A rational discussion on the state of American broadband
I was getting tired of hearing all the exaggerated dire claims of how behind the U.S. is in terms of broadband deployment, so I wrote this article to put things into better perspective. While there’s no question that improvement needs to be made, we need an accurate assessment of the current situation and we need realistic goals for where we want to go.
In response to some of the feedback, I’ve posted this updated discussion “We need to be reasonable about broadband usage caps“
I am very disappointed by the analysis for two reasons:
1. Duty cycle analysis(from the first chart saying AT&T has 77% compared to Japanese 2.78%) is more flawed than anything. So it is basically saying that Japanese only need to burst about 2.78% of their duty cycle to reach their usage cap, isn’t that a good thing? That means the Japanese only need to spend 2.78% of their lives to download everything they ever wanted(900GB limit) vs the American broadband, where it takes 77% of your life to download a pultry 25GB data limit? So shorter duty cycle means better productivity. Ooops.
2. Second chart where you showed “average GB budget per month”. Conveniently, you skipped the benchmark country Japan in the chart, which is what the US really should be looking to. Instead, you bench to Belgium? Iceland? The United States isn’t that socialist just yet.
In order for the United States to be competitive in the 21st century in the digital economy, our benchmark target should be Japan, South Korea, and China. All three countries mentioned here all have 100mbit burstable ethernet connections directly sent to home residences for about the same price we pay our cable companies for a 5Mbit connection. You know what is funny? When the Americans were playing Starcraft on 128K ADSL modems back in 1998, the South Koreans were playing Starcraft on shared 10Mbit Ethernets. No wonder why they are so much better than us playing Starcraft
Now that Japan, South Korea and China all have 100mbit connections, we are barely talking about 10mbit. That is one zero off.
Hopefully I made my point.
I agree with TS. Japan has 20 times the cap that the US has, so them being able to have a quota that takes 2.78% of the time to fill while seeming small, is still quite reasonable as long as the data requirements are being met. That’s like complaining that a Mac Truck has to only use 2.78% of it’s power and yet still manages to do 20 times the work load of a Prius. So even though the Prius is being used close to 90%, if you aren’t getting very much done. So who cares what the rest of the world is doing in way of caps. We should focus on taking the lead and providing the most freedom to the end users as possible.
This is the United States, the supposed leader in technology. We invented the computer chip, the internet, and now we have to take 20th place in the world in broadband deployment. Way to overcome hardship.
Between being 50th in life expectancy and 46th in infant mortality, I am pretty disappointed to find out our technological prowess now may slip to those standards. And instead of focusing on maximizing our gains, we are spending time researching how to handicap ourselves. Really brilliant if you ask me. Next, let’s play the blame game about who is to blame for our broadband deployment for being ranked #20 in the world. I think we should blame the users, why do they have to be spread out so far.. They should all huddle together like little masses like in other countries so that we can just run CAT5 into their homes. Why do they have to be so spread out, it just doesn’t make any sense to me.
Your turn George.
@nucrash
I have already watched BILLIONS of taxpayer dollars being used to fund broadband and fiber to “the middle of nowhere”. And guess what? That bandwidth is being used for *nothing useful*. For what? So some folks in “the sticks” can watch YouTube videos of dancing babies? So some teenager boys in the suburbs can swap porno and pirated movies over BitTorrent? Give me a break! As it is, there are untold thousands of miles of “dark fiber” laid during the last government sponsored bandwidth buildout. That’s billions of our tax dollars sitting underground unused. The only good thing to come of that build out was a lot of jobs.
Sorry, but until I see a truly useful purpose for the bandwdith, one that has a real social utility but not enough potential profit to interest a commercial vendor, I am not going to support anything other than market forces running the amount of broadband available. If people want broadband, they should either pay for it to be run to their house (gee, when they need to cough up $10,000 to get a cable modem in the middle of nowhere, I bet they aren’t so keen for it!), or move to a place that has it. Do you support running subways and bus lines out to rural areas? Of course not, the population density isn’t there to support it. So why support broadband everywhere in the US?
The simple fact is, our backbone speeds are able to maintain the needs of commercial users just fine, and broadband has been rolled out to consumers where it is profitable to do so. Broadband isn’t a social good like “law enforcement” and “police departments” where it makes sense to spend tax dollars to fill the gaps that private companies won’t fill. I’m never going to support any tax dollar to roll any more of it out!
J.Ja
@Justin James
That’s my point though. We have built up this empire of dark fiber and yet we don’t have anything to show for it. Not even do we fail at that, but we have other countries kicking our tail for it. Even in not so rural communities or small towns such as mine are lacking in real broadband penetration. Currently there are 2 vendors in a small town of 12000 with a college of 5000+ students. Fortunately there is some improved investment in this community. As I speak, new fiber lines are being ran through town. My hopes are the line right across the street from me can be tapped into so that I can have a serious connection to the web.
You don’t think that I don’t complain about not having rail or better infrastructure for shipping goods across a nation. Think about how three high speed rail lines across the US could improve distribution for goods and clean up the roads at the same time.
What can we use the bandwidth for? Same thing Japan uses it for, richer internet applications, sharing your family photos and high def movies, becoming a more connected society. Piracy is probably the first move because pirates are the first to abuse anything. But if they want to deliver HD movies via the web, there should definitely be a way to get them to a user on demand and not have this cut down pseudo version of HD on Youtube or what ever your streaming media provider of choice.
You are right that Broadband isn’t a social good, but the corporate providers shouldn’t be allowed to dominate the markets that they do and call the shots without being as competitive as other industries are. And for that matter, I really don’t think the Government should be the ones providing the fiber. But that’s my opinion. Personally, I think the Telecom industry should have to use their own check book to cover the costs and then in turn charge the customers directly. This government funded gestapo has to stop. Basically the government is ruling the telecom as a utility and not a service. While I know that we can’t just open the doors and let the market build it self up because we would have the same issues as New York when Electricity first hit big(80 power lines down the street.) But the market should be allowed to get more competitive and at least allow more than a single vendor in a market. Especially with Telecom. Cable with VoIP is has actually been the first time that any Telecom company has had a threat. By all means, the resulting drops in prices for these services has been a good thing for many customers that have both Cable and DSL as a choice.
@Justin James
@Justin James:
Just read what you wrote, and I am going to try to echo your voice with the best of my abilities:
I have watched Trillions of Dollars being used to fund a “weapon of ass destruction” war to pump up the price of oil and 700 Billion dollars to bail out banks where the real people on the main streets are still stuck with their house under water. For what? So someone in the “know” can get paid for their mistakes in the first place? No, please give me a break. As you have said, we have the fiber infrastructure to support pretty much endless amount of bandwidth, yet we let all that resource sitting there in the “dark”, so the current US telecommunication companies can milk the main street for a price point that is 10 times higher than what it could be?
