I won't address the specifics on the $200bn spending that happened as I'm sure there are many complexities. I will however argue that the issue seems to be how the companies are leveraging the infrastructure / what they're doing with it.
Sometime in the early 2000's all the below-ground cable lines in my parent's neighborhood (in southern Florida) were dug up and new ones put in. Shortly thereafter they were able to get cable internet at the blazing speed of 3mbps/128kbps. Now, 8-9 years later, with no wiring changes, they get 16mbps down. I live 250 miles away in Central Florida and I get 15mbps constant with a "power boost" to 30mbps, 2mbps up. Realistically it's closer to 10-15 down.
The point is - all that internet bandwidth is on top of all of the "on demand" features the cable companies like to push, which is also consuming bandwidth, which is of course on top of all the multi-cast content they offer (30-50 analog channels + hundreds of QAM channels with varying levels of quality & encryption). In this case, the bandwidth is making it through the last mile, and it becomes an issue of utilization / allocation. Would I be willing to give up ESPN HD in Spanish (which I don't pay for, but do receive, albeit encrypted) or 50 on-demand listings to get another 5-25 mbps out of my internet? Absolutely. Move analog channels to clear QAM? Again, sure. But since the cable company doesn't offer that I assume it's either not popular or not profitable.
Neither area is "rural" by any means, but this is definitely not a "metro" area in either case.
I think the question is after $200bn in spending (works out to about $660pp for every man woman & child in the US), why does basic cable + basic internet cost over $100 a month, with premium packages & other features easily taking it into the $200+ range?
The way I see it this is no different than drilling for oil. 100 years ago people didn't understand the source of this "cheap, limitless energy source" and didn't really think about it until our energy demands grew exponentially, supplies became short, and they were faced with numerous problems they didn't foresee. Who's to say this technology will be ANY different? Just because you can't foresee any potential problems doesn't mean there won't be any - you're still mining a limited natural resource, albeit one much more abundant than oil.
Hell, in the FIRST experimental well, they already managed to cause an earthquake! Have humans even managed to do that before (besides shock waves from really big explosions)? You can make all the arguments about specific heat or "scratching the shell of the egg", but we don't really know exactly how the inner earth operates. The way I see it is there is too much potential risk considering the other options we have for energy.
IMO, we, as a society / species need to focus on energies that are completely renewable and that we are very sure we can predict the results of, such as wind and solar... not to mention trying to reduce our energy demands... As populations continue to grow exponentially, and energy demands grow even faster (what happens when everyone in China and India wants to buy a plasma screen 10-20 years from now, like people in the west today) - Finding solutions to help minimize demand might be the real answer.
I understand where you're coming from and won't attempt to defend your IT department's actions - completely. Poorly designed network, server, and backup schemes like that are inexcusable. It's quite obvious they're making problems worse instead of fixing them, and creating new ones. It's very simple to have computers turn on with WOL, run a virus scan at night, and turn back off with remote shutdown, and totally unnecessary for any background scans to be running during the day. And lack of storage space is probably the lamest excuse any IT department can come up with these days, with 1TB SATA drives under $400. We maintain 225GB of shared storage PER USER, and the costs were rather small, even for fibre channel.
However, I've found IT is sometimes used to take care of problems that are really the domain of management or HR, and in this case you generally have to focus on the lowest common denominator. Say you have an employee who's really, really good at what he does, and has gone above and beyond tasked duties a number of times for the company. His skill set alone makes him difficult to replace, especially at what he's currently being paid. However, he has the bad habit of coming in at 6AM and downloading porn on company computers, because he has a wife and kids at home. How did we find out? the startup page being changed to a porn site, as well as several minor adware installations. "Um I don't know how this happened!!" This was when we instituted several new technology policies, including a content-filter as well as a GPO-set home page. Fortunately our startup page only contains links to the most-used work related sites, and google. But it still pissed off people who wanted to catch the news headlines every time they opened their browser.
I've had similar issues with webmail, screensavers, backgrounds, partypoker, ebay, solitaire and similar programs, the list goes on. It's sad that many people can't get it through their heads that when they're at work they're being paid to work, not work when it's convenient for them. It's also sad that these problems have to be solved via technology instead of management addressing them directly. I've found that to be the origin of many IT "control" policies in my brief experience, and they only tend to make problems worse. You have a secretary in a cubicle who spends half an hour a day (paid) on myspace, and instead of her receiving some sort of formal reprimand, you're instructed to block myspace at the proxy server. She then wastes an hour per day - half of it trying to get around the filter with various proxies, the other half taking care of her social business. Management's response? "well, we'll lose more productivity firing her and training someone else than keeping her on", like there's no middle ground.
