Only a handful? There are 12 operators in India. Not MVNOs (which are technically illegal, although some are little more than additional brands established through Joint-Ventures with the bigger players, especially Tata) but operators with their own towers and licenses and all.
There used to be 14 before Etisalat and that other one (Spice?) shut up shop... and with Loop now having been acquired that'll bring it down to 11... but compare that to say, China (3) or Russia (4) or even the US (effectively 5 if we do not include MVNOs) so India has A LOT of choice.
And roaming charges are not exorbitant - paying under Rs1 per minute (close enough to US$0.01 that it doesn't matter) and the fact that you can easily switch to one of the many plans that allows you unlimited roaming to different states for under Rs100 (Rs62 to the $1 makes that less than $1.50 for a month) or in some cases even free -- OR if you're not from Mumbai or Delhi you can have service from BSNL and they have their IndiaOne tariff which gets rid of domestic roaming charges altogether... mobile services are some of the cheapest in the world. Even 3G back when it was released in India was about half the price (per GB) as compared to many developed countries, and prices have only gone down since then.
And even for international roaming, Vodafone has stuff like free incoming texts so if I'm out of the country I can receive an SMS about whatever and call back if it's urgent or write an email or Skype or whatever.
What costs a lot in India? Data. Yes on mobile (because it's mobile, this is somewhat expected) but more-so on wired connectivity - that was my big shocker when I first moved there, and why I do what I do.
Which numbers are you referring to? The numbers I quoted are what I pay as direct costs... The cost of regulation is another matter entirely, but even then there are also subsidies offered left, right and centre in some areas which can counteract some or sometimes most of these costs.
For providers offering phone service, there's usually between $5 and $10 on top of the advertised monthly rate that's taken directly from the subscriber as "taxes and fees" for stuff like 911 (which I think is absurd - other countries manage to fund their emergency numbers just fine) - we have something like 8 line-items on our invoices IIRC, it's ridiculous.
As far as other costs are concerned, the franchise agreements in some cases give almost free reign over the rights of way so there's not really any additional payment or differing rates as I understand it, it's just one big bulk thing - in my case, I'm in a Mediacom town and I've seen some really shitty cabling on their part (including stuff run across the ground and just left lying there for what has now been... 4 months?), yet, we got bitched at for having a cable secured in a slightly incorrect way which was 1. temporary (72 hours) and 2. was actually secured to the surface and, we believe, less of a hazard than some of what we've seen. Of course, we don't have a franchise//yet// either.
I deal almost exclusively with smaller towns though so my situation may not be representative of what happens in larger cities - I can imagine those being a complete bitch simply due to their size and the extra layers. I do agree, however, that the "playing fields" **should** be level, monopolies should be absolutely verboten and as above, that all infrastructure should be shared with any licensed provider who wishes to use it (the latter would probably prevent some of these mega-mergers too).
Err... I've seen a bunch of franchise agreements in places we've looked at operating and none of them were exclusive.
There are other barriers though (company has to be a registered CLEC or cable TV operator, FCC hoops to jump through including registrations and contributions which are simply downright confusing and so forth... oh, and sometimes working with the cities themselves can be a royal pain in the arse and/or painstakingly slow).
As for banning competition, I think that's a new thing with those municipalities that have done so, and said bans are probably not entirely legal anyway.
What are the pole leasing rates where you are? In So IL, it costs $9/year per pole, or about what... $0.75 a month per pole? If you assume 25% penetration (or we say that 1 in 4 houses has cable) & roughly 1 pole per 2 houses passed (judging by what I can see out my window), that means about $1.50/cust/mo goes to poles in built-up areas.
Granted, it could possibly be cheaper, but it's not as absurd or exorbitant as it seems to be being made out to be.
Disclaimer: Prices are based on leasing space on Ameren poles, does not include the cost of having their engineers come to examine the poles to make sure my cables won't cause them to fall over and stuff. I'm on the ISP side & I think all the infrastructure - including cabling - should be shared/open for any provider to use. I also think providers in this country charge too much for too little service, there isn't enough competition, and that the Comcast/TWC merger ultimately is probably a bad idea for consumers.
