The public is going to be mercilessly taxed to provide themselves with high-speed internet, and the cost will be entirely on the people who benefit!
This failed in Chattanooga, in North Carolina, and everywhere else it has been tried!
I can guarantee it will not fail in Leverett, MA
83% of the town voted yes for the tax increase to build the network 75% of the town signed up for service before the network was built 82% of the town is signed up now as the network is in its final stages of construction
The network has tremendous support from the residents. The ISP is a local company that has been providing ISP services in the area for 20+ years
$75/month for 1gbps is a great price IMHO $95/month for 1gbps & unlimited phone service is a great price
The remaining towns should be so lucky to follow in Leveretts footsteps. Video can be streamed when you have a lot of bandwidth
The public is going to be mercilessly taxed to provide themselves with high-speed internet, and the cost will be entirely on the people who benefit!
Your sarcasm aside, from TFA it looks like the town in question borrowed ~$1900 per person (NOT per household) to put in the system. They'll get that back with taxes eventually, but it's not clear whether the taxes will be on the locals or Statewide. Assuming a five year note, average household size of four, and the costs paid entirely by the locals, that should about double the $65/month that is the nominal cost of the system.
In addition, the Federal government (that's the rest of us in the USA) are going to cover ~$90M of the cost. Since the $90M covers multiple towns in the region, it's impossible to say how much the total cost of the system will be.
The Active Ethernet Fiber network in Leverett is paid for through property tax of the residents. State & Federal funds were not used for the construction. Operating costs of the network are paid by subscribers through the Municipal Light Plant fee (currently $49.95/month)
Residents in Leverett are now receiving 1gbps of Internet for $75/month, it is expected to decrease to $70/month by the end of the year.
The Internet service is $24.95 to the ISP and $49.95 to the Municipal Light Plant. The ISP is a locally owned and operated ISP that has been in business in the area for 20+ years.
The remaining towns are raising 2/3rds of the money needed for their parts of the network through local property taxes. The remaining 1/3 is from a $40 Million state grant. No federal funds will be used to construct the network in the remaining towns.
Assets seized during a drug bust go to the arresting agency. In this case the FBI gets the asset (bitcoin) which they can do anything they want with. Assuming they have the private key and/or they have brute forced the private key password. They can convert the coins to dollars. Dumping 144k coins into the market will decimate the market price so they will have to do it slowly. They will probably use the money to buy more Bearcats for domestic oppression.
If you are in Western Massachusetts and the middle mile network is MassBroadband123 network you should give me a call. I'm the only small ISP left in this region and I can help.
12" netbook with multi-touch display, Full OS X, MBP Power. wifi + 3G would be great. I always have my laptop with me anyway and with blue tooth hands free my phone would just 'work'
But ultimately the winners are going to have to make their money back by sticking it to the consumer. The bidding system is basically a government tax on something that's free, the airways. So the revenues Google so kindly helped raise for the Feds are ultimately gonna be paid for by the end user. Are you naive enough to believe that if Verizon Wireless paid less for the license they would drop the price to the consumer? The consumer will be charged, and will pay what the market will bear based on competition. This is not related to the license cost. If Verizon paid too much for the license and they can't make a return on their investment while still being competitive in the market then that is their problem.
What Google did was feint competition to keep everyone honest with their bids.
We should have had a PUBLICLY OWNED 100GB optical fiber pipe across the nation FIFTEEN YEARS AGO but the cable and telcos reniged on their promise to build it after Congress gave them to money to do so in order to prevent local governments from building their own. Much of that pipe my city government installed is still buried and is still good. One line goes under my yard. We should demand that the cable and telcos FULFILL their promise and finish the job they were paid to do, and finish it without being paid a single penny more or raising their rates. That's right... take it out of the profits and stockholder dividends. The stockholder's didn't mind receiving windfall dividends while the cable and telcos management was taking the money and paying themselves huge salaries and bonuses and giving those dividends. It's time to pay up, with interest... just like they'd charge. What exactly are you smoking? 100Gb 15 years ago? 28.8 dialup was fast 15 years ago. The 100Gb Ethernet standard isn't even ratified TODAY how in the hell are the telcos supposed to build a 100Gig 'optical fiber pipe' when the technology doesn't even exist TODAY. There are NO routers that support 100Gb connections. OC-768, 40 Gb is the fastest you can get today and the are MILLIONS of dollars
While I agree the telcos and cable cos can and should do more to promote broadband around the country. You have NO idea what you are talking about!
