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How Much Does a New Internet Cost?
wschalle writes "Given the recent flurry of articles concerning ISP over subscription, increasing bandwidth needs, and lack of infrastructure spending on the part of cable companies, I'm forced to wonder, what is the solution? How much would a properly upgraded internet backbone cost? How long would it take to make it happen? Will the cable companies step up before Verizon's FiOS becomes the face of broadband in America?"
It will always cost as much as you are willing to pay, and the upgrade does not matter here at all.
If there's as much dark fiber around as people say there is, then it could just be a matter of buying it and activating it. How much would this cost? I don't know!
Which I presume is far cheaper than digging up the whole country to lay new fibre.
Whenever I move somewhere the first thing I do is call and get a new internet. It used to take about 6 weeks but now it only takes a couple of days. I'm living out here by the lake now so my internet got installed by some redneck but he did an okay job, my internet is fast enough.
Where's the bottleneck? In the fiber link between Chicago and New York? Or in the connection between Comcast's IT offices and their customer loops? Or is it in the customer loops themselves?
I've heard countless stories about how the Internet was going to be choked, but it's been a long time since I've heard widespread complaints about over-subscription on a particular cable loop. And I haven't heard anything specific about data not getting from Chicago to San Diego fast enough, or from New York to Europe.
Instead, all I've heard are complaints by ISPs and industry bloggers saying that ISPs can't push all the data they're being paid to. I haven't seen any real evidence in a while. (But then, most of my tech news comes from Slashdot...)
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As long as they can get away with offering sub-par connectivity at premium prices, what incentive do they have to rock the boat? The only thing that can induce these telcos to make costly infrastructure upgrades is competition, which is in pretty short supply currently.
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
Well, we gotta figure the cost of laying down the new tubing, maybe even cutting some bigger holes in our houses. I figure if we expand the tubes from the current quarter inch to oh, four inches or so, we won't clog them with all our crap.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
It'll cost a hell of a lot less than the war on Iraq.
If that much money had been spent on internet infrastructure, we'd probably have 99% wireless penetration and 10Gbps fiber to the home for $30/month.
Yeah, the cost of that war is *that* ridiculous.
All you need to know is the cost of the fastest connection material per metre, the cost of decoding stations, the cost of laying cable per metre, cost of building decoding stations. Then all that would be need is to take the area you want to rebuild, map out where you want to cover, and it would be prettysimple assuming you just use a simple back bone spidering out to smaller and smaller areas untill it goes to each individual home. Unfortunately, this would only work on smallish scales, because while you could with a bit of work figure out how to rebuild a state, or maybe at a push a small country, in reality you'd be talking about possibly continents rewired. Plus of course you want to be future proof, so would you want to put breaks into the backbone connections, it would cause lsightly more latency, but if you don't, and you need to add a connection onto the backbone, that could severely damage backbone structures for several hours and slow connectivity by huge amounts during the time.
Then of course do you want backups- do you want to protect california for example, against earthquakes, possibly by wireless, or by several backbones running perpendicular to each other.
An internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Unfortunately, they didn't tell me how much they paid.
5) More than $2
4) $78,432,011 Vlifenscarde, I'll let you do the math
3) Less than a dozen pirated mp3s (as valued by the RIAA)
2) More than the corporations are going to pay.
1) Years of grief, shady accounting, questionable ethics and finally government intervention... after the situation has become inconvenient to the lowest denominator.
Perhaps the question should be re-framed. As an iPhone owner, the most damaging aspect of the product is the AT&T service. Edge blows on this thing. As a consumer in Chicago, city-wide wireless would be an incredible benefit to business. But, our shortsightedness, or the effective lobbying by various groups, makes us focus on their business rather than ours. I am also a small business person.
Whatever it is that we are being sold, it is ineffective at best and long-term incredibly damaging to education, business, and culture. In the states, we like to argue about the "issues" which is in effect lobbying, rather than the discuss the desired results. What kind of economy do we want? And, what do we need to achieve it?
Whether the computer is useful in education, whether the businesses we should focus on are large or small, or whether it costs too much are side issues at best. Our infrastructure and our priorities are unfortunately showing all to well lately.
And we can entertain the 150 000+ troops who would be twiddling their thumbs with ultra fast porn!
Hey, I'm still waiting (been over SEVEN YEARS now) for AT&T to deliver DSL to my home. I've been using Comcast/Time Warner (expensive but relatively high bandwidth) for the last five. Cable companies have already spent billions to upgrade their infrastructure, only now are they running out of bandwidth. AT&T spent billions on acquisitions and millions on lobbiests to lock in their monopoly on the final mile. And I'm still waiting.
"Where's the bottleneck? "
At the server.
Somebody is causing all of this panic about internet problems! All these articles rehashing scary thoughts like:
The Bandwidth is becoming unsufficient! We're going to run out any week now! The torrentors are killing it! The Youtubers are killing it! The ISP's are throttling our bottlenecks! Too much downloading! Spam is clogging up the NIC's, Viruses, Trojans, Malware, birds, squirrels, monkeys, sharks, and other animal organizations are fowling up the lines!
This stuff needs to be stopped. These articles are becoming annoying. My internet connection is going great. I had dial-up for years and have finally swtched to cable. It's so much better. I am really not inconvenienced. If the internet is really going to choke then the ISP's are going to fix it. Sure, they'll make us pay but it'll be done. Besides, they wouldn't want to lose all that money they make each month on us. It's just too lucrative!
To bring some outside perspective, in France we had a huge problem due to the monopoly and then quasi monopoly of the original state operator. Prices were pretty high and nothing seemed to move. We had a really great phone system thanks to the state-operated France Telecom and the amount of cash the state spent building it, but prices and choices were not that great.
At some point arrived an operator named Free. They offered a no-contract, local call (no more expensive than calling your neighboor) RTC service that was a huge success (along with e-mail and web-site hosting).
When came the time of moving to DSL (able never was a real success in France), again the prices were high and the choice scarce. Free deployed its own equipments and offered a low-cost 512 Kb Downstream ADSL access (30 EUR a month, about $40, when others were more easily around 60 EUR).
That proved to be a nice example of how competition pushes the market in good directions for the most parts).
Ever since, Free upgraded their access to 1 Mb, then 8 Mb. Today 25 Mb is available if you are lucky enough to be in the right zones (and to leave almost in the DSLAM, since DSL is distance dependant), with free national telephony (and free calls to a bunch of other countries like the US, landline or mobiles) as well as TV. All of that for the exact same amount of 30 EUR a month.
Let it be said, they might have invested a bunch in laying down the equipment. But they made it big, and customers saw right away where they should go.
Granted, there are issues with Free (poor hotline support, poor coverage for rural zones, accusations of violating GPL license in their terminal which seem to be true...), but they did bring the market to where it is today in France. At this point, Free is busy trying to bring fiber optic into buildings (no word yet on the price or speed for this future service).
No, laying down equipment and upgrading it to support faster delivery speed does not seem to require a "price upgrade" if the business model involves selling what customers are ready to purchase. Investment is not about hitting the customer, it's about planning what return you expect of it.
"As long as they can get away with offering sub-par connectivity at premium prices"
Oh cry me a river. I'm on dial-up. Your "sub-par" connection would be like manna from heaven. Kids these days don't know how to appreciate what they do have.
"The only thing that can induce these telcos to make costly infrastructure upgrades is competition, which is in pretty short supply currently."
