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?"

Comments

How much?

[tftp]

How much would a properly upgraded internet backbone cost?

It will always cost as much as you are willing to pay, and the upgrade does not matter here at all.

Re:How much?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:How much?

[techno-vampire]

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.

Re:How much?

[sedmonds]

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.

Re:How much?

[sqrt(2)]

Compared to S. Korea, the continental USA is a big motherfucker. You have to think about that too. You think the distance from one end of Seoul to other is long way? Imagine maintaining those speeds between LA and NY. For a couple hundred million more people too. Internet access doesn't scale so nicely. The USA is a country where you can literally start driving in one direction and go for days, or at least hours without even crossing a state border, and we've got FIFTY of those. If we took all the money we spend on infrastructure and packed it all into one of the smaller states, yeah we'd all have speeds so fast that your HDD becomes the bottle neck. But we have to spread our resources out over VAST distances because you might want to access things more than a few hundred miles away.

Re:How much?

[blhack]

Just to let you know, I live in phoenix (well, a bit north of phoenix actually), and really do get my full 8mbps. Luckily for me there is a usenet service hosted in town (easynews, which i found by always using their mirrors on sourceforge, so easynews marketing peoples, hosting a sourceforge mirror is working!). I can peg my cable modem on its limiter. I could also peg my cable modem when i lived in des moines iowa, using another usenet service.

Just saying, cable doesn't suck everywhere..

Re:How much?

[Bender0x7D1]

Actually, that isn't a good comparison either. Over 90% of the Canadian population lives within 150 km of the U.S.-Canada border. This means there are vast areas of Canada that don't have a person living there, let alone Internet access. In the U.S. there are towns scattered throughout the entire lower 48 states which would need to be provided with access.

Re:How much?

[king-manic]

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.

Re:How much?

[u-235-sentinel]

It will always cost as much as you are willing to pay, and the upgrade does not matter here at all.

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

Starting in the early 1990's, the Clinton-Gore Administration had aggressive plans to create the "National Infrastructure Initiative" to rewire ALL of America with fiber optic wiring, replacing the 100 year old copper wire. The Bell companies - SBC, Verizon, BellSouth and Qwest, claimed that they would step up to the plate and rewire homes, schools, libraries, government agencies, businesses and hospitals, etc. if they received financial incentives.

- By 2006, 86 million households should have already been wired with a fiber (and coax), wire, capable of at least 45 Mbps in both directions, and could handle 500+ channels.
- Universal Broadband: This wiring was to be done in rich and poor neighborhoods, in rural, urban and suburban areas equally.
- Open to ALL Competition: These networks were to be open to ALL competitors, not a closed-in network or deployed only where the phone company desired.
- This is not Verizon's FIOS or SBC's Lightspeed fiber optics, which are slower, can't handle 500 channels, are not open to competition, and are not being deployed equitably.
- This was NOT fiber somewhere in the network ether, but directly to homes.

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.

Re:How much?

[sedmonds]

I frequently see the argument made that the US (and/or Canada) is big, so internet coverage just won't work. That doesn't explain why you can't get a connection in Los Angeles, or New York, or Chicago, or Toronto that, at least within that region, which is as connections within Seoul. These are all densely populated areas, so there should be excellent telecom here. That just doesn't seem to be the case.

Re:How much?

[blitziod]

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.

Re:How much?

[Jose]

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.

Re:How much?

[uhmmmm]

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.

Re:How much?

[corychristison]

Ouch...

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.

I agree. Don't use Rogers. ;-) Although, I'm quite keen on what they offer in Mobile Phone Service.. at least, compared to the other provider in my area.

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.

I live in Saskatchewan. The only other ISP is Sasktel. They have OK connections for OK prices. Right now I am signed up with the High Speed Plus package... it's about $45/month. It's supposed 5Mbps download and 700-something Kbps upload. I run a small web development server and no complaints there. It runs great for what I use it for. The static IP package, however, is pretty absurd. $15/month for one static address. The website said two for that price so I'm pretty confused, really. I think I am going to have to give them a call and find out what that is about.

To my knowledge, my connection runs to the station here, then to Regina, SK. I live in Moose Jaw. I've never had any drag or downtime since I moved into my latest apartment. I've only been here about 7 months now, though. Still, so far it's been great!
Anywho... just my input. :-)

Re:How much?