To me it seems like your company is attempting a piss-poor attempt at increasing productivity by decreasing the opportunities for distraction. They're probably the type who think their way of doing things is the most efficient and forcing that upon everyone else is a good thing (such as those custom folders brought up). I've been on the other side of that coin when an employee was having issues with yahoo directions, when we had a copy of mappoint 2k7 as well as google earth on their computer. It's tricky business, and sometimes it's difficult to foresee when you might step on a user's toes, especially the rare advanced user.
As for the rest of the stuff your IT department does, such as video sharing, well, erm, see article on using linux at work?
There's the cost of downtime. I work for a rather small company, and we've estimated the cost of peak-hour downtime at around $1000 / hour, simply from a wage perspective, not including lost productivity. That number would be even higher. Because of this, we have a rather distributed server architecture (IE split up functionally), with all servers being clusters. The business is only an 8-8 one, not 24/7, but it's been over two years since we've had ANY downtime. We've had six occasions where the internet was down for over two hours during that timeframe, during which time our provider said "tough". Granted, we could invest in a more expensive connection, multi-homing, or other technologies, but that's still no guarantee. It definitely isn't worth the cost. For us, internet currently has no crucial role besides outbound E-mail, the interruptions were hardly noticeable.
There's also the performance consideration. Right now, we get away with around 6mbps of throughput. Our average office document size is 245k. I don't see how we could be able to maintain decent performance without at least doubling our bandwidth. Still wouldn't compete with our fibre channel arrays and GbE for the boss's huge PPT presentation, or a 200-page report with graphics.
I face all same security issues above, but in addition to that, loss of key files is simply not tolerable. I'd guestimate the intellectual property value our data is 8-9 figures, and it's simply not worth trusting google. We use Volume Shadow Copy, Hard drive to Hard drive online backup, a nightly tape incremental (Taken offsite) and a weekly full tape (taken to a different offsite location). Google's systems may or may not be better and I doubt they're worse, but they're not accountable to me, and I have no control or auditing of their procedures.
If you're a small upstart company looking at building an IT infrastructure from the ground up, or your downtime costs aren't so great, it may not be such a bad idea. However, not only are the above issues, but the learning curve, and associated productivity loss. Sure, it may be cheaper to license, but at $50 vs $225, even if I save $3-5k per year, it only takes a few hours of downtime or any other issue to totally destroy that. Just not worth it right now.
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I won't address the specifics on the $200bn spending that happened as I'm sure there are many complexities. I will however argue that the issue seems to be how the companies are leveraging the infrastructure / what they're doing with it.
Sometime in the early 2000's all the below-ground cable lines in my parent's neighborhood (in southern Florida) were dug up and new ones put in. Shortly thereafter they were able to get cable internet at the blazing speed of 3mbps/128kbps. Now, 8-9 years later, with no wiring changes, they get 16mbps down. I live 250 miles away in Central Florida and I get 15mbps constant with a "power boost" to 30mbps, 2mbps up. Realistically it's closer to 10-15 down.
The point is - all that internet bandwidth is on top of all of the "on demand" features the cable companies like to push, which is also consuming bandwidth, which is of course on top of all the multi-cast content they offer (30-50 analog channels + hundreds of QAM channels with varying levels of quality & encryption). In this case, the bandwidth is making it through the last mile, and it becomes an issue of utilization / allocation. Would I be willing to give up ESPN HD in Spanish (which I don't pay for, but do receive, albeit encrypted) or 50 on-demand listings to get another 5-25 mbps out of my internet? Absolutely. Move analog channels to clear QAM? Again, sure. But since the cable company doesn't offer that I assume it's either not popular or not profitable.
Neither area is "rural" by any means, but this is definitely not a "metro" area in either case.
I think the question is after $200bn in spending (works out to about $660pp for every man woman & child in the US), why does basic cable + basic internet cost over $100 a month, with premium packages & other features easily taking it into the $200+ range?
The way I see it this is no different than drilling for oil. 100 years ago people didn't understand the source of this "cheap, limitless energy source" and didn't really think about it until our energy demands grew exponentially, supplies became short, and they were faced with numerous problems they didn't foresee. Who's to say this technology will be ANY different? Just because you can't foresee any potential problems doesn't mean there won't be any - you're still mining a limited natural resource, albeit one much more abundant than oil.
Hell, in the FIRST experimental well, they already managed to cause an earthquake! Have humans even managed to do that before (besides shock waves from really big explosions)? You can make all the arguments about specific heat or "scratching the shell of the egg", but we don't really know exactly how the inner earth operates. The way I see it is there is too much potential risk considering the other options we have for energy.