All the competition in the world isn't going to change the financial question. Who's going to pay for it?
To put questions like the Ask Slashdot asker into the perspective of a typical slashdotter: How much would it cost to replace all legacy code with something new?
Telecom started the first day any sort of communication took place, and we've been building on that ever since. There's no choice but to continue working with what we have and hope something better organically comes out the other end.
1&1 - Cheap domain and web hosting.
Probably the cheapest solution is to kill a couple billion people. that will reduce demand for a fair bit of time.
Senior Server Technical Analyst? JobID=61015523
http://jobsearch.monsterscotland.co.uk/getjob.asp
You could have your own pipe.
Please don't slashdot the site.
Ohh, go on then, if they can afford to pay wages like this, then they must have lots of bandwidth.
Now if only those ham radio operators would shut up and sign off!
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
One the war in Iraq is a government expense. The internet is mostly private and academic.
Two I know at least one group that's glad for the war.
This Ask Slashdot question makes the false assumption that there is one, and only one Internet backbone, and that the only way to upgrade is to replace it. As Foldoc shows, the so-called backbone is composed of a number of large-scale networks that interconnect. If you need more bandwidth, all that's needed is to add as much as you need and can afford.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
The answer is to create wireless mesh devices and take centralized control out of the equation entirely.
You'd still need a backbone to cross long uninhabited expanses, but that's all.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
on how much a session of congress costs. Keep in mind you'll be bidding against ma bell.
They're getting a pretty sweet deal right now so a few hundred million in lobbyists, campaign contributions and other misc bribes is nothing.
The cost of the actual wires vanishes when compared to the munny-munny-munny nonsense of the political side.
To boldly use to and too two times and get it right too! They're not gonna believe their eyes when they see it there!
One solution may be to take back control of the last mile. Build (or rebuilt) subdivisions with ftth. Pay for and maintain this with subdivision dues. Allow data/voice/media providers to connect to the neighborhood fiber non exclusively. Now providers compete for the same access to consumers and prices drop while speed goes up.
"The neat thing about the internet is when one line of communication goes down, data actually finds another way around automatically."
Actually I'd say you weren't. Oh I'm not talking about the textbook definition, but the actual reality when you get out of your basement and visit the locations that are "The internet". It's not as redundant as a slashdot dupe and there have been examples when it has gone down faster than a cheap hooker.
Because people keep telling me that I've "won an internet" all the time.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I seem to recall that not too long ago the concern was all that dark fibre
lying around doing nothing. T'would seem the concern was a tad misplaced.
Sure, that works in Neil Stephenson books, but in practice, the latency would be so high as to be worthless for most time critical applications.
I had to quote that word because it's getting ridiculous how often it's thrown around now.
Anyway, the government should make, lay, and lease the fiber to the service providers, or even create one themselves. It would provide a MAJOR employment boost for the people, most notably the linemen who would actually lay the fiber. The manufacturing of it isn't rocket science and from the top down you could hire people for it, from the designers to the janitors. Teams of men and women would go out and work on the network and that would probably be thousands of jobs, if only temporarily. Keep some on per region (or many depending on how hard it is to upkeep) and keep the manufacturing plants open to sell the fiber to businesses.
Lay it all out like we did the highway systems, charge Verizon, Time Warner et. al. to use it. If it breaks, it's like a pothole, fix it.
Make it a not for profit (as if the government wasn't already) take all money from it and put it back into the network, not into some bridge to no where.
Upgrade as necessary, keep the country moving forward, the internet is too important to the world to allow it to slow or crash (not that I fear a crash).
My name is Anonymous Coward and I am running for President.
Qwest Communications just told me last week that they have plenty of capacity, and I should choose them as a provider because their network was way overbuilt for how many subscribers they have.
That begs the question, is all this talk of a 'shortage' just American ISPs prepping us for a soon-to-come price increase?! I sense capitalism at work!
"You forgot the #1 rule of the Internet: crap size increases to fit the available tube."
Have you considered dropping the Styrofoam peanuts from your diet?
group that's glad for the war.
Who for and where? Net topology is never carpet-flat. US policy is owned by the lobby, S korea has great indidual bband rates, and comapare China, India, and Pakistan's ideas of a backbone.
Just getting bband in a low\middle income urban neighborhood or past the exurbs is still nuts. We are on a plateau that will continue to occupy for sometime. I was listening to a pair of new Verizon guys just hired to sell fibre door2door. One had made 1800 in commisions the previous week. They were only working the creame of the Dallas suburbs.
Back in 95 or so, I was supporting MSN 1.0 when M$ purchased UUNET. In a deal with what became the Worldcom fiasco. I knew the per shift download totals for the newest versions of IE, and it was obvioius the numbers quoted in the paper were far different than what we were seeing on site. They still havent learned thier lesson.
The major oil & gas companies all share the US pipeline sytems, and the sytem of accounting attatched to it makes Enron look like an amish community. (In texas, pipelines are almost as important as high school football. Almost)
There is no honest broker in the backbone game. There are no believable numbers.
hey retard.
read the whole summary.
"...in America" it says. Thus, he's talking about the internet backbone in America.
Jackass.
How many time critical applications do any of us really use though?
I personally don't use VOIP or Webcams or play FPSes, so all the big things that'd make latency an issue aren't important for me.
Knowing that I'm in control of the internet and not just the cash hungry telcos would go pretty far in my book for most of what I do use it for (text based applications, web apps, email, and IM, none of which will see you fragged if you happen to spend 5-10 seconds waiting for your message to get through.
Mind you I'm not one of the myspace whoring masses.
Australia = Continent = 1 Country, jfyi.
Congrats, you're a stupid fucking troll who can't seem to read an entire paragraph without launching into a pointless anti-american tirade. You win an internets.
There must be a euphemism for invoking unrelated starving African children or something in an Internet argument as a corollary to calling your opponent a Nazi ala Godwin's law.. Mugabe's law?
You'd still need a backbone to cross long uninhabited expanses, but that's all.
That, my friend is EVERYTHING. Try wandering out of [insert large city name] sometime. Distributed wireless mesh coast to coast is a total fantasy.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The problem is that bandwidth is wasted and abused.
And one of the main abuser and waster is EMail. What I'm talking about is Spam, and the need of everyone and his dog to send pretty much every kind of content as an EMail attachment. If there is a way to waste bandwidth, it's the ridiculous need to attach not only pictures to emails (which is oh-so-necessary for those oh-so-wonderful HTML-mails, and, while pointless, at least HTML doesn't add too much to the waste) but everything. Instead of putting the content on a server and sending the link, the content is sent. What's wrong with putting it on a server or, if you don't have one yourself, putting it on rapidshare or similar services and having people download it?
And of course spam. I'll stop wasting electrons by ranting about it, I guess it ain't necessary.
So if our beloved rulers want to save us from a bandwidth collapse, crack down on spammers finally (i.e. don't just make laws but actually spend a dime or two to get those bastards) and educate pointy haired managers that mail is supposed to send text, not arbitrary content.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yes, people are starving. Yes this site is US centric. Still, can't we have a tech discussion without the "people are starving" bullshit? Quit posting on slashdot and go feed them if its so important to you jackass.
you can't ack before you balls.. you just
Once my current project is up and running and I have a little more free time, I want to try to integrate one with a RepRap, then make as many as I can and give them away. The idea would be to have any improved designs the device is used to print automatically shared.
