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.
Reasons for broadband slowdown (Score:5, Interesting)
1. The Drought of VC money of late.
2. ILEC's / MSO cable operators not opening access lines easily
3. Cost - for smaller operators, the mantra of "stick new headends on either end of the fiber" is true, except those digipeaters are $$$$.
4. Incremental need, People are not making quantum shifts in usage, it grows over time
5. Virus threats are contained quickly anymore by most people, so the network crawling to a halt because of traffic is a temporal thing.
Here in Kansas city we actually have a company called everest-kc.com that has done a full overbuild of some of the cable infrastructure in the area. phone, Long distance, cable modem & television on a competing / seperate wire. Imagine that. .
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.
Re:Reasons for broadband slowdown (Score:2)
The charge 10 cents per for every full Meg after that?
When Streaming content arrives with decent content, and a decen format, let market forces set your prices.(as long as there are at least 3 competitors!)
Re:Reasons for broadband slowdown (Score:2)
Well, perhaps that's an exaggeration, but a glance over the history of Cable/xDSL stories on
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.
govt utilty monopolies are needed (Score:2)
Really you can't beat govt Telco monopolies - look at Nokia & Singapore Telecom.
Re:Reasons for broadband slowdown (Score:5, Interesting)
I want to LAN my home, I want to use a VPN, I want to run an FTP server and a ShoutCast server and have a firewall and do my Morpheus thing and maybe a little httpd. But you know what? I'm not allowed.
A killer app is something that you're going to use. But broadband providers don't WANT us to use all our bandwidth. That's how they make their dough: promise 1500 kbps for each & every subscriber -- I'm talking cable here, folks -- and then damn you if you use it, because, surprise, there's not enough for us all.
If people found out how easy it is to run those apps named above, then maybe we WOULD have a quantum shift.
Preventing *new* killer app development (Score:4, Interesting)
What kinds of applications would people develop if it only took creativity and technical skill and wasn't forbidden by usage policies? Most interesting applications include at least some kind of server somewhere - even an ICQ or IM "client" is technically a server, because it's sitting there on your system waiting for people to connect to it, and it's often advertising its presence using some kind of presence server (the ICQ login stuff or Napster index servers or whatever.) Some successful applications were carefully planned by a small or large group of people, but many of them just happened - somebody tried it, and a few people liked it, and it caught on. And the more opportunity you have for people to develop things that probably won't catch on, the more chance that somebody will develop things that DO succeed. Maybe it'll be a "neighborhood watch" or "home traffic/weather cam" application, or maybe cheap cameras and better PC audio will allow the ICQ-phone to replace large chunks of the phone company (so duhh, either team with a gateway company like Net2Phone or a long-distance phone company to profit from professionalizing it), or maybe simply getting $40/month instead of $80/month from people working at home over VPNs is enough to be happy with, or maybe you can provide a $5/month IP relay service an 802.11 client software so that wireless users will become paying customers instead of service-stealing evil leeches. Or maybe it won't come from home developers, it'll come from game developers, like the integration of networking, Dancepads, and Quake into Combat Aerobics, or the World Wide Rave Network, burning its 15 minutes of fame before something else takes over. Whatever. More likely, it'll be something I haven't thought of, and much more likely, it'll be something the cable companies haven't thought of, because it's a decentralized decision-making process, not central planning.
But if you're a cable modem company desperately needing enough customers to sign on to pay for growing your infrastructure, decreasing the chances of potential customers finding the killer-for-them app that makes *them* want to buy service from you is really, Darwinianly stupid.
Cablecos do have things they're legitimately afraid of, though it was worse in the past than today. Upstream bandwidth is still limited, and people running popular amateur porn or warez websites on their cable modems could dog down performance for their neighborhoods (unlike commercial sites, which need better performance than the typical 128kbps upstream of current cable modem.) And that gives them a bad reputation for performance, and encourages the local phone company to run "Web Hog" ads taunting them. And Napster and Movie-ripoff-ster and other copyright-violation-promoting services directly hurt the business of their major business partners, so they need some way to discourage them. And the band on "email servers" is partly driven by fear of spammers, though it's largely driven by the sheer corporate greed assumption that if it's a mail server, it's either a business that you'd be willing to pay more money for or that you're taking away potential cablemodem customers instead of encourage more people to get cable. But blanket "can't serve anything because we don't want to monitor your content or upgrade our hardware to meter" policies are just stupid.