[rtb61]

The answer why you can't get better broadband is quite simple, existing telecom infrastructure holders will do everything they can to block it in order to inflate the value of their network. They will lie to the public continually, they will cheat in every one they can, they will corrupt every politician they can get hold of.

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.

Re:How much?

[tilandal]

The cost of a 1Mbps network does not differ drastically from the cost of a 100MBps network. The cost of internet service is not at all proportional to the quality of service. Fundamentally, once you have any network already built the only cost you have left is the maintenance of the network. Maintaining a 100MBps network is not anymore costly then maintaining our current network. Prices only go up when you begin to reach network capacity demanding more build out. This is the fundamental reason other countries have better internet then we do. They built thier networks later then we did and they are capable of handling more bandwidth then our are. We have been piggybacking on old infrastructure for too long. The problem is that few are willing to take the risk to build out a new network. One of the few companies actually rolling out a new network is Verizon. The problem here is that they have a monopoly on that network and The risk for building the network is quite high. This leads to Verizon trying to leverage their FIOS network as far as it can go. If Verizon succeeds they will ultimately earn many times what it cost to build an maintain the FIOS network in the first place. What this means for you is higher prices for less service. What needs to be done is the US government needs to set up an independent not for profit company to build an maintain a national internet backbone. It would be run similar to the USPS in that it would be self sufficient but not for profit. It would most likely be funded by Bonds so that the full cost of the network can be amortized over many years. This USNet would then whole-sell bandwidth to ISP's and content providers at set rates. These fees would be used to pay back the bonds used to build the network and to pay for the continued maintenance of the network. Ideally the entire cost of building and maintaining the network for its entire usefull life would be covered by these fees and not a penny more. In reality the network would probably pay itself off before it becomes obsolete. These additional funds can be pushed back into expanding capabilities to extend the use able life. Really, it is just not wise to leave vital infrastructure in the hands of private business. One of the reasons the US emerged as a world power after WWII was government funding of critical pubic infrastructure. If you look at our history most of our infrastructure was built with public funding. Our roads, telecommunications, power, postal service and more are all either government projects or a government/private cooperative effort. We have reaped the dividends of those efforts for many years and they are, in no small part, responsible for the economic power of this country.

Re:How much?

[bjourne]

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.

Key is who built it. Building a network with 99.99% penetration isn't economically defensible, you don't make any money providing fibre to a single family 100 km from the nearest town. It is an investment that it takes 50 years to become profitable so no company would ever do that. However, a fibre network to each household benefits society in a number of ways, just like telephone lines do. Which is why it was state owned entities that built the telephone network. But in the US, it is somehow expected of the cable companies to provide a completely covering network. So strong is the American belief in Capitalism that companies are expected to do things for the greater good of society even if they cannot profit from it.

The world just doesn't work that way. But in the US they have choosen the low taxes and each man for himself way and crappy infrastructure is the price they pay.

Re:How much?

[sjames]

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?

Re:How much?

[LeafOnTheWind]

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.

About 49.95 a month, if I install it myself

[Saint Stephen]

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.

Re:About 49.95 a month, if I install it myself

[Lordpidey]

Wow, a redneck? I thought rednecks were only interested in trucks. And the internet is not a truck. Its a series of tubes.

Re:About 49.95 a month, if I install it myself

[RealGrouchy]

If you move out to the boonies, you can get an Internet on a CD from AOL. Then you don't have to get a guy to install it for you.

Comes with all sorts of games, too!

Although one problem I've had with AOL is no matter how many times I call their tech support, they won't get it to work without the modem cable plugged in--even when the CD-ROM is in the drive! But they send me another CD with an Internet on it, and it works ok for a while.

- RG>

Where's the bottleneck?

[Short Circuit]

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...)

Re:Where's the bottleneck?

[drmerope]

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.

Re:Where's the bottleneck?

[doon]

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.

What's in it for the providers?

[exploder]

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.

Re:What's in it for the providers?

[value_added]

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 ...

Tell you what...

[__aailob1448]

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.

Re:Tell you what...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but then the poor bastards in Iraq would be without FREEDOM!

Re:Tell you what...

[jombeewoof]

If the money was not being spent on the war it will have been spent on something else, certainly not the internet backbone.

