Equipment Makers Want Telecoms to Upgrade Networks

[Grandmastersexsay]

This is the US greed machine at work. Years ago Verizon start rolling out fiber in several places and the cable companies ended up making a deal with Verizon to NOT upgrade. This is because the cable companies dont like Streaming Services like Hulu, Netflix, Google TV. They want the networks to get congested so they can charge for better tiers of service. On a side note the caps the cable companies impose on us are not needed either. If their hardware is configued properly one user cannot use all the bandwidth unless no one else is requesting anything (load balancing anyone). The Govt here in the US even gave out billions to upgrade our internet here. The answer from the cable companies...dont upgrade anything in the infrastructure, pocket the money and just allow burst transfers to exceed the imposed caps, that way the speedtest average will go up. I pay for a 30Mbit downstream and it will speedtest close to that, in realworld use with a sustained download i will always max out at just under 15Mbit.

Greed can be good or bad. Greed makes people work harder, and drives competition. So greed in and of itself is not the problem. The problem is that government shields these companies from competition. If these companies had to deal with competition, their greed would lead to better service at cheaper prices.

 

[jabliese]

Google Fiber is not expensive. If memory serves, they connected Kansas City for $2500 per user. Does that sound like a lot to you? Spread the cost out over a year, $210 a month. Over 2 years, $105 a month. Starts to sound like a cell phone plan, except this is fiber, it will not be obsolete in 6 months.

Please, Google, hurry up and decide to hit the ISP business big time.

 

[Skippy27]

Daniel Tang is an idiot.

ISP's should be delivering ALL data to and from the customer as fast as it can possibly do it (line speed). It cost fractions of a penny to deliver 1gbps over a 1mbps line so speed is not the issue and charging a price difference between the 2 when they run across the same lines is silly. They do it because there is a perceived value by the customer for the additional money.

So you get the customers on the internet to get what they want and then you get them off the internet because their need has been satisfied. Movie studios and video providers should allow for their content to be cached so that when my DVD player wants a Netflix movie it is downloaded completely before I am even through the beginning credits. Why stream it it to me for 120 minutes at 10mpbs when you can just get it all to me in 5 minutes at 300mbps?

People that are saturating their line constantly can be dealt with on an individual basis.

 

[Grandmastersexsay]

Daniel Tang is an idiot.

ISP's should be delivering ALL data to and from the customer as fast as it can possibly do it (line speed). It cost fractions of a penny to deliver 1gbps over a 1mbps line so speed is not the issue and charging a price difference between the 2 when they run across the same lines is silly. They do it because there is a perceived value by the customer for the additional money.

So you get the customers on the internet to get what they want and then you get them off the internet because their need has been satisfied. Movie studios and video providers should allow for their content to be cached so that when my DVD player wants a Netflix movie it is downloaded completely before I am even through the beginning credits. Why stream it it to me for 120 minutes at 10mpbs when you can just get it all to me in 5 minutes at 300mbps?

People that are saturating their line constantly can be dealt with on an individual basis.

You are the one who sounds like an idiot. ISPs have a finite amount of bandwidth. They only have what their infrastructure can support, and that infrastructure cost money. If you want to use a larger portion of their total bandwidth, it only makes sense that they charge you more.

 

[Skippy27]

You are the one who sounds like an idiot. ISPs have a finite amount of bandwidth. They only have what their infrastructure can support, and that infrastructure cost money. If you want to use a larger portion of their total bandwidth, it only makes sense that they charge you more.

Yes grandmaster I am fully aware of bandwidth limitation and such on a network as I have been dealing with them for quite some time.

Wired bandwidth is for all practical purposes is unlimited being that the amount of money they can bring in to invest in any bottlenecks is quite unlimited. All the major ISP's could not even roll out fiber to the home fast enough to spend their quarterly profits. They could easily wire their entire foot print, rural areas included, and pay cash to do it. The issue is incentive to do it (lack of competition or regulations), not the ability to do it.

Regardless, if everything ran at wire speed then 97% of all customers would be on and off the network in no time. Sure the more that is on there the more bandwidth is being used at any given time but the only time that would truly be noticeable is realtime streaming (watching video) and pretty much any 10-20mbps connection is plenty to prevent any stuttering.

I can't tell you of a single business network that sets up their user's ports with a slice of bandwidth to control congestion to servers internally. They simply let them run at line speed and if the internal network or the server can't handle it, they upgrade it as needed. The internet is really no different.

Cost between ISP's and backbone providers are negligible for the most part as most are "free" between them as they agree to take on data to be able to pass data across each others networks so we can't blame that.

Once the infrastructure is in place the cost of delivering 10mbps or 1gbps can't even be measured so you can't use that as an excuse for charging more either, but good try.

 

[somebodyspecial]

Google's plan isn't expensive to rollout. They make money on every installed neighborhood. Partly because they get ~25% or so to sign up (for years) and the rest to pay up front to get it into there etc. They commented they profit on every install even at $70/month. Cable etc are just lying or not approaching it correctly like google is. I think the only thing stopping google from taking over more quickly (and giving us 700Mbit-1Gbit connection speeds) is cable etc blocking them as much as possible. It's also slowed somewhat by the nature of it and being a bit ugly to implement at times (wires hanging everywhere in your area, since they usually aren't burying this stuff AFAIK). But it's not the PRICE of rolling out google blocking them it's the LOOK and Cable companies etc blocking it. Even the FREE people (5Mb/s) pay an up front one time fee ($300 if memory serves in Kansas City, $30 though in Provo soon) thus paying for the roll-out without google having to fork over billions to get it done. $120 gets you those speeds with TV included and a 7in tablet (at least in KC). UNLIMITED! There are multiple articles online about how they do it so efficiently. They guarantee the free loaders 7yrs of free service, though working the math that ends up being $3.55 or so per month for 84 months (still awesome for the price even at 5Mbit), but Google is paid up front again avoiding out of pocket. It ends up being a great deal for both sides no matter how they slice it and schools etc get access (25 local institutions got it free in KC I think, again good for everyone who says yes to google).

 

[somebodyspecial]

Actually the 25 institutions was part of the Provo deal, can't remember what KC was, but the point is nobody gets screwed (except cable?...LOL) when google comes to roll-out service. It's also causing cable to respond like 300Mbit in Austin by ATT (but is that unlimited?). I hope Apple or someone else with big funds starts doing this also. It takes a large company to be able to get things done these days in politics with cable/telco etc always greasing peoples palms to block you.

 

[GreaseMonkey_62]

Maybe in an alternate universe, money would go to upgrading networks. Not in this one though...

Indeed if telecoms would spend more money on upgrading infrastructure and less money on stupid ads trying to tell us how their products are different (in marketing world) from the other big telecom we might have more fibre.