I figure that will be the way forward... final nails in the coffin of centralized information control, first nails in the coffin of centralized manufacturing control.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
One would hope that WiMax would settle the technical issues.
However, the "free market" that you advocate has been turned into a license for the entrenched "monopolies." Our government is us, or should be us anyway. I would expect any business where the management removes itself from the function would run that way.
But, if a goal-oriented "internet" is off-topic, what can I say? It was established with a purpose, and will need to be reevaluated and continually rebuilt for purposes. These purposes will become as unimaginable as the current form is from the originally intended net.
My father and I used to own and operate an ISP in our region. We sold it in early 2000 and last year my father finally contacted the phone company and had a tech come out to remove the hardware on the outside of the house. The tech recommended letting it there, as he said that in the next 2 years, Verizon plans on offering an equal connection and bandwidth of a T1 for 100 per month, dedicated. I haven't check into this recently for a follow-up but that alone sounds promising.
Never try to beat a professional at his own game!
Believe me, if you put up BPL in my neck of the woods, I could pump out a pretty powerful HF signal and be perfectly licensed to do so. Those power lines aren't just radiating antennas, they'll also pick up my HF signal. And since the whole BPL scheme is based on a 'live with the interference' clause, guess whose packets will end up fragmented into noise? Here's a clue: not my morse code.
Microsoft says legacy (serial/parallel) ports are bad. They don't obfuscate the hardware enough.
BPL is a red herring. Just think about what it's attempting: pushing broadband data over unshielded, unbalanced lines -- lines that are already carrying line current and are connected to all sorts of noisy equipment. You think that DSL is bad? At least those wires are designed for carrying information, and are wired in balanced loops, with circuits end-run to the DSLAMs -- and DSL sucks in most places already.
Using power lines combines the worst of DSL, unshielded wiring (even worse, since it's unbalanced), and shared-circuit cable internet. BPL was the power companies' attempt at cashing in on 'last mile mania'; the damage it would do to the radio spectrum is only the very tip of the iceberg when it comes to its problems.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
What bloated over priced area of the nation do you live at? 50 feet for a grand? We got a big ditchwitch here, tell me where the over paid fat fools pay that kind of money for half an hour's work, and that includes a ten minute coffee break.
Given the recent flurry of articles ..., I'm forced to wonder, what is the solution?
The solution: Stop reading the articles.
And all we have to do to get them onboard is offer HOIP...
Ham Over IP
"Knowing that I'm in control of the internet and not just the cash hungry telcos would go pretty far in my book for most of what I do use it for (text based applications, web apps, email, and IM, none of which will see you fragged if you happen to spend 5-10 seconds waiting for your message to get through."
I feel the same way about the road system. Oh wait.
Why for f*ck's sake do private companies still own the pipes that come into my house?? Shouldn't these pipes be fiber optic and owned by my local municipal government? That way I can pick any ISP, Phone or Television company I want to run to my house at the same blazing fast speed.
The Internet seriously went downhill after the NAPs were sold off.
As long as the phone companies and cable companies own these pipes, monopolies will exist forever.
Andy
How Much Does a New Internet Cost?
And can you send it to me on CD?
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
And, quite frankly, whether you value a cheaper internet or not, your response isn't really apropos and your participation in the discussion has been digressive.
The underlying point I really wanted to make is that I feel a cheap, fast internet is extremely valuable to society as it enables complex content, creative or productive, to be easily shared and communication to occur on many levels. It also allows for cheaper food at walmart, or other large distribution centers and therefore eventually less capital rich markets become acceptable investments and they eventually get to enjoy better access to food, as well.
Reality is a slackware box running on a 386 tucked away in god's sock drawer.
I'll add a bit more. The aftermath of Katrina should have shown everyone that when you have third world conditions good communication would help a great deal to improve the conditions. Most of the utter stupidity we saw was due to poor communications - the rest like sending hundreds of firemen to a PR course on how to deal with the media before they were sent in was management out of their depth and unaware of how serious the situation was, possibly partly due to poor communication. The net is a communications infrastructure.
We need an alternative to the current backbone with way more fibers packed together.
We need fiber to the p(fttp) or FTTH.
We need multiplexing.
I am wondering about the limitations of digital tech and all this bandwidth. Maybe thats the bottleneck also.
An analog system for mass high speed downloads?? A hybrid system?
Four... maybe five. Definately not six.
Wow. Sound like someone really should have had their afternoon nap.
FIOS ran cable through my neighborhood a few weeks ago. I have buried utilities in on my street. They had 3 people cutting tree roots and putting in a foundation for a distribution box in my front yard for almost a week. I think it cost them more than $1000.
Some analysts think laying the FIOS network is costing more like $9000 to $10000 per home. Hookup of the home after laying the network is more like $650 or so. The costs include the PON, the tap in the distribution box, wiring the house and so on.
And yes there was a Ditch Witch in use.
Oh, and 50 ft gets you about 1/4 of the way from the curb to the service entry point for my house.
Still, can't we have a tech discussion without the "people are starving" bullshit?
Apparently not. Someone above said something about how if we weren't in Iraq, we could have spent the money on the internet backbone in the US. technically, this is true, but we wouldn't have spent the money on the internet. Can't we have a technical discussion without Iraq popping up?
Seriously, some shit isn't related to the discussion and bringing it up is just stupid. So what if people are starving? Did this Ask Slashdot post make anyone in Africa any hungrier? I seriously doubt it. Does lowering the price of broadband in the US make anyone hungrier?
Only if we lower the price by making new broadband lines out of their food.
Given the recent flurry of articles concerning ISP over subscription
That article seems to be about throttling BT bandwith. Thats not the same thing as over-subscription. Oversubscribing a network is when the service you are providing (say 5Mb DSL), multiplied by the number of clients is greater than the pipe you are feeding it. Let me give you a little hint, consumer DSL has been oversubscribed virtually from it's inception. I used to work at a company who developed provisioning automation software and when we first talked with vendors about our DSL offerings (this was back in the day when CLECs were popping up everywhere) they laughed that our product didn't support over-subscribing.
Why do they do this? Not sure but I'd lay a bet that their cost-model for DSL implementation was based on data from dial-up usage which was a far different behavior pattern than people use today. It could even be that they simply applied a model similar to POTS which is also designed for over-subscription. Ever get a fast busy signal instead of the usual slow one? In my hometown it was uncommon about 20 years ago (and today unheard of) but that's an all-circuits-busy signal.
Point here is that over-subscription isn't something new, neither is it a sign of the collapsing internet. It's just the model that telcos adopted because of some assumption about usage patterns. It is a reason to feel ripped-off though, since it's part of the reason you will virtually never get 6Mbps out of your 6Mb DSL line.
increasing bandwidth needs
This article really seems like it's about Cable infrastructure supporting IPTV. This, to me seems to be about the capacity of the cable network - NOT the internet, specifically about upstream traffic. I'm not an expert here and I don't think I'm willing to pay for the original article but I would expect there's a variety of technologies in play amongst cable providers. So how many cable providers this affects is the worthwhile question to ask.
I'm forced to wonder, what is the solution? How much would a properly upgraded internet backbone cost?
It's an interesting question but I don't see how any of the above forces you to wonder it.
I had a two-hour nap in the afternoon, and I have a headache because of it.
How about you, Shieldw0lf? Take some Aleve...it makes the cramps feel much less worse...
The technology has changed:
...) using redundant and heterogeneus nodes (bridges optic-laser-cable-sat-tv).