Re:Tell you what...

[starkravingmad]

As my economics professor used to say, we could have dropped washing machines on Vietnam and achieved the same result, and probably killed fewer people.

Re:Tell you what...

[Kjella]

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.

Re:Tell you what...

[iminplaya]

To us it's the "cost of war". To the profiteers and pirates, it's the business of war. A very profitable business. Much more profitable than selling internet services.

Re:Tell you what...

[timeOday]

You really think $1,000 per capita could do that?

OK, who modded this +5 insightful? Come on people, he didn't even site any figures. $1.2 trillion for 113 million households is a little over $10K / household, and yes that will buy you something. Even if you want to go with individuals instead of households (which is totally unreasonable since homes, not individuals, are wired), it's still $4000 (not $1000) per capita. And $1.2 trillion is a conservative prediction of the costs of the war; I don't think it includes e.g. the high gas prices resulting from all the chaos in the middle east.

Theoritically

[JamesRose]

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.

Re:Don't clog the tubes!

[Compholio]

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.

You forgot the #1 rule of the Internet: crap size increases to fit the available tube.

Ask my staff

[Baumi]

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.

Re:Ask my staff

[plover]

According to Google products, really cheap tubes are about $0.10 per foot. Of course, those can get all tangled up with your own personal internets. It's not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck.

Re:Dark Fiber

[Isomer]

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.

How much does it cost not to...

[simpl3x]

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.

Re:How much does it cost not to...

[Bluesman]

"What kind of economy do we want? And, what do we need to achieve it?"

Free market. End government supported monopolies to the extent possible.

I don't see why a private company doesn't set up a city-wide 802.11 wireless network. Businesses and private owners would be likely to let the company use the very small space required for the equipment, since customers would find wireless access attractive. Vending machines operate on this kind of principle, and there is no shortage of those.

It's nice to think that government could take care of the infrastructure instead, but do you trust the same people who can't fix potholes in asphalt with managing and maintaining a wireless LAN?

I don't, especially since after the network is installed, there's no political gain for maintaining it. It's the same reason great sysadmins whose systems never fail are typically seen as unnecessary.

Re:How much does it cost not to...

[tftp]

I don't see why a private company doesn't set up a city-wide 802.11 wireless network.

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.)

Re:How much does it cost not to...

[blhack]

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!

Re:How much does it cost not to...

[Lenolium]

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.

Re:How much does it cost not to...

[flydpnkrtn]

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

Re:How much does it cost not to...

[dreamchaser]

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.

Re:How much does it cost not to...

[MBGMorden]

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.

Infrastructure

[Hemlock Stones]

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.

Interesting question

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Interesting question

[isdnip]

France is an example of how different public policy decisions produce different outcomes.

France is pursuing, roughly, the public policy that the US adopted in the mid-1990s: Unbundle the local loop, permit competitive interconnection, encourage competition for services over the incumbent's old wire. That was, in fact, the gist of the Telecom Act of 1996.

In 2001, the Cheney-Rove regime's new FCC executed an about-face. They decided that the Bells were to be the winners, And their competitors were not to be. Furthermore, the Bells saw the Internet as the real enemy, not local telephone competitors per se, so they were allowed to execute their strategy to knock off the ISPs while replacing it with their own marginal substitutes. The last stage, which has not yet happened, is to remove "neutrality" from their networks, replacing Internet access with a set of "broadband services" of their own, like kickback-selected shopping, censored "news", and pay-per-view "media" access. That could never happen with real competition. The FCC's excuse is that there's cable, and a duopoly is "enough" competition, especially with the imaginary "third pipe" that never really appears in any useful way.

France, in contrast, stayed the course. There are multiple ISPs sharing the old FT wire. So advances in DSL technology meant advances in available speeds, and reductions in DSLAM prices and backbone ISP rates meant reductions in DSL charges. It's not exactly peaches and cream for FT, but it's great for the economy as a whole.

