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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?"
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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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.
I never realized how pathetic American Internet services were until I visited South Korea. It's like night and day. While we're paying out our asses for lousy service often not topping 256 kbps, on the low end they've got 20 Mbps fibre connections to individual apartments! My friend there had a 60 Mbps connection in his apartment, and each month he was paying (after currency conversion) just over 2/3 of what I was for my 128 kbps cable connection!
And he doesn't worry about caps or any of that bullshit. He transferred some Linux ISOs to a friend who lived across the city, and he was actually maxing out his 60 Mbps connection. It probably helped that his friend had an 80 Mbps connection, although he paid a fair bit more for it.
Now, I know there will be people who say I'm full of shit. I would have thought so, too, until seeing it with my own eyes. Coming back to the American Internet experience, I felt like I'd stepped back decades. I often wonder how great our Internet infrastructure would be had the money spent on the Iraq War debacle instead been put to better domestic use. Maybe we'd be comparable to a nation like South Korea.
Thankfully, I've since moved to Canada, where we get excellent service at a very reasonable price.
You must live in a different part of Canada than I do. I am fortunate enough to have a choice between cable and dsl.
Rogers throttles the shit out of the connection, imposes monthly bandwidth caps, and won't sell me service with a static address or the ability to run "servers". Gibbled service from Rogers costs about the same as cable in the US.
Bell has monthly bandwidth caps, and I get frequent disconnects and piss poor sync rates because even though I'm in a residential area of a half million person area (Kitchener/Waterloo/Cambridge) that they say will get 3-5Mbps I'm 6.2km wire distance from the CO that's 3km away. It took 3 months for them to figure out that my connection blows because of the wire distance. Bell will give me an unstable piece of shit line with static address and ability to run servers for $99/month. Other DSL providers use the same copper, and so provide an unstable piece of shit line, for around $30/month.
Excellent service at very reasonable prices? Not here.
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!
The telcos will, individually, if they find that without doing so they'll be at a competitive disadvantage. Under any other scenario, not a chance.
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
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
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
Compared to S. Korea, the continental USA is a big motherfucker.
hrm, I wonder how much dark fibre there is in the US? from what I understand, there is tonnes of it. to/from large cities at least, the US most likely has the potential to up speeds quite a bit. They just need the incentive to do it.
The basic sleazeware produced in a drunken fury by a bunch of UCBerkeley grad students was still the core of BIND. --PV
But that argument only works for traffic that has to go over the internet infrastructure itself. If I've got a cable connection, and want to transfer to someone else down the street, or even across the same city who's on the same provider, that traffic never has to leave the cable company. And no matter how limited the cable company's connection to their provider may be, or how limited the infrastructure out there may be because of being spread too thin, the cable company can definitely handle the traffic within their own network.
Plus, I don't buy the argument about the problem being the infrastructure in the US. The connections I got to sites in the US from Japan was faster than I get from my ISP here in the US. If the problem was infrastructure, that'd never happen. No, this is simply a case of the ISPs charging more and offering less service than other countries.
In America, at least, BPL is a political smokescreen. The REAL goal of power companies is to just hang fiber from the poles they already have. However, if they came out and said, "we want to run fiber everywhere our power lines go," the phone and cable companies would have gone berserk. So they pretended instead that they really intend to do something that would be utterly insane on both engineering and accounting grounds, in the hope that once they get the OK, they can roll it out, start interfering with radio (assuming they can even get the network part to actually work reliably), then when the complaints come rolling in, generously volunteer to ditch the whole thing and run fiber instead.
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
Not trying to be funny but this is why I would tell the OP that it will take an infinite amount of money to replace the Internet. If you can ever get agreement on the technical issues you will then be forced to also deal with non-technical isues like porn (Think of the children), spam, politically sensetive content (Think of the dictators), phishing (Think of the corporations), etc. You will never be able to get everyone to agree. The only reason the existing Internet has its current freedoms is that it was never intended to become a public network. Don't expect any replacement Internet to have anywhere near the freedoms that exist on the current one.
If you try to replace the existing Internet, be prepared to deal with both the technical issues and the non-technical ones. Some of the technical changes will happen over time since the IETF moves the Internet forward as fast as it can but don't expect a clean slate replacement to be created anytime soon. If anything, I'd expect a replacement Internet to resemble broadcast media with government agencies deciding who can provide content and what the content will be. I think I'll stick with the existing Internet (warts and all) and just hope the IETF can keep making it faster.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
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.
Actually, in the U.S. the telecomm companies have so far recieved 200 billion in tax breaks and grants from the government to build out data network infrastructure and to compensate them for unprofitable build-outs. Unfortunatly, they proved themselvces to be con artists by pocketing the money and failing to provide the services.
The only unreasonable part was believing that the telcos are honest companies that will actually provide the goods and services they are paid to provide. They should ALL be in court defending against criminal fraud charges. That's where the bribes and corruption come in.
A few years ago, Bellsouth dug up my neighborhood to run new phone lines everywhere. Considering that the biggest expense in running cable is the digging, one might have thought they'd lay fibre in parallel while they were at it, but they didn't. Of course, they never bothered to bury the lines from curb to demarc at many of the homes. The line comes up from a pedistal, over a small pine tree up alongside the driveway, and to the back of the house. They left an extra 15 feet or so of slack laying in a big loop in the back yard. I guess it was just too hard to reach all the way to the toolbelt for the cutters or a zip tie.
It is noteworthy that 10GigE is now a ratified standard and works perfectly well over the same single mode fiber already in the ground everywhere. The simple upgrade was a strong consideration when the spec was written. It is now easier than ever before to increase available bandwidth by an order of magnitude, so where is it?
Roofnet is better than skynet: http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/papers/roofnet:mobicom 05/roofnet-mobicom05.pdf