Slashdot Mirror
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 the money was not being spent on the war it will have been spent on something else, certainly not the internet backbone.
Linux Zealots: Smarter than Mac Zealots, but still zealots.
The only thing that can induce these telcos to make costly infrastructure upgrades is competition, which is in pretty short supply currently.
...
Well, maybe the government can step in and develop a public/private partnership, and then offer them tax breaks to offset the costs of infrastructure upgrades. IIRC, similar models are in place for the military, the oil industry, and big pharma.
Oh, wait
So in other words, spending money on something stupid is ok because it would have been used on something stupid anyway? I realize trying to stop the government to spend money on useless think is an enormous game of whack-a-mole, but even I usually don't get that depressive.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
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
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).