I respect people's right to be religious. What I do not respect is their right to shove it down my throat or teach it to my children - especially as a factual, scientific thing. Or even as a subject of any kind: if I wanted them to learn a particular religion, I would take them to a particular church. If I'm raising my kids to be Buddhists or Hindus or Muslims, I would take them to an appropriate temple or mosque.
Who in their right mind thinks they have the right to teach them Christianity as the only "correct" doctrine, especially in a nation where church and state are supposed to be separate?
End of the day, it boils down to this: Religion is a choice. Science (and the things that govern science, like the laws of physics and chemical compounds and fossils and bio-diversity and what-have-you) is not. As such, they should keep it to themselves.
And this is why I respect Jimmy Wales telling the holistic people what he's telling them (maybe he could add the fodder about Steve Jobs and his holistic approach shortening his life)
...the powers that be in the US would take a similar approach with other things like evolution vs creationism in schools and all the hoo-hah surrounding NDTs Cosmos series...
"Prove it", meaning, prove it by means OTHER THAN throwing a bible in my face and saying "See? Here it is written! IT IS THE TRUTH!!!!1!1!!!"
Yeah, well, fossils, motherfucker - the only thing I've ever gotten from your book is confused and wondering where all the historical evidence is to correlate the story.
Happy to do it, but who will fund the initial build? Should I go out to every customer in town and promise them a future service in exchange for them signing up and pre-paying for it now? I don't know about you but that would smell of a scam to me.
Personally I think Google's progress isn't half bad, all things considered - and they have pretty deep pockets compared to many budding operators which I expect offers them some advantage.
For the record, I'd love to peer or host a Netflix box, but we're not pulling enough traffic from them yet, so for now my Netflix packets will have to come from Level3.
Hasn't the S-Class had this for a couple of years already now? I seem to recall seeing something about it on Top-Gear.
May not have been an S-Class, it just seems to ring a bell since that series is usually first to get bleeding-edge stuff like this that finds it's way in to regular cars a few years later.
(Fiber is dedicated to the building, active ethernet, not GPON, typically delivered on a gigabit port, rate-limited at the CPE according to the requirements of the complex).
We charge $10 for 4mbit/s and $20/mo for 10mbit/s symmetrical per subscriber in Southern IL... but that's mostly because the complex itself buys the connection which means we're providing a lot of subscribers in one go, so in fairness we don't have a last mile to worry about.
There are some entities (peering exchanges) which require this already: if your pipe has a CBR of over 80 or 85% they require you to upgrade. In some countries (like India), it's even mandated in one of the various regulations (along with many other things which providers in that country will quite happily flout or ignore).
I understand where you're coming from, but the devices are not black boxes. As I mentioned, the devices operate using a collection of open-source software (Debian MIPS & Vyatta) and presumably can be hacked/upgraded/fiddled with to your hearts content if you so desire.
As I also mentioned, IF ANYTHING probably it's only the GUI that is closed, but having not bothered to check on my own devices I don't know whether it actually is or is not. Considering however that the functionality you're referring to is in the core system (which appears to be OSS), what you're describing seems largely to be a non-issue - you can SSH in to the device and see a good old mostly-standard Linux CLI.
I can and have successfully installed other debian packages on it just by running apt-get, so, as long as the debian repos are up-to-date, I have no reason to suspect that the software on my own ER is not also up-to-date.
I always thought of it like a BBM replacement (which is why I don't get the reason for BBM on Android/iOS) but also
Of course, Skype, Hangouts, and lots of other apps satisfy all those requirements.
As far as taking the account with you when you change phone numbers...
Gosh, yeah, like when you move to a different country or switch to another carrier and can't take your number with you.
As someone who moves countries on a fairly regular basis (7-ish times in 10-ish years), I understand that argument better than most, however, for the majority of people that would be a non issue, hence my expression of desiring the option for a username/password to link the account(s) together and/or keep the history etc.
As for simply moving carrier, number portability is available in many countries - not knowing which country you're from, however, I can't say for certain if it's an option for you.
As for Skype/Hangouts/etc that's all good and well for those with smartphones, but in a country like India for example, most people don't have smartphones yet whatsapp can still run on some fairly basic hardware and fairly reliably on 2G whereas those options require 3G**
(**by "requires", I mean, in order for it to work//well// - Skype does work on a 2G network, but it is worse than awful, and hangouts is slow as soggy shit on low-end Androids -- not everyone has an S4, you know).