Moore's commentary on Sturgeon's law says that the 90% of stuff out there that's crap keeps doubling every 18 months, and typical Freshmeat experience says that lots of projects will die out before they reach usable stages. But that's ok, and if we're lucky many of them would be in the 90% and not the 10%, or that the ideas in the good ones will get recycled by somebody else.
Re:Reasons for broadband slowdown (Score:2)
It blow my mind... (Score:4, Interesting)
BTW: I know the blurb above says that regulatory issues aren't the problem, but I don't buy it - not while content-control interests can buy something like the DMCA.
And of course, I can't get to the article at the post - likely because they can't get enough cheap, high-bandwidth connections. Who says irony is dead?
OK,
- B
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.
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:5, Interesting)
$40 may be a lot of cash to some people, but they also need to examine the costs of dialup. In most areas a decent ISP is going to run about $20. If you don't want people griping that your phone is busy while you are on the internet, a 2nd phone line is needed. In my locality, this is about $12, but once all the taxes and other fees are tacked on, it runs about $20 or more. So we have about $40 for broadband and about the same for dialup. Other than being potentially less reliabile, if broadband costs the person about the same as dialup but is much faster, why wouldn't they choose it?
Personally, I don't care about entertainment content via the web. I just like not having to wait for sites with a lot of html and/or images per page (like slashdot). It makes downloading email and software nice too.
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.
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.
How about economics? (Score:2)
Re:How about economics? (Score:3, Insightful)
3 Year Waiting List (Score:2, Interesting)
But it's useless. Despite repeated phone calls, Comcast and Earthlink still say service in my area is "a year or two out". This is pathetic, truly.
They say it's "too expensive" to branch out into new areas -- but surely it's less expensive then not reaching new customers! I wish there were a solution. Europe's way ahead in wireless technology, too.
I'm buying one of those new iMacs. They're amazing. But you know what? I'll still only have a 56k modem to use with it. Something's not right with that.
Re:3 Year Waiting List (Score:2)
Thank you deregulation (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Thank you deregulation (Score:2)
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.
Re:Yes, telco market is a disaster (Score:2)
For many observers, there's nothing strange about that at all. Many types of service favor a winner-take-all scenario in the market, and naturally tend towards monopoly. Operating systems are a good example: if you control 60 percent of the market, it is far easier to get the next 30 percent than it was to get the first thirty percent, because of network effects (networkability, standardization, etc.) Utilities, which usually have somewhere a bottleneck in distribution which can allow only one "gatekeeper," also fall into this category.
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)
Re:Long live the glorious revolution! (Score:2)
There are still some hardware issues (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, some telcos are making the investment, particularly in new neighborhoods.
Re:There are still some hardware issues (Score:2)
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.
Re:Phone Lines Not Capable (Score:2)
Not really. If you're more than 3 mi from the CO (or other box with DSL equipment in it) you're stuck. I'm 10 mi outside Boston, but 3.5 mi from the CO. Thus, the only option for me is cable modem, which is going through the whole @Home problems. Given that this area already has cable service, will the phone company upgrade their local service to offer DSL and offer competition? Doubt it.
Speaking of @Home, companies fail. It happens. The idea was pretty stupid to begin with.
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.
Re:Broadband Providers are holding up Broadband. (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
I believe this is what the discussion is all about. Why is it that broadband is so hard to come by in the US and if you can get it, why is it so bad? (BTW, I didn't read the article cuz it has been
I'm Canadian and I think I'm the luckiest person in the world! For $20/month I have a choice of a 3Mb cable connection or a 1.2Mb ADSL connection. They have to fight for my business, and it's now down to $20/month. (Well, for 6 months anyways, reg. price for me is $35/month). But still, from what I here you get for $150/month in the US, I'm laughing! Why is it that Rogers (one of the Canadian providers of the @home service) was able to switch over to their own backbones after the excite@home fiasco and still give me this great service at an unbelievable price (I do believe it's the cheapest in the world!)
I thought the US had more money AND technology. They also have more people and assuming relatively simular needs to Canadians, they'd have a much bigger demand!
I don't claim to know the answer but I'd thought I'd share with you Americans the experiences I get up here in the great white north in my igloo with a 3Mb connection for $20/month.