Re:Interesting question

[Cussin_IT]

I'd like to add some outside perspetive. Here in New Zealand, we only have two non-dailup internet options thanks to a goverment sposored monopoly: ADSL and microwave. Thanks to our aging phone system, our ADSL is the same speed as good dailup in the US, and Dailup is on par with nailing ones own hand to the table. What the microwave providers have done is produce a resonable speed and price connection that is slowly crawling down the contry. The odd thing is that ADSL will magicaly 'apear' in areas that have microwave towers going up. I used to live in a verry rural area where the only way to get any net at all was dailup, and then only at about 8kb/s (serious), the phone company claimed that it was too expesive to install the ADSL repeaters on the old phone hardware running there. Then the power company put up a microwave tower ofering high speed internet, and suddenly the phone company worked out how to do it. The piont I'm trying to make here is that if it's making companys money (especialy hand over fist) then you can have all the discusions about a new net you like, it's not going to happen unless the almighty buck says it is.

One simple solution

[SECProto]

Probably the cheapest solution is to kill a couple billion people. that will reduce demand for a fair bit of time.

Re:One simple solution

[jon287]

Ha! Then the phone company would just claim that there aren't enough subscribers in your area to make a broadband deployment feasible, then ask you if you'd like to be put on a waiting list to be notified if it ever becomes available in your area!

(Hint: There is no list, they just put your name on a giant board at the telco along with all of the other suckers on dail-up so everyone can have a good laugh.)

Re:One simple solution

[hoojus]

Can we start with the MySpace users? That would free up a lot of bandwidth and then remove all bloggers....

Forget Infrastructure! Broadband Over Powerlines!

[morari]

Now if only those ham radio operators would shut up and sign off!

There isn't just one Internet backbone.

[techno-vampire]

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.

Re:Mod parent up!!

[ShieldW0lf]

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.

That depends

[jon287]

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.

Re:What's in it for the spoiled brats?

[exploder]

All the competition in the world isn't going to change the financial question. Who's going to pay for it?

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.

Re:Mod parent up!!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

"Socialize" it.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

That's ALL????

[SuperKendall]

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.

Re:That's ALL????

[Nossie]

and anytime you have long uninhabited expanses you have bottlenecks. With bottlenecks you have greedy monopolists and with greedy monopolists you have restricted access.

I don't believe there is any big network issue that cannot be fixed with technology today. I just don't think that any of the corps that have the power to change have the incentive to change. Until they do, or are pushed we'll keep on running out of internets like we have been for the last 20 years!

Re:That's ALL????

[no1nose]

True, he who controls the long uninhabited expanses controls it all.

Re:Silly me, I forgot t'internet == USA

[Dego]

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.

Re:Mod parent up!!

[ShieldW0lf]

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.

Re:Forget Infrastructure! Broadband Over Powerline

[GPL Apostate]

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.

BPL was a dumb idea from the start.

[Kadin2048]

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.

Re:BPL was a dumb idea from the start.

[Miamicanes]

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.

That was kind of poorly worded.

[sarkeizen]

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.

Move to Japan...

[Kernel Corndog]

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!

I'm going to have to go with...

[Xanius]

One dollar Bob.

The longhaul is the problem...

[Zondar]

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).

Can't be good natured on that question

[smchris]

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.

Multiple non-trivial issues

[isdnip]

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. ;-)

Re:Multiple non-trivial issues

[DaveAtFraud]

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

Re:Forget Infrastructure! Broadband Over Powerline

[NateTech]

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!"

Too Much.

[Fatal67]

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

A few things to add

[Nicolas MONNET]

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.

OH NO NOT THAT SHIT AGAIN

[Nicolas MONNET]

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.

Re:Just Because

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll get back to you later on the "pigs" thing. Give me some time to figure out what you meant by it.

I think I can help giving that project some wheels. I had already made a start on that project some time ago. Currently, I have achieved the milestone where I can temporarily make it smell as if pigs will come flying out soon.

Next milestone is to make the smell sustainable longer. I think breakeven will occur at about seven pounds of beans and nineteen onions. Maybe somebody with more eating experience can pitch in and help?

Re:Here's your answer:

[chuckymonkey]

At first I read that as stinky finger......I laughed in a nervous uncomfortable kind of way until I realized that it said pinky finger. Ahh I love being at work at 2:13 in the morning.

Re:Mod parent up!!

[Baddas]

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),

Why don't we just implement this thing instead:

[alex_vegas]

Roofnet is better than skynet: http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/papers/roofnet:mobicom 05/roofnet-mobicom05.pdf

Dear USA, bend over.

[crovira]

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

Throw more hardware at it! - lame

[porneL]

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).