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.
No hype (Score:4, Insightful)
Broadband will always be available, the market just won't be so damn saturated as it was.
Re:No hype (Score:2)
Perhaps there are spotty areas of saturation but in many locations, people aren't being served. DSL has never been available where I live. Fortunately, you can get cable but Time Warner cable is the only game in town. I wouldn't call that saturated.
Re:No hype (Score:2)
I didn't think there was anybody in my town with that low a slashdot user number.
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.
Re:No hype (Score:2)
I am in Lenexa, KS. A company called Everest Connections (www.everestgt.com) has run fiber through my neighborhood. Tuesday I have an appointment to get hooked up with local phone service, digital cable with a couple of premium channel groups, and 1.5Mbit downstream internet (cable modem), all for $99 a month.
Anyone know about this company? If "broadband" is dead, I guess I'll be crawling back to Southwestern Bell and Time Warner in a week or two?
Re:No hype (Score:2)
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.
Re:DSL is dead, not broadband (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:DSL is dead, not broadband (Score:2, Insightful)
Already today, carriers probably pay more infrastructure costs for dial-in users than they pay for DSL. The only problem is they all sit on old voice technology that makes providing DSL much more expensive than it has to be.
So, in a few years, expect IP-over-Voice to be an expensive luxury.
Cringely just has no clue about the technologies involved.
f.
Re:DSL is dead, not broadband (Score:2)
It really depends. Usually telephone network was built by either state owned companies or companies heavily subsidized by state (practically everywhere in the world). And that's because physical communication networks, like other basic infrastructure (like roads, railroads, powerlines), are expensive to build and potentially costly to maintain, without actually directly producing anything. They 'only' provide for actual services; they are not services per se.
Thus, to begin with, it's seldom the case that fully private companies completely funded "their" networks using just their money. But in addition, few people think it would be beneficial to have more than one (or two, perhaps three for redundancy, at most) phone line networks (or, more than one redundant cable network). It just would usually be wasting lots and lots of money. Most of the time people need just one line, and want to choose the service provider (be it for cable or phone line... of course these may soon be combined, just need one physical highband network for all communication). Instead, it's thought, it would make sense to share the physical network, and compete on services.
I understand the feeling "it's mine all mine, why should I play with others". It's familiar feeling from childhood. But putting things in perspective, it really would be foolish to force competitors to build their own duplicate networks. That would be really really really inefficient; and as such would enforce de facto monopolies (that telcos now have... the weak competition between cable and telcos is just an excuse to prevent real competition)
The problem left is, of course, what is the 'fair cost' of a physical line. It would be much easier if the lines were taken care of by non-profict organizations, perhaps utility companies, perhaps counties. But unfortunately that's not the case. And that's why legislation tries to figure out a somewhat fair way to allow for actual competition.
The sad thing is... (Score:5, Interesting)
Headline problem....? (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps that should read
Re:Headline problem....? (Score:5, Insightful)
Broadband in the USA is Dead....
I think it should read "Cringley is an Idiot".
Broadband is doing just fine where I live (Central NJ). Most of my neighbors have cable modems on Optimum Online with it's great 1 Mb/sec up 5 Mb/sec down service at $29.95/mo. Just about eveyone I work with has some sort of DSL/Cable modem sevice as well.
The only thing that is slowing down broadband at the moment is the economic slowdown in the US has some Telco's profits in the dumps. As soon as things start picking up again broadband will really take off.
How true that is... (Score:3, Informative)
The trouble is that the market here has been hoisted on its own petard - when no subscription, toll-free, ad-free [ntlworld.com] dial-up is available (though for how much longer, no-one knows), Joe User can't see the point in broadband.
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.
Re:How true that is... (Score:2)
Bollocks, mate. ADSL is £40 ($60) + £10 line rental, and BT Openworld has been throttling the bandwidth on common P2P ports for weeks or months (they're not at the time of writing, but this is an actute PR requirement, and they're planning to start throttling again when they bring in a more expensive service aimed at P2P). Also, there are still problems with the BT Ignite backbone, and god help you if you get a dodgy connection, as the easiest way to get it fixed is to cancel it and start over again.
BT have also just announced that they're giving up network expansion until the demand picks up. How they expect demand to pick up when they're crippling the primary reason to get the service is beyond my comprehension.