It is sad that you don’t see the useful purpose for plentiful bandwidth, when you are operating a blog, where you are a major consumer for bandwidth yourself. Trust me, no one is asking you for your tax dollars to get us out of this bandwidth shit hole we are in, if anything else, the true value of bandwidth is the amount of “time” US people can save by having higher burstable connections. So instead of wasting 30 minutes to download a HD porn stream, it can be delivered to your computer in seconds, so people can do other productive things for the next 29 minutes or so, such as master debating with themselves.(Excuse my sarcasm)
The simple fact is this: in terms of technology, the United States used to have Cars before other countries had bicycles. In terms of bandwidth, which is the basic commodity for the current generation digital age, other countries are driving Ferraris while we, the inventor of computer and the internet, are stuck with unicycles. Broadband is a social good because our time is more valuable. The American minimum wage has been raised to $7.50ish now. So 30 minutes saved browsing the web a day does have the value of $3.75 dollars a day.(Over $100 a month) That is hard truth which you can’t see yourself.
You have a strong sentiment for not wanting to pay taxes for a broadband bill. The truth is: you can’t really do anything about it. Your taxes have been wasted 1000 times over in the past 8 years or so than you realize. In fact the majority of US taxes would be needed to pay for the interest we have on the national debt for all the US dollars we just printed in the past 2 years or so.
If this broadband thing does go through, trust me J.Ja, you are not going to be the one paying the bill. The whole resistance right now comes from the Telecommunication industry itself, trying to fight to preserve their phat profit margins. Why sell a 100mbit connection for $100 when you can sell a 5mbit connection with a tight cap for $50? The truth is: the true cost of bandwidth had already been breaching $1.5-$2 a mbit in wholesale quantities, and will continue to fall. In a year or so, $1 a mbit will be reality. That means, if you fill a 100mbit connection the whole time, the telecom companies can still avoid losing money. But look at where we are today, when the best of the best, Verizon Fios, can only be bought in selective areas, for about double the price what the Japanese pay for a 100mbit connection. I am not going to move to Japan to get the network.
I have been a fan of George Ou for a while, but this article is literally trying to prove the things George Ou is trying to disprove. The best connection is one that bursts limitlessly, so in other words, having Duty cycle approaching 0, while having no usage cap. We are behind the Japanese in bandwith adoption by a factor of 10.
Look at Amazon Web Services prices, where they are making a killing right now, unity bandwidth price is now about 10 cents a GB.(It goes as low as 5 cents/GB on the last tier of CloudFront) Why should we pay the cable companies 50 dollars to get a 100GB cap, where the 100GB burstable bandwidth is only worth $10 according to Amazon prices(which they are making nearly 50% margins on?) Look at the cell phone plans: unlimited data plan is “limited to 5GB a month”. So you are paying $80 for an iphone that gives you about $0.50 worth of bandwidth. The most progressive CDN company out there: SimpleCDN is already hitting 3.9 cents a GB to 1.9 cents a GB. Look at how many GB you are being cap’d today, and tell me if you are being robbed or what?
The whole thing smells like George Ou was getting paid by AT&T to defend their pathetic position. But I could be wrong.
Let me finish by saying this: there is social value for consumers to get burstable 100mbit connections. The time saved is immensely valuable, even if the bandwidth is used for porn. End of stories.
@TS
TS -
You are really missing it, I think. What problems will the bandwidth solve? By and large, outside of multimedia applications, there is little on the Internet that really needs broadband.
I agree that the telecoms are abusive monopolies, and love to take advantage of long standing government ties to get handouts. That’s how the taxpayers got bilked into paying out billions for all of that fiber in the first place. The telcos are purely profit driven. If there is potential profit in broadband, they will run it. So why aren’t they running it to a lot of places? Because it isn’t profitable.
So, if it is not profitable, then who is going to foot the remainder of the bill? I sure don’t, especially not so people in less dense areas can view multimedia over the Internet. Again, if you want “big city” services, move to the big city.
You want to compare the US to Japan? Fine. Ask the Japanese what they are doing with their bandwidth. George can tell you (I had this conversation with him a few months ago), he has talked to the folks in Japan. *It’s just sitting there*. Why would I want to see us pour billions down the drain to catch up to their levels of unused bandwidth?
J.Ja
@Justin James
You see idle bandwidth, we see potential for growth.
Microsoft probably sees a faster patch delivery system.
Google see the cloud’s room for growth.
We all see different views based on our perspective.
I would rather have the resource present than not. At one time, people didn’t see the need of having of sending pictures or posting videos. Now more than ever, I see the need.
Japan will probably figure out a way to utilize the bandwidth. They are good at that. This is the same country that has a different sauce and bowl for every dish, a different gadget for every aspect of their life, and yet they still manage to fit so much in to such a tiny space.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/27/us_broadband_report/
To add to the fire…
@nucrash
Something to keep in mind about Japan (and most Asian countries), is that Internet usage from cell phones is much higher than desktop access. Indeed, for the majority of the globe, cellular access is much more important, useful, and economically advantageous than wired access, hands down. In fact, we already have nearly nationwide broadband access. For $50 or so a month, AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, etc. are all happy to provide you with a cellular modem that, while not “cable modem” speeds, will beat the pants off of dialup.
I think we need to focus on getting the cellular access, not wired access, if the goal is to get access in the hands of those without. Look at the economics of it. Everyone owns a cell phone, even in the middle of nowhere. Computers are still too expensive (and far too complex) for a lot of people to own. I’ve been pushing for a long time, a model in which people just have a smartphone device that can dock, and application developers are going to have to have the UI adapt on the fly to being docked. Look at the hardware speeds. In a year or two (if not already), mobile devices will have the speed and storage equivalent to a low end PC from a few years ago, which we all know is more than enough to run what 99% of users run, with the exception of full screen, high resolution video (maybe have an optional GPU in those docking stations?).
To me, that model makes a million times more sense than rolling out wired access which only helps the decreasing numbers of people working at stationary desktops, and it certainly is a loser in less dense areas.
J.Ja
I won’t
I won’t argue with that, as long as latency isn’t a factor, wireless is great. There are a number of regulatory factors needed to be worked out though, and I think this is an area where heavy training needs to take place. There are some areas like where I live with wireless providers getting knocked out by other sources in the same frequency range. A wireless map should be kept, but the mapping utility would have to be almost 4 dimensional. The 4th dimension being frequency.
@Justin James
“In fact, we already have nearly nationwide broadband access. For $50 or so a month, AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, etc. are all happy to provide you with a cellular modem that, while not “cable modem” speeds, will beat the pants off of dialup.”
This is great. Until you use up the 5GB “unlimited” limit and get billed by the Kilobyte. BTW, it is $59 plus tax plus overage fees.
