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Poor US Infrastructure Threatens the Cloud
snydeq writes "Thanks to state-sponsored cable/phone duopolies, U.S. broadband stays slow and expensive — and will probably impede cloud adoption, writes Andrew C. Oliver. 'As a patriotic American, I find the current political atmosphere where telecom lobbyists set the agenda to be a nightmare. All over the world, high-end fiber is being deployed while powerful monopolies in the United States work to prevent it from coming here,' Oliver writes. 'I expect that cloud adoption will closely match broadband speed, cost, and availability curves. Those companies living in countries where the broadband monopoly is protected will adopt the cloud at a slower rate than those with competitive markets and municipal fiber. There's a good chance U.S. firms will fall into that group.'"
Here in Australia we just elected in a right wing government, they are intent on fucking up our Broadband network as well to protect entrenched interests such as Murdock and Foxtel, so you're not alone.
Lets not forget about the people that wont use a US based cloud service because of the NSA snooping.
Because the citizens have no balls. Too many Cheetos, I guess... That's what that shit does to you, it shrinks your balls. Makes you submissive and lazy... This is the government you deserve. Live with it, or fix it. Your choice.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Many municipalities have a franchise arrangement that gives the local cable company a monopoly so long as the cable company pays a franchise fee.
Where I live, that fee is 5% of GROSS revenue -- quite a lot of money. Many businesses would be happy with profits that are 5% of the gross.
Of course the cable company doesn't mind paying because they can inflate rates without worrying about competition. And the local government doesn't mind because higher rates mean more money for them!
It's really a hidden tax on an artificially higher bill. And the fact that it's hidden means the typical voter doesn't know they might have the power to change it -- and that's precisely the goal.
you can't make enough money off it in the short term to make it a worth while investment. As in investor there's always something with better gains in your lifetime. That's why the gov't made the comm network, the railroads, the (car) roads, and just about everything going back to the fsckin' Aquaducts.
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Slow broadband adoption? Baaaad
Slow cloud adoption (ie, not putting all your data at the mercy of someone else)? Good.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Optical to the node with existing copper?
Optical to the home replacing existing copper?
Optical to the tower with well installed line of sight wireless?
The existing copper loops can be long, damaged, old, in need of expensive ongoing long term work to keep them at a quoted min data speed.
Any node box will need power, cooling, backup power and has to positioned in suburbia or the copper length reduces the new speeds.
Trying to run optical from a home to a node hits a cpu/heat wall.
Optical to the home replacing existing copper is good as its passive and can be upgraded - no loud active cooling on the street.
Line of sight wireless? How many users per tower and at what speed? How do you give limited spectrum to users wanting huge uploads and downloads without caps, prices and other methods to contain their need for bandwidth?
Optical would be the smart way to go. The optical/copper node buys the telcos a few more years? As for the huge data push up to the cloud - the end user copies that 1080p, 2k or 4k video clip onto their home machine and wants to share/backup....
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
All over the world ,in smaller high population density countries, high-end fiber is being deployed while powerful monopolies
FTFY. Comparing the US to countries like Japan is not valid.
So other countries went from dialup modems and plain old telephone service (POTS) to optical? Adsl1 and 2+ never made it out of their telcos labs?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I have 50/10 Mbps for $70 and yes, it actually has been as advertised every time I have tested it for the last couple years. We routinely use two 9Mbps video streams with no issues and plenty of bandwidth left for browsing/downloading/whatever.
People in the US have routinely paid $100+ for cable/satellite TV for years. $8/month gets you Netflix or Hulu (or x2 for both) and there are a tons of VOD services now (VUDU, Amazon, CinemaNow, etc) to rent (or buy) movies/TV instead of using Showtime/HBO/Starz/etc.
The big problem is not necessarily US infrastructure (at least by expenditure) vs. other countries, it's the fact that the US has a lot less population density. In urban areas, there are almost always options and the performance/price is pretty decent. In rural areas it hasn't caught up because frankly it will cost a lot of $$ per customer. Yes, South Korea has great broadband, but that's because it's mostly VDSL, etc running to multi-unit high rises...
Yesterday I spent three hours trying to help a friend upload a mysql file to his Amazon cloud service. There was no such thing as a simple ftp. Trying to PuTTY into his setup was impossible too. Calling tech support, which he paid for, resulted in them sending us links to articles we had already found via google and which were not helpful. Everything was so cloaked in marketing speak that it was impossible to tease out how to do anything normal and straightforward. They couldn't even manage to say words like "VPN" or "ssh." Simply ridiculous. Who has the time to learn a whole new nomenclature for the same old tasks we've all been doing for decades, just to satisfy a bunch of marketing droids whose only interest is in being the least helpful they can possibly be, and sucking as much cash out of you as they possibly can. Jeeze, just set up your own server and VPN and you have your own "cloud." And it costs you nothing, and nobody gets in your way with a bunch of nonsense.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Wring every last cent out of the existing technology (i.e. copper wire), pay executives big bonuses and screw customers with rotten customer service. Small wonder we're becoming a backwater.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Jeeze, just set up your own server
I thought the difference between leasing a server and using "The Cloud" was originally supposed to refer to rapid provisioning and rapid failover. For example, you don't have to commit to a year's lease of a dedicated or virtual server; you can bring up virtual servers to meet demand and then decommission them once they're no longer needed.