Still, it could be worse. Kingston has already bandwidth capped their ADSL offering in Hull, and aren't backing down at all. That's effectively running up the white flag and saying "get off our MAN"
You're right that cable is £25, and I'm delighted (eventually) with my Telewest connection, but we've already seen NTL try to sneak through harsh restrictions on running servers (including P2P apps) and back down, but they've made it clear that it's on the cards. It's a hopeful sign that Telewest and NTL have teamed up to push cable though.
But on balance, I have to agree with the tone of the article: telcos and cablecos have realised (or will very soon have to realise) that broadband isn't a cash cow (we're not going to pay them for content that we can get free elsewhere), and there's really very little that they can do to recoup their investment. Without goverment investment or tax breaks to make it ubiquitous, it's in real trouble, as it's only attracting heavy users and isn't sustainable at current prices.
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.
Re:Headline problem....? (Score:2)
Re:Headline problem....? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Headline problem....? (Score:2, Informative)
This is from a smaller company specializing in ADSL. As far as I've been able to determine, as long as you're technically eligible (within a set distance from a switch and no filters in betwwen), you can get it.
/Janne
Re:Headline problem....? (Score:2)
Reliable would be the key word... neither is without it's problems depending on where you live and who you talk to (eastlink has stability problems in some areas, MTT has quality problems with Vibe Vision, and BOTH need some help with running Tech Support).
But at least we get some choice... I will always prefer to get some services from each, that way a single cable break wont leave you in the dark.
Broadband is alive and well (Score:3, Insightful)
Old copper + recalcitrant phone company / severe technical limitations + high cost == bad business.
Lets face it, just getting DSL to work is virtually a miracle, and getting it to work on every copper line going to every home is simply unrealistic.
DSL seems to be a good onesy-twosey kind of thing to implement, but I don't envy the people trying to make it work at thousands of subscriber sites.
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.
Yeah, broadband deserves to die. (Score:4, Interesting)
I was eleven years old, definitely a home user, and thinking to myself, "What? That sucks."
Re:Yeah, broadband deserves to die. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a stepping stone to a future where we all have fibre into our homes. But even that will most likely be severely restricted, especially in the US where RIAA and MPAA lobbyists will work to ensure that it is very difficult for home users to share files.
That is, assuming that the US still exists in its present form and that those lunatic islamists haven't infiltrated the system enough to sabatoge infrastructure. I won't even go into the nuclear or biological warfare issues.
Gawd help us all.
Re:Yeah, broadband deserves to die. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Yeah, broadband deserves to die. (Score:2)
I have been useing cable for almost five years, my suburb being a test market for mediaone express. i enjoy insane throughput nearly 27/7 (once... you... take... liberties... with certain.. throttle restrictions... oh actually even throttled i would be smoking any dialup anywhere, i still have to dial in when i use my laptops away from home and it "sucks".)
sadly, AT&T @home bought mediaone and i am foreseeing terrible trouble, so i am investigating options, currently the chicago area still has plenty, thank god.
Re:Yeah, broadband deserves to die. (Score:2)
I expect the other @Home cablecos to have a fix in place very, very fast. Either AT&T will "fix" @Home or something else will be done.
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.
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?
blah blah blah, pundits! (Score:3, Flamebait)
Keep in mind that these are the same morons who thought vrml, push technology, and internet advertising would be the "next big thing".
The fact is that broadband still has a substantial customer base that is willing to pay premium prices *AND* still has a large base of potential customers who do not have broadband but wish they do. The number of broadband users will only *increase*. Now, the number of small broandband ISPs may do all kinds of gymnastic activities and will most likely be much much smaller in the future. Nevertheless, broadband is still a viable technology, a hot commodity, a viable business, and a profitable enterprise. Broadband will not go away, not now, not ever.
What is "Insightful" about this? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:blah blah blah, pundits! (Score:4, Funny)
spoken like a true pundit
Re:blah blah blah, pundits! (Score:2)
Anyone know how I can get in on this scam?
Cringely (Score:5, Informative)
Here is Cringely on Excite@Home
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit199901
"Excite, like it's bigger, badder competitor Yahoo, is entirely about branding and brand awareness, so the name won't go away. Excite is better known than @Home. Current management at Excite won't change, either. Only the pockets get deeper. So in exactly the same spirit in which a little Mississippi long distance company became MCI-Worldcom, look for more content deals from Excite and more customer-acquiring deals from @Home, sucking-up smaller ISPs.
The one thing that has changed in all this is the identity of the competition. Unable to beat Yahoo at its own game, Excite is using @Home to change the game. The new target is America OnLine. "
While he has been right sometimes, he is just as often wrong, sometimes wildly wrong.