I'm talking backbone bandwidth, i.e. what your ISP buys their bandwidth for. Not consumer bandwidth which has heavily overcommitted.
Cogent is $10/mbps @ 1gbps commitments ($10,000/month) for bottom of the barrel pricing Sprint/Qwest/ATT/UUNET all hover between $24-$32/meg for 1gbps commitments ($24,000 - $32,000/month).
Verizon DSL 3.0mbps is $19.95 so $6.65/mb but they overcommit Comcast is 6.0mbps for $49.95 $8.32/mb also overcommited
My point was, if you actually paid for the bandwidth you use (i.e decicated/not-overcommited) it would run $700/month, not $20/month
ISPs have to overcommit, customers are idle 90% of the time. it is what makes the business models work.
New applications (YouTube, BitTorrent, etc) change the business model, someone needs to adapt. the ISP can easily increase the bandwidth available, but can the consumers afford to pay for it?
OC-768 line cards (40gbps) cost $250,000 each. And the router they plug into costs millions. This stuff aint cheap
Most consumer grade ISP services are sold as 'up to X mbps'. There is no guarantee in availability. read the fine print it is all classified as 'best effort'. You may have read it as '6mbps all day every day' but that isn't what the fine print says. You agreed to the fine print when you signed up for service so you really can't complain. You can speak loudly with your wallet, buy services from the few remaining independant ISPs and get better service, lower over commit rates and keep the big guys honest.
I expect Apple to buy Akamai and use their network to distrubute iTunes TV/Movies to feed AppleTVs. Once that is in place there is no need to ABC/CBS/NBC/FOX. TV Show producers can sell their show to Apple and bypass the middle man. Straight to the consumer/per-click payments
My ISP pushes 200-300mbps (not huge by any means) and the Akamai boxes in my network save about 10% of that (20-30mbps)
Buy Apple & Akamai stock now, they have the tools to flip the broadcasters on their heads.
This is also why it is so importan to keep Net-Neutrality. If Comcast & Verizon have the ability to rate-limit/traffic shape BitTorrent into oblivion they can do the same to VONAGE/iTunes/YouTube/ etc. The network has all the power/control. It has to be kept open, it has to be a 'public resource'
Lets see, 24mbps (ADSL2+) @ $30/mbps = $720/month. Are you willing to pay that much money or would you like me to overcommit 100:1 and get the price down to $7.20 ?
$30/meg is decent bandwidth, you can approach $10/meg for crap bandwidth but you do get what you pay for.
To put it another way, $30,000 for a GigE connection per month, but you need 2 of them because you have to be redundant, so $60,000 for 1 Gigabit of redundant bandwidth. A HDTV signal eats up 7mbps so you can support 142 of them on a GigE connection, $422 per channel. Using multicast you can send the same channel to multiple customers (IPTV) but that is broadcast, not pay-per-view. You wouldn't be able to watch on-demand or fast-forward the signal. You could pause/rewind it if you had a hard drive in your set top box. That isn't what consumers want. As a provider selling triple-play services you need to dedicate at least 7mbps per end user in your edge/aggregation network. You will also need massive hard drive caches in your POP to cache as much content as close to your subscribers as possible. Set top boxes with big drives so you can pre-load content using multicast/broadcast techniques (i.e. pre-load the new hit movie on all set boxes and make them available on the release date) The cable infrastructure isn't built to handle this type of content delivery. DSL is but DSL distance limitations make getting 7mbps to customers hard (10kft limit). FTTH is the obvious answer but that is insanley expensive
The days of broadcast television are dying. Things like AppleTV & YouTube are going to kill it. Soon independant television producers will be able to produce/distribute the show directly to the consumer, no need to sell the show to ABC/CBS/NBC/FOX. You'll be able to subscribe to the shows and download them. All of that is unicast traffic and it will destroy internet bandwidth ratios.