* WiFi was faster than Cable Modem, was cheaper than cabling many cables to houses.
* ADSL Modem was faster than Cable Modem because more fine frequencies and Fourier Transforms.
The providers wann't spend more money cabling.
The good solutions are:
* to install many parallel motorized invisible laser's nodes far away kilometers long.
* to improve the parallel invisible laser's technologies.
* to improve their in the worst case scenario (bad meteorology, raining,
* the cost is the sum of the invisible laser's nodes, not the sum of cabling's kilometers.
Lucky to Every Users!!!
...without a clue:
*** Will the cable companies step up before Verizon's FiOS becomes the face of broadband in America?" ***
Verizon is only offering FIOS in areas that they have local phone service. And those areas are NOT that vast. Thus, it doesn't mean jack, or squat.
Move to another country like Japan or South Korea. It would probably be cheaper.
As an American living in Japan, the prospect of moving back to the US is quite dismal when considering broadband. Currently I'm paying about $50/mo. for 50 Mbps ADSL. NTT in the last couple of months has rolled out a fiber optic service for approx $90/mo. at 100Mbps. I don't live in Tokyo or any other big city you might think of when you think of Japan. I live in the boonies of Aomori Prefecture and it is available.
Click and be jealous/angry (if you're american) http://flets.com/english/opt/charge_opt_hf.html (there is still an ISP charge on top of this number which is why I said ~$90 earlier)
It's a shame and disgrace the US is so far behind... Verizon promoting their FiOS at 5Mbps as top-of-the-line is a joke. But hey, FCC says better deals/competition will come from all the telcom mergers... 10 years from now maybe the US will see 25 Mbps service!
One dollar Bob.
So was flying to the moon, but we did it anyway.
So are pigs flying out of your ass, let us know the sitrep.
Physics were rather more on our side for the whole Moon thing.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The US DSL/cable/etc business model is built on a certain amount of oversubscription, just like (nearly) every network out there. I have worked for several companies, up to top 10 of the Fortune 500, and not a single one of them had a network that wasn't oversubscribed to a certain degree... even on the LAN (which is where it's the cheapest).
Those of you that work in a corporate environment with any density (>20 users on a floor, more than one floor)... If you've got a gigabit LAN, go ask your network guy if they have a 10-gig uplink for every 10 ports on the floor.
.
.
.
After he stops laughing and realizes you're serious, ask him why they are running an oversubscribed network. If he's on the design side, he'll end up telling you that you don't build a network for that level of traffic if it simply doesn't use it (most don't). The most likely place you're going to see a fully non-oversubscribed network is one that supports a supercomputer with many nodes. Even then you might see some.
It's just not economically feasible to build non-oversubscribed networks. Any of you know how much a card for a Cisco GSR that has just two OC-192 intermediate-reach ports on it is? MSRP is $585,000.
$585K for two 10 gigabit intermediate reach ports. And to build a non-oversubscribed network for a small community with say 2000 users on 8-meg cable connections that cost $60 a month. Gotta pay for the cable plant itself (to a certain degree), the fiber to link the customer-facing nodes (how much it cost to dig/hang/lay the fiber), the routers in the customer-facing nodes, the cards in the routers in those nodes (more bandwidth = higher cost cards), the distribution routers that link all the customer nodes together (and their cards), core routers with higher-speed interfaces to tie it all together if you have any decent number of distribution nodes (and their cards), peering routers to your upstream bandwidth provider (and cards), maintenance on every router/switch (which runs ~20-30% yearly over and above the purchase price), spares of a few of your most commonly-failing equipment, datacenter space, AC, cooling, engineering staff costs, field maintenance staff costs, systems administrators staff costs, 24x7 NOC staff costs, 24x7 helpdesk costs, multiple layers of management (each of those fields has to have management in an organization of any size), training costs to keep up on the latest developments, staff turnover costs, taxes... and that's before we've paid for one bit of peering bandwidth or even thought about making a profit - or considered what Mother Nature, backhoes, or out of control drunk drivers do to the equipment and fiber that make up the customer-facing network that sits in equipment sheds on concrete pads on the side of the road. And don't forget to add another 100% or so to all of those equipment costs, for redundancy. Don't want the whole east side of the city down because one port/device/fiber failed, do you?
There's a lot more than just a couple of Linksys gig switches and some cable RF converters that make up a cablemodem network. There's more than just a card in a phone switch that makes up a DSL network. The gear is very expensive, typically because there's lots of R&D that must go into the boxes to make them able to do what they do without having horrendous failure rates (which still happens sometimes).
More than a dump truck
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
One million dollars!! ::puts pinky finger next to lip::
Quick Google says we're pissing about $12,000,000,000 - $20,000,000,000 per MONTH away on Iraq. Where the F*CK do _YOU_ think we could get the money for domestic infrastructure?
Geez.
You know, there are _real_costs_ to letting a bunch of monkeys run free destroying a nation this size and we're the victims of it.
"You're correct, and it would cost very little to light up dark fibre as it is already set up and essentially just needs plugging in."
Oh hell for the sake of all these "dark fiber" posts, why don't you tell us exactly how much it does cost to fully outfit this dark fiber for use?
Hey, if you want to talk about infrastructure $$$'s spread over vast distances, come down to Australia sometime. We only have 20 million people, in a huge area. Especially in Western Australia where I am - we have 2 million people in a state nearly 4 times the size of Texas (for American readers to visualise). Broadband infrastructure is improving at a snail's pace - outside Perth, and a few of the larger country towns and cities, there is no broadband (except insanely priced wireless broadband via Telstra's NextG (HSDPA) phone network), and even in Perth, a lot of areas either still haven't had their exchanges upgraded for DSL, or they are full, and on a LONG waiting list for their capacity to be expanded. With most of the money for Telstra to do these upgrades coming from the Federal governement, and the majority of the country's population (and more importantly, politicians) being centred in Sydney and Melbourne, we don't get much of an allocation of funds over here.
Verizon's Fios face won't be in my house until they offer a static IP for something less than the current $100 a month.
Remember... ZG9uJ3QgZm9yZ2V0IHRvIGRyaW5rIHlvdXIgb3ZhbHRpbmU=
I'd like to thank Zondar for interjecting FACTS! into the usual hysteria that's the typical slashdot discussion and I'm going to BOOKMARK this so next time you all have amnesia you'll have something to read about the real world instead of the never-ending fantasy I keep having to put up with.
The biggest problem of the lasers is adjusting themself!!!
They are as lasers guns & sensors above boats.
Imagine the hard syncronization between boats navigating with waves/swells!!!
The real-time requirement for lasers is 3D-adjusting with P.I.D.s complexes transforms's XYZ-coordinates predictors measuring quickest motors in 0.005 seconds!!!
It's need a numerical study/research.
With the current technology, it's possible!!!
Lucky Free Users & Cheaper Providers!!!