Re:Broadband Providers are holding up Broadband. (Score:2)
Re:Broadband Providers are holding up Broadband. (Score:3, Interesting)
A static IP would be nice of course....
Datapoint: I have DSL in Allen, TX (Score:4, Interesting)
I pay around $80 a month for 768 kb/s downstream, 384 kb/s upstream to Internet America [airmail.net]. $15 of that is for a dedicated pair they lease from SW Bell because, at 15.6 kft from the CO, ADSL is not guaranteed to work piggybacked on a POTS line.
But even at $65 a month, that's way too expensive for most people.
Now, it is true, that I can get SW Bell's offering for around $50/month, but it is PPPoE hell with lousy TOS (in my opinion) -- my neighbor suffers with this.
Airmail.net (Internet America) has no problem with me running an "smtp" server to sink my email (of course, they appreciate that I do not relay) or any other server as long as I do not have "excessive" upstream bandwidth. Other ISPs freak at the mere suggestion of doing something like that. On the PPPoE issue, "we looked at that and held our noses" was their unoffocial comment. SOLD!
In short, I am a satisfied customer.
Broadband is a necessary service (Score:2, Insightful)
Man, I'm glad I'm Canadian
Re:Broadband is a necessary service (Score:3, Interesting)
the utilities you mention are metered, which means charged for actual use of the service (watts and gallons become bytes). and this is, i think, the kind of plan which has to happen to save broadband providers from themselves. of course we, as (ab)users of the system like our unmetered, wanton ways, but how many gigs of porn and divx would you be downloading if it was costing you.
the best comparison i think could be to cell phones. you pay X for service, you have Y bytes per month, and if you pay extra you get unlimited nights and weekends. this is the kind of thing which can give the broadpand providers an actual business model to get the service out the door. then, like cell phones, they can offer special things to you based on a model like USENET, where they have the content locally, you are just saturating the pipe to the provider. you can pay Z per month to get unlimited access to local content.
but the 'logical' comparison is to a service like cable TV. you pay your X per month, and you can watch as often as you like, unmetered. unfortunately that model simply doesn't work for broadband, because that does not reflect the manner in which THEIR costs are incurred, which is by your downloading gigs of porn and divx from the internet at large, meaning they get to pay THEIR providers for that usage.
There's nothing better than an always-on, FAST cable modem
how about an always-on, LOW LATENCY DSL modem
-sam
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.
Re:Oh, you mean *preventing*? (Score:2)
Or do you pay-nothing (apart from a flat monthly fee for the pipe) to download the full-screen DiVX, VCD, or MPEG-2 video once, and keep it on your hard drive, burn to CD-ROM or DVD-Whatever, and play on your widescreen at will?
I agree it was the mindlessly-optimistic marketroids who got the rollout started. I just happen to think that the providers finally realized that due to the third option (pay nothing and get pretty-damn-good multimedia from copyright infringers) the marketroids were wrong, and as a result, the rollout has stopped.
As you put it:
> 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.
Absolutely. And also, as you correctly point out, if that's the future, it's gonna get expensive, because it costs the ISP serious money to haul those kinds of quantities of data around without the advertiser dollars originally envisioned by the postage-stamp-video-portal business model.
Canada and the US (Score:5, Interesting)
In a country as large, unpopulated, and diverse (geographically, lingusitically, and culturally) that connection is very important. Recently, the Canadian government started rolling out a very fast fibre optic network that was put in the ground along the (surprise surprise) railroad.
Broadband is a tool to further our national identity.
In addition, thanks to near monopolies in telephone and cable, we have homogenous suppliers of DSL and Cable broadband. And, despite what most people think about monopolies, my DSL costs $25 US a month for 1.5 megabits, and my phone line costs $30 US a month for basic access and voice mail.
It almost seems that the extra competition in the US has ultimately led to the failure of broadband.
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.
The Railroads of the United States (Score:3, Informative)
Someone already has. Qwest was founded to take advantage of this opportunity. The funny thing is that no one bothered to take note that the railroads only had the surface rights to the land- which means that all those lines are running through land that Qwest doesn't own. Now there's a liability that I bet they don't put on their balance sheet... I wonder if buying US West with their over-inflated stock gave them the assets needed to survive such a fiasco.
