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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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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!
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?