I always thought of it like a BBM replacement (which is why I don't get the reason for BBM on Android/iOS) but also
1. Lots of countries don't have unlimited texting 2. Free international texting 3. Texts longer than 160 characters 4. Group texting (we use it to send status updates to subscribers when we have network outages) 5. Easy export of message history 6. Confirmed receipt & reading of messages...and probably something else.
As far as taking the account with you when you change phone numbers... I'd call that a feature, not a bug. Presumably if I was changing my phone number, I'd be doing it for a reason, although it would be nice to have the option to register properly and have it tied to a username/password if I wanted to.
They're updating EdgeMax every few months - 1.4.0 came out just a few weeks ago. As far as code is concerned, it seems to be sitting on top of vyatta with a mini install of Debian (MIPS) so it should be fairly straightforward for anyone who has ever used Linux CLI.
As far as any other proprietary stuff is concerned it would seem that, if at all, anything "proprietary" would probably be mostly UI stuff, but even that can be replaced if you really want (there seem to be a couple of projects floating around). You can install anything in the Debian repos (I usually start with nano and for a while I used darkstat but I now run cacti on a separate server and retrieve everything by snmp).
While most of the system is open-source/using FOSS components (that is to say, the entire underlying system is Open Source), is it really *necessary* to have everything 100% FOSS or would you rather have something that is 90-95% FOSS and that which isn't "just works"?
I suspect it's a lot less than that, but good luck getting bandwidth at $0.50/mbit/month (Yes, I'm aware you can get shitty non-premium bandwidth in some major centres for that price but as a carrier 1. you wouldn't want that and 2. most of the US isn't in a major centre and 3. even if you're buying the cheap bandwidth in a major centre, you're also going to have to take in to account all the fiber to get from there to where your customers are (and that may depend on all sorts of factors: buried or overhead, owned or leased,
I've been quoted as much as $55/mbit/month/delivered from Verizon (this would work out to a cost-equivalent of $0.183/GB, or if we were to use simple rule-of-thumb accounting, about $0.57/GB retail price including tax), and an average of $43-49/mbit/month/delivered from AT&T (it's pretty similar pricing in the 4 states I've got pricing from them in).
My alternative would have been to buy in a major centre at $something per mbit (say $1 for the sake of argument) but then I would have had the cost of leasing fiber from Chicago or whereever to the nearest drop plus a buildout cost of between $50k and $100k to reach my premises (and it is only really those upfront costs that prevented us from going ahead with that) - and that's before I even got to the delivery costs.
For that, if I'm deploying my fiber overhead, my direct costs are about $9/pole/year plus the fiber, distribution equipment & CPE plus some nominal costs to the city and state (nothing to the FCC - yet - since we're not doing TV or phone), so using some pretty crude numbers and assuming I could get the customer density I want, with the most expensive prices I've been quoted, I could still **probably** break even on about $20/month for a usage based plan including 30GB. Then, taking in to account that many of the users wouldn't use that much, I could probably offer 100GB for $50 or less.
But, since I have successfully managed to get my bandwidth costs to a pretty reasonable level, I could probably even look at 500GB - maybe even 1TB "limits" by the time we hit the $99 mark.
I must be lucky: testing from home at http://netneutralitytest.com/ my speeds to Linode Atlanta are between 35 & 45mbit/s whereas my speeds to AWS East are between 50 & 60mbit/s. Fairly consistantly (I alternated between each site 3 times).
I dual-boot Windows & Mint and was using Mint for about 18 months exclusively until I fell back to Windows due to shitty support for Broadcom WiFi in Linux (Internet connectivity circumstances changed), rather than the software (most of what I use is cross-platform anyway: web browsers, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, VLC, Skype and a few other things).
Fortunately, I'm about to upgrade my laptop, and one of the prerequisites is that the WiFi is based on another chipset (such as Intel), so I can go back to an OS that doesn't piss me off as much.
Most of the computers in my business - both desktops and servers - are running Linux in some form or another. Desktops mostly Mint 13 LTS and servers may be either CentOS or Debian-based depending on their function. We did have a BSD-based phone system but I think that's being shuttled on to a Debian-based machine now.