“You are really missing it, I think. What problems will the bandwidth solve? By and large, outside of multimedia applications, there is little on the Internet that really needs broadband.”
Bill Gates also said that we won’t need more than 640K ram. There are a lot on the Internet that can be enabled by having higher bandwidth. Of course, a blogger doesn’t see the need, since all he does is distributing words.
“I agree that the telecoms are abusive monopolies, and love to take advantage of long standing government ties to get handouts. That’s how the taxpayers got bilked into paying out billions for all of that fiber in the first place. The telcos are purely profit driven. If there is potential profit in broadband, they will run it. So why aren’t they running it to a lot of places? Because it isn’t profitable.”
My vantage point was not even about deregulation of monopolies or profitability of monopolies. It is about offering choice, enabling future possibilities, and becoming more productive. A lot of things aren’t profitable right now, but is socially valuable. Youtube for example, the primary consumer of bandwidth is not profitable now, but it does have social value. When bandwidth becomes cheap enough, it will then become profitable.
“So, if it is not profitable, then who is going to foot the remainder of the bill? I sure don’t, especially not so people in less dense areas can view multimedia over the Internet. Again, if you want “big city” services, move to the big city.”
As I have said over and over again, J.Ja, you are not the one footing the bill. If this bill comes out, the market will interpret it as Government involvement in margin suppression for the telecom industry. The telecom industry as a whole will lose at least 20% of their market cap valuation. So in essence, the telecom industry will foot 80% of the “cost” of the bill. You don’t have a thing to worry about. By the way, broadband infrastructure has nothing to do with population density if you deployed it in a wireless-N mesh network fashion like the mesh network on Google’s campus.
“You want to compare the US to Japan? Fine. Ask the Japanese what they are doing with their bandwidth. George can tell you (I had this conversation with him a few months ago), he has talked to the folks in Japan. *It’s just sitting there*. Why would I want to see us pour billions down the drain to catch up to their levels of unused bandwidth?”
It is just sitting there because the Japanese already can download all they ever wanted in their 2.48% duty cycle, far more than the Americans can download in their lifetimes. So excess capacity is almost proof for their network efficiency and superiority.
You should stop using the words “billions of dollars” as a deterrent for this current broadband movement. Billions of dollars is nothing when viewed in the context of the national budget. Heck, we pay about that much money in interest per day to service our debt!!! So think about the intangible values such as national pride, technological leadership, time saved, etc. These are not going to be measured in money.
@nucrash
Japan doesn’t have 20 times the cap allowance, that’s because Time Warner already backed out of their plan.
Justin said:
“I agree that the telecoms are abusive monopolies, and love to take advantage of long standing government ties to get handouts. That’s how the taxpayers got bilked into paying out billions for all of that fiber in the first place.”
Justin, I read that claim too. The problem is that I haven’t really found any actual evidence to back that claim up. All that dark fiber was laid during the dotcom boom, and dirk fiber doesn’t actually mean you can just use it because it may not connect the points you want to connect and it still costs a lot of money to light up with the expensive routers on each end of each leg.
After I did some research, I have found that the biggest waste of money in telecom policy is the Universal Service Fund (money we pay in telephone taxes) spending about 4 billion PER YEAR so that farmers who own quarter to multi-million dollar farms can get a bigger dividend from their “Telephone co-op” that they actually pay for their telephone service http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060731-7387.html. About 1 billion of that fund has been confirmed as straight up erroneous http://www.tr.com/online/trd/2008/td112608/index.htm.
TS and Nucrash, I’m going to have a new post in a few hours, and I’ll post link here.
Basically, I explain why you guys misunderstood what I was trying to say and your assessment of this analysis was unfair. Remember, I’m the guy that’s been calling out Free Press and the EFF for claiming Metered Pricing was superior to network management. I’ve written in policy papers that metered pricing was a blunt and inferior way of managing the network, but that it is needed if you’re not going to manage the network. I’m the guy that testified before the FCC arguing against Larry Lessig who thought usage caps were a better solution than network management.
Now Free Press is lobbying hard to get usage caps outlawed, and I’m saying wait a minute, you guys are hypocrites. Moreover, the examples used are misleading, because it doesn’t compare the US to every other OECD nation as being a nation with one of the most generous usage caps. Even when compared to Japan, we have a better duty cycle which is important no matter what anyone says. Moreover, the caps (other than the 40 GB Time Warner cap) are not that unreasonable, and they’re the caps that have pretty much existed all along but were undisclosed. Now there’s more transparency and they are disclosed, so what’s the problem? Is a new law prohibiting usage caps really the answer?
Now if you guys think I’m wrong, then I’m sorry to have to disagree with you but that doesn’t make me some kind of sell out as TS is suggesting. This is supposed to be a RATIONAL debate. I’m just pointing out that some of the hysteria is unjustified (especially since Time Warner responded to the market rejection) and the proposed regulatory solutions are unnecessary. I’ve always been personally opposed to caps and nothing has changed, but I’ve never thought they should be illegal, especially when they actually lower prices for the bottom usage cap tiers and there are billion overage protection and one-month overage wavers in place.
That’s a business problem, not a technical problem. My point is still valid. There is already nationwide broadband deployed in the form of cellular broadband, and it *is* getting better. Furthermore, there are plenty of sattalite companies out there who will get you a broadband connection anywhere in the country. Neither option may be as fast or as reliable as a DSL or cable connection, but they are both options.
First of all, get your history right… Bill Gates *never* said that. Secondly, please do not mistake the fact that I write on a blog with the idea that all I ever transmit across a network are text bits. I challenge you to find a use case for broadband that does not involve multimedia, and is an actually, on the ground “right here, right now” problem. The fact is, the widespread adoption of broadband has actually made the Web slower, because Web designers and developers feel free to be sloppy!
OK, so there is a lack of choice, but the problem is not abusive telco monopolies. In that case, the problem must be that there is no profit motive. So, if there is no potential profit to be made in this broadband rollout you want so badly, *who is paying for it*? If not the government, then the telcos and cable companies. And since it won’t be profitable, they will be raising my rates to pay for it.
That is the fundamental truth behind demanding something based purely on it being a “social good”; if it is not profitable for private enterprise to do, they won’t do it (or will go out of business trying). Therefore, either the government will be paying for it, or private enterprise will raise rates for non-consumers of the service/good in order to subsidize those who are getting it. Either way, I am paying for it.
Again, when the telcos pay for it, that means I pay for it. What, do you think I manage to not give any telcos any money or something? And mesh networks… don’t make me laugh.
No, it is just sitting there because, like everyone else, the Japanese do not have a use case for it. George talked to folks in Japan about this problem a few months ago, and may be able to elaborate on it for you.
