What's Holding Up Broadband in the U.S.? 548
ProfBooty writes "A recent opinion piece in the Washington Post discloses that the broadband could potentially aid in the economy's recovery (and that Canadians are 2x as likely to have it, South Koreans 4x), but it's not regulation that is the hold up, it's *surprise* content holders' fears of 'piracy' as well as unwillingness to adapt to new markets. Also discusses the governments of Canada and South Korea and how they were involved in bringing broadband to the people. In additon discusses how in the past, Congress would pass laws as to protect innovators as well as the old guard." The article's by Lawrence Lessig.
Shouldn't the question be.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Mostly last mile issues. Here in Germany DSL is available in larger cities, but little towns like mine will never get a taste for broadband since DSL is pretty much the only option for now.
Thank you deregulation (Score:5, Insightful)
There are still some hardware issues (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, some telcos are making the investment, particularly in new neighborhoods.
Uhm..right (Score:3, Insightful)
If what is described is the case, then why is AOLTW selling broadband? Why isn't TW's Road Runner shutting down instead of expanding?
The problem is that phone lines have never really been built to handle DSL and the phone companies don't want to spend a lot of money to upgrade (see Robert X. Cringley's comments). The cable companies have only so many houses hooked up, and satellite has too much lag and often requires a phone line anyway.
Broadband Providers are holding up Broadband. (Score:5, Insightful)
DSL, with its ridiculously long install wait time, crappy PPPoE platform (In other words, shell out another $100 for a router that will do it for you so all your machines can have a 'normal' connection), and a general lack of value (+$15 for a static IP? Get real Ameritech)
On the other hand you have cable, which @home and all their partners managed to bumble enough to make people stay away from cable for a LONG time.
The content is THERE, these pundits are screaming that there is no killer app for broadband, as if having it will make things easier for users.
Broadband is a necessary service (Score:2, Insightful)
Man, I'm glad I'm Canadian
Oh, you mean *preventing*? (Score:5, Insightful)
Straight up, when I saw "holding up", I read it as meaning "propping up".
When you look at the beatings that broadband providers are taking, it seems like the only thing keeping the whole broadband "revolution" going is the mindless optimism of marketing droids, based on the mythical "average user" spending all of their time (and disposable income) sucking down advert laden pay-per-stream postage stamp sized Britney Spears videos from the provider's portal. It's insane (gee, do I pay-per-view for a postage stamp, or do I pay-per-view to the same provider down the same cable, but have it go to the big widescreen TV on the other side of the splitter?) but it seems to be the only thing keeping the rollouts going.
This is an interesting piece, but it doesn't address the basic problem of broadband. Those of us who already have it know exactly why we want it: we want a fat and unmetered pipe to go find and create our own content with. But the pricing is aimed at bringing in Ms Average User. Frankly, I just don't think that's going to happen, not until the price is way down (in which case you've got to gouge that bit deeper on the pay-pers), and sooner or later broadband providers are going to give up this nonsense about selling content, and are going to have to start charging a sustainable amount for a sustainable service. And those of us who have got used to (fairly) affordable broadband are going to catch it right in the shorts. Oops.
Yes, telco market is a disaster (Score:2, Insightful)
Consumers have been the victims of this unfortunate series of events. I don't know when things will change - we are looking at three companies - Verizon, Qwest, SBC, carving up most of the markets in the country in the next few years, and it seems they will be content to simply milk money from the services they currently offer instead of innovating.
Economics (Score:2, Insightful)
Sadly, the average person usually has to know a tech savvy person and hear the beenfits firsthand before honestly considering getting cable or DSL service. Sure the commercials are flashy, but consumers quickly do the math ($40 + 5 modem rental = $45 x 12 = too much $) and skip over it. They are paying AOL and they like it, and most don't know that AOL will still work over the cable modem.
It's too bad, really. Demand would be there if it was $20 a month, but until they get more subscribers there is little incentive to roll out the backbones quickly.