A bunch of crap spewed there. If size was the problem, i.e. the whole there isn't enough population in area XYZ to have a profitable service because they are too far away to support, then that should mean that the highest population density areas in the USA would have service on par with S. Korea, Japan, and other high density areas, because there is "no difference" in the amount of customers in the high density areas. So South Korea has a population density of ~1,274 /SQ MI (according to Wikipedia), and Japan has a population density of ~836 / SQ MI. Japan has an average download speed of 61 Mbps, South Korea has 45 Mbps. So Japan which has only 2/3rds the population density has a much faster connection rate average. Sweden, has a population density of only 52 / SQ MI (2007 census data), and yet has an average download speed of 18 Mbps. The USA has an average population density of 76 / SQ MI (note LOWER then Sweden), and yet ONLY has an average download speed of 1.9 Mbps!!! That is almost 10 times slower then Sweden, when we have a denser population!!!! The insult does not end there, if you look at areas of the USA that have high density, for instance, New Jersey, which is 1,334 / SQ MI, that value is HIGHER than Japan AND EVEN South Korea! So don't go saying that it is because of the distances. Sweden has to deal with the same issues the USA has with large areas of low density and high areas of density, yet, they have an internet infrastructure that is an order of magnitude faster than the USA.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
"It's a matter of our understanding the physics. Not the physics itself. Besides, the reason wireless mesh isn't widespread is a matter of economics, not physics."
Oh man! Someone get Claude Shannon on the phone. Iminplaya just had a breakthrough. And since we're dialing around? Get that Maxwell guy too. Make it a conference call.
There isn't anything wrong with the backbone of the internet- its your ISP- and they are not part of the backbone.
now that the congresswhores and the FTC (federal trade commission) or (Fuck the country) have approved the Bellsouth/AT&T merger, it will not happen.
AT&T won't put any money into infrastructure.
They're still offering dial-up service. They won't put money into infrastructure until they can no longer make money using the current infrastructure.
They're using their grammar skills there.
For something as important today as the Internet, it's surprisingly fragile and primitive. It's amazing we've gotten this far; it's not clear that "more of the same" can happen.
;-)
One obvious problem, at least in the United States, is the "last mile" or if you prefer "first mile" problem. In maybe half of homes it's a cable/ILEC (old monopoly phone company) duopoly. Most of the rest can get cable or telco DSL. A fair share can't get either yet. FCC statistics are intentionally deceptive about this, counting ZIP codes that have even one "broadband" subscriber as being served, even if most of the area isn't. And their 200 kbps downstream definition of "broadband" is pathetic.
DSL is a mid-life kicker for old copper. Passive Optical Network-style fiber, as in FiOS, is also questionable as a long-term goal; like ADSL, it too is highly assymetric, and it's really too expensive. (I think Verizon is doing it mainly for political show, and will slow down. Besides, FiOS is bundled with Verizon Online, with its onerous rules and likelihood of draconian censorship in the mid-term future.)
Still, I think it's premature to count out cable technology. Hybrid Fiber-Coax is an evolutionary path to bring optical fiber to the home. A decade ago, it was first being rolled out with maybe 1000 homes per node (optical transition node, where a strand of fiber turned to coax) and up to three analog coax amplifiers on the coax side. Modern builds have maybe 50-100 homes/node and no amplifiers. Thus far fewer users share the same capacity. DOCSIS 3.0, now being tested (CableLabs is very strict on compatibility certification), uses more than one 6 MHz TV channel at a time in order to boost download speeds. And while upstream is still a bottleneck, DOSCIS 2.0 tripled upstream efficiency over the original cable modems; as each DOCSIS 1.x modem is phased out, overall capacity can increase. There are also tricks for boosting upstream on a point basis by using the spectrum above 900 MHz as well as below 42 MHz, while cable companies can also just drop off fiber at a location that really needs it (not a house, but a business or multiple-dwelling-unit site).
Next glitch: The protocols themselves. TCP/IP is from the 1970s, and while it's amazing how far it's gotten, it is really not designed for today's applications. IPv6 is the wrong approach -- tastes crappy, more filling. We really need an all-new protocol stack; it's not obvious how to phase it in though, or get consensus on a replacement. Remember TCP/IP happened because the government financed it for its own internal use (ARPAnet) and Berkeley produced open source code for it, so it became a de facto standard for multivendor corporate networks too. (This during the 1980s when OSI was supposed to be the standard, and most companies used their vendors' proprietary network technologies like DECnet, IPX, SNA and Wangnet.)
Plus there's the business issue: It's hard to make money providing Internet service. The early public ISPs were subsidized by the 1990s stock bubble. Telco/cable duopolies are potentially profitable (actually, telcos may still be losing money at it, though cable does better) but pure ISPs have a tricky time meeting demand with the kind of prices people want. Since there is usually no price feedback, users have no incentive to not do things that cost their ISP a lot of money (streaming HDTV, lots of big DVD downloads, etc., especially from distant sources). ISPs prefer the proverbial little old lady who just uses the computer to check email and stock prices a few times a week.
"I had to quote that word because it's getting ridiculous how often it's thrown around now."
Apparently your post doesn't make it any better.
"Upgrade as necessary, keep the country moving forward, the internet is too important to the world to allow it to slow or crash (not that I fear a crash)."
We're not talking about "the world". Now until socialists answer this, it will never work. Why should the majority (including that computerless woman being sued by the RIAA) finance a vocal minority so they can be entertained? With the present system those who need the internet are paying for it like they're suppose to and not asking for government handouts.
sharks + raid 1000 of laptop's hard disks + lasers = random googlesharks in the seainternet!!!
Meat for you idiot shark! Meat for you idiot shark! Meat for you idiot shark!
Ohhh, your googleshark is fished!!!
The network providers/ISPs/Telcos have been charging us out the ass for service of whatever type as long as they've existed. Time for them to take some of the loot and funnel it back into the infrastructure. Or research, for whatever the next protocol/technology/gadget is going to be.
Where's the fiber to my house? They've had years to get it done. I can pay.
And FEMA, and various other Federal agencies, and the military, and ... the list of folks who would be interfered with by BPL is very long. The NTIA's comments to the FCC regarding BPL read something along the lines of, "Not only no, but fuck no!"
+++OK ATH
A) It's not the backbone that is having issues. It's the edge network. The line that actually connects to your house is where the bottleneck is. Not the backbone.
B) It costs a lot. In the case of a fiber drop, it can be 3-5k per house, if they use the cheaper PON solutions.
C) The time cycle to build out a new network is longer than the technology cycle that drives the bandwidth demands. By the time it is finished, the bandwidth demand will be 10 times what the estimated it to be. Unless they are one of those folks that can see accurately 5-10 years in to the future and know what innovation will be next, they will miss their guess. If they are one of those guys, they have bigger and better fish to fry.
If it were cheap, a lot of companies would be running connections to your house. When the Telco's were ordered to open their network and allow other companies to use their infrastructure, you had hundreds of companies wanting to offer you DSL service, because they didn't have to build an infrastructure. There was no risk in leasing a copper line you had a customer for. There is a lot of risk in running a fiber optic line to every house in any area. Especially low income areas.
Cable companies built their own infrastructure. It was built for television. There was no Internet when cable started. There was no High-Definition TV and Radio. If you consider when and what the cable infrastructure was really built for, you cannot say it has performed poorly.
The cable companies have upgraded and most plants are now at least fiber to the node. The Telco's are now overbuilding their own copper plants with fiber optics. It's a venture in which they may never break even. When you're looking at a 5k nut just to place a box in the customers house, you'd have to charge 50 bucks a month for 10 years just for the line, assuming every house you passed became a customer. Internet service and TV would be over the top options and cost more.
The Telco's are building a new infrastructure. But only in certain cities. Take a look at the ARPU for those markets and you'll see they are cherry picking the big spenders. Only going to places that they think can support 2 infrastructures and still make a profit. Unfortunately, these are the areas that already have the best service in the country and don't benefit as much. The well to do customers currently have more choices than the rest of America, and pay less on top of that due to the increased competition in the area. But that's big business.