OK, in that case, the government should give me a few hundred thousand dollars… after all, that’s a drop of a drop in the bucket. I can use it to pay for social goods like buying a house so I can stop renting, and sending my child to private school because the schools here in SC are downright awful (HS graduation rate under 70% in my area!). While I am at it, I can pay off my car, and maybe buy a new one. My wife would like a new car too.
Quite frankly, I can think of many, many better things for the government to be spending money on, and even those things I can’t (in many cases) justify the government spending the money on. Anything that forces telcos to do something unprofitable “at their own expense” is going to be passed down to consumers anyways. So please stop acting like this will not cost people money.
J.Ja
Talking about rankings is pretty useless.
The big problem with rankings is that it doesn’t really tell you much about how far ahead or behind someone is. So if a bunch of countries have average speeds of 5.61 to 5.95 Mbps, you could jump from 10th place to 50th place. Is that really something to freak out about?
Second, those cheap examples of 100 Mbps access are for condo and apartment complexes where they just run one piece of fiber to the basement and then share that with the whole building of maybe 100 tenants. That’s a very economical way to provide broadband, IPTV, and phone service using very short haul telephone wire. Verizon is primarily serving single resident homes which is very expensive to wire since each home gets its own fiber run, rather than 100 tenants sharing a single fiber run. In fact in Japan, single resident home fiber broadband is much more expensive, and it’s roughly the same as Verizon FiOS.
Third, be very careful with statistics. We all know that Japan has a very advanced broadband infrastructure, yet they’re ranked 17 by connections per person according to the OECD while Korea is #7. But if you measure broadband per telephone wire which is more accurate (since household size varies and broadband is ordered by household and not by each person), Korea is #1 and Japan is ranked #21. So depending on the “ranking”, Japan is ranked 17 or 21. Now isn’t that horrible? Well it turns out that nearly all of that difference between Japan and Korea’s penetration rate is due to Japan’s aging population, and we all know that older people are less likely to adopt new technology such as computers and Internet. So all these stats are just a numbers game where’s you’re measuring demographics and not actual performance. Then if you measured Europe which is effectively one nation of 27 member states rather than America’s 50 states, you see that they have lower average speeds than the USA. But if you measure our top 10 states which is larger than most nations, we beat the pants off any European country average. Hell, New York alone is bigger in population and area than most nations and it’s ranked way up there. So just because a “country” like Hong Kong which is almost entirely metropolitan with mostly cheap-to-wire apartments is ranked high doesn’t really mean squat to me, because it’s all just a statistical demographics game. We got a few states that effectively drag down our average, and another big part of the problem is that we have a higher illiteracy rate than most of the OECD nations and broadband and computers are shunned by the illiterate so what do we do about that? Isn’t education policy the problem and not broadband policy?
As Justin mentioned, I have done a lot of research on Japan. I even contributed to this paper below on “The need for speed and next generation broadband networks”.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1354032
Almost all of the bandwidth in Japan is P2P traffic, and we know it’s not being used to transport Linux distributions or copies of the bible if you look at the popular torrents http://thepiratebay.org/top/all. Aside from P2P, the most popular sites that use the most bandwidth are the paid porn sites (don’t ask me how I know, but I swear it’s because a Japanese analyst told me) and those sites were only 2 Mbps (which is no better than our YouTube). Now why is that? Because while client side bandwidth is cheap, dedicated server side bandwidth is expensive and metered. Try shopping around for some server bandwidth and you’ll find out real quick how expensive it gets. So with all that bandwidth, what are they really doing in Japan? Turns out that Akamai (which moves up to 20% of the world’s Internet traffic on their premium private delivery networks for those who pay) measured that the average Japanese broadband customer was pulling 8 Mbps on average, which is close to 2x faster than the US.
The main thing that people don’t realize is that our wave of fast broadband is coming within the next 2 years. By the end of this year, 40 million homes, 80% of Comcast’s total footprint will have access to DOCSIS 3.0. AT&T was already at 17 Million homes for FTTN at the end of last year. Verizon was already over 10 million for FTTH at the end of last year. Within the next 2 years, most homes will have access to next gen broadband. Now will we move up the average? Maybe, maybe not, but that’s just a numbers game that heavily depends on demographics. Drop a few rural states and the rankings go way up.
Lastly, almost all the important innovations in the Internet and Web happen in the US. Does it really matter that we’re “ranked” way behind Hong Kong based on some arbitrary statistic?
@Justin James
Well, this is the last reply I will post here because any more replies on this topic is simply not worth my while.
I think cellular network is a form of national broadband. Just like Wireless mesh networks, and Wimax. But given the current absurd unlimited plan of “5GB limit”, it is bull shit. (I said it.) You conveniently disguise it as a “business problem”. Sure of course it is a business problem, broadband networks never was a technical problem for us. Since Japan and South Korea all had to buy network gear from the US anyways for their network, I wonder what our “business problem” is since we can actually source our network gear within the border, yet the Japanese had to do it across the sea.
Whether or not Bill Gates said anything about 640K ram limit is unprovable at this point, most people use it as a basic form of sarcasm for people who argue that we don’t need more technology.
You have challenged me for one use case without involving multimedia where our current broadband isn’t cutting it. Sure I will give you one case right now(I have a few, but you won’t understand the other ones). For example, if you mess with the iphone SDK right now, every time Apple releases a new iphone SDK version, it is a 2GB+ download for the SDK, and a 500MB+ patch for OSX, then 100MB for iTunes update, and then 250MB firmware update for each of the iphones and ipod touches. So every time Apple wants to release something to dwarf DevTeam, it is a freaking 3.5GB download for me. You say, well 3.5GB downloads isn’t bad, let’s do some math: if I was in Japan on their 100mbit connection, I can go get a cup of coffee and it will be downloaded in about 5-6 minutes. So you can get to work after you get your cold drinks. What happens on a throttled 5Mbit connection? Best case you get 500KB/sec or so, and it slows down after a while to 1-2Mbit. It takes some where around 3 hours to get the freaking software updates. So you need to go to sleep, and wake up and hope that your cable modem didn’t cut you in the middle of the session. And this is on average about once a month when Apple releases stuff. Same thing happens if OpenSolaris gets a biweekly new build. Once you have to download legal 4-5GB OS images, you have to waste a night. There are other realtime usage cases that would require 200Mbit+ of bandwidth to do it right, so I am out of luck for that for a while unless I colo my machine for that one task. So Amazon EC2′s burstable 250Mbit is a better fit at the moment.
Again, Justin James, you have serious issues about paying for “it”, when you don’t even know what the hell you are paying “for”. When it comes to infrastructure improvements, which the broadband bill is about, the end result is that the Telcom shareholders pay for it when they realize the margin suppression. The majority of the cost of the bill is in the form of loss of public market cap for the telcom companies. You don’t really pay for a higher price if you don’t want to. The Telcoms will try to pass as high a price onto the customers, but eventually their pricing model will break if they milked their customer too much. (Like what is happening right now, where Amazon can charge 10 cents a GB, and the Telcom wants 50 dollars for a 5GB limit on their Mifi cards and iphone 80 dollar plans.)