It will be a slow crawl until that magic $20 price point is hit and things start snowballing. Don't believe me? Think back to these devices and their magic price points. When these things got cheap enough, Joe Average ponyed up the cash:
CDR drives - $200
DVD Players - $125
Re:How about economics? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Broadband is a necessary service (Score:1, Insightful)
oh well. mod me down if you must.
Re:Reasons for broadband slowdown (Score:5, Insightful)
(Umm, you forgot pr0n ;-) And that is why there's a lack of demand.
While copyright infringement may be the "killer app" for broadband, it's not the content industry that's killing broadband. It's the fact that the ISPs can't profit from these users.
From the ISP's point of view, transiting hundreds gigabytes of data per month per user costs money. Your $50/month broadband connection doesn't cover the ISP's transit costs if you keep the pipe saturated. Until the ISP can find a way to make you pay for the transit cost of the data, the ISP will not want you to keep your pipe full.
(Side note: I believe this to be a defence of USENET -- it may well be cheaper for an ISP to transit in 300GB per day once, and then all your multimedia downloaders can l33ch from your NNTP server, which is on your local network, than to l33ch from P2P users that may not be on your local network.)
The original business plan ("Gee, our market research shows we have users interested in online music and video!") was for the ISP to sell you streaming audio/video subscription services. As we all know, the content offered was, and is, laughably inadequate, copy-controlled, and more than often, both. (No, Mr. Eisner, I don't want a copy-crippled .WMV or .RM stream of whatever ABC deems "must-see TV" this season. I just want my fscking DiVXs of Futurama and Babylon 5!)
Since there's no money in giving customers what they want, that leaves the not-for-pay "killer apps", for which the ISP receive no revenue.
None of this changes the fact that Messrs. Rosen and Valenti would love to kill broadband outright. I merely dispute that they're the ones at fault in this particular instance.
It is too regulation (Score:4, Insightful)
But the simple matter is that the Bells were allowed to drive out 3rd party DSL, Congress regulated internet service on cable INTO bigger monopolies (at least local cable companies had to compete with DSL).
Of all the reasons I've heard for people not going with "broadband" (and little since my inital experience on a cable modem has truly been "broadband"), I have never, not once, heard anything about content. In fact, I've wanted to do things for people with dialup access that I couldn't do because downloading that nifty new 13.4 MB program was just too long to tie up the phone line.
Lessig is an interesting writer, but he really pushes his arguments into places they just don't work.
Litiginous Society, That's Why! (Score:2, Insightful)
This is a subtle clue as to why broadband isn't being bought. Broadband is all about my having the resources to run my own web pages or FTP site or MP3 stream. If I can't do that without the fear of the RIAA (gotta pay royalties!), FBI (think Linux is warez) or whoever patented hyperlinks (whatever happened to "non-obvious"?)breaking down my bedroom door, then I sure don't have any reason to invest in that big a connection.
Come on, broadband isn't about how much I can suck down at once, it's about being able to produce my own content.
Misses the real problems (Score:5, Insightful)
Consider the telcos, who are responsible for providing DSL. They want DSL dead, because it cuts into their massive-profit sales of T1s. They're also big, lumbering bureaucracies, which deal badly with change. I won't recount my own DSL horror stories, but there are plenty to be had at DSL Reports [dslreports.com]. Technically DSL is functional and capable, but the businesses behind it, and the support bureaucracies, are not.
Cable has different problems. First, there's the cable companies; in my area, and in others, cable Internet is simply not an option because the local providers don't offer it. There's also the problem of bandwidth sharing. It's true that DSL bandwidth is also shared, but it's shared at a central point, which is easily upgraded; with cable, mis-estimation of demand or usage can leave people drastically short on bandwidth. (DSLReports again for horror stories).
Finally, consider the population layout in the US, as compared to elsewhere. If you have population-dense cities, surrounded by low-density farmland, you can provide access to most of the population simply by providing short-range access in the cities. In the US, most of the demand is in the suburbs, which involve much longer distances and are, therefore, much harder to provide for. (This is especially true in my home state of Massachusetts, where economics are such that the demand and the money is all in the suburbs).
