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How Much Does a New Internet Cost?
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Sun Aug 19, 2007 07:41 PM
from the someone-call-al-gore dept.
from the someone-call-al-gore dept.
wschalle writes "Given the recent flurry of articles concerning ISP over subscription, increasing bandwidth needs, and lack of infrastructure spending on the part of cable companies, I'm forced to wonder, what is the solution? How much would a properly upgraded internet backbone cost? How long would it take to make it happen? Will the cable companies step up before Verizon's FiOS becomes the face of broadband in America?"
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How much? (Score:5, Insightful)
It will always cost as much as you are willing to pay, and the upgrade does not matter here at all.
Re:How much does it cost not to... (Score:5, Insightful)
Free market. End government supported monopolies to the extent possible.
I don't see why a private company doesn't set up a city-wide 802.11 wireless network. Businesses and private owners would be likely to let the company use the very small space required for the equipment, since customers would find wireless access attractive. Vending machines operate on this kind of principle, and there is no shortage of those.
It's nice to think that government could take care of the infrastructure instead, but do you trust the same people who can't fix potholes in asphalt with managing and maintaining a wireless LAN?
I don't, especially since after the network is installed, there's no political gain for maintaining it. It's the same reason great sysadmins whose systems never fail are typically seen as unnecessary.
Parent
Re:How much does it cost not to... (Score:5, Informative)
MetroFi [metrofi.com], actually, did just that - and I live within their coverage.
The MetroFi's signal is decent, but they require a login before you can access any IPs beyond the registration server, so if you have equipment that assumes connectivity (like an IP phone, or even a PS3) then it does not work (since there may be no browser to do the login first.)
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Re:How much does it cost not to... (Score:5, Informative)
my dorms in college did the same thing (you had to get past cisco's clean access), and i used the same method to get my openwrt box on the network (cause the wireless signal strength in my dorm room was like -84dbm).
hope this helps!
Parent
Re:How much? (Score:5, Interesting)
You must live in a different part of Canada than I do. I am fortunate enough to have a choice between cable and dsl.
Rogers throttles the shit out of the connection, imposes monthly bandwidth caps, and won't sell me service with a static address or the ability to run "servers". Gibbled service from Rogers costs about the same as cable in the US.
Bell has monthly bandwidth caps, and I get frequent disconnects and piss poor sync rates because even though I'm in a residential area of a half million person area (Kitchener/Waterloo/Cambridge) that they say will get 3-5Mbps I'm 6.2km wire distance from the CO that's 3km away. It took 3 months for them to figure out that my connection blows because of the wire distance. Bell will give me an unstable piece of shit line with static address and ability to run servers for $99/month. Other DSL providers use the same copper, and so provide an unstable piece of shit line, for around $30/month.
Excellent service at very reasonable prices? Not here.
Parent
Re:How much? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:How much? (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, that isn't a good comparison either. Over 90% of the Canadian population lives within 150 km of the U.S.-Canada border. This means there are vast areas of Canada that don't have a person living there, let alone Internet access. In the U.S. there are towns scattered throughout the entire lower 48 states which would need to be provided with access.
Parent
About 49.95 a month, if I install it myself (Score:5, Funny)
Where's the bottleneck? (Score:5, Interesting)
I've heard countless stories about how the Internet was going to be choked, but it's been a long time since I've heard widespread complaints about over-subscription on a particular cable loop. And I haven't heard anything specific about data not getting from Chicago to San Diego fast enough, or from New York to Europe.
Instead, all I've heard are complaints by ISPs and industry bloggers saying that ISPs can't push all the data they're being paid to. I haven't seen any real evidence in a while. (But then, most of my tech news comes from Slashdot...)
Re:Where's the bottleneck? (Score:5, Informative)
Google is pushing vendors for very fast, high density interconnect. 10Gbps from the server to the mesh. An IEEE study group just green lighted work on a 100Gbps ethernet standard. The target market for this is in metropolitan networks.
An OC-192 fiber connection is worth a mere 622.080 Mbps. Layer-3 switches can operate at roughly 240Gbps.
The noise is all about the business model not about the fundamentals. The backbone providers are becoming something of a commodity service. This would be okay if the tax structure let them provide their service + pay dividends. Instead every company has to be a 'growth company'. Ergo, they have a problem. There is no revenue growth future in what they are doing--unless they can dig their teeth into a new revenue stream--e.g., by raising the rents of content providers.
Parent
Re:Where's the bottleneck? (Score:5, Informative)
OC-192 is approx 10gb/s.
We are moving to GIG-E 10Gig- connections for backbones now, as Ethernet interfaces are way cheaper than POS (Packet of Sonet) ones.
Parent
What's in it for the providers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What's in it for the providers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, maybe the government can step in and develop a public/private partnership, and then offer them tax breaks to offset the costs of infrastructure upgrades. IIRC, similar models are in place for the military, the oil industry, and big pharma.
Oh, wait
Parent
Interesting question (Score:5, Informative)
At some point arrived an operator named Free. They offered a no-contract, local call (no more expensive than calling your neighboor) RTC service that was a huge success (along with e-mail and web-site hosting).
When came the time of moving to DSL (able never was a real success in France), again the prices were high and the choice scarce. Free deployed its own equipments and offered a low-cost 512 Kb Downstream ADSL access (30 EUR a month, about $40, when others were more easily around 60 EUR).