The only Windows machines are for some specific tasks - marketing/design likes to have the Adobe suite available but that's about it. It's due to a strange form of irony that we *don't* have any Apple machines in there for aesthetic reasons (a mostly non-user-serviceable white or brushed aluminium machine in a city like Mumbai? Hah, gross! At least with PC-based machines we can just swap stuff out.)
Even those aren't//too// expensive in the grand scheme of things - it'll be the digging that will have cost them money.
The point was that the electronics should cost nowhere near $150k per cabinet based on the pricing I've seen from major vendors. They could (should), in fact, double the number of cabinets to reduce the overall copper lengths (thus improving quality of service).
I'm not exactly certain on what else needs to go in a *DSL cabinet other than the ONT and batteries, but with equipment as cheap as it is, the costs for replacing equipment in 16 cabinets (and adding another 16) likely would not cause a loss at the end of the financial year.
I'll use Alcatel as an example because that was the first spreadsheet I opened: $1k for an Alcatel O-00240v-q ONT (each) $4k averaged across 32 cabinets for batteries, construction and such is probably not out of the question =total $5k * 32 = $160k ~$30k for an Alcatel 7302 16 slot shelf with 4x 8 port line cards, 32 SFPs and all the rest $minimal to change POTS to VOIP ~$100 each for battery backups at each customer location (total $105k) Some other misc fees the power company will charge to come out and survey the poles and allow things to be changed around (assuming they use the power company poles)
RoI break-even is still only about 2 years with a total cost of maybe $300k all up. Considering they already have the fiber in the ground and copper presumably in the air, most other changes come under labour which one would assume they have a salaried staff member for and thus are already paying.
Then, find a cheaper middle-mile supplier - we all know that AT&T is expensive compared to pretty much everyone except Verizon, but if cost really is an issue, don't use them. Either way, contending bandwidth at 1:30 on a $5500/mo line (assuming 100mbit/s on the highest cost basis I've been quoted in the last 2-3 months for service in rural areas) still works out at a cost per GB equivalent of less than $0.20, and allows 10GB per mbit served (or, an average of 30GB per customer - and considering that they're saying their average customer uses 15GB, they should be golden). And even if that cost is double because they have "plenty" of spare bandwidth for their IPTV services and everything else, their costs aren't anywhere near high enough to justify $5/GB - that's just daylight robbery.
Perhaps, but an ISP is unlikely to buy a 600mbit/s pipe unless it is needed. In practice a small provider buys say 100 mbit/s from y company for $z and 100 mbit/s from b company for $c, configures his routers accordingly (fail-over, least-cost, whatever) and upgrades to the next tier only when he's hitting an average of say 80mbit/s - he doesn't buy 600 mbit/s on day 1 -- unless he has at least say 500 of those mbit/s to fill, of course.
The agreement with the upstream probably supports this with wording along the lines of "we buy x mbit/s for $y per month/year (or possibly but not likely, we buy an IRU for $y per decade) and when our usage hits 75-80% continual flow, you get ready to provision us more and bill accordingly".
Given the timeframes given to me by the likes of AT&T when I've gone to them for quotes (don't usually end up buying from them because they're not very good value over their competition IMO) typically this means there will be a 2-4 week period where the network will seem a bit congested while the upstream provider provisions the necessary bandwidth from point A to point Z in it's network to support the new traffic.**
**If you are able to go with a company more efficient than AT&T, you can get more bandwidth provisioned same-day (depending on exactly how much more you want/need, of course).
And of course, the more you buy, the more you save: at the 100mbit level the ISP pays say $25/mbit/mo but at the gigabit level the ISP pays say $10/mbit/mo - the increase in costs **should** only relate to hardware (new SFPs or even new routers), but on a cost-per-customer basis and with equipment basically only decreasing in price, actual expenditure usually works out to be minimal, so to be honest, how they are spending 900% over what they used to is somewhat baffling: in terms of dollars, perhaps it's true; in terms of dollars per customer, I'd be skeptical -- unless 850% of that comes under "executive renumeration";)
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In any case, I do happen to agree that domestic roaming charges and charges for incoming calls are stupid.
Only a handful? There are 12 operators in India. Not MVNOs (which are technically illegal, although some are little more than additional brands established through Joint-Ventures with the bigger players, especially Tata) but operators with their own towers and licenses and all.