As to the Japanese excess capacity issue, you keep on saying they don’t have a use case for it. It is bull shit. Their use case has been about the 30 minutes a day they spent on downloading whatever they wanted. So the use case is whatever they download during their 2.78% duty cycle. Just because the client network idles 97% of the time doesn’t mean the network doesn’t have value or isn’t worth the money.
When I said that billions of dollars isn’t much when looked at in the context of national budget, I didn’t say that it should be spend to give individuals a handout for a few 100K or so. You come across as a very selfish being when you expect the government to give you a handout, while refuse to pay for what you enjoy right now. It still amazes me right now, that a blogger would argue that bandwidth has no value or he is not willing to pay for better bandwidth infrastructure, when his job is enabled by bandwidth in the first place.
Nobody is forcing the telcos to be unprofitable. Amazon’s price structure already shows that it can be profitable at 1/10 of what the telcos charge currently. Those numbers don’t lie.
Look, in the end, I never liked your articles pumping Microsoft junk anyways, or how “inconceivable” things don’t work. I come here twice a month or so to check out what George Ou has to say, and 90% of the time, his opinions are decent.
@TS
“Nobody is forcing the telcos to be unprofitable. Amazon’s price structure already shows that it can be profitable at 1/10 of what the telcos charge currently. Those numbers don’t lie.”
TS, you can’t seriously be comparing Amazon’s business to the Telco business. I mean just the wireless industry alone employs 268,500 people as of 2008. Those people don’t work cheap, nor should they have to work cheap in this country. It shouldn’t take a lot to realize that a dotcom is not the same as a network provider. As a matter of fact, many of these dotcoms brag to their venture capital suc… I mean investors how they have no infrastructure to pay for any they just offload their distribution costs to the broadband providers and offload their server and electrical costs to the consumers. I mean BitTorrent calls that “innovation”.
Anyhow, I’m not sure why you’re getting so outraged against Justin as he merely pointed out some facts that were a bit inconvenient for you. As for your assessment of American broadband, read my post above on how meaningless rankings are, and read about how we are moving ahead within the next two years.
@George Ou:
Comparing Telco and Amazon isn’t that far fetched. I have a friend who recently got himself a MVNO license(it is tough to get those), and was told behind doors(he wasn’t really supposed to tell me this) the pricing structures of MVNO.
Basically the telcos are selling excess capacity to MVNO resellers at a rate of 0.1 cents per cell phone minute. Yes, 1/10 of a cent per minute! Then the MVNO reseller can bundle those minutes to their own cell phone plans at the market price. Think about the implication of this: this is the whole reason why retards like BestBuy is getting into the cell phone business and why you go to the mall, all you see is Cell Phone reseller kiosks.
The implication is that the 500 minute plans you get for $40 dollars a month is really worth about 50 cents. That is why they can afford to give away $500 cell phones for a 2 year contract in return. Apple and Google are both MVNO resellers in that sense by having their own phones.
I am getting outraged against JJa because I feel like every time I respond to him, I am trying to beat numbers into a numb head of a Republican technology hater who don’t feel like his tax dollars should be used to expand network infrastructure. I apologize to him, if my words sound harsh at times, mostly sarcastic. I got issues of my own. But most of the time, he should consider my vantage point.
@TS
TS, this is the first time I’ve heard someone accuse Justin as a Republican. Hell, someone damn near accused him of being a socialist recently. Also, I’m not aware of this “fact” that Republicans are technology haters. Some of them aren’t as quick to swallow all the Silicon Valley Kool-Aid and buzzwords, but that doesn’t make them “technology haters”.
Anyhow, your first paragraph is sounding way too much like Dave Burstein who goes around telling capitol hill that DOCSIS 3.0 only cost 10 cents a month to deploy. Then he either cites some unnamed engineer or unnamed executive, or he cites an executive out of context, or he just flat out makes up the numbers and says he’s right until you prove him wrong.
Now if you’re going to tell me that $42 for 15 Mbps Internet with a 250 GB cap is a ripoff, nothing I’m going to say here is going to convince you otherwise. It won’t matter if I explain to you that you need to live in a crammed apartment complex to get some of those cheap, fast, but heavily shared 100 Mbps Fiber to the Curb connections you see in some of these other countries. If you think that $60/month for nationwide mobile 3G MiFi access with 5GB budget is unreasonable, nothing that I explain to you about the cost of running a wireless network e.g., putting up thousands of $750K cell towers and paying a quarter million employees is going to convince you otherwise. If you think that saying these things makes me some kind of a corporate sell out, nothing I’m going to say is going to convince you otherwise, so I’m going to have to leave it at that.
@George Ou:
I think putting Caps on any network is a rip off. The truth is: you are going to download whatever data you will download in a month. The only difference is if you have to waste 3 hours of your life to get it vs getting it instantly. Most of us are dealing with the best broadband we can get for the dollar right now, but it could be far better.
As to 5GB data limit on Cell phone plans and Mifi, yes, I am utterly disgusted by that limit. It is not like you can download 100TB of data off a stupid 2mbit 3G connection. Considering what I said in the previous post, of how much people are getting the cell phone minutes for, the 5GB is the biggest rip off in the history of telecom.
I feel like I need to apologize to J.Ja. I am a very sarcastic person, so if my words offend you, I am sorry. The “Republican technology hater” comment was probably uncalled for, but it does show you my feelings toward what the country went through in the past 8 years or so, and my general analysis of where J.Ja’s reasoning come from.
@TS
First of all, you’re talking about the fastest Japanese connection against one of the slower US broadband options. If you compare their 100 Mbps service to our 50 Mbps fiber service from Verizon, you’ll actually find out that actual speeds are comparable. That’s because a UK Ofcom study showed that Japanese broadband consumers got much lower than their advertising lead them to believe compared to the US, which lead to a much lower satisfaction rate. So if you compare their best against our best connections, not their fiber against our DSL connections, you’ll sit around for roughly the same amount of time. That’s also largely because no server will give you a single flow of more than 50 Mbps, and Akamai pretty much averages only 8 Mbps to their Japanese customers. You can forget about downloading from P2P at full speeds because the seeders are afraid to seed more than 40 minutes a day, or they’re throttling themselves to 2 Mbps which means you can’t download at faster than 10 Mbps if their are a healthy number of seeders compared to leeches. So I think you’re really drinking too much of the stats Kool-Aid if you honestly believe people are routinely downloading more than 8 Mbps average.