That proved to be a nice example of how competition pushes the market in good directions for the most parts).
Ever since, Free upgraded their access to 1 Mb, then 8 Mb. Today 25 Mb is available if you are lucky enough to be in the right zones (and to leave almost in the DSLAM, since DSL is distance dependant), with free national telephony (and free calls to a bunch of other countries like the US, landline or mobiles) as well as TV. All of that for the exact same amount of 30 EUR a month.
Let it be said, they might have invested a bunch in laying down the equipment. But they made it big, and customers saw right away where they should go.
Granted, there are issues with Free (poor hotline support, poor coverage for rural zones, accusations of violating GPL license in their terminal which seem to be true...), but they did bring the market to where it is today in France. At this point, Free is busy trying to bring fiber optic into buildings (no word yet on the price or speed for this future service).
No, laying down equipment and upgrading it to support faster delivery speed does not seem to require a "price upgrade" if the business model involves selling what customers are ready to purchase. Investment is not about hitting the customer, it's about planning what return you expect of it.
One simple solution (Score:5, Funny)
Re:One simple solution (Score:5, Funny)
(Hint: There is no list, they just put your name on a giant board at the telco along with all of the other suckers on dail-up so everyone can have a good laugh.)
Parent
There isn't just one Internet backbone. (Score:5, Insightful)
That depends (Score:5, Interesting)
They're getting a pretty sweet deal right now so a few hundred million in lobbyists, campaign contributions and other misc bribes is nothing. [muniwireless.com]
The cost of the actual wires vanishes when compared to the munny-munny-munny nonsense of the political side.
"Socialize" it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyway, the government should make, lay, and lease the fiber to the service providers, or even create one themselves. It would provide a MAJOR employment boost for the people, most notably the linemen who would actually lay the fiber. The manufacturing of it isn't rocket science and from the top down you could hire people for it, from the designers to the janitors. Teams of men and women would go out and work on the network and that would probably be thousands of jobs, if only temporarily. Keep some on per region (or many depending on how hard it is to upkeep) and keep the manufacturing plants open to sell the fiber to businesses.
Lay it all out like we did the highway systems, charge Verizon, Time Warner et. al. to use it. If it breaks, it's like a pothole, fix it.
Make it a not for profit (as if the government wasn't already) take all money from it and put it back into the network, not into some bridge to no where.
Upgrade as necessary, keep the country moving forward, the internet is too important to the world to allow it to slow or crash (not that I fear a crash).
My name is Anonymous Coward and I am running for President.
The longhaul is the problem... (Score:5, Insightful)
Those of you that work in a corporate environment with any density (>20 users on a floor, more than one floor)... If you've got a gigabit LAN, go ask your network guy if they have a 10-gig uplink for every 10 ports on the floor.
.
.
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After he stops laughing and realizes you're serious, ask him why they are running an oversubscribed network. If he's on the design side, he'll end up telling you that you don't build a network for that level of traffic if it simply doesn't use it (most don't). The most likely place you're going to see a fully non-oversubscribed network is one that supports a supercomputer with many nodes. Even then you might see some.
It's just not economically feasible to build non-oversubscribed networks. Any of you know how much a card for a Cisco GSR that has just two OC-192 intermediate-reach ports on it is? MSRP is $585,000.
$585K for two 10 gigabit intermediate reach ports. And to build a non-oversubscribed network for a small community with say 2000 users on 8-meg cable connections that cost $60 a month. Gotta pay for the cable plant itself (to a certain degree), the fiber to link the customer-facing nodes (how much it cost to dig/hang/lay the fiber), the routers in the customer-facing nodes, the cards in the routers in those nodes (more bandwidth = higher cost cards), the distribution routers that link all the customer nodes together (and their cards), core routers with higher-speed interfaces to tie it all together if you have any decent number of distribution nodes (and their cards), peering routers to your upstream bandwidth provider (and cards), maintenance on every router/switch (which runs ~20-30% yearly over and above the purchase price), spares of a few of your most commonly-failing equipment, datacenter space, AC, cooling, engineering staff costs, field maintenance staff costs, systems administrators staff costs, 24x7 NOC staff costs, 24x7 helpdesk costs, multiple layers of management (each of those fields has to have management in an organization of any size), training costs to keep up on the latest developments, staff turnover costs, taxes... and that's before we've paid for one bit of peering bandwidth or even thought about making a profit - or considered what Mother Nature, backhoes, or out of control drunk drivers do to the equipment and fiber that make up the customer-facing network that sits in equipment sheds on concrete pads on the side of the road. And don't forget to add another 100% or so to all of those equipment costs, for redundancy. Don't want the whole east side of the city down because one port/device/fiber failed, do you?
There's a lot more than just a couple of Linksys gig switches and some cable RF converters that make up a cablemodem network. There's more than just a card in a phone switch that makes up a DSL network. The gear is very expensive, typically because there's lots of R&D that must go into the boxes to make them able to do what they do without having horrendous failure rates (which still happens sometimes).
Re:Tell you what... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Tell you what... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Tell you what... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Dark Fiber (Score:5, Informative)
And then you have to assume that the dark fiber has actually been maintained sufficiently that it's worth using. Dark fiber often is left in the ground and ignored and when you go to use it you discover it doesn't work anymore.
Parent
Re:Silly me, I forgot t'internet == USA (Score:5, Insightful)
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