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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?"
The problem with dark fiber is that it never goes where you want it to. Sure theres heaps of it around in various areas of CBD's (but not past the building you care about), or long distances between cities, but it'll probably coz you a whole heap of money to actually get it from where the fiber is to where you need it to be.
And then you have to assume that the dark fiber has actually been maintained sufficiently that it's worth using. Dark fiber often is left in the ground and ignored and when you go to use it you discover it doesn't work anymore.
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.
MetroFi, actually, did just that - and I live within their coverage.
The MetroFi's signal is decent, but they require a login before you can access any IPs beyond the registration server, so if you have equipment that assumes connectivity (like an IP phone, or even a PS3) then it does not work (since there may be no browser to do the login first.)
Yes, considering the insane amount of dark-fiber between major cities and business districts, I'd guess that the problem is not there. Obviously it takes money to light that fiber. I have to say that technology is being driven very fast right--and its being driven by the likes of Google.
Google is pushing vendors for very fast, high density interconnect. 10Gbps from the server to the mesh. An IEEE study group just green lighted work on a 100Gbps ethernet standard. The target market for this is in metropolitan networks.
An OC-192 fiber connection is worth a mere 622.080 Mbps. Layer-3 switches can operate at roughly 240Gbps.
The noise is all about the business model not about the fundamentals. The backbone providers are becoming something of a commodity service. This would be okay if the tax structure let them provide their service + pay dividends. Instead every company has to be a 'growth company'. Ergo, they have a problem. There is no revenue growth future in what they are doing--unless they can dig their teeth into a new revenue stream--e.g., by raising the rents of content providers.
I know what you mean. I use ADSL here, and get about 1200KBPS download or so. I've house-sat for a friend a few times who's on cable, and I was appalled by the poor service he gets: about a third of what I get at home. Now, I'm not saying all cable is like that; I know better, and he's just stuck on a busy segment. I can imagine that coming here from Korea is to you like hooking up at my friend's is for me, if not worse.
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Err oc192 = 622mbps? Explain to me how I get 2.5gbps out of an OC-48 then :) I think you meant an OC-12. which would be 622mbps.
OC-192 is approx 10gb/s.
We are moving to GIG-E 10Gig- connections for backbones now, as Ethernet interfaces are way cheaper than POS (Packet of Sonet) ones.
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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.
use a lin-box to spoof the mac address of the device that you need to "log-in"...then use firefox (or opera or whatever) to do the logging in...
my dorms in college did the same thing (you had to get past cisco's clean access), and i used the same method to get my openwrt box on the network (cause the wireless signal strength in my dorm room was like -84dbm).
hope this helps!
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Those 150km are still less dense as the most areas in the states (we do have 1/6 the people). The closest minor city to me is 150km away the next largest is 300 km. Most states are a 150 from each other let alone major cities. The comparison is very apt.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
That's the cool thing about this. We've already paid for it and have yet to see it built.
From the article I linked
Feels like fraud doesn't it.
Until we have fiber to the home like Verizon FioS or Utopia we won't have the infrastructure to handle future needs.
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
i live in a shit hole town in southeast texas. I was getting 2.5 to 3 mbps on DSL. AT&T offered 6 mbps service, but AFTER i subscribed told me OOPS you live too far from switch we can sell you 3 mbps only. I switched to cable( after too many service ouages lasting over a DAY and requiring a tech to come service ancient lines around my home. I just got time warner cable. Max is 5 mbps advertised. I clocked 4.3 down and 350 kbps up at around 6pm on a saturday. For 59.95 a month i am kinda happy BUT according to DSLreports.com west coast roadrunner is running like 22mbps( iguess they have faster coyotes out there?) on the up side.
The only way to bust a doper--is when you yourself become a smoker!
True, he who controls the long uninhabited expanses controls it all.
It is all just endless streams of bull shit. Consider how much it cost to do the original copper telephone network, which contrary to the bull was far, far more expensive they any new fibre network and guess what the population has risen since then quite a lot in fact, so not only is copper tech more expensive but it had to be done with a far far lower population density, it had to be done with far more primitive technology, it had to be done using backward switching technology, telephone exchanges as major buildings and even the local was not a box but a whole building. Think each and every copper connection had to have it own line, it's own independent bit of wire, nothing like fibre at all with thousands of connections down the same line.