Back in 1998 he proclaimed, loudly that the iMac's intro was going to be flawed by the fact that something like 18% of them didn't work. Well the failure rate was under the industry average when they actually came out of the box. I would provide a link, but his Old Hat list starts the week after this column was out. But I remeber it dangit.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit199901
Then in Jan of '99 he said that Apple was screwed because it came out with different colors of iMacs and that was stupid.
Or there was the decleration that broadband was going to make Blockbuster go out of business.
"How long will it be before the time difference between driving to get video on demand or downloading from the Net is a wash? Three years, according to my figures. Add another three years for broad availability and to cover the impact of HDTV, which will make our video files five times larger again. In six years, then, the Blockbuster and Hollywood Videos of this country will probably be have sold their storefronts, too, leaving the strip malls of America to Starbucks and Bennetton. These intellectual property businesses will simply go away, along with what's left of the retail software business. All that will be left is books -- the oldest intellectual property vessels of all. "
It's been three years and video on demand over broadband is only for the peer to peer file sharing crowd.
Re:Cringely (Score:2)
Broadband isn't dead... (Score:4, Informative)
It's the fact that that last mile at all parts is *physically* controlled by some facet of the baby bells, none which are struggling in terms of cash flow, which is making DSL seem like a loser. Because they control both the physical access at the CO and at the user's home, every CLEC has to sit and wait for the ILEC to go out and do something; only recently have the ILECs (at least for Ameritech here in the midwest) have been hand-slapped for being 'intentionally' slow in responding to voice-line installs and problems for residental customers, but all that was was a hand-slap in terms of fines in the millions; DSL is hidden behind this issue. If the CLECs didn't have to deal with the ILEC in any way, I would fully expect most CLEC to be able to offer installes within 5 business days, as opposed to the 4-6 week standard now.
However, fortunately, we have Verizon and PacBell at the end of lawsuits from DSL ISPs for being intentally slow, as well as the FCC watching out for the decline of CLECs (the extention on Rhythms' shutdown, for example). However, I still believe that the ownership of the last mile , from CO to the network interface, should not be in the hands of anyone that is providing the service along those lines; either the phone company can sell it off to a different group (possibly owned by the city/town as with mayn other utility services), or it can split off from that. As long as both the ILECs, CLECs, and standard phone ccompanies have to play the same pricing game, there would be much more competition in the DSL market.
I doubt it will be dead, but it probably will end up as being two major CLECs (Covad and Worldcom) along with several ISPs that use ILECs for the last mile. The only probably now is that artificial bandwidth limits are coming into play particularly with those that use ADSL. Certainly speeds are much better than dialup, but given the projected rate of growth of multimedia on the web, more speed is going to be needed for the 'average Joe' and these artificial caps appear to be fixed at the current time.
Re:Broadband isn't dead... (Score:2)
In case you hadn't noticed, Covad recently filed for chapter 11. [slashdot.org]. And the rest of the telecom business is going into the ground along with it.
Things are looking bleak right now. Right now I expect the winner in all of this will be AOL/TimeWarner.
Crack-smoking Cringley. (Score:2)
Cringley dismisses out-of-hand the porn industry, which is the #2 broadband content provider on the Internet. #1, you ask? Ever download an MP3?
File-sharing is here to stay, and it's the driving force behind broadband. Nobody that has cable modems or DSL lines is going to give them up once they've gotten a taste of them, and nobody who has them will ever go back to modem unless it's their ONLY option.
I'll believe it when I see it, Mr. Cringely.
Dead... dead... deadski... (Score:4, Funny)
Apple is dead.
Java is dead.
USB is dead.
IBM is dead.
Motorola is dead.
and of course...
Linux is dead.
Pft...
Re:Dead... dead... deadski... (Score:2)
MS-DOS is dead
the RIAA is dead
MP3 is dead
Slashdot is dead.
Re:Dead... dead... deadski... (Score:3, Funny)
*yawn* ... somebody wake me up when Cringely is dead.
Re:Dead... dead... deadski... (Score:2)
Re:Dead... dead... deadski... (Score:2)
Broadband is not dead, it just smells that way. (Score:4, Insightful)
After having DSL I moved and tried to get it again. After 6 months, 4 routers on my shelf, and receiving functioning cable, I gave up on it.
I would not live without broadband. I'm not alone. All we are seeing now is the natural retrenchment that takes place after an all out competition to grab customers saw the entry of too many players with marginal prospects of profit. One day investors woke up and the retrenchment begin.
