Having just moved (and thus done my shopping for a new internet connection), I found it pretty galling that I was pretty much expected to either get a $30 land line or a $50 cable-TV package if I wanted to get internet. Technically I didn't need to get the bundle, but they didn't even list prices for an internet-only connection.<p>I have line-of-sight to our local water tower, though, so I was able to get a wireless internet connection and bypass everyone else. It's not super-high-speed, but I have 2.5 down and 1.5 up, and that's not too bad... and I have the moral satisfaction of not paying anything at all to either the cable companies <i>or</i> the telcos.
The last line stood out to me.<p>> ... passing by along the way the idle fiber infrastructure that the FCC set aside nearly a decade ago.<p>Can anyone elaborate on what exactly they mean? Is this dark fiber sitting around somewhere? Did the FCC sanction the deployment and private companies built it out (and then ignored it) or was government money spent to lay the wires?
The conclusions are interesting, although I think they give government intervention way too much credit. If other product lines are any indication, people can become pretty content pretty quickly; they may not <i>demand</i> more even if they might achieve it. I suppose life is just too short and people move on to more pressing concerns. If tomorrow all TVs in the world stopped working and shows could only be watched online, I think customers' attentions would shift and demand for high speed would see a new life. That's just the way these things work.<p>Incidentally, I hate the use of the term "Republican led FCC" in this article when "FCC" would have sufficed. I'm no Republican, but these kinds of loaded phrases invite ad hominem arguments. Readers should be able to learn about the actions of an organization such as the FCC and judge them as good or bad based on <i>relevant</i> facts.
Potentially silly question: Why did we dig ditches and bury cable? Why didn't we dig ditches and bury pipes that you can snake cable out of and into as needed? This makes our Internet seem less like a problem of feasibility, and more like a complete engineering fuck-up.
Switched to Sonic.net about 2 months ago and love it! Twice the speed (getting over 6 megabit now) of AT&T and for 1/2 the cost ($40/month vs. almost $80).
Or, you could do what Verizon did: Build a large fiber optic-based network in several metropolitan areas and, for the first time, give Comcast, Charter, and Time Warner a run for their money. Then, turn around and dump several "second-tier" markets (Portland, Redmond/Kirkland/Bellevue, most of North Carolina, etc) onto a company that is actively trying to persuade customers <i>not</i> to use that network.<p>Sometimes large telcos just baffle me.
The interesting bit is that I'm not sure in many cases it matters.<p>I'm lucky to have FiOS (25down/5up), and I have many times the bandwidth I can manage. I can be downloading a couple torrents, my wife and I can both be streaming a movie, our phones can both be updating, I can forget I left Pandora running, and a friend can be in another room doing goodness knows what, and web sites still load more or less the same as normal.<p>I'd don't think I've ever come close to saturating my connection mainly because the sites I'm connecting to...even major sites...can't serve me data fast enough. For example, I routinely wait for youtube to buffer (though oddly 720p appears to load faster and more smoothly than any other resolution)...often I'll watch something on hulu while a videoclip buffers on youtube.<p>I've been on 100mbps connections in East Asia and didn't notice any perceptible difference...I did about the same amount of stuff in about the same amount of time...the sites I was connected to simply weren't servicing me any faster.
I do find it strange that you can go and get wholesale bw in the US for $1/mbit or less, yet residential ADSL tails, sold with contention ratios in the order of thousands:1 can be sold for like $60/month....
In the UK the main speed factor is the line between you and either your cabinet, or your exchange. You're sold packages that are probably either 8 or 24 MB/s, and you get what you can. I'm 1.1 miles from the exchange directly with no fibre in the road, so I get 6.5 while paying for 24. When fibre comes any nearer, it will be free. How is it in US? Is fibre to the street/cabinet common?
My favorite article on this topic, by Robert X. Cringely in 2007, on the Telecommunications Act of 1996: <a href="http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_002683.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_0026...</a><p>"The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen."
Why doesn't another big company step up and lay down its own copper/fiber into homes? Sure, it will be a BIG investment but the return should be awesome. I am sure it will be worthwhile in at least some areas like NYC, Bay Area, Boston etc.
Hong Kong is small country which makes it faster / cheaper to adopt new technologies compared to adopting it in 50 states where some states are magnitude bigger than Hong Kong.
The Western capitalist dogma is that state-run economies like those of China are inherently inefficient. But it seems to me that more and more recent evidence suggests that it may be that the partisan gridlock of Western democracies, dominated by monied interests and their lobbies, is more detrimental.
Not sure what people are going to do with 20mbps+ broadband when they will certainly set caps that will be used up within the first few days of your billing cycle?<p>Sonic apparently has no cap but that's virtually unheard of today. <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/07/05/BUFD1K6GF7.DTL" rel="nofollow">http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/07/05/...</a><p>Which would you rather have, unlimited speed with a 150gb cap or 6mpbs with no cap?
When choosing internet service 4 months ago for my new place, i made a decision that my next job hunt will be around areas were walking distance from the office are covered by sonic.<p>Startups think about mentioning this as a benefit. seriously.