TOO MANY TOYS (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Cable TV $40
2. Car Note $250
3. Car Insurance $100
4. Regular Phone $30
5. Cell Phone $45
6. Tivo $10
7. Cable Modem $40
That's $515 a month and it's missing the cost of 2 little of things:
1. FOOD
2. SHELTER
It's easy to say something like:
"Well, I could get AOL for 20 bucks less, I don't use the internet that much anyway." --Quote from my Mother.
Maybe it's just price... (Score:2, Insightful)
Here in Toronto, cable (300KB/s max downstream, ~45KB/s max upstream) is only $40.00cdn a month.
That comes out to $25usd a month (assuming 1.6 exchange rate).
Maybe us canadian's are more likely to switch because it's so cheap. As for americans, is there a reason why you guys are paying 2-3 times what we pay?
Re:It's Held Up? (Score:3, Insightful)
What's holding it up? Nothing, cheap-ass. Call up your phone or cable company and get it.
I'm happy that you and your brother both have broadband access. I'm also suspicious that the circle of people you speak with through the internet is rather small. If you'll step outside your front door for a little while, you'll quickly see that this is not the case for many Americans. (OK, maybe you'll have to go a little further than your front door. :) )
There are many reasons why people may not have broadband access, but the two prominant ones are cost and availability.
COST
Some people are forced to pay $50 per month for broadband, and they just can't afford that. It's a big jump compared to the $9 they are used to paying for dialup.
AVAILABILITY
I think this is the real big one. It's just plain not available everywhere. DSL has such extreme distance limits that many people living in suburbia are not close enough to a central office to take advantage of it. And the 128Kbps promised by iDSL (which works over longer distances) is not really what I'd refer to as high-speed. Plus, the huge monopolies possessed by companies like Verizon lead to very poor performance and customer service. I know quite a few people that have actually gone BACK to dialup in disgust because of problems with DSL and lack of customer service. I never thought I'd see that happen. I, like your brother, live in a small town. We have cable modem available. This is only because our cable company is small enough and progressive enough to be able to provide this service. Many people live in areas covered by such giants as Comcast. There has been no real incentive for these companies to hurry up their deployment because there is just no competition. If you look at where cable modem is most likely available, you'll find that it is in the same areas where DSL is available. The cable companies plan to compete with the telecomm companies first, then add other areas later. From a business standpoint, this makes sense, but it also leaves quite a few people without the broadband access they desire.
One final thought. Yes, I know that satellite is available to most people. However, be warned that satellite is nowhere near an optimal solution. The latency times caused by the amount of time it takes a signal to bounce off a satellite located outside our atmosphere are significant enough to discourage many from using it as a viable internet connection.
Its the telco Monopoly In My Opinion (Score:3, Insightful)
Amoung other interested companies, why provide high speed service to the customer, and better infrastructure, when you can turn enormous profit and treat the customer like shit,because well where else they gonna go. Even Broadband modem is just plain stupid, they can go much faster, and this game playing with TOS contracts, and you can do this but not that is rediculous. Stop protecting the entrenched old guard, give us high speed connections(fiber, they can do it they just don't want to) to the home, let us buy IP6 Schemes(more than enough space there) to put on them, nd get out of the way. I should be able to get 100mps to the home, cram all the data I want down that pipe, and support everything I want to do(Telephone, Servers, Video, etc) off the one line or a 39.95 flat rate. If the local Telco won't do it the Cable-Co should, hell they are putting fiber on the Poles to support Digital cable, just tkae it to the next step. 'nuff said.
Re:It blow my mind... (Score:3, Insightful)
As much as I'd like to think the big content companies are behind the crap rollout of broadband, I think Mr. Lessig is stretching it here. I find it a little hard to believe that the likes of Disney, Universal, et al are getting Mafioso on the likes of Verizon, et al.
