing equipment that provides power. At that point, the problem goes from being providing a service to providing a product. In general, it is practical for companies that provide products to compete. In general, it is impractical for companies that provide services to the general public (with the rare exception of services delivered by a third party carrier) to truly compete in any useful way.
In fact, with the possible exception of cell phones and DSL, I can't think of any services that have like-for-like competition.
And the only reason that DSL can be moved from provider to provider is because the government regulates the heck out of the last mile and forces them to share the lines (and this is probably going away because they have convinced the government that
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It is an indication of something wrong---properly made dishes should not shatter---and I have yet to hear you put forth any alternate solution that can actually work.
And yet people seem to prefer dishes that will shatter and kitchen floors that will shatter them when alternatives to both are readily available and often less expensive.
Furthermore, as a society, if we would prefer fewer shattered dishes (and glass wounds and broken hips), why do we not enforce plastic dishes and padded kitchen floors?
Often the most preferrable solution does not appear most efficient.
I recently considered solar power. I rejected it because the local energy company (SDGE) was still cheaper by a large margin... and was even during the summer of 2000. I could not have recouped my costs in a reasonable amount of time. I believe that were energy more expensive, "solarization" would become more viable, scaling costs would improve, and I would have be getting it in five years instead of twenty. This then becomes a more and more viable alternative, putting the screws on the transmission grid and forcing them to lower prices.
I envision condo HOAs with giant solar arrays on the roofs. I am sad we don't have that now. I believe we should. I believe we don't due to regulation. Regulation has done the same thing for the transmission grid that OPEC has done for oil prices and drug dealers do for their product.
Keep prices just low enough to keep their junkies hooked and the dealers in pimpin' clothes.
Also you are talking specifically about transmission while the problem in 2000 was attempted de-regulation of producer FROM the grid. At this point the final mile question does still suggest oversight. BTW, just so you think I don't simply hate all government, the solution to the de-regulation problem was to do it MORE SLOWLY. Just like the other comment about Soviet/vs Chinese. Soviets went for almost a century and then collapsed into chaos to their detriment. This is essentially what we experienced with the power de-regulation. The Chinese started de-socializing slowly in the late 1980s after only a few decades, to their apparent benefit, though the ultimate result does remain to be seen.
I may not have a better alternative right NOW, but what I believe is that under the current system, the better alternative will take far longer to appear and the transition will ultimately have larger broader costs for society. I didn't think of NetFlix either.
I dislike having a single provider.
I dislike having an armed single provider more.
Yes. Some people would prefer to buy cheap glassware that shatters instead of spending more money on dishes that will last longer. (And no, I don't mean plastic. Not all glassware shatters. Good dishes bounce and, at most, chip slightly.) In the end, though, those people break so many more dishes and glasses that it costs them more, thus proving their folly.
As for solar power, it's a nice idea, but the amount of space required to provide power for a typical home is a large portion of the roof. The amount of space required to provide power for businesses, condos, hotels, etc. is far greater than the available space. Thus, for a sizable percentage of the population replacing transmission with local solar gathering is simply not possible.
Now, one could argue that the existence of solar power will reduce the load, thus reducing demand, thus making the price drop. Of course, if the energy crisis taught us anything, it was that the corporate entities who run the generators will see the reduced load and will start scaling back on production so that the cost of electricity never drops. That's exactly what they did the last time, and I don't see any reason to believe that they would somehow behave differently in the future.
In fact, one could reasonably argue that increasing the number of people on solar power would result in even more financial harm to society, as the cost of staying in high density areas (which tend to be the areas most frequently inhabited by the poorest parts of our country) could actually increase. Why? Because maintaining the power grid costs money, and if there are fewer people using it, the maintenance costs get spread across fewer households, and thus the power companies will have the perfect excuse to raise rates even further for the people who can least afford it.
Sorry, but I'm quite certain that power and other essential services will always be a mess as long as the profit motive is the driving force behind its maintenance, and I'm quite certain that alternative power cannot reasonably prevent corporate greed by power providers from causing societal harm any time in the foreseeable future. Maybe in a hundred years... but not any time soon.
BTW, just so you think I don't simply hate all government, the solution to the de-regulation problem was to do it MORE SLOWLY.
On that point, with respect to the generator companies, we mostly agree, though in addition, I feel that in order to prevent the situation from eventually exploding anyway, the government would have to have prevented the regulated monopoly from being under the same corporate umbrella as any of the generator companies feeding it. The very fact that they were able to convince the government to bail them out by playing shell games with money between divisions of a single company is absolute malfeasance of the highest order....
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Yes. Some people would prefer to buy cheap glassware that shatters instead of spending more money on dishes that will last longer. (And no, I don't mean plastic. Not all glassware shatters. Good dishes bounce and, at most, chip slightly.) In the end, though, those people break so many more dishes and glasses that it costs them more, thus proving their folly.
Some people also prefer expensive glassware that shatters instead of spending LESS money on dishes that will last longer: ie fine china and crystal. People pay more for a fragile luxury when cheaper items, whether it's plastic or more durable glassware are available. We've gotten way off-topic there but the main points are short-term cost/efficiency are not the only consideration.