As for the caps, if you believe that there should be zero caps, not even a sanity check like a 150 GB cap, then you believe that you’re entitled to a 24×7 dedicated circuit that normally costs 20-40 times more money for the cost of normal consumer grade broadband. Well as it turns out, you were never entitled to that in the first place even before the ISPs began becoming more transparent and disclosed what they’ve done all along, which is enforce reasonable limits. The only difference now is that they tell you about it. That’s life man, things cost money, and our caps are typically far more generous than anywhere else in the world, by at least an order of magnitude. Even compared to Japan, Verizon for example doesn’t cap you to 30 GB upstream a day though I’m sure if you go too far overboard and you do it frequently, they’ll give you a call since you’re not supposed to be doing that on residential broadband.
As for wireless, you seem to be under the mistaken impression that we’re talking about wired broadband, which has more capacity on a single strand of fiber than all the available spectrum in any area. But we’re talking about wireless which has some severe limitations on overall capacity. The total capacity of a 3G cell is only about 1 to 14 Mbps depending on how far the customer is from the base station so we’ll average it out to 7 Mbps which means it can transport maybe 2.2 terabytes a month per cell. Each 3G tower cost roughly $750,000 to build (not counting maintenance and property taxes), and you’re not the only person that gets to use it. It might need to serve 1000 customers or more, though thankfully most of them are not active at the same time. So they might only have enough capacity for 2.2 GB a month if they had 1000 customers per cell. But because we know most people don’t use their bandwidth up, they can let you use up to 5 GB without additional fees. And if there were that many people going over, and paying the fees, they’d be able to justify putting in more capacity (if the city will let them put a tower in. Understand that cities like San Francisco like to brag that they haven’t approved a new tower in 10 years to satisfy the RF fear mongers).
So now here you come feeling that you’re entitled to 50, maybe 100 GB, maybe 1000 GB, but the problem is that they can’t give it to you unless they kick their other customers off. Well I got news for you, the world doesn’t work that way.
Wow, so many points made and I don’t even know how to quote anymore so let me go the old fashioned ZDnet way of thinking and break this down into a list item form.
1. Regulation is only good when it prevents abuses, not when it does nothing but limits growth. If every telco decided to go with bandwidth caps, and charged for overages, the government should probably step in.
a. If they do provide a bandwidth cap, they should also provide a meter for that cap.
b. As long as they have a reasonable amount of investment and do what they can to increase the total cap in the long run. If they keep the same cap for 5 years and record record profits, I might be a bit miffed.
2. Government money on programs for corporations that generate a direct profit off of tax payer dollars should be deemed illegal, or the government should consider this a business loan that requires everyone to pay it back. This includes Genetic research, or using NASA to launch satellites, or laying fiber from here to where ever. This is just as bad as subsidizing farming, the only difference is that farming is the only industry that doesn’t get to specify the cost at which they sell their product.
3. I would be thrilled if the US had the best Cellular network in the world. If our network was the most developed, I wouldn’t have a problem. I am impressed at the growth over the last year alone. I think we should continue and hopefully use this as a methodology to promote connectivity. I was upset to see Apple blamed AT&T for their lack of options while the other carriers in the world didn’t seem to have the problems.
4. I grow frustrated when we have articles about how the US is falling behind further and further in the world. We are supposed to be the world leader in tech, we are supposed to be the leader in many things, but this country is growing old and starting to fall apart at the seems. The technology revolution of the nineties with the dot com bubble proved that we still have some kick in us, but this last decade has been nothing but a disappointment. I don’t care how much bandwidth I get as long as I am still growing by leaps and bounds and near the top five in the world. The twentieth spot is unacceptable for a technology leader.
5. Uses for ridiculous amounts of bandwidth with a business case? You want them, here you go:
a: Remote Backup and Disaster recovery fail over.
b: Site to Site Virtualization (Kindof the same thing)
c: True global video conferencing in HD or even 3D interactivity.
d: Cloud Computing (While the least demanding, probably the most relevant.)
The fact of the matter is that the more we use the internet, the more bandwidth we figure out how to use. Where our records used to be limited in the past, our data collection has improved and our mass of data storage has increased several fold.
I have a terabyte storage of email for 300 people when I had a fraction of that for 150 people. I had a network server with 150 users and 60 GB when I started. Now I have double the servers with 1.2 TB on one server and 3.8 TB on another and for some reason or another, I still lack space.
Bandwidth applies just the same. I had my girlfriend uploading 200 pictures to Facebook and couldn’t figure out why they kept failing. Apparently because the session timed out because she didn’t have enough bandwidth. She still has 4800 pictures left to go. No, I am not kidding, I am in fact very serious, she does take that many pictures without any sign of stopping. 5 mbps with 512k up is not enough for the average interactivity of a college student.
The Japanese in this town would love to be able to use video chat with their families in Japan but can’t because they lack the bandwidth.
But feel free and delude your self with the thought that no one will ever use 100 mbps connection. I can see this happening in the next twenty years. Japan isn’t there yet, but since the groundwork has been laid, it will probably happen there first.
Just to add, this has to be the most interesting conversation with the fewest amount of people that I have had online. While I do miss the wider audience of ZDnet, I appreciate the smaller venue. Keep up the updates and I will see what I can do to draw an audience.
Nucrash, I’d ask that you read my post on “rankings”. The difference between the US and Japan isn’t 6 Mbps versus 100 Mbps; the usable bandwidth going across the Japanese backbone from the CDN servers is more like 8 Mbps in Japan versus our 4.2 Mbps in the US. This is based on Q1-2009 statistics from Akamai CDN which transports up to 20% of the world’s Internet traffic, so they are one of the biggest and most relevant statistical samples in the world. This data is also inline with a UK Ofcom report that Japanese broadband consumers get far less in practical performance than what was being advertised compared to the US which is why they’re generally less satisfied with their broadband than US customers.
As for usage caps, it’s clear that no broadband provider, not even in Japan can offer unlimited usage. In fact if they offered you “no cap”, it would be more misleading because they really can’t offer it to you since broadband is typically over-subscribed 20-1 or higher because it was never intended to be a dedicated circuit. In fact, Japan has a much more restrictive duty cycle relative to the US.
I’m not against faster Internet, and why would I be? Do you honestly believe that a red blooded geek like myself would oppose that?
I’m just pointing out that we should not be exaggerating the state of broadband in Japan and Korea. I’ve done a lot of hard research on this stuff and I’ve spoken with a lot of Japanese and Korean analysts. The biggest continuous bandwidth usage in Japan other than P2P are the video streaming sites, and it’s no more than what our sites in the US offer which is 2 Mbps 720P video. That makes a lot of sense because server capacity is pretty much the same all over. Just because Japan has fast broadband connections doesn’t mean you can get cheaper server capacity.
The fact that sever capacity is so expensive and metered puts a huge constraint on what type of applications service providers are offering. P2P can offer lots of bandwidth, but it was jamming their Internet (based on Japanese government reports) so upstream caps were put in place. P2P was never supposed to be an end run around on providers paying for server capacity in the first place, and consumer broadband was never sold as dedicated server capacity.