There used to be 14 before Etisalat and that other one (Spice?) shut up shop... and with Loop now having been acquired that'll bring it down to 11... but compare that to say, China (3) or Russia (4) or even the US (effectively 5 if we do not include MVNOs) so India has A LOT of choice.
And roaming charges are not exorbitant - paying under Rs1 per minute (close enough to US$0.01 that it doesn't matter) and the fact that you can easily switch to one of the many plans that allows you unlimited roaming to different states for under Rs100 (Rs62 to the $1 makes that less than $1.50 for a month) or in some cases even free -- OR if you're not from Mumbai or Delhi you can have service from BSNL and they have their IndiaOne tariff which gets rid of domestic roaming charges altogether... mobile services are some of the cheapest in the world. Even 3G back when it was released in India was about half the price (per GB) as compared to many developed countries, and prices have only gone down since then.
Roaming charge citations:
http://www.airtel.in/mobile/pr...
https://www.vodafone.in/prepai...
And even for international roaming, Vodafone has stuff like free incoming texts so if I'm out of the country I can receive an SMS about whatever and call back if it's urgent or write an email or Skype or whatever.
What costs a lot in India? Data. Yes on mobile (because it's mobile, this is somewhat expected) but more-so on wired connectivity - that was my big shocker when I first moved there, and why I do what I do.
You're either on Google Fiber, one of those municipal fiber projects or not in the USA... which is it? Because I would be very much interested.
Pity you posted as AC.
Which numbers are you referring to? The numbers I quoted are what I pay as direct costs... The cost of regulation is another matter entirely, but even then there are also subsidies offered left, right and centre in some areas which can counteract some or sometimes most of these costs.
For providers offering phone service, there's usually between $5 and $10 on top of the advertised monthly rate that's taken directly from the subscriber as "taxes and fees" for stuff like 911 (which I think is absurd - other countries manage to fund their emergency numbers just fine) - we have something like 8 line-items on our invoices IIRC, it's ridiculous.
As far as other costs are concerned, the franchise agreements in some cases give almost free reign over the rights of way so there's not really any additional payment or differing rates as I understand it, it's just one big bulk thing - in my case, I'm in a Mediacom town and I've seen some really shitty cabling on their part (including stuff run across the ground and just left lying there for what has now been... 4 months?), yet, we got bitched at for having a cable secured in a slightly incorrect way which was 1. temporary (72 hours) and 2. was actually secured to the surface and, we believe, less of a hazard than some of what we've seen. Of course, we don't have a franchise //yet// either.
I deal almost exclusively with smaller towns though so my situation may not be representative of what happens in larger cities - I can imagine those being a complete bitch simply due to their size and the extra layers. I do agree, however, that the "playing fields" **should** be level, monopolies should be absolutely verboten and as above, that all infrastructure should be shared with any licensed provider who wishes to use it (the latter would probably prevent some of these mega-mergers too).
Err... I've seen a bunch of franchise agreements in places we've looked at operating and none of them were exclusive.
There are other barriers though (company has to be a registered CLEC or cable TV operator, FCC hoops to jump through including registrations and contributions which are simply downright confusing and so forth... oh, and sometimes working with the cities themselves can be a royal pain in the arse and/or painstakingly slow).
As for banning competition, I think that's a new thing with those municipalities that have done so, and said bans are probably not entirely legal anyway.
What are the pole leasing rates where you are? In So IL, it costs $9/year per pole, or about what... $0.75 a month per pole? If you assume 25% penetration (or we say that 1 in 4 houses has cable) & roughly 1 pole per 2 houses passed (judging by what I can see out my window), that means about $1.50/cust/mo goes to poles in built-up areas.
Granted, it could possibly be cheaper, but it's not as absurd or exorbitant as it seems to be being made out to be.
Disclaimer: Prices are based on leasing space on Ameren poles, does not include the cost of having their engineers come to examine the poles to make sure my cables won't cause them to fall over and stuff. I'm on the ISP side & I think all the infrastructure - including cabling - should be shared/open for any provider to use. I also think providers in this country charge too much for too little service, there isn't enough competition, and that the Comcast/TWC merger ultimately is probably a bad idea for consumers.
