How Much Does a New Internet Cost? 446
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?"
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.
How much does it cost not to... (Score:3, Insightful)
Whatever it is that we are being sold, it is ineffective at best and long-term incredibly damaging to education,
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.
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.)
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!
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Re:How much does it cost not to... (Score:4, Informative)
ifconfig eth1 hw ether 00:00:00:00:00:00
login with the Linux box (as your PS3's mac address), then swap over to your PS3 or whatever. that's what he meant by mac spoofing
WiMax (Score:2)
However, the "free market" that you advocate has been turned into a license for the entrenched "monopolies." Our government is us, or should be us anyway. I would expect any business where the management removes itself from the function would run that way.
But, if a goal-oriented "internet" is off-topic, what can I say? It was established with a purpose, and will need to be reevaluated and continually rebuilt for purposes. These purposes will become
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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.
They do. Or at least around Seattle they do. Clearwire offers plans around here. Not as fast as DSL or cable, but the price is competitive and if one has a laptop or similar portable the service is available around town.
I can't vouch for the quality or the value, but at least around here they represent an additional option. Also hughes offers satellite service as well. So yes there are other companies that have figured out how to get in on the action besides the DSL and cable carriers.
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What it has is a city run fiber-to-the-house system. Basically, it works in that just about any provider can signup and provide service on the network, so you get your choice of internet providers while operating on the same network. You can checkout the background here: http://www.utopianet.org/ [utopianet.org] . The service also allows for more than just internet, you can run IPTV and VOIP services over it as well, on separate chunks of bandwidth so your phone doesn't drop ou
Re:How much? (Score:4, Interesting)
And he doesn't worry about caps or any of that bullshit. He transferred some Linux ISOs to a friend who lived across the city, and he was actually maxing out his 60 Mbps connection. It probably helped that his friend had an 80 Mbps connection, although he paid a fair bit more for it.
Now, I know there will be people who say I'm full of shit. I would have thought so, too, until seeing it with my own eyes. Coming back to the American Internet experience, I felt like I'd stepped back decades. I often wonder how great our Internet infrastructure would be had the money spent on the Iraq War debacle instead been put to better domestic use. Maybe we'd be comparable to a nation like South Korea.
Thankfully, I've since moved to Canada, where we get excellent service at a very reasonable price.
Re:How much? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:How much? (Score:4, Insightful)
Just saying, cable doesn't suck everywhere..
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.
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I agree. Don't use Rogers. ;-) Although, I'm quite keen on what they offer in Mobile Phone Service.. at least, compared to the other provider in my area.
Re:How much? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:How much? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How much? (Score:5, Informative)
It is all just endless streams of bull shit. Consider how much it cost to do the original copper telephone network, which contrary to the bull was far, far more expensive they any new fibre network and guess what the population has risen since then quite a lot in fact, so not only is copper tech more expensive but it had to be done with a far far lower population density, it had to be done with far more primitive technology, it had to be done using backward switching technology, telephone exchanges as major buildings and even the local was not a box but a whole building. Think each and every copper connection had to have it own line, it's own independent bit of wire, nothing like fibre at all with thousands of connections down the same line.
Face it, it is just bullshit, more bull shit and yet more bull shit. Under the current corrupt political system you will not be getting FTH until such time as the copper network degrades to the point were it significantly impacts the US economy, let me see, hmm, lets say 2025 at a minimum, possibly as late as 2050, good luck.
Re:How much? (Score:5, Insightful)
Key is who built it. Building a network with 99.99% penetration isn't economically defensible, you don't make any money providing fibre to a single family 100 km from the nearest town. It is an investment that it takes 50 years to become profitable so no company would ever do that. However, a fibre network to each household benefits society in a number of ways, just like telephone lines do. Which is why it was state owned entities that built the telephone network. But in the US, it is somehow expected of the cable companies to provide a completely covering network. So strong is the American belief in Capitalism that companies are expected to do things for the greater good of society even if they cannot profit from it.
The world just doesn't work that way. But in the US they have choosen the low taxes and each man for himself way and crappy infrastructure is the price they pay.
Re:How much? (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, in the U.S. the telecomm companies have so far recieved 200 billion in tax breaks and grants from the government to build out data network infrastructure and to compensate them for unprofitable build-outs. Unfortunatly, they proved themselvces to be con artists by pocketing the money and failing to provide the services.
The only unreasonable part was believing that the telcos are honest companies that will actually provide the goods and services they are paid to provide. They should ALL be in court defending against criminal fraud charges. That's where the bribes and corruption come in.
A few years ago, Bellsouth dug up my neighborhood to run new phone lines everywhere. Considering that the biggest expense in running cable is the digging, one might have thought they'd lay fibre in parallel while they were at it, but they didn't. Of course, they never bothered to bury the lines from curb to demarc at many of the homes. The line comes up from a pedistal, over a small pine tree up alongside the driveway, and to the back of the house. They left an extra 15 feet or so of slack laying in a big loop in the back yard. I guess it was just too hard to reach all the way to the toolbelt for the cutters or a zip tie.