IMO, we, as a society / species need to focus on energies that are completely renewable and that we are very sure we can predict the results of, such as wind and solar... not to mention trying to reduce our energy demands... As populations continue to grow exponentially, and energy demands grow even faster (what happens when everyone in China and India wants to buy a plasma screen 10-20 years from now, like people in the west today) - Finding solutions to help minimize demand might be the real answer.
I understand where you're coming from and won't attempt to defend your IT department's actions - completely. Poorly designed network, server, and backup schemes like that are inexcusable. It's quite obvious they're making problems worse instead of fixing them, and creating new ones. It's very simple to have computers turn on with WOL, run a virus scan at night, and turn back off with remote shutdown, and totally unnecessary for any background scans to be running during the day. And lack of storage space is probably the lamest excuse any IT department can come up with these days, with 1TB SATA drives under $400. We maintain 225GB of shared storage PER USER, and the costs were rather small, even for fibre channel.
However, I've found IT is sometimes used to take care of problems that are really the domain of management or HR, and in this case you generally have to focus on the lowest common denominator. Say you have an employee who's really, really good at what he does, and has gone above and beyond tasked duties a number of times for the company. His skill set alone makes him difficult to replace, especially at what he's currently being paid. However, he has the bad habit of coming in at 6AM and downloading porn on company computers, because he has a wife and kids at home. How did we find out? the startup page being changed to a porn site, as well as several minor adware installations. "Um I don't know how this happened!!" This was when we instituted several new technology policies, including a content-filter as well as a GPO-set home page. Fortunately our startup page only contains links to the most-used work related sites, and google. But it still pissed off people who wanted to catch the news headlines every time they opened their browser.
I've had similar issues with webmail, screensavers, backgrounds, partypoker, ebay, solitaire and similar programs, the list goes on. It's sad that many people can't get it through their heads that when they're at work they're being paid to work, not work when it's convenient for them. It's also sad that these problems have to be solved via technology instead of management addressing them directly. I've found that to be the origin of many IT "control" policies in my brief experience, and they only tend to make problems worse. You have a secretary in a cubicle who spends half an hour a day (paid) on myspace, and instead of her receiving some sort of formal reprimand, you're instructed to block myspace at the proxy server. She then wastes an hour per day - half of it trying to get around the filter with various proxies, the other half taking care of her social business. Management's response? "well, we'll lose more productivity firing her and training someone else than keeping her on", like there's no middle ground.
To me it seems like your company is attempting a piss-poor attempt at increasing productivity by decreasing the opportunities for distraction. They're probably the type who think their way of doing things is the most efficient and forcing that upon everyone else is a good thing (such as those custom folders brought up). I've been on the other side of that coin when an employee was having issues with yahoo directions, when we had a copy of mappoint 2k7 as well as google earth on their computer. It's tricky business, and sometimes it's difficult to foresee when you might step on a user's toes, especially the rare advanced user.
As for the rest of the stuff your IT department does, such as video sharing, well, erm, see article on using linux at work?
There's the cost of downtime. I work for a rather small company, and we've estimated the cost of peak-hour downtime at around $1000 / hour, simply from a wage perspective, not including lost productivity. That number would be even higher. Because of this, we have a rather distributed server architecture (IE split up functionally), with all servers being clusters. The business is only an 8-8 one, not 24/7, but it's been over two years since we've had ANY downtime. We've had six occasions where the internet was down for over two hours during that timeframe, during which time our provider said "tough". Granted, we could invest in a more expensive connection, multi-homing, or other technologies, but that's still no guarantee. It definitely isn't worth the cost. For us, internet currently has no crucial role besides outbound E-mail, the interruptions were hardly noticeable.
There's also the performance consideration. Right now, we get away with around 6mbps of throughput. Our average office document size is 245k. I don't see how we could be able to maintain decent performance without at least doubling our bandwidth. Still wouldn't compete with our fibre channel arrays and GbE for the boss's huge PPT presentation, or a 200-page report with graphics.
I face all same security issues above, but in addition to that, loss of key files is simply not tolerable. I'd guestimate the intellectual property value our data is 8-9 figures, and it's simply not worth trusting google. We use Volume Shadow Copy, Hard drive to Hard drive online backup, a nightly tape incremental (Taken offsite) and a weekly full tape (taken to a different offsite location). Google's systems may or may not be better and I doubt they're worse, but they're not accountable to me, and I have no control or auditing of their procedures.
If you're a small upstart company looking at building an IT infrastructure from the ground up, or your downtime costs aren't so great, it may not be such a bad idea. However, not only are the above issues, but the learning curve, and associated productivity loss. Sure, it may be cheaper to license, but at $50 vs $225, even if I save $3-5k per year, it only takes a few hours of downtime or any other issue to totally destroy that. Just not worth it right now.