I respect people's right to be religious. What I do not respect is their right to shove it down my throat or teach it to my children - especially as a factual, scientific thing. Or even as a subject of any kind: if I wanted them to learn a particular religion, I would take them to a particular church. If I'm raising my kids to be Buddhists or Hindus or Muslims, I would take them to an appropriate temple or mosque.
Who in their right mind thinks they have the right to teach them Christianity as the only "correct" doctrine, especially in a nation where church and state are supposed to be separate?
End of the day, it boils down to this: Religion is a choice. Science (and the things that govern science, like the laws of physics and chemical compounds and fossils and bio-diversity and what-have-you) is not. As such, they should keep it to themselves.
And this is why I respect Jimmy Wales telling the holistic people what he's telling them (maybe he could add the fodder about Steve Jobs and his holistic approach shortening his life)
...the powers that be in the US would take a similar approach with other things like evolution vs creationism in schools and all the hoo-hah surrounding NDTs Cosmos series...
"Prove it", meaning, prove it by means OTHER THAN throwing a bible in my face and saying "See? Here it is written! IT IS THE TRUTH!!!!1!1!!!"
Yeah, well, fossils, motherfucker - the only thing I've ever gotten from your book is confused and wondering where all the historical evidence is to correlate the story.
Happy to do it, but who will fund the initial build? Should I go out to every customer in town and promise them a future service in exchange for them signing up and pre-paying for it now? I don't know about you but that would smell of a scam to me.
Personally I think Google's progress isn't half bad, all things considered - and they have pretty deep pockets compared to many budding operators which I expect offers them some advantage.
For the record, I'd love to peer or host a Netflix box, but we're not pulling enough traffic from them yet, so for now my Netflix packets will have to come from Level3.
Hasn't the S-Class had this for a couple of years already now? I seem to recall seeing something about it on Top-Gear.
May not have been an S-Class, it just seems to ring a bell since that series is usually first to get bleeding-edge stuff like this that finds it's way in to regular cars a few years later.
(Fiber is dedicated to the building, active ethernet, not GPON, typically delivered on a gigabit port, rate-limited at the CPE according to the requirements of the complex).
Should mention that we overprovision connections by 20%, just because. Connections are typically FTTB + complex-wide wifi.
We charge $10 for 4mbit/s and $20/mo for 10mbit/s symmetrical per subscriber in Southern IL... but that's mostly because the complex itself buys the connection which means we're providing a lot of subscribers in one go, so in fairness we don't have a last mile to worry about.
There are some entities (peering exchanges) which require this already: if your pipe has a CBR of over 80 or 85% they require you to upgrade. In some countries (like India), it's even mandated in one of the various regulations (along with many other things which providers in that country will quite happily flout or ignore).
I understand where you're coming from, but the devices are not black boxes. As I mentioned, the devices operate using a collection of open-source software (Debian MIPS & Vyatta) and presumably can be hacked/upgraded/fiddled with to your hearts content if you so desire.
As I also mentioned, IF ANYTHING probably it's only the GUI that is closed, but having not bothered to check on my own devices I don't know whether it actually is or is not. Considering however that the functionality you're referring to is in the core system (which appears to be OSS), what you're describing seems largely to be a non-issue - you can SSH in to the device and see a good old mostly-standard Linux CLI.
I can and have successfully installed other debian packages on it just by running apt-get, so, as long as the debian repos are up-to-date, I have no reason to suspect that the software on my own ER is not also up-to-date.
Of course, Skype, Hangouts, and lots of other apps satisfy all those requirements.
Gosh, yeah, like when you move to a different country or switch to another carrier and can't take your number with you.
As someone who moves countries on a fairly regular basis (7-ish times in 10-ish years), I understand that argument better than most, however, for the majority of people that would be a non issue, hence my expression of desiring the option for a username/password to link the account(s) together and/or keep the history etc.
As for simply moving carrier, number portability is available in many countries - not knowing which country you're from, however, I can't say for certain if it's an option for you.
As for Skype/Hangouts/etc that's all good and well for those with smartphones, but in a country like India for example, most people don't have smartphones yet whatsapp can still run on some fairly basic hardware and fairly reliably on 2G whereas those options require 3G**
(**by "requires", I mean, in order for it to work //well// - Skype does work on a 2G network, but it is worse than awful, and hangouts is slow as soggy shit on low-end Androids -- not everyone has an S4, you know).