I'm on Excite now but I'm in NYC. I expect that my service will survive even if Excite does not. Living out in the boonies is a different question. They're marginal to begin with.
If I remember correctly phone service only has about 95-98% penetration. There are still plenty of people that don't have in-door plumbing. No market ever really fully saturates, the margins just get smaller.
After retrenchment it will expand again. Years will pass. Cable and then fiber are the future. All but seriously marginal abodes will have fiber in 20 years.
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:DSL for everyone... (Score:2, Insightful)
Hmmm, this seems to be exactly what Cringley said in his article. Nobody, so far, has been able to make a profit and they are not likely to in the near(?) future.
You make a good point about the small local providers though -- if there's any hope for the future it lies with them. The big guys overexpanded and overspent, and are now (justifiably) going bust.
The Way Things Are Supposed to Work (Score:2)
This is an example to cite to the "Marketplace will Provide" true believers. There's more to making technology work than simple profit-and-loss.
Capitalism at work. (Score:2, Insightful)
However, a lot of providers got caught up in the hype. They raked in millions of investor money, set stupidly optimistic goals for themselves and got proverbial suits waaay too large for their proverbial bodies. Take Exodus for example, with their we-will-withstand-a-nuclear-war-bunkers.
So basically, any firm who has asked itself "do the clients really need this, and can we afford to run it in the long term" will do just fine. This is perhaps the Old Economy way of doing it, but hey -- the time of crazy new business models with investors on speed is past. Perhaps rates will go up, perhaps one provider will establish itself as the Sole Monopolistic Ruler, perhaps we'll all get screwed in the end. But it's just capitalism. Nothing new.
I'll but not dead (Score:2, Insightful)
Broadband IS dead, or certainly dying. By this, I mean that the industry for providing homes and individual users with Internet access at speeds in excess of 500 kilobits-per-second is not generally viable, and the current players in that business are likely to decline over time.
But that's not "dead" or even "dying". I'll believe "dead" when Comcast turns off my Internet service.
Cringely may have good insights but he needs to lose the sensational headlines.
Re:I'll but not dead (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, and RoadRunner isn't going anywhere eit.*(P&(_&* ^)*(&PFSAS
NO CARRIER
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.
Re:grave implications to publishing (Score:2, Insightful)
On the other hand, if everyone drops broadband,
Canadian Rural Broadband Plan Likely to Die (Score:2, 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.
Broadband is in the hands of large companies (Score:2)
We have seen Northpoint, Covad, Rhythms and now @Home all go down the tubes. These were all pretty much small companies who's business plans were centric to broadband, with exception of @home but it got bought by a doomed DotCom) But pretty much their ENTIRE revenue stream came from providing people service. The growing pains of emerging technolgies have really hurt these companies as the cost to set up and run service has been consistently outweighing incoming revenue. I would like to see some of their business plans and ETA to profitability.
On the other hand - Who is still providing service? The major players left are the baby bells, and Roadrunner. All companies that get their major source of revenue from something else OTHER than broadband. The baby bells get it from telephone service. Roadrunner gets it from it's media conglomerate father. Starting to make sense?
We're slowly seeing the remaining DSL assets get bidded on and bought by major companies. Maybe that will help their businesses survive and not leave their customers "out in the cold."
I feel curious. (Score:2)
Re:I feel curious. (Score:2, Informative)
From whence came that gem of wisdom.
In the UK the largest ISP, Demon, owned by Thus, is unprofitable. BT charges all DSL ISPs an astonishing $60 a month for use of their copper. ISPs can only charge a small mark-up (c. $10). Would you like to run a broadband ISP on $10 per month? To make things worse, BT then limits the number of sign-up to 10 a week. That's right - you can only sign up 10 customers a week and only have $10 a month to maintain your equipment, rent your bandwidth and hire your support staff. British broadband ISPs are losing money hand-over-fist and when the VC money runs out will need to merge.
In Germany, T Online, the largest broadband ISP is signing up lots of customers. Germany has the largest ISDN user base in the world and is the process of converting them to ADSL. Unfortunately T Online isn't making money out of broadband either, as customers are paying less per month for ADSL than they did for ISDN and T Online has to buy expensive equipment and do lots of costly installations.
I'm not saying broadband is dead. Of course it isn't. Technology pundits should be banned from making ridiculous statements. But is true that there is no viable business model for providing ADSL right now.