Re:Canada and the US (Score:2, Informative)
It seems in the US, competition in broadband has been along technological lines, e.g. cable vs. DSL vs. wireless, etc. I'm now living in Toronto, and I can tell you in contradiction to your statement that there is plenty of competition just within DSL in parts of Canada. In this case, all of the ISPs (including Bell's Sympatico) lease DSLAM ports in the CO. Some of the ISPs go a step further and install their own equipment, which is why IStop has maximum residential speeds of 3mbs/800kbs, and business speeds of 6/1mbs.
Now, can somebody explain how the DSL "resellers" work (worked?) in the US? Is that like here, where they lease DSLAM ports, or is it truly the "reselling" of the service? I've been gone from the US for over 2 years, so is my impression of competition just within DSL out-of-date?
Re:Canada and the US (Score:3, Insightful)
Canada eh? (Score:5, Funny)
I hate to boast, but a broadband over cable only costs $CDN 29.95 per month up here in Frezzeyerassoffland. Since our dollar continues its slide against the mighty greenback, that works out to about $US 19.25 per month.
When you combine that with the fact that I don't have to put up with strip searches [detnews.com] when I fly off to Moosejaw, it just proves the point that Canada is the best country in the world for high speed internet users that like to keep their clothes on in public places.
Clothes OFF?!? (Score:2)
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.
The reason is (Score:2)
Actually, it's usually only another $8/month (Score:4, Interesting)
Hell, that $8 will be more than made up for in the sheer number of other things I *don't* spend money on because I'm too busy online.
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
Damn those evil pirates... (Score:3, Funny)
The FCC is holding up Broadband. (Score:2)
Stupid question time: Is broadband profitable? (Score:2)
Given that offering broadband services requires fairly substantial infrastructure upgrades (costing a pretty penny), why would any provider in their right minds jump into the market now?
I was part of a hole-in-the-wall company that was looking at getting into the ISP market shortly after it stabilized as a commodity (back in the days of 33.6 modems). Our conclusions were that we'd make very little money from offering Internet service, and that we'd only make money at all if the service we offered was lousy. And that was with our upstream connection mostly paid for by other means.
Could it be that there is no conspiracy?
[Disclaimer: I am not intimately familiar with the economics of offering broadband. If you have more detailed information, by all means post it.]
Contrary to popular opinion (Score:5, Informative)
Broadband is not available everywhere in the US. I've noticed many people post stating that they have several broadband options available to them. I don't doubt that's the case, as where I currently live I have both cable and DSL options available for me. Of course, I also live in a major metropolitan area.
However, let's take the case of my parents that live in a small town in the Shenandoah Valley. They've been asking about broadband options for their house for several years now. They own a Bed and Breakfast, and a dedicated high-speed Internet connection would definitely be a benefit for them. Every time they inquire at the local Cable provider, they're told that "We're still testing it in the big town up north." Whenever they go to any DSL provider, they're told "We haven't upgraded the hardware in the area for that. However, we can offer this 64k ISDN line at 3x the going DSL price, or a fractional T-1 at 10x the going DSL price."
I doubt it has much to do with hardware or anything like that. It has more to do with the following lines of thought...
So long as the major broadband providers can get away with pushing around the local carriers, nothing's going to change. Even when the major broadband providers are responsible for delivering the product direct to the consumer, there's not much difference. Verizon has long waiting lists to get DSL in their service area's (Oh, and they don't allow smaller local carriers to gain access to their DSL lines. They pay the minor fines and screw the competition until it dies and Tauzin-Dingle passes/goes into effect.) Cox Communication is the monopoly Cable Internet provider for Fairfax County, VA. Their Road Runner service is notorious for outtages, high latency, dropped packets, etc. Do they care very much? Not really. So long as customers are willing to pay them $50/m for crappy service, they will continue to provide it and stuff their wallets with their massive profits.
Re:Contrary to popular opinion (Score:2)
In major metropoiton areas, you make more money per square mile, then you do in rural areas.
So I can charge X, but in a switch(oir what ever) and get 1000 customers, but if they put in a switch in a rural area, they might get 50 people in that same area.
Number are rough, I know, but for DSL, got to where they would put the switch and see home many customers they would have within 15000 ft, then do the same thing in a metropotin area, you'll see what I mean.
Interesting staement about RoadRuneeer, because it was the best sevice I ever got with any technology product. of course I was the only one on my node....
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.
