Broadband Is Dead (Or At Least Very Ill) 371
Thornkin writes: "Broadband is dead. That is the proclamation of tech pundit Robert Cringely. With Excite@Home turning away new customers and going bankrupt along with most of the DSL companies, things are bleak and will get worse. The icing on the cake could be this bill which would remand the requirement for local phone providers to open their networks before competing in the long distance market." And at a different scale, apparently the DSL circuits in Blacksburg, VA (a place which liked to claim it was "the most wired town in America" not long ago) are now full, and turning away residential customers.
Shaw@home/shawcable.net (Score:2, Interesting)
Just because *most* broadband ISPs are staffed by short-term-thinking idiots doesn't mean that all of them are. I don't work for them, but I have a couple of friends who do. Honestly, they really have it together.
DSL is dead, not broadband (Score:2, Interesting)
Fact is, Exite@home hoisted itself on its own petard, the broadband bill is DOA in legislation, and those companies smart enough to invest in cable, or better yet, fiber are holding their own. DSL is a nasty expensive way to try to make last centuries' technology perform to the needs of this one. Sorry to all of those out there who are stuck with DSL. Honest.
The sad thing is... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, broadband deserves to die. (Score:4, Interesting)
I was eleven years old, definitely a home user, and thinking to myself, "What? That sucks."
i doubt that it is dead... (Score:3, Interesting)
I think that the industry had a rough go of it at first because they assummed that this was the latest and greatest thing and everybody will be doing it. This is partly true. The technology was not all that it should be. I was not able to qualify for DSL until Qwest reevaluated its conditions on what allows a line to qualify. A lot of people I know would like to have DSL, but can't.
My prediction for the future...
1) A few companies will be able to continue their service, Qwest (I hope) and a few others.
2) The technology will mature to reach the masses in an affordable manner.
3)In 5-10 years (probably closer to 10) high speed internet access will be as common in America as cable tv.
I would like to know that when cable companies started up if they did not have a similar history and set of problems. Does anybody know?
DSL for everyone... (Score:5, Interesting)
We're talking in the mountains too folks!
Over 18,000 voice lines, 105 wire centers; they've converted hundreds of miles of copper to fiber, and are considering cable tv over fiber next year.
And nearly EVERY customer has DSL access.
The company spent about 1.5 million to make it happen, and customers get speeds up to 1.5mbs; they've yet to make a profit on the DSL, but, the customers are happy and are eating it up.
My point: if a small company can do it, in rough and nonlinear terrain [mapquest.com] ANY company should be able to follow suit.
Screaming broadband is dead is ludicrous.
Re:Broadband is alive and well (Score:4, Interesting)
In the Netherlands the copper network is in good shape and the largest problem has been getting the local telecom switches converted (a process that is still not completed everywhere). In most of the larger cities people have a choice between cable and DSL. DSL tends to be bit more reliable but also more expensive and cable has a bad reputation mainly due to the fact that companies like @home are active on the isp site there. The competition between cable and DSL has stimulated quality improvements in both.
I've had my DSL connection for nearly a year now. Apart from some technical problems in the beginning, I've enjoyed a good connection and get exactly what I payed for. In any case, DSL and cable are of course a temporary solution until we all can have a fiber optic connection.
Of course in Europe, local telephone connections not for free (like in the US), so people are more likely to take DSL to save money. Basically if, like me, you want to be online a lot, DSL is much cheaper than a regular modem connection. In the US your local connection is for free so you can be online all day relatively cheaply.
grave implications to publishing (Score:3, Interesting)
They are all wrong. The net is the future of publishing. It is a public resource and should be protected by existing laws. To deny any person the ability to publish on the web on their own terms, without editorial control like any meat space news paper, it to deny that person constitutionally protected rights of free speech and press. There are no valid techincal justifications for this kind of violation. Effective public legislation should be going in the opposite direction, and those companies who oppose the public interest like this should be stripped of their franchises.