It is noteworthy that 10GigE is now a ratified standard and works perfectly well over the same single mode fiber already in the ground everywhere. The simple upgrade was a strong consideration when the spec was written. It is now easier than ever before to increase available bandwidth by an order of magnitude, so where is it?
Dear USA, bend over. (Score:4, Funny)
And we have been replacing copper networks FOR OURSELVES during that time, but NOT delivering ONE INCH of what you've been paying for to you suckers.
We, the telcos, have been sitting on a growing pile of your tax dollars and using the latest and best technologies to our own benefit and WE'RE not about to stop doing so until a couple of CEOs get sent to prison.
Screw you,
-the telcos
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hrm, I wonder how much dark fibre there is in the US? from what I understand, there is tonnes of it. to/from large cities at least, the US most likely has the potential to up speeds quite a bit. They just need the incentive to do it.
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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.
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Too Much. (Score:3, Interesting)
B) It costs a lot. In the case of a fiber drop, it can be 3-5k per house, if they use the cheaper PON solutions.
C) The time cycle to build out a new network is longer than the technology cycle that drives the bandwidth demands. By the time it is finished, the bandwidth demand will be 10 times what the estimated it to be. Unless they are one of t
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You'd still need a backbone to cross long uninhabited expanses, but that's all.
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I figure that will be the way forward... final nails in the coffin of centralized information control, first nails in the coffin of centralized manufacturing control.
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I remember a friend discussing how he was working with a sensor company that was struggling to maintain 200 bytes per second over a large mesh (20 nodes),
That's ALL???? (Score:3, Interesting)
That, my friend is EVERYTHING. Try wandering out of [insert large city name] sometime. Distributed wireless mesh coast to coast is a total fantasy.
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I don't believe there is any big network issue that cannot be fixed with technology today. I just don't think that any of the corps that have the power to change have the incentive to change. Until they do, or are pushed we'll keep on running out of internets like we have been for the last 20 years!
About 49.95 a month, if I install it myself (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
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.
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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
Re:What's in it for the spoiled brats? (Score:4, Interesting)
The telcos will, individually, if they find that without doing so they'll be at a competitive disadvantage. Under any other scenario, not a chance.
Tell you what... (Score:2, Interesting)
If that much money had been spent on internet infrastructure, we'd probably have 99% wireless penetration and 10Gbps fiber to the home for $30/month.
Yeah, the cost of that war is *that* ridiculous.
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Re:Tell you what... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Tell you what... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Emergency Military spending has been the name of the game for Iraq and Afghanistan military spending.
Emergency money is not part of the 'normal' budget.
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Re:Tell you what... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Tell you what... (Score:5, Informative)
Theoritically (Score:3, Interesting)
Then of course do you want backups- do you want to protect california for example, against earthquakes, possibly by wireless, or by several backbones running perpendicular to each other.
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Ask my staff (Score:4, Funny)
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Infrastructure (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Interesting question (Score:5, Insightful)
France is pursuing, roughly, the public policy that the US adopted in the mid-1990s: Unbundle the local loop, permit competitive interconnection, encourage competition for services over the incumbent's old wire. That was, in fact, the gist of the Telecom Act of 1996.
In 2001, the Cheney-Rove regime's new FCC executed an about-face. They decided that the Bells were to be the winners, And their competitors were not to be. Furthermore, the Bells saw the Internet as the real enemy, not local telephone competitors per se, so they were allowed to execute their strategy to knock off the ISPs while replacing it with their own marginal substitutes. The last stage, which has not yet happened, is to remove "neutrality" from their networks, replacing Internet access with a set of "broadband services" of their own, like kickback-selected shopping, censored "news", and pay-per-view "media" access. That could never happen with real competition. The FCC's excuse is that there's cable, and a duopoly is "enough" competition, especially with the imaginary "third pipe" that never really appears in any useful way.
France, in contrast, stayed the course. There are multiple ISPs sharing the old FT wire. So advances in DSL technology meant advances in available speeds, and reductions in DSLAM prices and backbone ISP rates meant reductions in DSL charges. It's not exactly peaches and cream for FT, but it's great for the economy as a whole.
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A few things to add (Score:3, Interesting)
"Poor rural coverage" is relative. They cover (I believe) most 50k+ cities directly. Below that you might only get slightly lesser co
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.)
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Forget Infrastructure! Broadband Over Powerlines! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Forget Infrastructure! Broadband Over Powerline (Score:3, Insightful)
BPL was a dumb idea from the start. (Score:3, Insightful)
Using power lines combines the worst of DSL, unshielded wiring (even worse, since it's unbalanced)
Re:BPL was a dumb idea from the start. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Forget Infrastructure! Broadband Over Powerline (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Don't they give them out for free? (Score:2)
"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.
Fiber (Score:2)
The solution (Score:2)
The solution: Stop reading the articles.
I don't get it. (Score:2)
The Internet seriously went downhill after the NAPs were sold off.
As long as the phone companies and cable companies own these pipes, monopolies will exist forever.
Andy
my boss adds... (Score:2)
And can you send it to me on CD?
We need new ideas. phone co's own the backbone. (Score:2)
We need fiber to the p(fttp) or FTTH.