Not dead in the Southeast! (Score:2, Informative)
I am a residential customer of Bellsouth Fastaccess DSL, I pay 45$ a month for 1.5 mbits down, and 256 kbits up.
I have yet to have any service outages, and while the service is PPPoE based, it still works wonderfully reliably.
My friend just signed up recently, and there's no reason to suspect his experience will be different.
Just check dslreports.com, and notice how almost every entry on Bellsouth is a "smooth ride", or at least, acceptable.
Broadband is far from dead.
Here it's very much alive (Score:2, Informative)
The "domestic" Speedy grants me a static IP address and is supposed to have the low ports (0-1024) blocked - but they aren't. It costs around US$ 45,00 /month in total. The one I have at home is 128 Kbps.
The "business" Speedy at the office gives me 5 static addresses (although not in the same net block) and is currently 256 Kbps. It costs around US$ 80,00 and is promised to never have any ports blocked.
Both flavors can be juiced up to 2 Mbps if I'm willing to pay up to US$ 400,00/month.
Technically the service is provided by the phone company and you shouldn't need a specific ISP for it to work. Legislation, though, forces customers to sign up with the provider of their choice for what is essentially an "Internet tax" - it's the workaround found to resolve jurisdiction over the service.
I call it a tax because the ISP side of the equation is totally unnecessary. The thing works equally well with or without the ISP. All the ISPs do for Speedy customers is to provide support - which I don't need anyway.
Anyway, the formula seems to be working and a big portion of my city's Internet connection has become DSL lines, both for home and for business purposes.
Hmm. (Score:2)
Network service will stay.. what will go are the @home specific services: email addresses, website, etc. They are already transitioning existing users, and signing new users up, using @shaw.ca email addresses I believe.
As for DSL.. It's widely available in Canada... and doens't appear to be going bankrupt.. perhaps because it's actually run, for the most part, by our phone companies, not by middlemen (which, if you ask me, is the real problem)
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!!!
How much trouble is cable having? (Score:2)
And then they told me I was too far away.
And then they told me I was fine again.
And so on.
Finally, After about a month and a week or two, I just called Time Warner to get road runner. By the weekend, it had been set up.
I'm not suprised these guys are losing tremendous amounts of money. (DSL)
feeeeeeeew (Score:2, Funny)
Blacksburg Broadband (Score:2, Informative)
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.
In the big city of blacksburg (14,000 full time residents and 25,000 Virginia Tech students) the majority of people that are in the area already have broadband, either on campus or as an ethernet connection from their appartment to the campus network. I'm not sure what kind of connection the campus has but it is nice. Cable access is picking up any slack that is left by any dsl problems. As a matter of fact my appartment building is getting wired for cable internet access later this month. (Whoo hoo! No more 56k!)
Pipe not content and video-on-demand (Score:2)
Even more so than content surfing I telework 40+ hrs a week, so again.. I JUST NEED A FAST CONSUMER-GRADE PIPE.
When will the cable companies do video-on-demand by putting hard drives in the digital cable boxes? How long can it take to xfer a 1GB movie to your cable box over the LOCAL LAN? It can't take all that long. Download it for $3, watch it an unlimited number of times for 3 days, and its automatically deleted. It just doesn't seem that hard to me.
DSL as a replacement for T1? (Score:2)
Whatever (Score:2)
I am going to run my own broadband service. That's right, I think I can make money where other companies failed. Why? Because these startups were idiots! Everyone wants broadband! My friends who really aren't computer people, are signing up for DSL or cable, happily shelling out $50/mo.
If you can't make money providing a simple service to customers who will pay you $50 a month and be happy if they can just get their porn, well you're dumb. I may be oversimplifying things, but here is the fact: Plenty of times, people have wanted things. Stuff like cars, computers, and broadband Internet. If people want things, the bottom line is that SOMEONE is going to sell it to them! When these companies fail, it's not because people don't want the product - it's because of poor management. Management that couldn't see the eventual downturn in Internet companies was coming, management who thought $2M super bowl commercials, where most of the viewers weren't actually in the service area, were a really good idea.
Yeah, the current round of dumbshit broadband providers is failing.. so what? There are millions of people out there, without service, who are PRAYING for someone to come along and take their $50/mo. Broadband just isn't going away.. it's not an inherently 'unprofitable' market. Few things are.
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!
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?)