Its funny seeing US broadband as being expensive and slow, try Australia for plans, ranked 40th in the world at the moment. The US is 9th.
http://www.news.com.au/technology/state-of-the-internet-australia-web-speeds-ranking-dwindles-to-40th-place-globally/story-e6frfro0-1226560992748
An easy fix is to change the "game theory" dynamic.
Currently, we don't pay for usage, we pay for access. The providers get the best value by discouraging use: high monthly fees, data caps, throttling power users, poor facilities, installation fees, and poor customer care.
If the government required providers to charge for usage only, then the providers couldn't increase profits except by increasing use. They would have an incentive to build fast pipes, connect everyone in their area, have customer service that gets people up and running quickly, allow servers, and encourage innovative new applications.
This could be changed without affecting their annual profits - just tally up all the usage in the last year and divide into their current revenues. They would make the same profits next year as last year, but with an to provide better service.
Just another example of how the federal government doesn't really benefit the people.
Right, American people cannot afford the cloud because their residential internet is to weak, and non American people with good internet connectivity should reject it because of NSA spying.
There is some irony here in how free market and government intervention can enter a synergy here.
Crappy infrastructure or not.
Bryan
Sweden made the journey years ago. Most municipal infrastructure companies started to roll out fiber in parallel with existing cable ducts. The railroad company put fiber along all tracks nation wide. All of this fiber is dark fiber that isp can rent cheap.
So I have 6 isp to select from at home. Competition is the key for cheap prices.
nuf said
The NSA could lease out some of their infrastructure to help move the cloud along. I hear they have some pretty fast networks and large storage capacity. If they leased that out to cloud services, then those companies wouldn't have to develop their own infrastructure. :-p
One country in North America will lag the US in adoption, that would be Canada. Canada, the northern backwater for affordable digital connectivity rights, will lag for all the same reasons suggested for the US, except the US population will eventually galvanize and change things ... something that will not happen in passive ol' Canada.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
"The cloud" is just a fancy new word for server farms, which is already been in use on a massive scale for as long as I can remember. Sure cloud implementations provide different services such as paying per CPU cycle, but even that is nothing new. The internet will thrash on. I think this article was just disguised attempt at bashing communication conglomerates (I hate them too).
I've always said English was my second language. Had Romeo and Juliet been written in C, I might have understood it.
I've been chosen
to warn you that we've been down this road before. In 1982 IBM was incredibly convinced that their new Personal Computer was destined to be used for simple word processing and as a dumb terminal to dial in and access their Really Smart Computers to do the Real Work. You wouldn't even need to purchase an expensive high speed printer, you'd just key in your time card data, run some reports and drive down to the nearest Service Bureau to pick up a little package containing the week's dot matrix bursty-form payroll checks.
All twelve of them.
The concept of your business cranking to a silent standstill because someone with a backhoe cut a cable somewhere or someone cannot be swallowed by Amazon or Zaxxon in time is not new.
DISCLAIMER: I admit that I have not read all of The Reg Whitepapers that describe how while we were asleep we have passed beyond the virtualization era into the even sexier post-meta-virtualization era of metametametadata , where one IT worker can do the work of thousands, millions --- after of course Complete Migration is Achieved and the simple 'GO' button is installed by a licensed technician at your business. There's just no time to read all that stuff.
I'm here stuck in traffic, on my way to pick up the payroll checks.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Or maybe better broadband is slow to roll out because the NSA can't monitor it fast enough? It's part of the 'No Kilobits Left Behind' program...
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. -HLM
Imagine a world where every HTTP request has DNT:1, and you're a server. What does that header tell you? Do you have a branch in your code, where the value of the header influences your code's behavior? Or is the header just wasted bandwidth, since it doesn't actually tell you anything?
DNT cannot be "fixed." It is already as powerful as it can possibly be. Go back from the server's PoV to the user's: can you even imagine how you would implement a situation where an HTTP header somehow magically forces other peoples' computers to forget things? DNT not a "technical measure" in DMCA-speak; it's an expression of a user's preference.
DNT's expression is advisory and it always will be, at best. The most you can ever possibly change it, would be to push it from advisory and informative, to ignored -- from possibly useless to definitely useless.
That's why it should default to unset, neither on nor off. It is only through an act of the user's will, that the header can possibly contain information, in the hopes that the server chooses to use it (and hoping to persuade someone else's computer to act a certain way, is the upper bound in what you can hope to achieve; that is the best case scenario). If you make it default to something other than unset, then you have removed information and lowered the probability that the server chooses to act the way you want it to. Whatever value DNT has, will be decreased.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
For one thing, the server whose maintainer announced plans to ignore DNT was Apache HTTP Server, one of the most widely used freely licensed web servers. This survey claims that over 65% of web sites run Apache. For another, there may be additional proprietary, company-specific web application code that ignores DNT, and a browser has no way of knowing about it. P3P is supposed to express a site's privacy policy in a machine-readable form, but Google and others have policies that are too complex to be represented in P3P.