We must not let anti-terrorist hysteria accelerate the loss of our rights. The USA ACT destroys our fourth amendment protection for security in our homes, possesions and personal effects. Beware of Anti-Hacker legislation that removes your first amendment rights to free speech and press.
Canadian Rural Broadband Plan Likely to Die (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Headline problem....? (Score:1, Interesting)
Uh, I don't think so... (Score:3, Interesting)
Demand, as far as I can tell, has not slipped. Availability is the problem. I would sign up right now, if only DSL or cable were offered here. This is true for my co-workers and some of my neighbors.
Re:DSL is dead, not broadband (Score:4, Interesting)
retarded post (Score:2, Interesting)
I live in a city of 150,000. Just signed up for DSL yesterday. I had 3 local choices for DSL (not Cable though).
Broadband is not dead where I live (Wisconsin). Shit, my 65-year old father has DSL and he lives in a town of 8,000!!!
That totally depends on the implimentation (Score:3, Interesting)
All this for about 40 bucks a month. I can hardly complain about that; my only real complaint is with their service departments (tech support and service), they're idiotic there.
But given the money, I really can't expect much better. I still consider it quite a bargain though. I'm getting everything I paid for, and more. I find it difficult to believe that DSL can provide a better value and, empirically speaking, they simply don't.
That said, even with certain mediocre broadband services, I find it difficult to believe that their relative lack of speed had much to do with today's problems. Besides the fact that it's still many times faster than dialup, not to mention less of a hassle once configure, most of the broadband companies were adding new customers on a fast as they could. Their problems are more financial. With DSL, the economics simply aren't there to compete against cable modem for the home user. With cable modem providers like @home, they've just made some really stupid financial moves, such as acquiring overly priced and troubled internet companies and maybe even underpricing the service a bit. I strongly suspect that the major cable modem services will survive. Even if @Home goes completely under, their existing cable modem service offers solid economics.
Real story on Excite@Home move (Score:3, Interesting)
This from a friend of mine who's a sales support engineer in their business-customer division.
(Also, while Cringely sometimes has interesting things to say, where Excite@Home's concerned, he's off his gourd. Remember his article a little while back about how unprofitable @Home absorbed poor profitable Excite and bled it to death? Never mind that the collapse in Web ad revenue is killing portals all over the place, that's got nothing to do with it -- just @Home's poor management, right?)
Re:Headline problem....? (Score:3, Interesting)
Look at what large companies pay for metered access. It's much higher outside of the US.
Bandwidth costs ~$0.04 a megabyte in the US (and much higher rates, in the teens, for places like India) for my fortune 100 company. Count up how much you're costing your cable modem company, versus how much you're paying them. For me personally, I'm getting a tremendous bargain.
Verizon is forcing "Net CONSUMER" down everyone (Score:5, Interesting)
musiccity/morpheus/winmx or anything that acts as a server to share files.
Verizon is the first company to force "Net Consumer" where your connection is effectively limited to "consuming" the commercial aspects of the internet.
This will be the death of the internet IMHO. The internet existed long before monopolies like verizon were able to control the whole east coast portion of it.
It has been discussed on http://www.dslreports.com, but i can't say it enough. Send in your complaints. They're making people who need to to "use" the internet purchase a much more expensive "commercial" dsl connection.
Why is it considered commercial for me to be able to send/receive email from work, login to my home pc and test things i want to learn? Why am i being charged more for not "consuming" what verizon shoves down my throat?
To add to it, even when you signon to verizon's support website you have to register for there portal, there is no escaping the commercial grip verizon is enforcing on customers that don't want it.
I think DSL companies are killing themselves.. no simpler way to say it. The internet isn't a system to consume like television, it is a 2 way interactive street. I want to run a node in which people can interact with me and i pay 100.00 bucks a month for the speed/connectivity to run a node and verizon now says that is illegal.