The problem with the dsl market is the competitors (Score:2)
Northpoint had excellent service. I wish they could have stayed in business, would have saved me thousands of dollars over the T1 that I have now. Both lines were actually with Savvis. T1 is just dang expensive for a small company. It's more than my house payment!
Blacksburg isn't just DSL ... (Score:2, Informative)
---------------
What if the Hokie Pokie really is what it's all about?
If broadband dies... (Score:2, Funny)
That's where the money is.
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.
Meanwhile, Small ISP's who actually did it right.. (Score:2)
Why don't we just have more small-town ISPs? If I could get the funding (that's something I have absolutely no clue about) I'd even start something. It's a simple business. You just keep the servers up, charge people monthly, and have the cable company take care of the lines (ahhh...there's the problem!)
Seriously, though, I've had cable for close to 4 years, by a small ISP that caters to just this area. I was worried that we would be screwed when comcast bought out our local cable company, but it appears they let the ISP continue business as usual *whew*.
My only gripe is that although the service is reasonably good, when there is a problem, the admins are pretty clueless (microsoft shop, go figure). If I were to do it, I would certainly offer a better software solution than what they do for web-hosting, dns, dhcp, etc.
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?
Re:The problem with Broadband... (Score:2)
Mistaken? You can tell me I'm mistaken when:
1) PacBell no longer says it'll take 3 months to set up my DSL
2) PacBell's DSL in the area doesn't go down for hours every week
3) My local phone bills don't still cost more for a phone call several blocks down than a call to Texas
4) Cable to my apartment is less than $40 a month, base package
5) PacBell's tech support does something other than open tickets, and then close them without notifying the complainant or fixing the problem
6) The traffic on the cable modem network doesn't consist largely of port scans from Code Red
7) I can actually access the web pages I want to access from my Linux box
Well, looks like you've got your work cut out for you. Don't worry-- if it looks too easy to accomplish, I can find more items to add to my list.
Re:The problem with Broadband... (Score:2)
1) PacBell no longer says it'll take 3 months to set up my DSL
Not knowing where you are, but is PacBell still a monopoly in your area? Could the real problem possibly be that PacBell is busy supporting not only their own DSL customers, but also the customers of other DSL providers that are nothing but billing services that cost PacBell money in order to provide sham competition.
2) PacBell's DSL in the area doesn't go down for hours every week
There are strong service support regulations for true monopolies. Again, is this really a problem with them being a well regulated monopoly?
3) My local phone bills don't still cost more for a phone call several blocks down than a call to Texas
Sounds like you should change your intrastate long distance provider. You can, you know, because they aren't a monopoly anymore.
4) Cable to my apartment is less than $40 a month, base package
Not knowing what your basic cable package contains, nor what your basic cable bill is, I have no way to judge if it is unfair. Have you considered writing your local Corporation Commission and bitching to them, since they are the ones who regulate a monopoly? Where I live, the local cable company has been gigged several times by the local corporation commission for excessive prices. The CC has the legal right to do this only because they are a monopoly.
5) PacBell's tech support does something other than open tickets, and then close them without notifying the complainant or fixing the problem
Again, is this a problem with them being a well regulated monopoly, or with them having to deal with the other provider's customers?
6) The traffic on the cable modem network doesn't consist largely of port scans from Code Red
7) I can actually access the web pages I want to access from my Linux box
And what monopoly is this because of? Microsoft, who are in court because they are not regulated as a monopoly yet.
Re:just beutiful (Score:2)
I'm not sure if your are being sarcastic or serious, but regulation isn't the socialist approach - socialism would require the State to provide connectivity. Facism would require the State to force the private sector to provide connectivity in fashion and at the price the State demands, and capitalism would require the State to butt out and allow The Market to provide whatever the Market felt was profitable.
Re:You're full of shit. (Score:2)
As I said previously in this thread, contact your local Corporation Commission. They have the legal power to compell a licenses monopoly to provide proper service.
Now, a point about DNS. I've found that ***everybodies*** DNS servers are getting hammered. Where I work gets connectivity from UUNET, and their DNS servers are taking on average about 2 seconds to respond to a simple DNS lookup. So we just set up our own DNS server, configured NOT to forward to SpewScrewNyet. I suggest you do the same.
DNS was designed to have lots of servers supporting hundreds of users, but ISPs keep having thousands of users accessing the same three DNS servers. SpewScrewNet, AT&T, and several others I've dealt with have had the same problem. Especially with all the Windows clients that do NO caching of lookups.
