Not long after I overheard a Comcast ad on a college football broadcast, the doorbell rang. It was a guy wearing a Comcast shirt and carrying a clipboard-type contraption with some kind of a phone-like keyboard at one end. Under the clip was a list of channels. We greeted each other, and he asked me if we had cable. I said no, we just had Internet service.
“Oh, from RCN?”
“No, Verizon FiOS.”
“Oh. Just Internet?”
“That’s it.”
“No telephone?”
“We dropped it along with the television. We only use the Net.”
“Just Internet?”
“Just Internet.”
“What kind of speed are you getting?”
“We have 20Mb symmetrical service. Twenty up, twenty down.”
“We can beat that.”
“How?”
“We have fifty.”
“Fifty up and down?”
“Fifty. It’s expensive, though.”
“How much?”
“Seventy a month.”
“That’s not bad, if it’s symmetrical. What’s the upstream speed?”
“Fifty.”
“You sure? If you can tell me twenty up, we might have a deal.”
He wasn’t sure. “Hang on. Let me make a call.”
A conversation with somebody at Comcast followed. “Oh,” he said to the phone. “Okay… okay.” After hanging up, he said, “It’s fifty down and ten up.”
“Can’t do twenty, huh?”
He started to walk down the stairs in front of the house. “Only a tiny minority wants that,” he said.
“That might be the case nationwide,” I replied. “But around here with all these universities and businesses, you’ll get more demand. You might have sold me if you could have beaten Verizon’s offer.”
He shook his head. “It’s just a tiny minority.” And then he walked down the sidewalk, toward the next doorbell.
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I wish I could get a better Internet service provider like Verizon FiOS, it would make life a lot happier with out Comcast’s BS.. Like the 404 DNS redirect that… no one wants, Technicians that are contractors for your company that don’t do anything and blames the customer for the problem, Service that works 99.9% of the time, Tech’s and their managers that don’t lie to you over the phone and at for face, Tech’s that don’t show up and when they do they are late or really early.. like 7am on a Saturday, and 4 months of time and headaches wasted trying to get the service to work after Comcast upgrades your service, but some how only works when the tech’s are at your home. COMCAST FAIL
BTW this is a rant and I still want Verizon FiOS -
Here in the San Francisco bay area, I only get 2Mbs up.
On a good day, maybe 10Mbs down, but most of the time only 4Mbs down.
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So here’s the deal: you can have a symmetrical pipe, or you can have an unmanaged pipe, but you can’t have both. Why? Because that’s the way the Internet is designed.
Between your house to the nearest Internet Exchange Point, your ISP (any ISP, doesn’t matter who it is) aggregates a set of lower-speed pipes onto higher-speed pipes, multiple times; looking at it from the other direction, it disaggregates fat pipes onto narrow pipes multiple times.
If all the pipes are symmetrical but pipes get fatter further from your home, you will have congestion events on the downstream side but not so much on the upstream side. Users do more downstream than upstream, so ISPs provide more b/w on that side, reducing congestion, relieving the need for management, and reducing symmetry.
So which would you rather have, a symmetrical pipe or a dumb pipe? You can’t have both, so you have to choose; it’s the aggregation, you see.
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Here in Albuquerque, there is a company offering 100/150Mb symmetrical FTTH service for $80-100/month:
http://www.citylinkfiber.com/ftth-pricing-plans.html
Unfortunately, it is not available across the whole city (but their coverage is expanding):
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF&msa=0&msid=110651101806739184460.00046e70b9f77595deadd
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Lobbyists for regulation of the Internet claim that we MUST have onerous, overly prescriptive regulation because there’s no competition. But Doc’s account demonstrates that there is, indeed, competition, and that different people will choose different competitive offerings depending upon their needs.
Most home users don’t need blazing upstream speeds, so Comcast’s service will likely be attractive to a lot of people even though it wasn’t to Doc — who truly is part of a tiny minority. (I’m an Internet power user, and I don’t need 20 Mbps upstream.)
So, why regulate? It’s clear that that competition is working.
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Doc, what’s keeping $FOO from running fiber all around Cambridge? Well, for one, the poles are privately owned. Okay, so put up your own poles. Oops, the government won’t let you do that. Well, then bury it. Nope, you need a license to do that. Well, then just string it from building to building. That’s fine until you want to cross a road. Again, gotta ask the government.