I'm sorry, but verizon doesn't own the internet. Sure they own the pop, but the "internet connectivity" isn't Verizon's to filter and put laws on. Verizon doesnt own the content, sites, and ip that i use when i connect, so how can they claim responsibility to limit it when infact on the top of the TOS they say it isn't there's to limit.
its hogwash i tell you. Verizon is like Comcast but changing the TV shows and overriding commercials and putting in what THEY think is right, how they think they can get away with that is beyond me.
Q: How is Bin Laden like Fred Flintstone?
A: Both may look out their windows and see Rubble.
Re:How true that is... (Score:3, Interesting)
Cable broadband does cost about £25 per month, and there's a recently announced a lower-speed £15/$22 per month cable connection service, 128 Kbps but still always on and flat rate - a lot better than ISDN.
The problem with Broadband... (Score:5, Interesting)
OK, let's look at the monopoly issue. Monopolies per se are neither bad nor unlawful - only when they are improperly regulated are they bad and unlawful. Only one electric company can provide service to my house, because it is just not cost effective for there to be more than one power line to my house. It's what is called a "natural monopoly" - look it up in your Econ textbooks. Now, if somebody comes up with a disruptive technology (Mr. Fusion, anyone?), then that natural monopoly ceases to exists, and competition is restored, but until then it makes sense to allow the monopoly to exists but regulate it!
Now, DSL service is a natural monopoly - there is one owner of the phone lines running to my house, and therefor trying to create fake competition by allowing multiple companies to bill me just doesn't work. I get my telephony, DSL, and Internet service from the same company (my phone company), and so when I have a problem, it isn't the "The wires are bad, talk to the phone company" "No, the DSLAM is bad. Talk to the DSL company" "No, the router is dead. Talk to the ISP" garbage. I say "Gene, my DSL is down." "Yes sir, we'll get it fixed right away."
The same for cable modems - there is only one owner of the coax to your house. Pretending there can be more than one provider of cable modem service is not the answer - regulating the cable company is.
Now, on to the second item - the technologies involved.
cable modems - a hacky technology done right. The idea of shared bandwidth, limited upstream bandwidth, and using a line topology rather than a star topology went out of fashion when 10Base-2 died. However, due to the standards, I can buy just about any cable modem, take it home, plug it in, call the cable company and give them the MAC, and I'm on the air.
DSL - a better technology done horribly wrong. Layering TCP atop PPP atop ATM was bad and wrong. I was helping an aquantance fix his DSL service - we had to reset his router to factory defaults. We couldn't get it to connect because it was unable to automatically determine the virtual circuit number - it saw the DSLAM, but it wouldn't move freight. We ended up calling the DSL provider, and waiting an hour and a half for them to call us back with the parameters to reset the router. Not that we were doing anything complex - we weren't doing VOIP or VODSL - we were just moving TCP/IP packets.
Wireless Great in that there is no "last mile" to wire up, but there are only so many MHz of bandwidth to modulate a signal on. You get too many customers in an area, and you are going to get slowdowns.
Satelite Sorry, but until somebody can work out how to get a signal to geosync and back faster than C, this is great for FTPing down an ISO, but not for browsing.
When we finally realize that the wire to your house is a natural monopoly, allow the companies to own it as such, and then have the local corporation commissions watch them like hawks, we will always see broadband being priced below what it really costs to provide, and thus going out of business.
One last thought: what if we did a Rural Electrification Act style program for deployment of broadband?
Will broadband always be available? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm on my fourth ISP. The first three have all gone out of business and I have their useless DSL boxes to prove it. Now I'm facing the fact that my second DSL provider may go bye-bye. It's a pretty grim future for broadbad in my opinion. Even if the phone company (Verizon) continued to offer DSL, it's such a bad service (friends have had endless QOS problems) I doubt I could bring myself to use it.
I'm so spoiled by broadband that I don't think I could bear to go back to a modem. On the other hand, not having any sort of net connection at home would mean I might actually have some semblence of a life.