I chalk it more up to economics. It ain't cheap rewiring the world, and the Phone/Cable companies of the world will go as slow as the market allows. Cable's a great example. Cable service (at least around my parts) all of the sudden got A LOT better when satalite and (the failed) Telco companies started eyeing their turf.
For the average person there's no compelling reason to get broadband. Now, once you have it its hard as hell to go back (I have DSL) but at $40 a month you need a 'killer app.' of some sort to justify it.
I'm still hooking my shingle with cheap wireless networks. I think they're now in the same position as ISPs were in the early 90s. Tonnes of them are going to spring up, offer good enough / cheap enough service to give other broadband services a kick in the pants. I know of a couple of companies out in my area that are going after the middle/upper middle class neighborhoods that the phone/cable companies have been telling "broadband's coming in a few months" for the last three years. I suspect if they do well (and I think they will) it'll be amazing how fast Comcast and Verizon will be offering broadband.
Broadband doesn't do video yet (Score:5, Insightful)
Cable companies don't want to merely be the last mile for unconstrained flat-rate video streams. They want to be in the pay-per-view business. Telcos don't want to be merely the last mile for third-party DSL providers. And content owners are terrified of systems that let anyone pass video around.
The game industry wants a general-purpose wire with low latency and high bandwidth, but doesn't have the clout to get cable and telco plants rebuilt to support it. Web advertisers play a lesser role than they did two years ago, and the pressure for high bandwidth ad delivery is down. So the pure-Internet mass market applications don't really need much beyond minimal DSL bandwidths.
And finally, if a new infrastructure is to be deployed, it should have the capacity for real HDTV, or it will be obsolete by 2006.
That's closer to the real problem than what Lessig says.
Establishes a direct connection from your wallet to our bank account!
Re:Canada and the US (Score:3, Insightful)
There are very few companies that offer braod band, and all of them are in bed wiht each other, so to speak.
I used to get 768 DSL 29.95 per month. The the phone company got bought, jacked up my provders costs, which forced my provider take it in the short from people who had a 29.95 contract, AND charge new cutomer 49.95 for 128!
Thus the stiffling of competition is what is killing broadband. If they went back to charging 29.95 you would see a large swelling of broadband users.
Now, if they would only open up the cable lines to competitor, we could get subscription service we want.
Persoanlly I would like the government to put in place an open national broadband system in the US.
Re:Wake up America!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
"It's telcos, stupid!" (Score:4, Insightful)
It's telcos, stupid!
All the Qwest and Verizons are neither skilled nor motivated enough to change the situation.
What about all that "dark fiber" out there? (Score:2, Insightful)
Before the investment bubble burst last year, an unbelievable amount of fiber optic telco cable was laid, and IIRC, a lot of these lines have not even been activated, and won't be. Company after company has gone bankrupt trying to provide broadband and make money, even though most of us want the service.
Trouble is the damn RBOCs have managed to not only keep their local service monopolies pretty much intact but to strangle the up-and-comers at the connection point --- which was supposed to have been opened up by the 1996 telecommunications reform bill. Some legislators at the time grumbled that they had been sold a lie by the big telcos about the reforms, and promised to revisit the issue in the very next Congress... So here we are five years later... these same politicians continue to feed on the lobbyist cash cow, the RBOCS continue to rake in the profits on their existing poor service, and we wonder why nothing changes?
While some of Mr. Lessig's points strike true, in my view more of the problem has to do with big money corrupting the U.S. political process than any stranglehold on content because many of us would provide the content if we could get fairly priced access through-out the whole telco system.
Re:It blow my mind... (Score:4, Insightful)
Powell is making the same case that you are: There's no compelling economic reason for consumer's to get broadband. But he goes farther, saying that the reason there's no compelling content is that content holders are unwilling to risk their "intellectual property" by making it available. IOW, if the content owners loosened their grip and made stuff available, people would get broadband so that they could access it.