The incumbents didn’t have to cross all those barriers to entry. Hell, their practices were responsible for some of them being created. They were able to cross the barriers *after* having a proven business model.
We need to be clear here: if there’s a natural monopoly in telecom, it’s only because the government created it.
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If one is “trafficking” in products that require high bandwidth to transmit, the best solution by far is to rent space in a server farm. Getting the same kind of capacity to every individual home, when most people don’t need it, can cost a lot of money and wouldn’t be a good investment for the carrier.
As for competition: it exists even in very small towns like the one I live in, which has at least 10 facilities-based providers and dozens of non-facilities-based ones. But admittedly, there is one thing competition won’t do: carriers won’t compete to lose money on customers. Bandwidth is not free; spectrum isn’t free; fiber isn’t free; copper isn’t free. Competition will keep the price fair, but we will all still have to pay our freight.
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Sorry Russell, but I know exactly what I’m talking about.
It doesn’t matter whether your first mile is symmetrical or not, the structure of the Internet does not support fully symmetrical usage end-to-end. In order to access the Internet – you know, that big, sprawling, world-wide network – you need to get to an Internet Exchange Point, and the endpoint you want to access has to get to one too. While there’s a mesh between well-connected IXPs, the connections between the edge of the first mile network and the IXP are a series of aggregation and disaggregation points. Aggregation is taking many lines down to one, and disaggregation is the reverse. Tell me how we do that with equal size pipes without creating congestion on the aggregated links or with unequal pipes without creating congestion on thr disaggregated links.
Hint: over-provisioning is under-provisioning from another point of view.
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Hong Kong is a city of high-rise buildings where it’s cheap to pull fiber and easy to advertise ridiculous (local) speeds. Access to content outside HK is at the mercy of undersea cables, so all that bandwidth does for you is get you to the bottleneck faster. I’ve done ping and traceroute tests from Korea and found the same thing.
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Doc, the reason Lafayette, LA can offer very high capacities inside their network but not to the Internet is that they pay $50 per Mbps per month for Internet backbone bandwidth. (You were at Isenberg’s conference when they quoted this number.) They can’t resell this bandwidth below cost! Unfortunately, unless the FCC is able to free itself of the diversion of unnecessary “network neutrality” regulation and focus on actual problems, such as price gouging on “special access” lines and the middle mile, this situation will persist.
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Pings and traceroutes within Korea are very fast, but between Korea and the rest of the world they’re pedestrian.
Mr. Leyden fails to mention an interesting aspect of the Hong Kong service: the international speed is 20 Mb/s. There are services available in the US in comparably densely-populated areas that offer this much capacity for a similar price, once you take out the taxes, fees, USF contributions, eRate, and all the other burdens on the bill.
So what can we learn from Asian broadband? There is an intense transnational rivalry between Japan, Korea, and Hong Kong to offer the highest speed broadband for the lowest price per month. The governments have stoked the rivalry by subsidizing fiber in the cities, where most people live in high-rise buildings. The highest speeds are reserved for local end-to-end connections (no hollow sphere) and their primary use is for low-latency gaming and high capacity P2P (mostly piracy and/or porn).
From these examples and similar dynamics in Scandinavia, one can deduce that extremely high broadband speeds are enabled by population density and subsidy, but they’re mainly the result of national rivalries. The US is at a disadvantage, as we don’t really have a national rival. We don’t particularly care what they can do in Japan or Sweden or even Canada. And if the truth be known, bad weather and crappy TV programming probably creates more demand for very high speed broadband than most other factors.
National telecoms regulators are aware of the fact that the rationale of very high speed broadband is entertainment, not productivity or free speech.
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Its all about chasing shadows.
By that I mean latching on to this or that latest, most innovative idea that some self styled money making guru has put out in the hope it’ll go viral and make them a lot of money off the backs of all the headless chickens who will follow them blindly down a blind alley. Its a shame but a truism nonetheless that people will follow where someone they see as an expert leads. Even if they lead them to certain disaster, which is what most of the gurus tend to do to their flocks.
The trick is to recognize a shadow when you see it!
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