Broadband Net Access in the News - and in Canada

limited wrote in about the October issue of Scientific American, in which, he says, "there is a Special Report on High Speed Inet Access." Great in-depth tech stuff! In related (and IMO excellent) news, here's a News.com story Zyber sent in about a new ruling from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission that requires cable TV operators to sell access to competing Internet service providers. Perhaps the US FCC will be smart enough to follow the Canadians' lead. One can only hope.

Comments

Details, details, details...

[Baraka]

Finally, a topic I know a little about ;)

First, some background info: since the beginning of the year, I've been involved with a consumer's telecommunications organization, the Rogers @Home User's Association. We are a collection of about 500 users of the Rogers@Home internet service, based in both the Ontario and British Columbia provinces in Canada. I serve as their technical director and liaison to management.

What do we do and why do we exist? We formed out of necessity. The entire service had literally collapsed under its own weight, back in December. All of our circuits going to the @Home Network in the US, were completely oversaturated. This had the effect of raising minimum network latency during peak hours, to an excess of 400, 500 and even 600 milliseconds. People were extremely angry, technical support could offer no help, hold times were a minimum of 30 minutes and management would not admit that anything was wrong. Hell, management was thoroughly incommunicado. That entire mess lasted six weeks before it was corrected in the middle of December.

I went to the CRTC, our equivalent of the American FCC, and complained bitterly. They proved to be more technically inept than I had ever dreamed of and didn't want to touch the issue with a 10 foot pole. I went to other industry officials, but nothing seemed to help.

Fast forward to February- after many of my comments in the various related newsgroups, a successful petition of angry subscribers, the threat of legal action and the RHUA right there in the thick of things, I received a call from the General Manager of Rogers Cablesystems (parent to Rogers@Home), of the Greater Toronto Area. Seeing as Rogers is the largest cable operator (MSO) in all of Canada, I was a little stunned that I would receive a call from someone so high up in the company. He was interested in setting up a meeting between senior management and I, to discuss the various problems with the service. Over the next few months, two meetings took place, the results of which can both be viewed here.

Now I'm not going to say that the results were very encouraging, but I will say that this whole process has been a step in the right direction. To the best of my knowledge, there are no other consumers groups in the sphere of telecommunications who have direct lines of communication to the senior management of their respective service(s). Due to these open channels of communication between me, our other regional reps and management, some users experiencing serious problems, were able to receive attention a lot sooner than they normally would have. The RHUA is continuing its efforts to hold management accountable for any problems that affect this service and to ensure that the needs of our subscribers are tended to quickly and efficiently.

Now, what the hell does any of this have to do with third party access to the various broadband infrastructures? Well, I've been dealing with the management of my service long enough to know that they, along with every other MSO out there, won't take this newest CRTC ruling lying down and they have the power to see their will through. Open access to the coaxial broadband infrastructure was ordered way back in 1996! Today we're in the same, damned place as we were back then. I don't think this ruling is likely to change anything in the near term. Rogers has revealed a target date of mid-2000 for the provisioning of their service to third party ISP's. Another thing I learned from my management meetings is that MSO's are definitely NOT very good at following target dates. As I have no faith in the CRTC to see their ruling through, God Only Knows (tm) when we'll see any real movement on this issue.

As per my subject of this posts, there are a great deal many details that have yet to be ironed out in order for the CRTC's ruling to be followed. In my opinion, they've barely even started yet. This document contains the recent CRTC decision that has been referenced by our press as of yesterday. Here is another URL that contains basically all the related links to CRTC rulings on broadband internet access. Of particular note is the Canadian Cable Television Association's technical report on providing third party access to the coaxial infrastructure. Be warned that this link is to a dreaded Micros~1 Word 97 Document, but the information contained therein is extremely interesting and critically important, IMHO. The methods for actually provisioning third party access are outlined and briefly discussed.