In fact, one could reasonably argue that increasing the number of people on solar power would result in even more financial harm to society, as the cost of staying in high density areas (which tend to be the areas most frequently inhabited by the poorest parts of our country) could actually increase. Why? Because maintaining the power grid costs money, and if there are fewer people using it, the maintenance costs get spread across fewer households, and thus the power companies will have the perfect excuse to raise rates even further for the people who can least afford it.
Absolutely. So therefore leaving them on this outdated system is HARMING THEM THE MOST. That's what I'm trying to say! Solar power is most beneficial for highly concentrated (lower-income urban) households! Yet it's not here. A short-term rise in costs would be painful... but force the transition to better alternatives. Look at the desertion of Hummers and adoption of Hybrids recently. We have condo associations/apartment complexes that run communal pools but don't bother with communcal solar arrays. Something is wrong here. We then take their kids and send them to foreign nations to die to secure outdated energy sources and ensure the status quo continues. Very very wrong. I absolutely agree there will be short-term pain and costs.
Is it any less than a war costing thousands of lives on the other side of the planet with a final bill nearing $300B?
Sorry, but I'm quite certain that power and other essential services will always be a mess as long as the profit motive is the driving force behind its maintenance, and I'm quite certain that alternative power cannot reasonably prevent corporate greed by power providers from causing societal harm any time in the foreseeable future. Maybe in a hundred years... but not any time soon.
The profit motive will always be behind providing any service. But that aside...
You should really check out solar power. We're closer than you think. Solar power would also be most effective for highly concentrated housing where one array could serve multiple apartment/condo households. Quite a bit of electricity is consumed during transmission and a lot of effort is expended tracking usage. Even if we don't have a truck driving around with batteries, we have a person driving around checking meters.
Also, google "transmission line loss" with respect to electricity generation. It runs about 10-15%. You joked earlier about putting batteries on a truck and driving about... well we do pay a similar cost in both line loss and driving around checking meters. Like you said, once we get superconductors, the point is moot. I don't expect that soon... however:
You're saying "digging/pumping a finite source of decayed bio-matter out of the ground, transporting it to a central location by truck, using it to run huge centralized power generators, and then having those generators transport it across hundreds of miles of power lines (with associated losses)" is going to be cheaper than alternatives such as local tidal/wind/solar for another hundred years.
I respectfully disagree.
Also, we'd be a lot closer towards a hydrogen economy if we'd spend $270B to move towar
I'm familiar with what solar power can and can't do. Solar power to provide for a twelve story apartment or condo building with people packed in like sardines isn't going to work.
A typical household consumes an average of about 1 kW with the peak being much higher during certain times of day. Let's crudely approximate this as 24 kWh/day. Solar power produces about 12 Watts per square foot. This means that even if you had 24x7x365 sunlight, you would need at least 83 square feet of roof space per household. But, of course, this isn't realistic.
Lets take Montgomery, AL as an example. It gets an average of 4.23 "sun hours per day" (an approximation of the number of hours of full sun that would hit the panels if the entire day were compressed in such a way that you got either full sun or no sun). The minimum is 3.37 hours. Assuming enough battery capacity to spread the load over a full day is pretty much a given. If you assume more than that, you could get screwed by a rainy season, so we really have to use the minimum here in order for it to be a reliable power delivery mechanism.
Now assume that we have a poor apartment complex. Say 800 square foot apartments in a ten story building. That means that for every 800 square feet of roof space, there are ten households. Thus each household has 80 square feet of roof space. So we have 3.37 hours * 80 *12W = 3,235 kWh/day, a far cry from the 24 kWh that would be required. And this isn't even what most people would classify as high density housing....
It isn't that I don't like the idea of solar power. It's a great idea, and it is a practical solution for single family homes; however, it is not, and can never be, a general solution to the power needs of our country unless we eliminate high density housing. Solar cells can be as high as 25% efficiency today. That means there's only a factor of four to be gained even if they were perfectly efficient, and the modest example I gave above would require a factor of eight. Maybe if you covered all the side walls you might be able to scrape up that factor of two for this particular example, but it is relatively trivial to come up with a high density housing environment where this won't work, since volume increases with the cube of the length of the sides while outside surface area increases at ~5x the square of the length of the sides.
I'd love for alternative energy sources to replace the power grid, but there are plenty of reasons that this can never happen in urban areas. Smog decreases the viability of solar power, housing density is too high, the initial cost outlay is sufficiently high that slum lords would never be willing to pay it anyway, etc. It's a nice dream, but it just isn't a realistic one for the foreseeable future.
Also, we'd be a lot closer towards a hydrogen economy if we'd spend $270B to move towards it rather than blowing holes in the sand... but I assume we both agree on that.
Yes. My next car will be a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle. I'm fed up with oil, and won't be replacing my current vehicle until the auto manufacturers get me a vehicle that runs on a fuel source that i can generate in my home. :-)
Also, google "transmission line loss" with respect to electricity generation. It runs about 10-15%. You joked earlier about putting batteries on a truck and driving about... well we do pay a similar cost in both line loss and driving around checking meters. Like you said, once we get superconductors, the point is moot. I don't expect that soon... however:
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