The bankruptcy has NOTHING to do with broadband (Score:1, Interesting)
It has everything to do with AT&T and Excite's arrogant corporate leadership.
AT&T, as majority owner, has intentionally led Excite into bankruptcy so that it can pick up the pieces at fire-sale prices, cheating legitimate investors who bought Excite shares on the open market. I'm one of those investors, and yes, I'm bitter. Some bastards ought to go to jail over this.
But it's not all AT&T. It also is Excite's arrogant management that blew millions of dollars on Internet-bubble nonsense such as BlueMountainArts and the Excite portal itself. Good lord, kill that piece of crap and bring back Infoseek; at least it was useful.
And a good share of the blame also gooes to ATHM's other main corporate investors, Cox and Comcast, which lost the power struggle with AT&T but made sure their pockets were lined at the expense of independent investors.
Cable modems aren't going away. They continue to be an efficient and effective way of delivering broadband to the home.
Re:Whatever (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is not infrastructure, it is management. There's no brand recognition in broadband, with all the companies merging and going under.. My cable company has already changed names once, and my internet service has had 3 different names!
With few exceptions, the current providers suck. My Mediaone Road Runner (oops, I mean AT&T @Home now) connection has become consistently slower and unreliable.. Verizon DSL in my area uses PPPOE along with WinPOET, which I hear is a real pain in the ass.
I say, give the people decent service, don't waste money, and watch the subscribers roll in. For god's sake, AT&T calls me every week to find out if I want a cable modem. I already HAVE one of their cable modems!
@home sucks - A sad but true story... (Score:4, Interesting)
I called @home this past Monday because my network connection was dropping packets like hot potatoes. Once I got a human on the phone, I told them I was pinging my gateway and I was seeing a 70% packet loss. He immediately told me, "Don't you think you ought to leave those kind of things to us technicians?" What an insult! I didn't know you had to be a certified phone jockey just to know how to ping an IP?!?! So anyway, after _he_ pinged my gateway for a few minutes, he confirmed the enormous packet loss and scheduled a trouble call, and much to my surprise - for the very next day even.
The next day came and no-one showed up. I work from home and I was here all day, not to mention my very loud doorbell. No excuses, they simply didn't show up. I waited a couple of hours past the scheduled appointment time, just to be a courteous end user, and then I called back to see what happened. The technician I spoke to this time was very quick to apologize for the mishap and very hurriedly tried to see what the issue was. He said my account info never made it onto their outgoing trouble call list for that particular day. I said OK, honest mistake, and I re-scheduled a new trouble call. The new appointment time sucked though, it was 3 days away. I figured I might have to do the dial-up thing if things got really bad, as if a 70% loss wasn't bad enough.
So Friday, the new appointment day, finally arrived. The tech was supposed to be here between 4:00 and 6:00pm. Much to my disbelief no-one showed yet again. It was Friday afternoon, and my need to drink beer overcame my need for less packet loss so I decided not to call it in. But this morning I got up and immediately gave them a call. I found yet again my account was not added to the outgoing trouble call list for the day, and yet again I would have to be rescheduled. At this point I was ready to really lose my cool and start telling them all my favorite curse words, but I didn't. I rescheduled (again), but this time it was for 5 days away. Pretty sad that they have 5 days worth of trouble calls scheduled. That's a lot of people!
Of course I've been hearing about @home's recent money problems, but does lack of money make networks break? Or is it really a lack of competent @home technicians and phone jockeys? I'm totally fed up with the @home run-around.
Broadband isn't dead everywhere... (Score:1, Interesting)
No one is willing to pay for bandwidth (Score:1, Interesting)
However, if you give people 768k, they will use it. Our network started becoming saturated and having major lag issues. As a result, we limited our DSL to 384k and are refering anyone who wants faster than that to Verizon.