I just keep remembering VHS tapes going for >$100. Nobody bought them and lot's of people copied them. As soon as they came out ~$20 people bought way more then 5x more and (home) copying virtually stopped. As soon as some daring content provider makes comes up with a novel way of making broadband content worthwhile, they'll make a fortune. What these providers need to understand is that all the consumer wants is economic and convenient entertainment. If they're willing to provide it, they'll get our business. If they're not, people will either find some other form of entertainment, or find a way to make the existing entertainment more convenient.
Re:It blow my mind... (Score:4, Insightful)
When you think about it, dialup is a fucking pain in the ass. You have to try to connect, then you sit and wait for the fucking modem to dial, and handshake, which takes MINUTES, and only IF it's successful, and about 1 out of 10 times when it fails, it fails in a way that hangs a lot of low-end systems. (in my experience).
Then, you're tying up your phone line, or you've had to pay the phone company for a second line.
Plus, configuration and troubleshooting is a no-brainer for broadband, compared to troubleshooting and configuring a modem.
For DSL and cable, it's not so much the speed, as it is the convenience.
By the way, PacBell is phasing in $50/mo as the DSL rate.
Constituents will demand better infrastructure (Score:3, Insightful)
My point is that in the next 10 years, a huge hunk of the workforce will have attended schools with broadband. Broadband is like crack. If I ever have to dial pu with a 33.6 modem again like I did last summer I am gonna go nuts. That huge hunk of workforce is going to be a major part of the constituency of our democracy, and if broadband isn't cheap and available, we will demand it be so (just like cable TV, which operates under heavy price controls in many places).
I predict the Internet will become like the roads and sewers of the nation - it will become public infrastructure. See Chicago MAN project article. [slashdot.org]
History Provides the Answear (Score:1, Insightful)
The problem is then when your trying to make money, you look for the places where you can get the most return on your investment, ie, urban locations and their suburbs. At some point the population density becomes low enough that a rollout in that area would be more liability then benefit. Hence, no rollout.
It wasn't until the us nationalized the power industry and set requirements on coverage that electricity was available to everyone. Even then it took until the 1960's to get electricity into the real boonies.
It was the same story all over again for cell phone coverage, and it'll be the same for broadband. In order for broadband to become a utility and not a comodity, government regulation is required. Ask the Canucks.
-Chris
Re:Reasons for broadband slowdown (Score:2, Insightful)
No, the outrage comes from the service providers failing to live up to their (possibly implied, via advertising) contractual obligations. If I sign a contract with an ISP stating I'll give them $50/month for the next twelve (or more) months, and in return they'll give me "always on, 1.5 Mbit speed, blah blah blah" they'd better live up to it. They're the ones that wrote up the service agreement, right?
I write this as one unable to get DSL, but I can throw a rock from my house to the wirecenter. I was -->right out. I could get Earthlink cable I suppose, but I'm not sure about the service people at TWC; they'd be the ones doing the hardware.
Re:It blow my mind... (Score:3, Insightful)
For you and I, yes. For someone who doesn't sit in front of their machine a lot, I don't think so. Not yet at least.
I also find the 'always on' aspect of my DSL is more compelling than the speed, but I'm a power user. I apt-get like crazy, surf a lot, VPN to work sometime, and a goober computer lover. That's not the average computer user though. To check mail and do some lite surfing dialup is fine. It may be a bit of a pain and tie up a phone line, but people will put up with it and save $40 a month. As I said in a previous post either the price has to come down or a "killer app" that makes you want to be online / suck bandwidth needs to come along.
Eminent Domain, Seize the Telco Last Mile (Score:2, Insightful)
We have all this dark fibre running between cities. We have all these consumers. We have intransigent telco ILECs and monopoly coax cable companies blocking consumer access to the dark fibre.
One way around this would be for regulatory agencies to step in, ala great public works projects of the past such as the Hoover Dam or universal dialtone access, and seize control of the last mile to mandate real broadband, fibre, connections between consumers. If this means appropriating incumbent's assets, then so be it. They have proved themselves to be a liability and are now impeding economic and social progress.