I always thought of it like a BBM replacement (which is why I don't get the reason for BBM on Android/iOS) but also
1. Lots of countries don't have unlimited texting ...and probably something else.
2. Free international texting
3. Texts longer than 160 characters
4. Group texting (we use it to send status updates to subscribers when we have network outages)
5. Easy export of message history
6. Confirmed receipt & reading of messages
As far as taking the account with you when you change phone numbers... I'd call that a feature, not a bug. Presumably if I was changing my phone number, I'd be doing it for a reason, although it would be nice to have the option to register properly and have it tied to a username/password if I wanted to.
They're updating EdgeMax every few months - 1.4.0 came out just a few weeks ago. As far as code is concerned, it seems to be sitting on top of vyatta with a mini install of Debian (MIPS) so it should be fairly straightforward for anyone who has ever used Linux CLI.
As far as any other proprietary stuff is concerned it would seem that, if at all, anything "proprietary" would probably be mostly UI stuff, but even that can be replaced if you really want (there seem to be a couple of projects floating around). You can install anything in the Debian repos (I usually start with nano and for a while I used darkstat but I now run cacti on a separate server and retrieve everything by snmp).
While most of the system is open-source/using FOSS components (that is to say, the entire underlying system is Open Source), is it really *necessary* to have everything 100% FOSS or would you rather have something that is 90-95% FOSS and that which isn't "just works"?
I suspect it's a lot less than that, but good luck getting bandwidth at $0.50/mbit/month (Yes, I'm aware you can get shitty non-premium bandwidth in some major centres for that price but as a carrier 1. you wouldn't want that and 2. most of the US isn't in a major centre and 3. even if you're buying the cheap bandwidth in a major centre, you're also going to have to take in to account all the fiber to get from there to where your customers are (and that may depend on all sorts of factors: buried or overhead, owned or leased,
I've been quoted as much as $55/mbit/month/delivered from Verizon (this would work out to a cost-equivalent of $0.183/GB, or if we were to use simple rule-of-thumb accounting, about $0.57/GB retail price including tax), and an average of $43-49/mbit/month/delivered from AT&T (it's pretty similar pricing in the 4 states I've got pricing from them in).
My alternative would have been to buy in a major centre at $something per mbit (say $1 for the sake of argument) but then I would have had the cost of leasing fiber from Chicago or whereever to the nearest drop plus a buildout cost of between $50k and $100k to reach my premises (and it is only really those upfront costs that prevented us from going ahead with that) - and that's before I even got to the delivery costs.
For that, if I'm deploying my fiber overhead, my direct costs are about $9/pole/year plus the fiber, distribution equipment & CPE plus some nominal costs to the city and state (nothing to the FCC - yet - since we're not doing TV or phone), so using some pretty crude numbers and assuming I could get the customer density I want, with the most expensive prices I've been quoted, I could still **probably** break even on about $20/month for a usage based plan including 30GB. Then, taking in to account that many of the users wouldn't use that much, I could probably offer 100GB for $50 or less.
But, since I have successfully managed to get my bandwidth costs to a pretty reasonable level, I could probably even look at 500GB - maybe even 1TB "limits" by the time we hit the $99 mark.
ISP Name please?
I must be lucky: testing from home at http://netneutralitytest.com/ my speeds to Linode Atlanta are between 35 & 45mbit/s whereas my speeds to AWS East are between 50 & 60mbit/s. Fairly consistantly (I alternated between each site 3 times).
Of course, I'm not with or carried by Verizon.
I dual-boot Windows & Mint and was using Mint for about 18 months exclusively until I fell back to Windows due to shitty support for Broadcom WiFi in Linux (Internet connectivity circumstances changed), rather than the software (most of what I use is cross-platform anyway: web browsers, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, VLC, Skype and a few other things).
Fortunately, I'm about to upgrade my laptop, and one of the prerequisites is that the WiFi is based on another chipset (such as Intel), so I can go back to an OS that doesn't piss me off as much.