Apple & iTunes is the way to go, once they start distributing content around the Internet (ala Akamai) they will have the parts needed to replace the broadcasters.
Um, If the hoover dam produces 2 Gigawatts then over an hour it would produce 2 Gigawatt hours. If the Government servers consume 1.2 Gigawatts then over an hour they would consume 1.2Gigawatt hours (GwH) So, 1 hoover damn can support all the servers. Still an ass load of power, no doubt but you don't need 4 hoover dams. That is by 2011, not today, they are expecting some growth over the next 4 years.
I OWN a CLEC in MA and Verizon does NOT change the rules on us. The rules are pretty straight forward, read 'The Act' and subsequent FCC TROs. The FCC DOES change the rules on occasion, sometimes for the good, sometimes for the bad. The biggest problem is that the 2 largest voices against the RBOCS were AT&T & MCI. Those voices have been silenced.
The single most troubling word in 'The Act' is 'impaired'. The RBOCS must provide a service to a CLEC at Unbundled Network Element (UNE) pricing if the CLEC would be impaired without it. The definition of impaired has been strongly contested for the past 10 years. Am I impaired when I don't have access to fiber to homes & businesses? I say yes, Verizon says no. The FCC agrees with Verizon.
I'm hoping Congress gets their act together with the 'Telecomunications Act of 2006', Maybe we'll see it in 2008, maybe it will be better written. It is more than just network nuetrality but that a big part
Boot my old computer in hard drive mode. Connect to my new computer via firewire, move all my settings/applications/data over to the new computer. Took me about 2 hours to pull my PPC mac stuff over to my Intel mac.
By Trip11
Everyone say it together with me: "Phase velocity vs Group velocity" There are no photons in this experiment that are traveling faster than the speed of light. Only collections of them that 'appear' to be doing so. Think of this as an example: I space people out in a line, each of them two light minutes apart from the people next in line (all at rest with respect to each other). Now I go about talking to them and informing them of my plan. At 12:00 the first person waves, at 12:01 the second person waves, at 12:02 the third person waves, and so forth. My "wave" is propogating, therefore, at twice the speed of light. This is the same thing that this experiment is doing more or less. By spending extra time setting up the experiment, you can make it appear that a light pulse travels faster than c, but like my "wave" it is only an appearance.
This is just plain stupid and wrong. Person #2 is 2 light seconds away from person number #1. At 12:00 person #1 waves, at 12:02 person #2 sees the wave, at 12:03 person #2 reacts to the wave by waving, 12:05 person #3 sees person #2s wave... wash rinse repeat.
Information (the 'wave') cannot travel faster than c
For local calls there are 2 carriers involved. The originating carrier and the terminating carrier. For local calls the originating carrier pays the terminating carrier a small amount per minute to terminate the call. This is called Reciprical compensation
For long distance (LD) calls there are 3 carriers involved. The originating carrier, the terminating carrier and the Inter eXchange Carrier (IXC). For LD calls the IXC bills the customer and pays the originating carrier and the terminating carrier a slightly bigger amount per minute. This is call Access Charges.
The problem arose when the FCC determined that Internet traffic, including dialup is considered interexchange traffic and is therefore considered LD calls. The way GNaps operated they established local phone numbers in every rate center in a LATA. That would allow the dialup user to dial a local (aka toll free) phone number. Just because the call is 'local' doesn't make it truly local. The call, according to the FCC is 'long distance' and because of that the originating carrier (Verizon in this case) is owed money by the terminating carrier (Global NAPs) that was acting as an IXC.