Re:TOO MANY TOYS (Score:2)
1. cable TV $0 (pirated)
2. car note $0 (stolen)
3. car insurance $0 (who needs it, and do you have ANY idea how HARD it is to insure a stolen car?)
4. regular phone $0 (don't need it, have a cell phone)
5. cell phone $20
6. tivo $0 (don't have one, don't need one, don't particularly want one)
7. broadband $0 (can't get it without a phone line or legal cable)
now despite the falsehoods in my list, point 7 is important. you can't get DSL without an actual regular phone line, and since i'm well covered by the verizon monopoly, no thank you, verizon, i'd even go without broadband rather than deal with you EVER again.
so i guess i'm waiting for some REAL broadband company (qwest fiber to your house, anyone?) to offer residential services, or for a local ISP to offer wireless broadband so i can enjoy it for a few months before they go bankrupt.
ps - the truth? i have bunny ears on my TV, a crappy used car which is overinsured in the hopes it catches fire spectacularly, DSL and a regular line from Verizon. only points 5 and 6 above are true
-sam
Lack of Choices (Score:4, Interesting)
With cable, until the @Home debacle, I had 3 static IPs and ran my domain off the cable modem. I had decent performance, but the it was expensive, not as highly available as I would have liked, and I knew that I could lose access at any time for running a server.
Now I have DSL, albeit the consumer service. Soon, it will be set up with static IPs and my domain will be back up (grumble). It will be even more expensive, for probably less performance, but is supposed to be more reliable (certainly has been so far), and I won't have to worry about running the domain (plus I'll get another pair of static IPs).
Both cable and DSL share a common downfall, and it is the reason that most dial up customers I've talked to are slow to switch: no choice of ISPs. With a phone line, I can sign up for any ISP, and can leave for another if I don't like the service I'm getting. With DSL or cable modem, I get one ISP, and cannot switch providers and keep my connection otherwise. There is therefore no price or service incentive for the vendor to improve.
For me, I'd select no ISP. My wife would use AOL. My father-in-law would use his current local provider, and my Dad would be happy just to get broadband at all. The imposition of service has nothing to do with the architecture, and everything to do with decisions made by the broadband access providers. However, as a consumer, I am forced to pay for services I do not want and will never use.
Certainly, content should not be a problem: every web designer out there seems to assume that you are plugged into the server room judging by the amount of bloated Flash and Java pages out there.
-jeff
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?
Thank you Canada! (Score:2, Informative)
The Cable companies Shaw and Rogers support internet basically everywhere you can get regular cable tv. It is fast, and they have scaled reasonaby to meet customer demand. I used to find rogers (when they were in vancouver) a little flaky, but that has all gone away now..
I think adoption of canadian broadband has been sucessful because:
a: Cheap
b: Reasonable to Excellent Quality
c: Availability
Keep up the good work guys!
my thoughts on lessig (Score:2)
all in all he actually does good things, and i like the thought of someone like him teaching at the best law school in the country. maybe the next generation of IP lawyers will know which side of the fence to stand on.
but then again, with stanford tuition being what it is, and the MPAA/RIAA paying what they do, don't count on it, i guess.
-sam
I don't see a hold-up (Score:2)
I'd rather have DSL service here. I liked it better. It was more reliable and I like the company who provided the service better. But when I moved a mere 3 miles from where I was, DSL was no longer available to me. Thankfully, however, Cable internet (which wasn't available to be at the previous location) was available when I moved. (Side note: "The grass is always greener...until you've visited both sides and you can tell the difference first-hand." I like DSL.)
Okay, that said, it SEEMS like the problem is area availability unless I am misunderstanding the article. The article does seem to confuse the matter by discussing "many channels with nothing on them." So are they talking about broadband cable TV or broadband internet? Or maybe I'm stupid enough not to realize they are one in the same..?
Now as far as that goes, I can MAYBE so some reason for the slowdown of progress and availability being made, but I don't believe it yet. I see matters progressing as the various providers have mapped them out. I once followed cable internet deployment in my local area when I didn't have it and now I follow DSL deployment. So far, both have remained adherant to their schedules.
Where is the PROOF or any indication that it's copyright holder issues slowing down the installation of DSL/Cable or other broadband internet technologies? I have read nothing about that... maybe I'm a bad reader.
Simply put, I don't see the connection between the slow-growth of broadband internet technologies available to consumers and copyright holder interests. What's the connection? Where are the stops being put into place? How are they being put into place?