Lastly, the Japanese consumers are using Skype HQ like the rest of us in the world, because they’re certainly buying $5000 720P video conferencing end-points which requires 1-3 Mbps. Until those video conferencing end-points become cheap, it’s just not happening and you shouldn’t be blaming broadband infrastructure for that since we have plenty of services that can provide 1-3 Mbps upstream/downstream. Even 1080P video conferencing end-points use around 6 Mbps, so be careful suggesting that 100 Mbps is required for video conferencing as that is simply not true.
@George Ou
George Ou:
First of all, when someone tells you that the data you used to show that “the US isn’t too far behind the rest of the world” is showing that Japan has higher burstable connection(100mbit) and higher burstable cap(900GB) than the US, you should say “OK, I fucked up, maybe I should write another article to hide those Japanese stats and South Korean stats better”. The truth is: you can only hide those stats from people who don’t know any better.
I have friends who went to Japan for a few months, and will never accept American broadband connections when they come back. Go to Tokyo and live there for 6 months, and find out yourself! 100mbit lines are attainable in the US, usually within university network environments. Outside of peered university networks, home networks need some major rework.
You seem to draw most of your stats from Akamai data. While they are the biggest CDN right now, I can tell you that their pricing model won’t last much longer. They face fierce competition from Amazon CloudFront and Google App Engine, that their higher price isn’t sustainable in the short run. And since they are the highest priced CDNs in the world and based in the US, they have an incentive to show US biased data.
The true power of 100mbit burstable connection is that, should the large files become popular, you don’t directly go to the origin server to get the data. Files like OSX updates, and Iphone SDKs and OS iso images are all cached by local proxy servers, and served directly to you at full speed locally without even contacting the origin server. Most ISPs already do this. It is that their connection pipe to you isn’t wide enough to give you 5GB of data in 5 minutes.
All the arguments aside, you fail to answer some basic questions I raised in my comments, I will repeat again.
1. The bulk bandwidth that the telcos buy or sell are all based on 95% percentile utilization. Current bulk pricing from Cogent and HE.net and Level 3 BGP mixes are about a little over $2 a meg and continuously falling. That’s why Uberbandwidth can offer $4 a meg on 10Mbit commit, and still be profitable enough to double their operation in the past year or so. 95 percentile utilization is pretty much a 24×7 utilized connection. While the residential networks never was designed to handle 24×7 workload, if it is Mbit capped, then the ISPs really don’t lose money if you burst for a day or burst for a month. Consider that for a fact and see if the GB limit is reasonable any more.
2. It is true that wireless 3G connection shouldn’t be compared to wired network pricing. However, I just leaked to you the pricing structure of MVNO operators in a previous post. Given the price, at 1/10 of a cent a minute over cellular network. Do you still consider that a 5GB limit for $60 or $40 for 500 minutes plan is worthwhile? Here is the math: 3G Mifi typically gives you 1-2Mbit bandwidth. You can fill 5GB of bandwidth by watching 2 YouTube videos a day on your laptop. You certainly can’t download iphone SDKs or OSX updates over Mifi for that matter. And the overage per KB charges are…you know, bull shit.
Answer those two basic questions with relevant data, and I will tip my hat to you.
@TS
Your data is just plain wrong TS. There are 100 Mbps connections available in the US and not just in the Universities. There are a whole lot more 50 Mbps connections coming with 40 Million Comcast homes and soon to be 20 million Verizon FiOS homes within the next year. Those 50 Mbps burst rate connections can easily be upgraded to 100 Mbps (or even 1000 Mbps in the case of FiOS) when the mainstream broadband consumer demands more.
You haven’t “leaked” anything but a bunch of hearsay. That kind of rumor works for Dave Burstein, it doesn’t fly with me. I also explained why 5 GB wireless caps are necessary because that’s probably already more than the available inventory on most 3G cell towers. So you can call it “bullshit” and repeat rumors and half truths all you like but it doesn’t change the facts. You’re not going to get unlimited wireless 3G for $20 per month even if you hold your breath till you’re blue in the face. If you honestly believe that running a wireless network isn’t that far from running an Amazon.com, then nobody is ever going to convince you otherwise.
Sure, George Ou:
100Mbps can only be gotten from colocation. There are no residential offerings to home users that I know of that is at price parity compared to colocation. Your 50Mbps Comcast numbers and 20 Million FIOS numbers are nothing but your guestimation. Yeah, by the time Comcast has 100mbps, Japan and South Korea would have had 1Gbps running to their homes, so really it is not solving the issue here. BTW, the issue is relative e-penis size if you haven’t figured out.
What I “leaked” to you is a bunch of hearsay. Ha. Oh well, I guess you wouldn’t believe your eyes until you see the documents that show you how much those cell phone minutes are really worth. The price of entry is about 5 million minutes for $5000 dollar blocks. I have seen it. Do the math. You could almost cover your entire life’s worth of cell phone usage with $5K one time charge. That’s why it is hard to get those coveted MVNO licenses, because nobody knew how valuable they are. It built RIMM an empire before Apple and Google figured out the game play.
I guess we will just leave it at that.
@George Ou
George, USF is not a tax. It’s a fee charged to telecom companies. They choose to pass it on to customers (which generally presents Cell customers an easy way to get out of their contracts, since it often changes).
As for U.S. broadband….just move to Lafayette La:
10 Mbps (Symmetric) $28.95
30 Mbps (Symmetric) $44.95
50 Mbps (Symmetric) $57.95
All connections come with a Symmetric 100mb p2p connection to any other Subscribers. 100MB is available, but they don’t publicly offer it to consumers.
The result is faster/cheaper broadband for Lafayette. And of course it lit a fire under COX and AT&T’s asses. I don’t think AT&T has officially announced they’re deploying their U-Verse (or whatever it’s called) broadband, but it’s that or they have to pack up in the area, because Cox is deploying their first Docsis 3 network in the city.
Amazing what competition will do….of course it wouldn’t have happened if the voters hadn’t opted for Municipal fiber first.
So what else happened? Well Cox decided that they had to upgrade their infrastructure PDQ if they wanted to keep pace and thus little old Lafayette got Cox’s first Docis 3 network in the U.S.
How AT&T is considering upgrading in Lafayette….why? Because they have no choice. Nevertheless, they all cost more than the municipal system and provide less.
@TS
TS, you can get 100MB in Lafayette, but consumers have to request it. The officials were asked earlier this year and they said they could do it, but didn’t see why any home user would want it.
http://www.lusfiber.com/custom/?id=12
@notgonnatellya
Now, that’s the pricing I am talking about. No, I won’t move there because of a connection, but that kind of pricing coincide with what Uberbandwidth is doing too. By running custom Fibers and ordering massive BGP mix in 10Gb+ commits from the vendors, you can get a 24×7 95% percentile burstable connection for a little over $2 a mbit cost. And there is a discussion at WebHostingTalk about a possible HE.net deal that is running for a 1Gbit line for $995 right now.