Face it, it is just bullshit, more bull shit and yet more bull shit. Under the current corrupt political system you will not be getting FTH until such time as the copper network degrades to the point were it significantly impacts the US economy, let me see, hmm, lets say 2025 at a minimum, possibly as late as 2050, good luck.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
The town that I'm in (in Utah) did one better.
What it has is a city run fiber-to-the-house system. Basically, it works in that just about any provider can signup and provide service on the network, so you get your choice of internet providers while operating on the same network. You can checkout the background here: http://www.utopianet.org/ . The service also allows for more than just internet, you can run IPTV and VOIP services over it as well, on separate chunks of bandwidth so your phone doesn't drop out when you're downloading your "used car ads" from usenet.
One of the providers is a bit cheaper ( MStar ), but from the reviews (on dslreports) I have read, it's pretty crappy service. They have low monthly bandwidth caps, do torrent filtering, and seem to have a tough time letting their users hit anything near their purchased transfer rates. So, this may sound like your local cable company, but there is one important difference: There are more providers than this one using those same fiber lines.
I'm using XMission ( http://www.xmission.com/ ) as my service provider, and so far it's been a pretty much perfect experience. The first day, I decided to test the limits of my pipe, and I seeded two different distro ISO downloads through bittorrent. My results were what I had expected, when I was downloading, I got up to the advertised 15Mb/s, and when I was seeding it would hit 15Mb/s as well. So, UTOPIA has given me the choice of if I want the cheaper service with a lower QoS, or the more expensive service that is rock-solid.
Overall, I would say that having this network available has made things like network neutrality much less important to me, because I know if the ISP I am on should ever go evil, I can just make a quick phone call and switch to one of the other providers on the line. It's amazing the service offerings you can get when you get the free-market back in full swing, and for the suckers still on Comcast the added competition has forced them to drop their prices in the area to $33/month (well, at least until you add in all the random taxes + fees + surcharges), so even the big guys are having to play along. The best part of this all is that the city doesn't actually pay for the fiber at all unless the project fails, so the only question is why all of the towns in this area don't have it already.
I think the solution the earlier post was suggesting was to change the Linux box MAC address to match the PS3 or phone or whatever
ifconfig eth1 hw ether 00:00:00:00:00:00
login with the Linux box (as your PS3's mac address), then swap over to your PS3 or whatever. that's what he meant by mac spoofing
Here's to the crazy ones
That's sort of what I do at times when I travel. I usually have 2 laptops with me (1 work, 1 play). Some hotels still charge up to $10/day for Internet access. I'm not going to use both at once, so I match their MAC addresses. I authenticate on one of them, do some work or play, then switch to the other. At the last place I stayed that did this I even asked if they minded if I did that. I got a blank look and a 'uh sure, you shouldn't have to pay twice...uhhh'. Fortunately more and more hotels have free 'net access.
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),
Strangely enough it seems like the more expensive hotels are the ones who still charge. I was recently at a Hilton in Florida. Internet was like $8 per day, and then only in the LOBBY (they had a "wireless area" setup). On the flip side, I've been in several Days Inns with free access in the rooms, and just recently I was in a Ramada Limited where I had free access with BETTER ping times than I get at home. These days I just look up internet access as a major thing when searching for a hotel before hand anyways. I'm a pretty spartan person - if it's in a safe part of town, clean and has a bed, toilet, shower, internet and proper heating/cooling system, then I'm fine with whatever cheap place I can find.
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Well, not to be all alarmist and anti-corporation, but I'd like to share a story. I live in the area of the Baltimore/Washington Metropolitan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_County,_Maryla nd and it is commonly referred to as the Internet battleground - Comcast and Verizon are constantly competing for access here. As soon as Verizon rolled out with its new FiOS service in Texas and here (which I have btw, and it is AWESOME; constant speeds, no downtime, 15/2 Mbps), it took a week before Comcast announced that its previously highest speed, 8 Mbps, was now its second highest, with a new top speed of 12 Mbps. I will note that there was ZERO infrastructure modification between these announcements. Therefore, the only logical conclusion was that they were capable of these speeds the whole time - they just wanted you to pay the most for as little as possible. As soon as competition comes in, then they show their hand. It was really pretty sleazy, and that plus TechTV speaks to why I don't have Comcast anymore.