It would be nice to wire the whole country with a national infrastructure that can be leased by anyone and maintained by the government. Only a few small things stopping that from happening. The government didn't want to be in that business when they turned the internet over to private interests. The government does not have the ability to build such an infrastructure and would have to contract that out to people who, which are only the telco's and cableco's at this point. The telco's and cableco's have absolutely no interest in building a network for the government that's sole purpose would be to put them out of business.
That's the situation with the wireline market. There is no quick fix for it.
Wireless last mile is another option that as of yet had very little success in the US. It is much cheaper to roll out a wireless infrastructure, but it is not cheap by any means. Until now the real issues, beyond a still wet behind the ears technology, has been a lack of national spectrum that a carrier that wanted to provide this service could use. Wireless currently available as a commercial product is very local in reach and more times than not it has been set up a local enthusiast. Consumer take rates on wireless have been dismal.
It may be that the current spectrum auction will give a player a real chance at this market, and who knows, our lives could be changed and everyone could suddenly have cheap and unlimited connectivity. But that's not an unlimited resource either and should it h
From where I sit there appear to be two problems.
First, for most Americans, the limit is not the backbone. It's the final mile. We're in a city of 500,000 within an hour of a top 15 market. What with looting the company and raping the customers, Qwest never had time to install more than 5 DSLAMs so well over 90+% of the DSL service is limited to 1M. Cable *cough*comcast*cough* sucks more going up (can you getting work done).
Second, Qwest and Comcast _really_ don't play nice (surprise), so traffic between the two goes via a POP 700+ miles away in another time zone. Imagine what I find with traceroute? I actually get better performance with vnc over ssh to a box behind a cable modem 1,000 miles away than I do across town. Note... we're again talking good backbone performance versus completely lousy final mile/local market performance.
All I can say is I wait longingly for our new Verizon overlords. They can't suck as bad as Comcast and Verizon. Some speed will be gravy.
the clock on the wall says 4 til 7
Try last yard.
Verizon offers FIOS in one city, about 10 miles east of me. Verizon also offers FIOS in one city, about 10 miles west of me. I live along the only road between these two cities. Verizon FIOS support has confirmed that, yes, the FIOS line runs through the ground along this road. There's a bunch (say, around 30 so far) of new, but not yet occupied homes in the neighborhood. There's a couple of new roughly refrigerator-sized Verizon boxes, sort of a drab green, across the street. I know these may serve regular copper phone service to the area, but since I already have regular phone service through Verizon, I have an idea that these might be the boxes to serve FIOS to the area. It's incredibly frustrating to have FIOS so very, very close- roughly 30 ft away- but not yet available. I know, from Verizon's point of view, there might not be enough potential customers in the area yet, but it's right...there... I'd sign up for at least the fastest residential service (about $100/mo), even the business service (about $200/mo) if it would actually get them to do the install. I'd be able to turn off Verizon's flat rate (yeah, 5gb/mo liars) wireless broadband, regular dialup (wife's service; has to be there for when i'm out of town), and Gamefly (about $38/mo for the full service), so the hit even for business class FIOS wouldn't be too terribly bad. So, take your time cable companies. Verizon doesn't seem to be going out of its way to get my business.
Same thing happens in the electric utility biz. It is not necessary for the utility to supply all of their customers max-ing out their connection simultaneously. I've seen estimates that the peak load for an electric utility is on the order of one-third of the sum of the peak loads for each of the utility's customers - and time based pricing can improve on that.
Possible Solution to the problem Use Cat5e not Cat5E with the big "E", between cities Make Ted Stevens dream come true, turn the internet into a series of tubes, PVC might work Use a bunch of Linksys wireless routers running DD-WRT in point to point Bring telegraph back then say = "Oh no, the imminent death of the telegraph" = nobody will care about the internet Instead of using the internet to exchange information grab a bunch of CD's, burn the data into them, ship them via USPS all the way to HQ on Japan It might work, from your president George W. Bush
..feel much less worse...You sir have just received the daily slashdot award for the worst writing in the troll category.
I got the new internet at netZero for $9.95 per month. hope that helps. good luck finding your new internets.
Will the cable companies step up before Verizon's FiOS becomes the face of broadband in America?
Clearly you've never been a Verizon customer. If it wasn't for competition from the cable companies, Americans would still be begging for 768kpbs DSL lines.
The damned "problems" you're talking about exists.. tadaaa, Only In America!(tm). So, start lobbying or something. Because we're enjoying some really awesome internets.. hahahaha..
It's not "just" density -- it's the combination of density and total size. The only countries that are a fair comparison to the U.S. are Russia, Canada, China, and India. Canada is slightly ahead of the U.S., and they're a bigger country, but almost 80% of Canada is unpopulated, so it's not really a fair comparison there either. Russia, China, and India are all significantly worse off than we are. On the other hand, considering that we had the Internet first, you would think that we'd be at least competitive with say, western europe, and we really aren't. Big cities aren't so bad (I live in the bay area and my connection averages about 8mbps down and 1.5 up), but we could certainly use improvement. My family back in Ohio tells me that they can't get anything better than 1 or 2 mbps, and even that's only in short bursts.
The problem is not the backbone, the problem is bad routing caused by stupid company policies.
So finally stop trusting in companies. Companies, unless they are really small, don't act sensibly, they act based on the believes of their owners which is not nessesarily even maximising profit.
Build your own networks wireless networking with meshed routing is now practicable.
So do the following. If you don't have a wireless card, buy one.
If you have a wireless card, set it to ad-hoc mode, ESSID "freifunk". Then assign it an IP-Adress in the 10.(channelnumber+100).x.y/16-Range and start OLSRd which you can get over http://www.olsr.org/ Set the LinkQualityLevel option to 2 and start it. Obviously if you already found another ad-hoc network named "freifunk" feel lucky you can connect to that person.
What OLSRd does is it creates routing tables. This will automatically find the best routing between 2 points.
If you have any questions, ask me.
if you happen to spend 5-10 seconds waiting for your message to get through. A 5-10 second response time on an SSH shell is unbearably slow. Those kind of response times are simply unusable for some.
He didn't mean "Maxwell Smart".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They are pushing a very aggressive move to FTTH, where they will provide 50Mbps symmetrical for the exact same price; they also intend to offer free "social" service, whereby unemployed people will get 64kbps internet, and free phone calls. Of course they do this last thing for a reason, but I'd rather have them do their lobbying that way than by buying junkets to politicians.
"Poor rural coverage" is relative. They cover (I believe) most 50k+ cities directly. Below that you might only get slightly lesser connectivity, because they're not always using their own DSLAMs. But in any case, they are moving at a very strong pace, covering more and more.
Lastly, they do indeed some shady behavior wrt the GPL in their set top box (which includes POTS adapter, ADSL modem, 802.11g, router, HDTV, and HD PVR), but to their credit they have explictly supported Linux (and possibly *BSD) since the beginning.
But best of all there is no capping, shaping, filtering or mangling whatsoever.
Norway, Sweden, Canada, Finland have lower pop. density than the US and better, MUCH BETTER broadband.
This stupid argument has been debunked a zillion times, including a few times in this very page already.
The only reason why broadband sucks in the US is because of CORRUPTION. Legal corruption, but corruption nonetheless.