Most of the computers in my business - both desktops and servers - are running Linux in some form or another. Desktops mostly Mint 13 LTS and servers may be either CentOS or Debian-based depending on their function. We did have a BSD-based phone system but I think that's being shuttled on to a Debian-based machine now.
The only Windows machines are for some specific tasks - marketing/design likes to have the Adobe suite available but that's about it. It's due to a strange form of irony that we *don't* have any Apple machines in there for aesthetic reasons (a mostly non-user-serviceable white or brushed aluminium machine in a city like Mumbai? Hah, gross! At least with PC-based machines we can just swap stuff out.)
Yes. Successfully on more than one occasion.
Even those aren't //too// expensive in the grand scheme of things - it'll be the digging that will have cost them money.
The point was that the electronics should cost nowhere near $150k per cabinet based on the pricing I've seen from major vendors. They could (should), in fact, double the number of cabinets to reduce the overall copper lengths (thus improving quality of service).
I'm not exactly certain on what else needs to go in a *DSL cabinet other than the ONT and batteries, but with equipment as cheap as it is, the costs for replacing equipment in 16 cabinets (and adding another 16) likely would not cause a loss at the end of the financial year.
I'll use Alcatel as an example because that was the first spreadsheet I opened:
$1k for an Alcatel O-00240v-q ONT (each)
$4k averaged across 32 cabinets for batteries, construction and such is probably not out of the question
=total $5k * 32 = $160k
~$30k for an Alcatel 7302 16 slot shelf with 4x 8 port line cards, 32 SFPs and all the rest
$minimal to change POTS to VOIP
~$100 each for battery backups at each customer location (total $105k)
Some other misc fees the power company will charge to come out and survey the poles and allow things to be changed around (assuming they use the power company poles)
RoI break-even is still only about 2 years with a total cost of maybe $300k all up. Considering they already have the fiber in the ground and copper presumably in the air, most other changes come under labour which one would assume they have a salaried staff member for and thus are already paying.
Then, find a cheaper middle-mile supplier - we all know that AT&T is expensive compared to pretty much everyone except Verizon, but if cost really is an issue, don't use them. Either way, contending bandwidth at 1:30 on a $5500/mo line (assuming 100mbit/s on the highest cost basis I've been quoted in the last 2-3 months for service in rural areas) still works out at a cost per GB equivalent of less than $0.20, and allows 10GB per mbit served (or, an average of 30GB per customer - and considering that they're saying their average customer uses 15GB, they should be golden). And even if that cost is double because they have "plenty" of spare bandwidth for their IPTV services and everything else, their costs aren't anywhere near high enough to justify $5/GB - that's just daylight robbery.
Perhaps, but an ISP is unlikely to buy a 600mbit/s pipe unless it is needed. In practice a small provider buys say 100 mbit/s from y company for $z and 100 mbit/s from b company for $c, configures his routers accordingly (fail-over, least-cost, whatever) and upgrades to the next tier only when he's hitting an average of say 80mbit/s - he doesn't buy 600 mbit/s on day 1 -- unless he has at least say 500 of those mbit/s to fill, of course.
The agreement with the upstream probably supports this with wording along the lines of "we buy x mbit/s for $y per month/year (or possibly but not likely, we buy an IRU for $y per decade) and when our usage hits 75-80% continual flow, you get ready to provision us more and bill accordingly".
Given the timeframes given to me by the likes of AT&T when I've gone to them for quotes (don't usually end up buying from them because they're not very good value over their competition IMO) typically this means there will be a 2-4 week period where the network will seem a bit congested while the upstream provider provisions the necessary bandwidth from point A to point Z in it's network to support the new traffic.**
**If you are able to go with a company more efficient than AT&T, you can get more bandwidth provisioned same-day (depending on exactly how much more you want/need, of course).
And of course, the more you buy, the more you save: at the 100mbit level the ISP pays say $25/mbit/mo but at the gigabit level the ISP pays say $10/mbit/mo - the increase in costs **should** only relate to hardware (new SFPs or even new routers), but on a cost-per-customer basis and with equipment basically only decreasing in price, actual expenditure usually works out to be minimal, so to be honest, how they are spending 900% over what they used to is somewhat baffling: in terms of dollars, perhaps it's true; in terms of dollars per customer, I'd be skeptical -- unless 850% of that comes under "executive renumeration" ;)