This aspect is more significant than most people realize. Anyone who is familiar with techologies favouring the PPP over Ethernet (PPPoE) encapsulation, will clue in to what I'm talking about here. To make a long story short, PPPoE was developed with third party access to the broadband infrastructures in mind (particularly DSL-related access methods). The scary thing about this technology is that it does not benefit the consumer- not in the slightest. It contains network management features that can only benefit the service providers, themselves. The features are- again, in my opinion- inherently oppressive to all consumers of these broadband services. They are designed to usurp power from users of broadband services, into the hands of their providers. Features include isolating each user's traffic into a "virtual circuit", completely dynamic IP addressing from designated address pools, point and click network monitoring, and a point and click user disconnection option, among many others. I quoted the virtual circuit term above because VC's are traditionally supposed to provide some enhanced reliability, but PPPoE does nothing of the sort.

Basically, if you're worried about CALEA, your online privacy and security, your consumer rights, or anything else that's related to your electronic freedom, be sure to check your concerns at the door in a PPPoE-enabled world. This technology puts way too much power in the hands of individual providers who will be free to do as they choose with it. Snooping on your online communications will be a cinch, as the virtual circuit ID is all that must be isolated for a party to easily see everything you're doing. I don't think I need to explain any further implications of this technology. The sad reality is that I feel that government regulation of broadband services will have to be implemented, in order to curb the abuses of service providers at some point in the future. And as we all know, regulation is definitely not the way to go.

I brought this all up because AOL and GTE specifically used PPPoE hardware, manufactured by Redback Networks, to provision third party access to GTE's coaxial infrastructure. Although I'm betting that PPPoE will not be implemented for open access to the coax infrastructure up here, I AM worried that a different scenario will unfold in the US. I think that every possible step must be taken to prevent PPPoE from being used to provision third party access to any and all broadband infrastructures in the US. This technology has already surreptitiously found its way into several consumer DSL markets out there, both in the US and in Canada, but it must not be permitted to come to cable.

I'm not against Redback Networks, UUNET, AOL, or any other proponents of the very proprietary PPPoE technology; it's just that unless I see any clearcut benefits to consumers out there and my doubts are confirmed by more and more existing and future broadband users, I will personally do all that I can to spread the word about PPP over Ethernet and its implications. One thing I'd really like to see, is someone like Bruce Schneier, and/or an organization like L0pht, go over this technology with a fine tooth comb and tear it to pieces. I have yet to read a critique of its supposed "security features".

On that note, if someone at /. wants me to write up a more detailed analysis of PPPoE for all to see, please give me a shout and I'll be more than happy to oblige.

To finish up here (you're all sighing with relief, I know), I want to say a few last things. First of all, some additional consumer groups must sprout up in the US and Canada, to pay attention to these serious developments and to protect the rights of their constituents. From what I have been able to tell thus far, there just aren't enough people who are willing to stand up and fight for their rights in an organizational manner. I have pushed and pushed for the formation of a Cox @Home user's group, but the main proponent of this idea has told me on numerous occasions that people just aren't angry enough with their service to do anything about it. And this after being well aware that Cox will implement further upstream rate caps of 128 Kbps, with NO proportional reductions in the monthly fees that subscribers pay. This is downright criminal, the way I see it and is something that's totally unjustifiable. Our upstream rates have remained at 400 Kbps because our objections to the cap were voiced very loudly, very early into the process. Purveyors of broadband services will do as they please unless they answer to a consumer authority.

Second, as the CRTC is technically clueless and toothless, with respect to consumer advocacy, our whole situation over here is in limbo, in my own view. I truly hope that American MSO's and, more importantly, American citizens interested in broadband access, observe our progress here and learn what works and what doesn't, from our successes and failures. If all goes well, the RHUA and I might have a hand in seeing how third party access is provisioned to the existing coax infrastructure.