Little info for ya... (Score:2)
Wake up America!!! (Score:2, Interesting)
Not that I have anything against the Korean citizens or believe that they are any less entitled to fast internet access (as are we all...). I am simply in utter disbelief that a once war-ravaged, divided country whose population indulges primarily in farming is in such a position of dominance over the United States in this respective area. For all intents and purposes, any comparison in terms of technological and/or economical dynamics would be heavily weighed in the favor of the United States. And yet, the Korean government and industries have been able to provide this amazing level of availability of the Internet to it's citizenry.
IMHO, anyone whom can be presented this fact and not arrive at the simple conclusion that there are evil corporate powers at work hindering the acceptance of broadband within the U.S. is simply not trying to see the truth or being paid off by big corporate money!!!
-n2q
Re:Wake up America!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Wake up America!!! (Score:2)
You're missing something else... (Score:2)
What we need is a good civil war to destroy all that infrastructure. Then we could start over with fibre all the way around. But what can we do to piss the south off this time? Maybe ban high school football?
Broadband companies waiting for govt funds (Score:2)
Population density (Score:4, Interesting)
--
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.
The price is holding it up (Score:2)
Right now, I'm with IStop.com [istop.com]. If you own your own modem, they offer a 1184/160kbs DSL connection for CDN$30 (ca. USD$19). To put it into perspective, that's less than the price I payed for dial-up when I lived in the US! This company also offers 3mbs/800kbs (CDN$99), and if you have a business line, 6/1mbs (CDN$195).
For myself, I have their 1.2mbs service + ethernet modem rental + static IP, all for ca. CDN$40. I can run any server I like - it's unrestricted access. The HTTP proxy is optional. If I exceed their 20GB monthly limit, I get charged $3/GB for excess (apparently this will be dropping in the future to $2/GB). THE PRICE IS RIGHT!
Living in Toronto (Canada)... (Score:2)
I've had a broadband connection with Rogers Cable since early 1998. Granted, my neighbourhood was one of the test zones, and I was one of the first people who got it in my area. At that time it was not available in the entire Greater Toronto Area. But for quite a while it's been available pretty much anywhere Rogers has TV cables installed. The service is pretty good, although I've had more than my share of problems, it's fast but most of all, it's cheap.
The other alternative in Toronto (and I guess the rest of Canada) is DSL. Bell Sympatico is the widest spread one, since they have the phone line monopoly. But they do lease the lines at decent prices, since there are at least 4 other companies offering DSL in my city. Again, a few years back DSL was not available everywhere, but now it is.
The funniest thing is that when I have on-going problems with my cable, I can threaten Rogers that I will move to DSL, and magically these problems get fixed. For example, I used to have a LanCity modem, which is very old and very sensitive to cable noise. I called them a couple of times, asking for a replacement from another manufacturer, but nothing happened. As soon as I mentioned Sympatico DSL, I had a Terayon modem installed by the next day.
I also mentioned the fact that broadband here is cheap. Well, on average it's about $60/month including the modem rental. That's Canadian funds, or about $40 USD. There are occasional promos, price wars, etc so you can get even better deals (sympatico had/has an offer for CAD$20/month for the first 6 months).
My point is that I enjoy my broadband connection.
Internet over DSL and cable TV is *NOT* broadband (Score:2, Interesting)
Real broadband would be fast enough to bring in at least two stream of decent quality video (which I define as being at least 4:3 DVD quality and really ought to be 16:9 HDTV quality at full frame rates and resolutions - I'm talking rates on the order of 6 to 20+ megabits/second per stream.)
And a real "broadband" service, even if it has asymetrical bandwidth, ought to be at least capable of supporting things like servers for small businesses. The "mostly-in" paradigm of most of today's DSL and cable services just creates a caste system.
We really need fiber optics to every home and business. At a minimum cities ought to require that every time a trench is dug in a roadway or to a house, that an empty conduit be installed and connected. That way, over time, a conduit system would be created so that the conduit system would be there when we are ready to install the glass itself (after we've figured out the patching and packet routing mechanisms that need to go along with the actual fiber.)
I'm not sure that people are aware of the efforts of the Cable TV and telco industries to prevent the installation of municipial fiber optic utilities. There are efforts underway at the State level to enact laws to prevent cities from installing city-owned fiber optic cable plants because that would cut into the near-monopoly services of the phone and cable TV companies.