Oh, Canada (Score:2)
$20 CAD = $12 USD
Imagine: $12 a month for DSL. My last order (January) took only 4 days to get it up and running. Compare that to 84 days (literally) from Telocity in San Francisco.
My dad got a cable modem. He's paying $40 a month. And they allow connection sharing -- just a hub and DHCP, no special software, nothing.
At work, we have DSL from dsl.ca (someone not the phone monopoly) an we even have a static IP. Imagine that.
Paul
We are the early adopters of broadband, (Score:2, Insightful)
Bring out your dead! (Score:2, Funny)
Cringely: Yes, he is.
Broadband: I'm not.
Cringely: Well, he will be soon. He's very ill.
Broadband: I'm getting better!
Cringely: No you're not. You'll be stone dead in a moment.
Broadband: I don't want to go on the cart
Cringely: Oh, don't be such a baby.
Broadband: I feel fine.
Cringely: Can you hang around? He won't be long.
Broadband: I think I'll go for a walk.
Cringely: You're not fooling anyone
Broadband: I feel happy! I feel happy!
Bandwidth is cheap. Installs are expensive. (Score:2)
Much of the install-cost problem for DSL providers is self-inflicted. US telcos have generally chosen to provide DSL through a separate subsidiary, then outsourced the physical install, and bundled the service with an ISP account. The result is that four organizations have to cooperate to install a DSL line. As commentators have pointed out, most of this coordination takes place via phone calls and fax messages. That's the real problem.
@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.
Re:@home sucks - A sad but true story... (Score:2)
As most
Surprisingly the Shaw service here has improved to the point where it has surpassed the local Telus DSL lines - @home users here were deserting the service for Telus DSL in droves. Shaw realized this, and separated themselves from the usless @home network.
In that separation - static IP's have become STATIC. (This sounds dumb, but "static" IP's on @home used to *CHANGE* every 6 months - WTF?) My bandwith has quadrupled, I can now get downloads up to 500kb/s (when previously, ~180 was the max).
Smaller compaines are more mobile in the broadband market - it is not yet ready for a large scale monopoly. Local "monopolies" are more versatile, and offer better service.
The companies will change - because they will have to or go out of business.
Make certain you *COMPLAIN* about the level of service though, or the companies will not change as they have no reason to do so. (They believe that their customers are happy.)
Doesn't anyone have a clue what broadband is for? (Score:5, Insightful)
Cringley falls into the same trap as everyone else when talking about what broadband is used for. It's not about speed. Nobody cares about "multimedia", and the reason that the video clips on CNN's website will never attract customers is that none of their customers care about the stupid video clips, not even the broadband customers; I'll go to their website to read the articles, and I'll watch TV if I want video. (When the major news sites pared down their website to the bare essentials on September 11, did you miss all the fluff?)
The reasons I have DSL are:
I wish broadband companies would stop trying to sell their service as some sort of expensive low-grade form of cable TV and instead figure out how to explain to customers the real advantages of a reliable, persistent internet connection. As first steps they could stop blocking ports and using dynamic IPs, and they could stop advertising high Mbps numbers, which nobody believes, and "streaming video", which nobody wants.
--Bruce Fields
Re:Doesn't anyone have a clue what broadband is fo (Score:2)
Excellent post. You spelled it out pretty thoroughly. If you weren't already at five, I'd mod you up even more.
No one cares about "streeeeeaming video"!
Nobody cares about streaming anything.
People don't want to tie up their phone line by reading their email. They want to browse a few of their favorite sites and not sit there twiddling their thumbs while the (inevitably bloated with graphics) page loads.
Some people want to play a decent low-latency game of quake (though unfortunately many broadband providers seem to trade latency for bandwidth whenever possible).
Re:Doesn't anyone have a clue what broadband is fo (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not joking. "Streaming video" right? Which sites really use it? Porn sites. Which sites propelled RealMedia into the spotlight? Which sites have consistantly upped the demand for bandwidth as soon as it becomes available? Which sites have been the most successful online, before and after the "dot-com" bubble?
Admit it, Slashdot, porn makes the Internet go round.
As for the rest of your reasons for using DSL, they're pretty marginal. Remember that during the outbreak of Code Red, most of the home clients running IIS who got infected didn't even know they were running it. Having a static IP is a big deal for you and me, but it isn't to people who are used to dial-up ISPs and have never thought it possible or necessary.