Last but not least, we need to see management become more accountable for the products and services they provide to ordinary consumers. Good customer service is a very difficult thing to find nowadays, with respect to individual consumers. The quality of customer service you receive should not be proportional to the size of your wallet, or the pull of your company. Cable companies providing broadband services, are simply not using the very medium they are selling, to reach their customers. People feel totally left out and unappreciated by the purveyors, and they have every right to feel that way. When someone wants to complain about poor service, or voice their concerns about a related issue, they often must wade through a thick veil of bureacracy to get even the most meager of results. It has been bad- and still is bad- for users of my internet service and as terrible as that may seem, broadband subscribers south of the border have it even worse. This has got to stop now! I've always maintained the highest respect for Slashdot and sites like it (okay, there are no others like it :P), for cutting through all the bullshit and propaganda that's peddled on a daily basis nowadays. The time for action against corporate apathy for individual consumers, has come. Just the very thought that a totally free operating system like Linux, will one day overtake the most widely used product of a corporate behemoth like MS, gives me a truckload of hope for the future. My only hope is that some of the creative power behind the open source effort, spills into the domain of broadband services and the rest of the telecom world.

-Chris Weisdorf

open up the cable to everyone?

[yack0]

OK Mr. and Mrs. Cable company. We want you to spend millions and even maybe billions of dollars (overall) on upgrading your plant and then we're going to insist that you allow Joe Anyone to use your network at some ridiculously low cost, therefore not allowing you to get any return on your investment for yourself.

Ummm... you've got to let the cable companies make some of their money back. If you fail to do this, there will be little incentive to have the cable companies make all these upgrades.

I can just see everyone bitching over who gets what transmit and receive frequencies on the CATV wires... it'll be damn interesting, and I've the feeling that the way some manufacturers control their hardware, you'll have interferences galore if you start mixing systems on a common cable plant. *sigh*

Cost vs Value

[LL]

What some companies tend to overlook is that the upfront costs is the sunk infrastructure but the long-term value is in the services on top. Unfortunately it does lead to a chicken and egg situation as nobody wants to seriously risk all that capital without having some guarenteed of payback down the track (can we say cable companies here?) but you can't create new services without experimental test-beds and cheap access. Thus the Canadian development is rather bold in opening up high-speed networks without obvious immediate commercial paybacks (and anyone mentioning video-on-demand should look at the distinct lack of consumer interest in trials so far) but then I suppose that is the definition of R&D.

Apart from 500 interactive home shopping channels :-(, what applications would benefit from greater bandwidth? Perhaps security monitoring (check on baby-sitters at home), or full-screen help-line type activities but one bottleneck I see is that the traditionalists who own the infrastructure may not always be the innovative providers, ie all the gear but no idea. Trying to "add value" by competing with customer applications which sit on top of the communications pipes (now that bandwidth and connectivity is becoming a commodity) is a rather interesting way of pissing off friends and creating enemies. The appearance of ISPs outside the traditional telcos indicate that it is not always easy to look outside traditional sources of cashflow.

So can anyone name any telco which has been particularly good at bringing new services to consumers? Or do /.ers think they mainly copy (and compete/crush) the plans of internet startups?

LL

Broadband in Canada

[legoboy]

I've got to say this... With no statistics to back me up, residents of Canada probably have the highest per capita access to the internet in the world. I would say that a *majority* of people in my area have private access. (ie, family)

In the area of BC where I live, the high schools all have t1 connections, and the public libraries have a *lot* of computers for public access. Most (if not all) of the universities have broadband in the dorms, and I know that at UBC, the only residence without it is Gage. (Locals could tell you that its buildings are about 60 years old, and solid concrete.) I'm not sure of the total student population at UBC, but I think it's over 50,000... If I'm wrong, correct me please.

In the past few months, the availibility of cable modems residentially has been skyrocketting. I'm in a town of about 30,000 people, and I'm paying a bit under $40 Canadian a month for my service. Bandwidth is unlimited, and I get t1-equivalent speeds in peak hours.

Tangent: City councils in the area are trying to encourage high-tech companies to move here, and there *are* a fair number of minor ones that have., despite our beloved NDP government.

It is interesting to note that the @Home Service has been expanding very quickly here in the last little while. It makes me wonder if the cable companies saw this ruling coming, and quickly made a deal with them so that they could get their own subscriber base before anyone else has a chance.

In other provinces, especially southern Ontario, I know that broadband is at least as easy to acquire as it is here.

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