Dumb users getting DDoS trojans, that's what! (Score:2, Interesting)
Do we really want these people to have big connections?
Technology can be dangerous. Those with the ability to widely distribute broadband should be wary of putting it in the hands of irresponsible people. Perhaps there should be a clause in the service agreement that they protect their systems from trojans and such or else face losing their connection. Maybe there should even be a credit-report style tracking system in place to enable ISPs to know who is a menace and charge them more money for a connection.
At this point, i think that neither broadband nor end users are mature enough to cooperate. Slow connections for Joe Sixpack, fast connections for Joe Sysadmin.
Sorry about my vulgarity and intensity, but i just got the butt end of a DDoS attack. Someone did a big DDoS attack using my ip address as the spoofed source for all the packets. Not only did it flood my feeble 1.5 Mb/s connection with SYN/ACK packets, but it got my ISP really pissed off. They were getting all kinds of threats of legal action. There was nothing anyone could do.
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!
I Trust Lessig and the WP About... (Score:4, Interesting)
I Trust Lessig and the WP About as far as I can throw them. Larry writing for the WP? That's like putting a red star on a red flag, if you catch my drift.
I live in NoVA. The reasons we don't have broadband are simple. We got analog cable before internet. Cox is struggling to upgrade all the analog stuff. Then of course DSL just sucks, but it sucks everywhere.
Wanna lay fiber in DC? The city slapped a moratorium on digging because they couldn't coordinate digs properly. Before, company A would lay fiber, then a week later company B would tear up the same street that was just patched. Residents and businesses said "enough is enough" and justifiable so. Now they have to coordinate through the city, but that takes time. DC has some infrastructure that dates back to the Civil War, and a government that is just beginning to recover from being run by a mayor who smoked crack. Literally.
If you want to look for reasons why broadband isn't making it in the US I'm sure there are plenty of them, but this business of suggesting that "content providers" are totally to blame, or even partially to blame seems like a stretch. This just smacks of political posturing and disinformation from the radical Leftist AIP movement, of which Lessig is a leader.
"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.
why no broadband? got cash? (Score:3)
It's the same basic reason that broadband came to metro areas first: they can afford it and most of the neccesary infrastructure is already there. Now take an area like a town in the midwest with a population of around 15,000. Even better, a town that used to have a thriving industry at some point (be it a steel or paper mill or whatever). What reason does a cable company (or phone company to get the people just outside of town) have to offer broadband? The meager monthly charges coupled with the lower population density just cannot justify the huge costs of implementation.
Well, maybe it *could* justify the cost, if utility companies were willing to look 5 or 10 years ahead. Over that stretch of time, the costs could be recovered, but that's a *very* long term investment, especially with the bad case of the flu dealt to the US economy of late.
Again, I'd love to have cheap broadband everywhere, but let's get serious. It ain't gonna happen by some altruistic whim. Somebody in DC is going to have to get it into thier head that this is a Good Thing and push to see it happen. But then again, the FCC has been trying to get HDTV adopted as well for 5 years now, and it'll be surprising if we make *that* deadline 5 years from now.
Re: (Score:3, Flamebait)
Re:why no broadband? got cash? (Score:2)
This isn't running water or telephone or electricity...but in some ways broadband is indistinguishable.
All 4 are services that are provided by a seperate, usually private entity. Actually, no! Please tell me how your telephone service is different from broadband (besides the obvious talk-on-one-gank-mp3s-on-the-other). Both are services you pay for, yes? The installation of telephone lines was once subsidized by the US government, wasn't it?
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]
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.
Canadians pay WAY less than Americans... (Score:3, Informative)
- 1640 Kbps Down
- 640 Kbps Up
- 5 E-mail addresses
- Two dynamic IP addresses
- A VERY cool TOS/AUP
Guess how much I pay? $35.99/month CAD. That is $22.30/month USD. For Shaw High-speed Internet (Cable), it comes with a higher speed and costs about $5 more ($40.99 CAD which is $25.40 USD).After seeing some people pay $49.99 ($79 CAD) for Cable Internet, and about 10 bucks less for dial-up, I am sure as hell not going to move to the Internet with Internet rates THAT high. Hell, you can get 56.6 Kbps Dial-up for $6.30 USD/m.