One of the issues in the law suit was that Verizon was billing GlobalNAPs access charges based off the MA state tariff while GNAPs said they should be billing off the FCC Federal Tariff. The MA state tariff is an order of magnitude more expensive than the federal tariff.
In any event, I had less than 24 hours notice and this 'event' knocked 5000 of my dialup users offline for almost a day. Luckily I could port my numbers to another carrier quickly
Slashdot Mirror
The public is going to be mercilessly taxed to provide themselves with high-speed internet, and the cost will be entirely on the people who benefit!
This failed in Chattanooga, in North Carolina, and everywhere else it has been tried!
I can guarantee it will not fail in Leverett, MA
83% of the town voted yes for the tax increase to build the network
75% of the town signed up for service before the network was built
82% of the town is signed up now as the network is in its final stages of construction
The network has tremendous support from the residents. The ISP is a local company that has been providing ISP services in the area for 20+ years
$75/month for 1gbps is a great price IMHO
$95/month for 1gbps & unlimited phone service is a great price
The remaining towns should be so lucky to follow in Leveretts footsteps.
Video can be streamed when you have a lot of bandwidth
Your sarcasm aside, from TFA it looks like the town in question borrowed ~$1900 per person (NOT per household) to put in the system. They'll get that back with taxes eventually, but it's not clear whether the taxes will be on the locals or Statewide. Assuming a five year note, average household size of four, and the costs paid entirely by the locals, that should about double the $65/month that is the nominal cost of the system.
In addition, the Federal government (that's the rest of us in the USA) are going to cover ~$90M of the cost. Since the $90M covers multiple towns in the region, it's impossible to say how much the total cost of the system will be.
The Active Ethernet Fiber network in Leverett is paid for through property tax of the residents. State & Federal funds were not used for the construction. Operating costs of the network are paid by subscribers through the Municipal Light Plant fee (currently $49.95/month)
Residents in Leverett are now receiving 1gbps of Internet for $75/month, it is expected to decrease to $70/month by the end of the year.
The Internet service is $24.95 to the ISP and $49.95 to the Municipal Light Plant. The ISP is a locally owned and operated ISP that has been in business in the area for 20+ years.
The remaining towns are raising 2/3rds of the money needed for their parts of the network through local property taxes. The remaining 1/3 is from a $40 Million state grant. No federal funds will be used to construct the network in the remaining towns.
Regulations and regulatory oversight is what keeps the FCC in business.
Did you honestly think the bureaucrats would vote for their jobs to go away?
Net Neutrality (the law) is not the same a Net Neutrality (the concept).
Assets seized during a drug bust go to the arresting agency. In this case the FBI gets the asset (bitcoin) which they can do anything they want with. Assuming they have the private key and/or they have brute forced the private key password. They can convert the coins to dollars. Dumping 144k coins into the market will decimate the market price so they will have to do it slowly. They will probably use the money to buy more Bearcats for domestic oppression.
Use 802.1x authentication on the switch ports and you can control access anyway you want.
http://www.juniper.net/us/en/local/pdf/whitepapers/2000216-en.pdf
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/switches/lan/catalyst2950/software/release/12.1_9_ea1/configuration/guide/Sw8021x.html
If you are in Western Massachusetts and the middle mile network is MassBroadband123 network you should give me a call. I'm the only small ISP left in this region and I can help.
Check out high density bar codes and back up to paper. That will be safe from solar flares.
Or, you could get the code tatooed on your body. The git commit process would kinda suck though.
Left monitor = documentation/help/email/IM/Shells
Center monitor = Development environment (IDE)
Right monitor = Application deployed/test environment
My Blu-Ray player is in my sons room with the PS3. Our main TV has TiVo & AppleTV attached. I don't bother with disc media anymore.