I would agree, except that I've actually run telnet if not ssh connections over a 2400 baud modem, with a couple of other connections open, so while yes I'd agree they're unusable for some, telnet could either A. fall under real-time apps, given that it's character rather than line based, and B. that those types of users have been spoiled by fast internet access for too many years :)
Regardless, the point was a mesh grid without one group controlling the whole, much like the internet ideally should be, and yes, it does have the potential to be abused, either maliciously or accidentally, but that doesn't mean it may not be worth doing.
5-10 seconds is well beyond the latency of any connection I have ever seen, granted it would be horrible, though....... ssh does have a decent amount of overhead as it is constantly streaming data and I'd bet if you've experienced issues with ssh acting unbearably slow you just need to turn on compression (ssh -C) I commonly use ssh over a 14.4 dialup connection and haven't had any issues (though it really does seem like it has 5-10 second latency if you don't use compression).
besides, at least the ISP I work for (presumably others?) will open a trouble ticket for you if your latency is over about 150ms continuously (at least to our servers, we can't really guarantee anything beyond that)
So I guess what I'm really saying is... 5-10 seconds latency? are you fscking insane??? I think you're exaggerating a bit.
On the other end of the spectrum - literally - you have Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing devices that can stack up as many parallel transmissions on a single fiber as the fiber has optical quality to carry. This is where you can get into the realms of terabits per second and even petabits per second. This doesn't come cheap. If you want high-end gear, you're looking at $150,000 total. Very high end, you can probably add a zero or two to that, but getting the actual prices becomes hard.
Typical gear for lighting up dark fiber is around ten grand. That is more than enough to get the hardware needed to build a good metronet or a fairly decent city-to-city link.
Ten thousand is a bit much for a student science project, but most cities waste more than that each year just to use up their budgets to avoid cuts the year after. If you put that wastage into infrastructure, gigabit links to private homes would be entirely within reach.
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 live in roughly the same area as you, close to Simcoe. I've got an Ultra DSL line from bell ($50 a month for a 5 Mbit connection). I download like a fiend. Just snagged 50 gigs of Simpson episodes via Bittorrent. I've never noticed any type of throttling going on. Could you post some more info about this?
I'd like to thank Zondar (AGAIN!) and the AC below. I can't imagine why a site for nerds and geeks are so adverse to simple facts. Economics are real and all the shell "government pays for this" or "competitive companies pay for that" games isn't going to change that.*
*That's one of the reasons I don't think the "dark fiber" mantra is going to be the magic bullet proponents make it out to be.
I was thinking- social restrictions. Not that I wanna give the larger conglomerates any ideas... but you do realize- replacing the entire internet means- "they" replace the entire internet? and the second time around-- those who were slow to wake to it's functionality, will be right there to help planning it's replacement-- including real ip tracking and locked down communication protocols?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I have got to call bullshite on that assertion.
Why would it cost more than three times as much to bury fiber as I recently paid to get a water line ran? Plastic conduit is cheaper and easier to work with than copper pipe (by far). Have you paid for having anything ran from curbside to inside a house? I have.
I figure RepRap has about 2 generations to go through before it becomes truly useful.
But the wait is OK with me, I'm more interested in building stuff than actual self bootstrapping.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
The Internet costs $9.95 per month from AOL!
When I was in Korea last, the cost for a 100mbps line was approximately $25/month. The apartments were built to support it, and there were direct ethernet jacks in the walls (1 per room, even in the closets). Place a phone call, and it was more or less instant activation. When moving into the apartment, it also came with a free 2yr of connection.
On that note, I also think it depends on how you first introduced the product. Some countries you can get cable TV for as low as $5/month, but because they can't raise the price to some $20-$40. No one would no longer use it. Internet in the falls under the same. Why drop prices/increase services if people are already spending their money on what they currently have.
All I can say is I wait longingly for our new Verizon overlords. They can't suck as bad as Comcast and Verizon.
:P
I assume that the second Verizon was supposed to be Qwest.
All I can say is that actually, they can. I gratefully switched to Comcast after having Verizon because Verizon gave me a mostly non-working DSL connection that they kept charging me for and not sending people out to investigate. Now Verizon just tells people that they don't offer DSL in my area code. In fact, I'm not exactly sure what they're offering in my area code, because when I check my phone number on their web site, it says FiOS is not available for me, but I can get High Speed Internet. Exactly what is that, do you think? Super high speed dial up?
For the record, I live in an affluent area of a city of 350,000. The population of the whole metropolitan area is 2.5 million. It's not like I live in the middle of nowhere.
I probably wouldn't be so bitter if I didn't know damn well that the state of Pennsylvania paid Verizon an obscene amount of money to provide a fiber-optic network to customers' homes with speeds of 45 mps in both directions and that they were supposed to have rewired 50% of the state in rural, suburban and urban areas with that fiber-optic to the home wire by 2004... but then Verizon admitted that they couldn't do it and the Pennsylvania Utilities Commission just let them off the hook. So really, I paid a bundle for a service that I can't even get.
I may not like that Comcast has a monopoly on the cable service in my area, but at least they do provide a service to me, and if it goes wonky, they do something about it.
And I won't tell you much about the horror stories of our Verizon connection at work. They don't know why, but it just randomly stops working for hours at a time. This is bad for a public library...
Asynchronous wireless nets run at the slowest node's bandwidth divided by the number of nodes, or something ludicrously slow like that.
I remember a friend discussing how he was working with a sensor company that was struggling to maintain 200 bytes per second over a large mesh (20 nodes),
Roofnet is better than skynet: http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/papers/roofnet:mobicom 05/roofnet-mobicom05.pdf
"Bandwidth is "running out" in the U.S, not everywhere .. Why? Because its a third world country run by big companies."
...not to mention many times the population of other developed nations. It's a big place. Also, see my previous comment about Democrats sabotaging the country by keeping minorities sucking on Uncle Sam's tit.
Third world? Have you been to the third world? Obviously not, because I have, and I'm always glad to return home to America.
"You are losing more and more of your civil rights each year that passes with Bush as president."
Meh. This country had had bad presidents before, and we still keep on truckin'. It's alot bigger than just one man. Bush makes a convenient target because he's the most prominent person in the government, but it's his advisors - not him - that have been the problem. They'll be gone soon enough, just like every other presidency before them. If you weren't a douche bag you'd know that.
"Your prison system is overflowing, and there just keeps coming more and more people ready to fill it up."
Well, of course it is. As long as we have a combination of effective law enforcement and Democrats willing to keep a large part of the population living on the dole so they can sustain their voting numbers, this will never change.
"You have more than twice the murder rate of other developed countries."
From wikipedia "The United States has the highest incarceration rate and total prison populationin the world and by far the highest figures among democratic, developed nations"
"Your health care system is failing."
That's funny. Maybe you should tell that to all the Canadians who come here for critical surgery due to the outrageously long waiting times in their home country, assuming their socialized healthcare system would even pay for their surgery.
"Your education system is failing."
Really? Then why are there so many God-damned smelly foreigners in our universities?
"Your telecom companies and other internet providers and the services they provide are a joke."
Ah, the first valid point you've made so far. Telcos here are huge monopolies, and Democratic politicians are just as content to let this stand as Republican politicians.
"The list goes on and on, didnt even mention the war... Its time for you guys to wake up and do something about your government, your legal system, etc, etc."