The point is, that if you compare the cost to provide someone with a broadband connection, it does not match up with the profit generated, if any profit is generated. I guess that the idea of handing out more bandwidth than you have is fine as long as you know that there will never be enough users be connected (i.e. dialup) to take all the bandwidth, but with the "always on" availability of cable and DSL, it just doesn't work. There's only so much bandwidth to go around. Even if you installed a new fiber cable, that can only be divided up so much. People just do not realize how much bandwidth actually costs.
Some providers are hurting but the concept's sound (Score:3, Interesting)
@Home failed because it was a bad business. They had a nice gig doing the ISP stuff for the cable industry, but they got caught up in dotcom mania and bought the third-rate search engine Excite for a ridiculous amount. Excite never had a prayer of breaking even, so the whole thing was weighted down. Excite was also irrelevant to @Home's mission, which was to provide the cablecos with an ISP back end.
The data CLECs who tanked had bad business plans too. They mostly spent too much on collocation cages (needed before 1998 to access the loops) and they went into each others' markets, so a single telco CO would have half a dozen of them dividing the market among them. They also designed for a high breakeven, assuming that the others would have no market share. And they had big expense structures. So they tanked.
Cablecos do not need @Home any more. They can create in-house ISPs, as MediaOne did (ignore the @Home label, which is a borrowed trademark used because AT&T now owns them). They can and will also learn to work with ISPs, providing (without being forced) choice in ISP service. That does require some serious network reconfiguration, and since @Home had exclusive contracts with most of the cablecos into 2002, the cablecos aren't ready to open up. But with @Home finally being put out of its misery, the cablecos might finally recognize that they should work with other ISPs.
Re:@home sucks - A sad but true story... (Score:1, Interesting)
I'll assume for the moment that you have not done tech support before. If you have, then this is for those who have not and think we are all jackasses. It is a shitty job, the lowest in the IT sector. We are disposable and subject to circular conversations with customers who just can't follow instructions or grasp certain concepts. ALOT of what we "support" is out of our hands.
Most techs are hobbled in what they can affect and do in the instance of a problem. The infrastructure to report and fix problems is not there. I work graveyards at an ISP, and if you call me at 3am, I certainly cannot do a daman thing if your wireless goes down at the office. Why? Because I don't have the privelege to affect change. Every time someone has a problem with a hosted site or their DSL, I have to mail our admin either via RT or manually. The customers expects me to go into their virtual config or talk to a field tech ASAP. Guess what? After 5:00pm only the phone monkeys are left at the office to play crowd control. That all tech support is. Crowd Control.
Besides, at avg. 12/hr, how much do you expect one too know? The better the tech the more likey he/she *isn't* doing tech support. (hmm, what does that say about me?
You want knowledgeable techs, then make tech support a job to be proud of, with some dignity and respect, and make it interesting.
As for @home, Shaw has also taken over the old Rogers net here and things are much better. Better speed, mail services are actually reliable, spam is down too. DSL sucks. I've worked for 3 different outfits offering DSL and had my own 2.5Mbps line for a year. 1) it's a money loser unless you're the Telco, and 2) if your DSL provider is NOT the Telco, don't expect much in the way of support. If your line dies, a trouble ticket has to be put in with the telco and we wait, and the customer waits for the results.
Broadband Alive and Well (Score:1, Interesting)
The government announced today a program to bring hi-speed to every rural resident within 3 years (a program to complete access to every address in Canada, no matter how remote, finished last year. Currently every school and public library in the country, no matter how remote, has a dedicated full-time link; in 3 years the goal is every classroom).
Broadband customers in Canada outnumber AOL sunbscribers over 10 to 1.
Denver sure was pretty (Score:3, Interesting)
What we really need... (Score:1, Interesting)
for fast, cheap broadband is Bill Fogal's semiconductor [eskimo.com]. If I read those pages correctly, it will eliminate the need to rip out the thousands of miles of existing copper cable and replace them with optical fibres, while providing LOTS of bandwidth. And more...
According to Tom Bearden, it should become available early next year. I just hope it doesn't fall into the same black hole that comsumes so many of these weird inventions.