As an executive I want to see how much additional growth I can add to a system before I need to expend additional capital.
A report saying XYZ resource is at X% and can handle Y% more growth before we need to spend $Z to expand capacity is immensely valuable.
12" netbook with multi-touch display, Full OS X, MBP Power. wifi + 3G would be great. I always have my laptop with me anyway and with blue tooth hands free my phone would just 'work'
As soon as the release a Mac version of the game I'll join up! For now, WoW is getting my money
And, no. Bootcamp is NOT an option
Yeah, try to use that '100 mbps' of bandwidth and see what happens.
that is CONSUMER bandwidth, it is OVERCOMMITTED. It has to be. Probably 100:1 which means it is really 1mbps for $39.95
I can guarantee that you can't run that 100mbps connection full rate, all day and not get shut off.
With my GigE from Sprint & Level(3) I can, because it isn't consumer grade bandwidth. It is also not $0.3995/mb
I'm talking backbone bandwidth, i.e. what your ISP buys their bandwidth for. Not consumer bandwidth which has heavily overcommitted.
Cogent is $10/mbps @ 1gbps commitments ($10,000/month) for bottom of the barrel pricing
Sprint/Qwest/ATT/UUNET all hover between $24-$32/meg for 1gbps commitments ($24,000 - $32,000/month).
Verizon DSL 3.0mbps is $19.95 so $6.65/mb but they overcommit
Comcast is 6.0mbps for $49.95 $8.32/mb also overcommited
My point was, if you actually paid for the bandwidth you use (i.e decicated/not-overcommited) it would run $700/month, not $20/month
ISPs have to overcommit, customers are idle 90% of the time. it is what makes the business models work.
New applications (YouTube, BitTorrent, etc) change the business model, someone needs to adapt. the ISP can easily increase the bandwidth available, but can the consumers afford to pay for it?
OC-768 line cards (40gbps) cost $250,000 each. And the router they plug into costs millions. This stuff aint cheap
Most consumer grade ISP services are sold as 'up to X mbps'. There is no guarantee in availability. read the fine print it is all classified as 'best effort'. You may have read it as '6mbps all day every day' but that isn't what the fine print says. You agreed to the fine print when you signed up for service so you really can't complain. You can speak loudly with your wallet, buy services from the few remaining independant ISPs and get better service, lower over commit rates and keep the big guys honest.
Exactly,
I expect Apple to buy Akamai and use their network to distrubute iTunes TV/Movies to feed AppleTVs. Once that is in place there is no need to ABC/CBS/NBC/FOX. TV Show producers can sell their show to Apple and bypass the middle man. Straight to the consumer/per-click payments
My ISP pushes 200-300mbps (not huge by any means) and the Akamai boxes in my network save about 10% of that (20-30mbps)
Buy Apple & Akamai stock now, they have the tools to flip the broadcasters on their heads.
This is also why it is so importan to keep Net-Neutrality. If Comcast & Verizon have the ability to rate-limit/traffic shape BitTorrent into oblivion they can do the same to VONAGE/iTunes/YouTube/ etc. The network has all the power/control. It has to be kept open, it has to be a 'public resource'
I would gladly sell you what you are buying.
Lets see, 24mbps (ADSL2+) @ $30/mbps = $720/month. Are you willing to pay that much money or would you like me to overcommit 100:1 and get the price down to $7.20 ?
$30/meg is decent bandwidth, you can approach $10/meg for crap bandwidth but you do get what you pay for.