You Americans are getting ripped off or we're getting a pretty impressive deal.
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:It's Held Up? (Score:2)
Re:It's Held Up? (Score:2, Interesting)
Wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
In the Western suburbs of Philadelphia (mainly Chester County), unless you live near the center of town, DSL is nonexistant. As for cable modems, Comcast has been saying they will be ready "Real Soon Now" for the past 3 years.
As for the DSL, I claim that its mainly cheapness on the part of Verizon as for the reason we cannot get it. Verizon is a Fortune 10 company, and as a result, we could have DSL tomorrow if they were willing to set it up here. What surprises me is that this is a fairly rich part of Penna., meaning that any DSL upgrade for the phone company here would result in an immediate ROI. But oh well
As for the cable modems though, that is a different story, prior to Comcast's buying out of the previous mom and pop cable company, there was no hope of getting cable modems here (the original company was saying 2006). It seems though, based on more and more of my friends in the county who are getting cable modems, that their availability is slowly spreading. As for me, I am near the bottom of the list for it. Not much to complain about, just sitting here waiting for Comcast to get going and deliver it... real soon now... hehehe
Re:Nope (Score:2, Informative)
Also, the signal may start breaking up after 3.5km, but maybe the technology can give you DSL at reduced speads (but better than iDSL) at slightly greater distances.
Re:It's Held Up? (Score:2, Informative)
Even in Fairfax County, the nation's richest, broadband is not univerally available. A friend of mine lives within walking distance to the Metro and still can't get DSL or cable modem.
Re:It's Held Up? (Score:4, Interesting)
So, even though you and a friend have broadband, its not quite proof positive that universal access is here. Why do you think 802.11 NAN's are popping up all ovcer the place?
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.
Re:there's no holdup of broadband where I live (Score:2)
Same is true in the Columbus area. Heck, Time Warner is actually expanding their Road Runner service area by HUGE amounts. They have expanded roughly a full hour's driving distance north and west of my home (about 50 miles altogether). Around here, 50 miles in ANY direction puts you really far into the sticks.
On the other hand, DSL is dying around here. I don't know anyone actually using it; whereas everyone and his/her brother has a good RR connection and loves it. Granted, cable modems used to take heat for their perceived lack of service; but I can say that in over a year and a half I've only had an outage of about 6 hours (all at one time, for an unknown reason). That's pretty reliable service in my opinion, at least for a residential ISP.
Now, businesses around here all seem to have ISP service through Ameritech one way or another. A full or fractional T-1 seems to be the defacto standard, and whoever the provider is, it's going through Ma Bell. No way around that (yet).
I just can't see how broadband isn't taking off around here. If DSL is your only classification of what broadband is... then well, okay... I can see that being the case. It's just too gosh darn expensive and it's no faster than cable. Now, if only Time Warner could only put my phone service on cable, too....
Re:there's no holdup of broadband where I live (Score:2)
Surprise! I like my cable modem connection. (Score:2)
for $69 I can get a 384/384 synchronous ADSL, and it gets installed in less than ten days...
384Kbps down/128Kbps up was the best Verizon, known as GTE back then, (with Flashcom as ISP) could give me, and I was less than a mile from the CO.
Now I have Adelphia PowerLink, and 384Kbps down is just about the worst it gets. Usually I get T1 speeds down. Yeah, bandwidth is capped at 128Kbps upstream, but c'est la vie. I got the same with DSL. They're trying to prevent people from running servers, that's all. I'm cool with that...I have a hosting provider for that. Let them deal with the minutiae of running a web server.
Before cable, I had two phone lines, one for voice, the other for fax/data/DSL. When my cable modem stabilized, I was able to shut down my second phone line. Cable modem costs $43/mo. That's about how much my second phone line costs. When Adelphia switches us from the proprietary setup we're on and onto DOCSIS, I'll buy my own modem and save $10/mo on renting this POS Terayon TeraPro. And hey, for the past three months I've been getting my cable modem service for $20/mo.
The only thing I should warn y'all about...don't get rid of your backup dialup ISP. And make sure your network is behind a firewall box...I have a SMC Barricade that has been working beautifully and has a serial port for a failover v90 modem. The only reason the cable companies don't like these boxen is that the clueless have been known to plug them in backwards, letting a rogue DHCP server loose on their network. Remember which port is the WAN port and which ports are the LAN ports and everyone will be happy.