Which one? We're involved in several, in case you haven't been paying attention. We're probably involved in some wars that you haven't even heard of on the news and probably won't until the intel documents are declassified in 50 years.
"But then again, I might just be trolling.
Yes, that's the most likely scenario.
Yeeee-haaaaw! Weeeze here in tha cit-tay have sidey-walks, paved streets, and even sew-arrs. I reckon they might just get in the way of yer diggin' contraption.
... but they get their money back on the extended warranty.
I had this discussion with a co-worker the other day. He is (or was) a fiberoptic cable installer (now a manager). I am a network engineer. After he spelled out the exact topography that is being laid for the FiOS network I don't believe that network is being setup to be scalable. It is a sort of bus topography with a overlaid star topography. It is quite unique. The problem is the same as cable. You are still sharing that link with all of your neighbors. The only thing is that fiber can carry more data than copper so they can put more neighbors on less fiber. This is a win win for the telco and somewhat of a scam for the end user. I have been told that the bandwidth is more stable on the FiOS network during peek hours but that could change when they achieve max capacity on a link.
Anyway, I think we are far from having individual single mode drops to our doorstep. It cost a lot of money to get those in my office where the providers fiber dmarc is in our basement.
Unfortunately, the money was already spent. No new Internet for you. Make do with your old tubes. Nothing to see here - the bridge goes to nowhere. Leave Senator Stevens alone. Sorry.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
You have been getting bent over and done dry (and paying in surcharges, and surcharges on the surcharges,) for the last twenty five years.
And we have been replacing copper networks FOR OURSELVES during that time, but NOT delivering ONE INCH of what you've been paying for to you suckers.
We, the telcos, have been sitting on a growing pile of your tax dollars and using the latest and best technologies to our own benefit and WE'RE not about to stop doing so until a couple of CEOs get sent to prison.
Screw you,
-the telcos
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
We've been paying for something for twenty five years and getting NONE of it.
Its time to sue the mother fuckers, after we charge them with theft.
Put a few CEOs in jail for the crap they've been pulling for over a quarter of a century.
THAT should send a message all right, and NOT SPAM either.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I'm not sure your example northern countries are really a comparable situation. For example, in Canada the vast majority of the people live in a band along the southern side of the country. A large portion is mostly uninhabited tundra. The US is a different situation because people actually live in most of the area between cities. So you can't really average out the pop. density for the entire country and get an accurate picture. A better metric would be comparing localized areas of similar population density. Has anyone done that? I don't know, so far it seems like a lot of hearsay.
Yes, there is too much corruption, I will heartily agree with that.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
What is the current cost of tubes?
Qwest just sucks. I moved to Denver (Qwest territory) from the SF Bay area earlier this year. Before I had At&T DSL, for $15/month and never had a single outage in the two years I was there (at two different addresses). Now I have Qwest VDSL (1.5Mbs) and I have an outage about once a month and pay twice as much. The other thing that sucks is that with VDSL Qwest could offer a true broadband connection of around 30Mbs, but instead they limit it to a max of 3Mbs and use all the bandwidth for their shitty TV service.
Shannon. Too low bandwidth.
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
Internets are free, judging by how often they give them away on 4chan ("100 internets to...")
"Will the cable companies step up before Verizon's FiOS becomes the face of broadband in America?"
Speaking as someone living in Los Angeles who's been waiting for FIOS since the moment it was introduced and who's becoming increasingly disillusioned as every podunk gets FIOS while LA sits barren, allow me to say, "Fat chance!"
Seriously, it's going to stay the way it is until consumers start shouting. And let me tell you, even if FIOS becomes the "face" of US broadband, unless there's some serious competition, Verizon doesn't offer the highest speeds, and even then only at an insane price.
Nope, I'm moving to Japan and taking my chances there.
The main differences between carriers who are looking at deploying WiMax are whether they're trying to use unlicensed bandwidth (competing with 802.11abgn, cordless phones, and microwave ovens) or paying for licensed bandwidth (more predictable performance but higher costs), and of course how to sell/market it. The markets for primary service to a site (competing with wireline telcos) are different from the business continuity market (getting reliability by providing separate connectivity that's backhoe-proof), and the roaming data market is not only different but requires more WiMax technology development.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
"Actually, in the U.S. the telecomm companies have so far received 200 billion in tax breaks and grants from the government to build out data network infrastructure and to compensate them for unprofitable build-outs. Unfortunately, they proved themselves to be con artists by pocketing the money and failing to provide the services."
Proof please.
We elected those monkeys (twice).
Quack, quack.
Even with Municipal Wi-FI, there is some point where the connection goes through a telco or cable company--even if you're on the open end, the service you're hitting is likely on the otherside of the telco toll booth.
Basically the only alternative I see is a 3rd backbone created by the community--which is going to be slow to develop as well, just as costly--not much different than the corporations. BUT, it will provide 100% more value and a better investment in the long run compared to any corporation creating the infrastructure.
Easy solution. The FCC can break up the US in pieces and give them out to Ma^^^^AT^^^Bell to run. It's totally a no brainer!
The US is too fucking big (seriously though). It makes the kind of shitty politics we have here inevitable because there is no way so many extremely diverse groups of people from so many different regions will ever agree on anything.
It's like feudalism with a puppet dictator in charge of the military and tax dollars. If I chose to have a child I would seriously consider moving abroad. You need a state small enough to listen to the people. No wonder corporations get so much attention. They are the smallest and most cohesive segment of the American population (sorry I'm ranting, no coffee, general frustration, I love people, cats and puppy dogs and never voted communist...unless Nader counts).
Quack, quack.
How about using existing resources better instead? Why a website having a million visitors should send copy of the same thing million times across the globe?
Problem, for the most part, could be solved by developing a new delivery mechanism that's not endpoint-oriented, but resource-oriented (you don't care where you get your data from as long as you can be sure you're getting latest, unaltered copy of data you asked for).
Lets start an American War on...well whatever. Make it a terroristy type thingy. We seem to funnel truckloads of money into anything terroristy or military related and just think, our boys of broadband would get to work at home. They'd probably get shot at a hell of a lot less, I mean aside from some red-necks or telcom hired assassins. And ninjas. Never underestimate the ninjas.
Quack, quack.
Because it will save everyone money? And I do mean everyone, rich and poor alike: a national rollout will have huge economies of scale.
The $200 billion that the telecoms have stolen recently would have been a nice start by the federal government on a national fiber-to-the-home infrastructure. It would have been like the interstate highway system. But no, that would be too "socialist". So now you are $200 billion poorer, and you got nothing for it. Sucker.
"The $200 billion that the telecoms have stolen recently would have been a nice start by the federal government on a national fiber-to-the-home infrastructure."
You're the second person to say that and you're also the second person to post no proof. What's with the hit and run slander?
Uh, we pay farmers not to grow certain crops. We're not exactly hurting for farmers.
And I don't think the people who lay broadband fiber are exactly interested in being farmers instead.
Unless you're being sarcastic.
Just taking the opportunity to give a little economics lesson as it arose, as the concept of opportunity cost is not very widely understood. I wasn't being sarcastic or suggesting that we should farm more food and lay less fiber.
everyone, quite your bitching. the only way to get broadband where i live is through hughesnet, the satellite. yes, it sucks, but it is hell of a lot better than the 16 KB/s you will get dial-up. yes, 16. and thats kilobytes. and it takes roughly three minutes to fully pull up google.
be happy your not in my shoes.