To put it another way, $30,000 for a GigE connection per month, but you need 2 of them because you have to be redundant, so $60,000 for 1 Gigabit of redundant bandwidth. A HDTV signal eats up 7mbps so you can support 142 of them on a GigE connection, $422 per channel. Using multicast you can send the same channel to multiple customers (IPTV) but that is broadcast, not pay-per-view. You wouldn't be able to watch on-demand or fast-forward the signal. You could pause/rewind it if you had a hard drive in your set top box. That isn't what consumers want. As a provider selling triple-play services you need to dedicate at least 7mbps per end user in your edge/aggregation network. You will also need massive hard drive caches in your POP to cache as much content as close to your subscribers as possible. Set top boxes with big drives so you can pre-load content using multicast/broadcast techniques (i.e. pre-load the new hit movie on all set boxes and make them available on the release date) The cable infrastructure isn't built to handle this type of content delivery. DSL is but DSL distance limitations make getting 7mbps to customers hard (10kft limit). FTTH is the obvious answer but that is insanley expensive
The days of broadcast television are dying. Things like AppleTV & YouTube are going to kill it. Soon independant television producers will be able to produce/distribute the show directly to the consumer, no need to sell the show to ABC/CBS/NBC/FOX. You'll be able to subscribe to the shows and download them. All of that is unicast traffic and it will destroy internet bandwidth ratios.
Apple & iTunes is the way to go, once they start distributing content around the Internet (ala Akamai) they will have the parts needed to replace the broadcasters.
Um, If the hoover dam produces 2 Gigawatts then over an hour it would produce 2 Gigawatt hours. If the Government servers consume 1.2 Gigawatts then over an hour they would consume 1.2Gigawatt hours (GwH) So, 1 hoover damn can support all the servers. Still an ass load of power, no doubt but you don't need 4 hoover dams. That is by 2011, not today, they are expecting some growth over the next 4 years.
I OWN a CLEC in MA and Verizon does NOT change the rules on us. The rules are pretty straight forward, read 'The Act' and subsequent FCC TROs. The FCC DOES change the rules on occasion, sometimes for the good, sometimes for the bad. The biggest problem is that the 2 largest voices against the RBOCS were AT&T & MCI. Those voices have been silenced.
The single most troubling word in 'The Act' is 'impaired'. The RBOCS must provide a service to a CLEC at Unbundled Network Element (UNE) pricing if the CLEC would be impaired without it. The definition of impaired has been strongly contested for the past 10 years. Am I impaired when I don't have access to fiber to homes & businesses? I say yes, Verizon says no. The FCC agrees with Verizon.
I'm hoping Congress gets their act together with the 'Telecomunications Act of 2006', Maybe we'll see it in 2008, maybe it will be better written. It is more than just network nuetrality but that a big part
Boot my old computer in hard drive mode. Connect to my new computer via firewire, move all my settings/applications/data over to the new computer. Took me about 2 hours to pull my PPC mac stuff over to my Intel mac.
will we go to war against the green cheese eating moon aliens?
For local calls there are 2 carriers involved. The originating carrier and the terminating carrier. For local calls the originating carrier pays the terminating carrier a small amount per minute to terminate the call. This is called Reciprical compensation
For long distance (LD) calls there are 3 carriers involved. The originating carrier, the terminating carrier and the Inter eXchange Carrier (IXC). For LD calls the IXC bills the customer and pays the originating carrier and the terminating carrier a slightly bigger amount per minute. This is call Access Charges.
The problem arose when the FCC determined that Internet traffic, including dialup is considered interexchange traffic and is therefore considered LD calls. The way GNaps operated they established local phone numbers in every rate center in a LATA. That would allow the dialup user to dial a local (aka toll free) phone number. Just because the call is 'local' doesn't make it truly local. The call, according to the FCC is 'long distance' and because of that the originating carrier (Verizon in this case) is owed money by the terminating carrier (Global NAPs) that was acting as an IXC.
One of the issues in the law suit was that Verizon was billing GlobalNAPs access charges based off the MA state tariff while GNAPs said they should be billing off the FCC Federal Tariff. The MA state tariff is an order of magnitude more expensive than the federal tariff.
In any event, I had less than 24 hours notice and this 'event' knocked 5000 of my dialup users offline for almost a day. Luckily I could port my numbers to another carrier quickly