There are things broadband ISPs can do to attract people like us, but, let's face it, we're more of a liability than a benefit: we use more than our alloted share of bandwidth (much less than the number they quote in the commercials, and easily exceeded by your distro's latest ISO), bitch at the slightest problem or outage, and expect a lot more out of the service than your average user. They don't want us. They want the average user who sits at home collecting his porn and doesn't bother them.
Re:Doesn't anyone have a clue what broadband is fo (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm still online with phone lines that give me the equivalent of a 28.8. Web pages don't take that long to load, and I've discovered that even with a lousy dial-up account, I can download or
peer to peer trade one hell of a lot over the course of a month with the right software. Right now, it's costing me 19.95 to do this. I would pay 10 bucks more a month for 256 or 512K access, as long as I can do all that I can do with my dial-up access. Extra speed is just not worth all that much to me; I have reliable connectivity and patience, and only so much time in my life to mess with whatever I'm downloading.
The real problem with broadband is that it's a luxury for a lot of ordinary users and there's no compelling reason to cause them to upgrade. I'm not interested in having it unless it's inexpensive.
Ethernet belongs in the aether (Score:2, Insightful)
Most posts here (as well as Cringely) have overlooked wireless. While the infrastructure for cable and DSL (miles of cables and vast banks of centralized switches) are ~ twenty and fifty years old, respectively, wireless relies on fresh technology with very low cost of installed infrastructure. Further, as the technology changes, you change the transmitters and receivers and software, which are cheap compared to laying and maintaining cables and switches, and independent of any fixed wire technology.
Who doesn't have a cell-phone now? I pay 2 cents a minute to call anywhere in the US. Yet no one foresaw this as little as half a dozen years ago. I don't even bother locking my car when my cellphone's on the front seat...it's more hassle for someone to steal one now than to buy one.
Broadband is already far along in the process of co-opting the excellent technologies developed for digital cellular. I traded in my T1 line last year for a 10MBit wireless connect beamed to me direct from my ISP. It costs me 35 bucks a month.The ISP can give this service to anyone within ten miles (they put up a little antenna on a building downtown). I routinely get 750KBytes up and down in real-world use.
Broadband is not endangered, only the retro technologies used to deliver it. Within the next few years, small entrepreneurs like my ISP will rapidly move in to fill the vacuum (pun intended) left by the likes of @Home. Broadband is not capital intensive, it is imagination intensive, so it plays to the strengths of smaller companies. The typical wireless entrepreneur will not have to protect or monetize existing assets like phone wires or television cables. Wireless can be installed simply and cheaply, and it works right away.
I think we'll see a replay of the situation in the mid 90s, when limber ISPs pioneered services based on (cheap) modem banks, then were amalgamated into the larger telcos and cable companies. Fast-moving technologies always favor the fast-moving players.
New players entering the market, too (SPRINT ION) (Score:2)
Cringely didn't seem to notice that, two years after their initial announcements, Sprint has finally rolled out their service. Based on the web site and hype, it seems to (finally) be everything they promised back in 1999.
I don't have the service yet -- so I can't comment on how good it is -- but I'll post something when it's installed.
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.
Everything Old Is New Again (Score:2)
Seriously, like others have said, I've been broadband for years. I had ISDN, then DSL, and am currently running both DSL and cable as I evaluate the latter. (Cable is winning.) Broadband is a pretty lively corpse around here!
"Good times and bum times, I've seen them all and, my dear, I'm still here."
-- Follies
*DSL is dying (Score:2)
You don't need to be a Cringely to predict *DSL's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *DSL faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *DSL because *DSL is dying. Things are looking very bad for *DSL. As many of us are already aware, *DSL continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
ADSL leader PacBell states that there are 7000 users of ADSL. How many users of SDSL are there? Let's see. The number of ADSL versus SDSL posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 SDSL users. MVL/DSL posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of SDSL posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of MVL/DSL. A recent article put Cable Modem at about 80 percent of the Broadband market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Cable users. This is consistent with the number of Cable Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Qwest, abysmal sales and so on, ADSL went out of business and was taken over by Northwood who sell another troubled broadband service. Now Northwood is also dead, its corpse turned over to another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *DSL has steadily declined in market share. *DSL is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *DSL is to survive at all it will be among hardcore child pornography dabblers. *DSL continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *DSL is dead.
Denver sure was pretty (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:slashdot frontpage glitch? (Score:2)
Re:slashdot frontpage glitch? (Score:2)
It is called 'supervise' and comes with daemontools [cr.yp.to].
Re:The question: is there demand? (Score:2)