If the current state of lethargy is allowed to continue, then within a generation the global centres of broadband usage and economic development will not be within the US. They'll be in Canada, Singapore, Holland, Sweden, Korea, and so on.
Bandwidth is not free (Score:4, Insightful)
Same disease that throttled ISDN in US (Score:3, Insightful)
...has tended to throttle the rapid development of broadband.
To wit, the last mile of wire to the house is owned by a heavily regulated monopoly.
Hence, said owners of last mile wire can do weasily things to anyone that wants to put boxes in the central office.
Hence, said owners of last mile wire, when attempting to offer service themselves, are subject to all kinds of litigous cries of unfair advantage, have they provided comparable service in high cost rural areas, etc.
The net result is higher costs and slower roll-outs of new technology.
It's a mess.
Re:Canada eh? (Score:3, Insightful)
We've already wired Korea twice with the amount of cable we've put down, we just live so far apart that it doesn't mean as much.
Re:Population density (Score:2, Insightful)
Canada is WAAAAAAY spread out. A hell of a lot more than US.
I gots my cable modem with very mighty bandwidth for $40cdn/month. I live in a city with 800000 people. It's one of the largest cities in Canada.
In the states, there are more municipalities over 800000 then there are cities in Canada. You gotta be kidding me!
Are you that unaware that the US has approx 281 million people to Canada's 30ish million? Canada's land mass exceeds the US!
My friend lives in a little town called Outlook, Saskatchewan. It's tiny. Think a few hundred people. SaskTel just hooked him up with DSL service.
Grab a map buddy!
There is more to it than that, Cable Companies are (Score:2, Insightful)
There is another conflict of interest that is not so obvious. That is that major media, and many major corporations also want to keep control over the total content that is available online. IE: Censorship of views contrary to their position. There is a great deal of port blocking, companies (DSL/Cable providers) from having static IP's - all in the hopes of preventing them from being able to host content. ISP's look at it as reducing utilization. Corporates look at it as keeping out public participation.
To the degree with which the news media is censored and self censored (fear of lawsuits, food disparagement laws ) is in the view of corporates a positive thing. Keeps information out of the public debate, out of public participation. They don't want to have to track down 1000 web site owners with their servers all over the world, and potentially in jurisdictions not covered by disparagement laws. Media companies also have an interest in keeping out competition, and the maintainance of the status quo is good for keeping advertising revenues(their real source of income) at a constant. They don't want societal upheaval, nor do they want anybody potentially tapping in to their revenue streams by siphoning away viewers (or even potentially advertising revenues).
The US is, afterall, the corporate megacenter of the world. If you seriously don't believe big business interest don't get higher billing than John Q Public... The last president to attempt to reign in corporate power in the US was Wilson.
What I expect to see: Further consolidation in the broadband market, restrictive controls placed on it where content providers are in charge of it, and an economic domino effect of pushing out smaller providers who don't follow the restrictions, provided by active disruption of their services where ISP's compete directly with major telco's but are still dependant on the major telco for any part of the process. This has been the trend. Don't expect government regulators to do anything but turn a blind eye to it either.
Re:Thank you deregulation (Score:3, Insightful)
That being said, there are very good reasons for anti-trust law, and other forms of government regulation. What you are complaining about is not a lack of regulation but rather an imbalance of regualtion (not regulating where you should while regulating where you should not).
And it does not take a constitutional lawyer to see that the current copyright regs make a mockery of the intent of the constitution. (IANAL)
It's NOT copyright/piracy (Score:3, Insightful)
Twenty years later, the telecom companies are only a little smarter. This time they know broadband has to be priced right to avoid "ISDN syndrome", but they will only commit the capital to deploy it where there is (1) a sizeable market, and (2) lack of competition. This leaves out huge sections of the country. As an added bonus, many of the prime customers live in areas with a low population density.
Here in the US, the government doesn't make the telecom companies do anything they don't want to do. That means broadband is only going to be delivered in the most lucrative markets. None of this has anything to do with copyright issues.
Re:Canada and the US (Score:3, Insightful)