And guess what? Bandwidth cost will continue to fall when major networks upgrade to 10Gbit Ethernet gear at the distribution layer, and 100Gbit gear at the core.
@notgonnatellya
“They choose to pass it on to customers”
Hmm, so you run a hotdog stand selling $3 hotdogs that cost you $2.5 to make in material, labor, and rent assuming you’re lucky enough to sell sufficient volume. Now the government steps in and says they’re going to add a $2 hotdog tax. Are you telling me that you’re not going to “choose” to pass on that tax?
@George Ou
George:
I wasn’t even aware of your affiliations with DigitalSociety. After I read your response article: “We need to be reasonable about broadband usage caps“, I can finally see the connections.
This is coming from a friend, and honestly, a long time reader of your postings since your zdnet days. I think that it is probably better to stand up on your own sometimes and say something that makes sense, instead of appeasing to big time corporations.
Back in the Zdnet days, you always had the linkage to Intel, Microsoft, although they were in fact doing some amazing things back then. Now, there is a much stronger political taste in your posting.
I am still going to read this blog once a while after this. But I encourage you to seek alternate venues. There are a lot of smaller, but very awesome companies to talk about out there. If you picked a few of them with high potentials, and focused on the consumers, and why they may benefit from game changers, then people will come to read your blogs more often. If you still insist on pumping large corporations’ agendas, then you better be sure you are on the right side, especially considering the current political climate.
To be honest, given the current political composition of the country, going against net-neutrality is like standing in front of a train, getting ready to commit suicide. The broadband bill is pretty much a done deal, the only question remains is how aggressive it will be. Think about it. As a blogger about technology for mortals, going against technological trends is probably not a wise choice at this moment.
Have a good night. I will check back in a week.
“To be honest, given the current political composition of the country, going against net-neutrality is like standing in front of a train, getting ready to commit suicide.”
First of all, what makes you think I’m not standing on my own and speaking my mind? Do you honestly believe that anyone who may disagree with you isn’t standing up for what they believe in? It’s one thing if you want to disagree with me on any particular point, and you have a right to disagree, but please don’t insult me like this.
Also, let’s me explain something to you. Digital Society and I don’t base our technology policy based on political parties. We call it like we see it an we won’t hesitate to criticize or praise policy decisions from either side of the political aisle.
I’ve been standing up for the engineering, the economics, what’s right on the Internet since 2006 when I fought against those who would hide behind slogan of Net Neutrality. I’m not going to stand by and let a bad law pass in the name of Net Neutrality when I know it’s wrong, and when even the most staunch Net Neutrality proponents like Larry Lessig and Tim Berners-Lee knows the legislation on Net Neutrality is wrong.
I don’t change colors because of peer pressure. I don’t go against my principles like Tim Berners-Lee who says he’s in believes in the freedom and necessity of having differentiated services yet he endorses the very bills that would ban that right. I’ll stand up for my principles and what’s right. Those who favor Net Neutrality legislation hide behind the phony slogans and duck the real debate on whether we in a free society have the right to differentiated services and a free and innovative market. I’ll keep fighting for these principles till the very end.
@nucrash
After looking at your examples, all of them (except the video chat at a consumer level) are things that are business specific. And you know what? Part of running a business is the idea that the business is located where the services needed by the business are available. This is why you don’t see places that import goods from overseas in the midwest, you see them in San Diego, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, etc. Places with major ports. Pharmeceutical companies are concentrated in New Jersey and Delaware due to the concentration of scientists and the proximity of other pharmecuetical companies (talent raiding). Technology startups tend to be located in “Silicon Valley” and “Silicon Alley” because of the availability of talent, funding, and infrastructure. And so on. If you want to run a business that requires network infrastructure, *located your business in an area with network infrastructure*. As George said, Japan, Taiwan, etc. (and for that matter, the Boston/NYC/Philly/DC axis) are much, much cheaper to wire up due to density. You could probably give broadband to 1,000 people in a city for the cost to bring broadband to a family farm in the middle of nowhere to service 5 people.
For the record, the Facebook problem is a matter of poor programming, not insufficient bandwidth. If the software is written right, it shouldn’t care how long the batch itself takes to transfer, so long as bits are flowing. The “average college student”… well, the average college student lives on campus. Many college campuses have had to severely restrict bandwidth to their students, because they can’t afford the “average interactivity of a college student!” The fact is, those kids sending videos and pictures all over the place are *crushing* college networks. They aren’t “broadband users”, they are primarily users of gigantic lease lines over a very large LAN. And for those living off campus, well, most college towns (except for really small colleges in rural areas) have access to broadband already.
There’s something else which you guys are forgetting here. If you want more bandwidth, you can usually get it! You just need to pay more. For example, I have a server at my house. I have heavy bandwidth requirements (I manage systems remotely). I have a “business class” cable modem from Time Warner. They give me 7 down, 1 up service, more than ample for my needs. It also gets me a static IP, an SLA for my bandwidth (my speed is *guaranteed*, not “best effort” like consumers get), and once my traffic gets to the CO, it goes onto an entirely different backbone than consumer traffic. Oh, and I am guaranteed an onsite dispatch in the next 4 hour service window (call before noon, get a tech by 5, call after noon, get a tech by noon the next day). All for $94.90/month including tax (that’s the total bill). At our main office, we have a FiOS line at like 50 down 20 up, 63 static IPs, and good customer support for something like $300/month.
And if you don’t live in a “broadband” area, I am sure you can get a telco to run a lease line (T1, T3, etc.) out to your premise. It will be expensive, of course, but again, *that’s the cost of doing business*.
I think that somewhere along the line, this discussion got very muddled. Are we talking about broadband for consumers? Or broadband for businesses? If we *are* talking about business usage, I say that my “put the business where the service is” arguements are quite valid. If it is for consumers, I say, “there’s not even usefulness to justify it”. Even the video chat example… well, you can do video chat on 56.6 dialup. It might not be HD quality, but unless you are willing to go to where the services are, it’s a bit much to expect the government and/or the other service users to subsidize your limited use scenario.
J.Ja
@George Ou
I wasn’t arguing whether USF is a good idea or bad or whether it should be passed on to consumers. All I said was it’s not a tax. There are many taxes on consumers, but that is not one of them. As I said, if you sign a contract with Verizon for cell service, and the USF goes up, you can get out of your contract, because they changed what they charged you.
@notgonnatellya
A rat wearing a rabbit costume is still a rat. A wolf wearing sheep’s clothing is still a wolf. A tax disguised as a fee is still a tax.