We need multiplexing.
I am wondering about the limitations of digital tech and all this bandwidth. Maybe thats the bottleneck also.
An analog system for mass high speed downloads?? A hybrid system?
Move to Japan... (Score:3, Insightful)
As an American living in Japan, the prospect of moving back to the US is quite dismal when considering broadband. Currently I'm paying about $50/mo. for 50 Mbps ADSL. NTT in the last couple of months has rolled out a fiber optic service for approx $90/mo. at 100Mbps. I don't live in Tokyo or any other big city you might think of when you think of Japan. I live in the boonies of Aomori Prefecture and it is available.
Click and be jealous/angry (if you're american) http://flets.com/english/opt/charge_opt_hf.html [flets.com] (there is still an ISP charge on top of this number which is why I said ~$90 earlier)
It's a shame and disgrace the US is so far behind... Verizon promoting their FiOS at 5Mbps as top-of-the-line is a joke. But hey, FCC says better deals/competition will come from all the telcom mergers... 10 years from now maybe the US will see 25 Mbps service!
OH NO NOT THAT SHIT AGAIN (Score:5, Insightful)
This stupid argument has been debunked a zillion times, including a few times in this very page already.
The only reason why broadband sucks in the US is because of CORRUPTION. Legal corruption, but corruption nonetheless.
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).
Can't be good natured on that question (Score:4, Insightful)
Geez.
You know, there are _real_costs_ to letting a bunch of monkeys run free destroying a nation this size and we're the victims of it.
Multiple non-trivial issues (Score:5, Insightful)
One obvious problem, at least in the United States, is the "last mile" or if you prefer "first mile" problem. In maybe half of homes it's a cable/ILEC (old monopoly phone company) duopoly. Most of the rest can get cable or telco DSL. A fair share can't get either yet. FCC statistics are intentionally deceptive about this, counting ZIP codes that have even one "broadband" subscriber as being served, even if most of the area isn't. And their 200 kbps downstream definition of "broadband" is pathetic.
DSL is a mid-life kicker for old copper. Passive Optical Network-style fiber, as in FiOS, is also questionable as a long-term goal; like ADSL, it too is highly assymetric, and it's really too expensive. (I think Verizon is doing it mainly for political show, and will slow down. Besides, FiOS is bundled with Verizon Online, with its onerous rules and likelihood of draconian censorship in the mid-term future.)
Still, I think it's premature to count out cable technology. Hybrid Fiber-Coax is an evolutionary path to bring optical fiber to the home. A decade ago, it was first being rolled out with maybe 1000 homes per node (optical transition node, where a strand of fiber turned to coax) and up to three analog coax amplifiers on the coax side. Modern builds have maybe 50-100 homes/node and no amplifiers. Thus far fewer users share the same capacity. DOCSIS 3.0, now being tested (CableLabs is very strict on compatibility certification), uses more than one 6 MHz TV channel at a time in order to boost download speeds. And while upstream is still a bottleneck, DOSCIS 2.0 tripled upstream efficiency over the original cable modems; as each DOCSIS 1.x modem is phased out, overall capacity can increase. There are also tricks for boosting upstream on a point basis by using the spectrum above 900 MHz as well as below 42 MHz, while cable companies can also just drop off fiber at a location that really needs it (not a house, but a business or multiple-dwelling-unit site).
Next glitch: The protocols themselves. TCP/IP is from the 1970s, and while it's amazing how far it's gotten, it is really not designed for today's applications. IPv6 is the wrong approach -- tastes crappy, more filling. We really need an all-new protocol stack; it's not obvious how to phase it in though, or get consensus on a replacement. Remember TCP/IP happened because the government financed it for its own internal use (ARPAnet) and Berkeley produced open source code for it, so it became a de facto standard for multivendor corporate networks too. (This during the 1980s when OSI was supposed to be the standard, and most companies used their vendors' proprietary network technologies like DECnet, IPX, SNA and Wangnet.)
Plus there's the business issue: It's hard to make money providing Internet service. The early public ISPs were subsidized by the 1990s stock bubble. Telco/cable duopolies are potentially profitable (actually, telcos may still be losing money at it, though cable does better) but pure ISPs have a tricky time meeting demand with the kind of prices people want. Since there is usually no price feedback, users have no incentive to not do things that cost their ISP a lot of money (streaming HDTV, lots of big DVD downloads, etc., especially from distant sources). ISPs prefer the proverbial little old lady who just uses the computer to check email and stock prices a few times a week.
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Throw more hardware at it! - lame (Score:3, Insightful)
How about using existing resources better instead? Why a website having a million visitors should send copy of the same thing million times across the globe?
Problem, for the most part, could be solved by developing a new delivery mechanism that's not endpoint-oriented, but resource-oriented (you don't care where you get your data from as long as you can be sure you're getting latest, unaltered copy of data you asked for).
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It might resemble deBeers controlling the amount of diamond allowed to be sold in order to keep margins high... Just a thought.
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.
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Anyway it's everyone ELSE's crap that clogs the tubes.
Re:Silly me, I forgot t'internet == USA (Score:5, Insightful)
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