Beginning to think that Tom Peters ( Circle of Innovation etc. etc.)
is right here. There have been a lot of excuses why broadband hasn't
taken off. But its becoming obvious that the wrong people are
running the show ( WorldCom etc. etc. ). Taking a page out of
Peter's books - may be time to fire all of the upper management
folks to get things moving.
I worked at a web company that started out doing CD-ROMs and all
along they kept saying "One day, broadband will come along and you
won't need CD-ROMs or anything else because it will all just stream".
That day is coming, some time around 2020 (eight years after the
world ends according to the X-Files). I've always believed that
broadband will never be available for the masses. One simple reason:
long distance. Here's the reasoning.
What does it cost to call next door? 35 cents. What does it cost to
call New Zealand? 5 dollars a minute (I'm pulling a figure out of my
nether parts, but you get the drift) What does it cost to email next
door? 20 dollars a month. What does it cost to email New Zealand?
20 dollars a month. We all know that once the lines are in place and
the equipment is humming along and everything's connected, it doesn't
cost any more to call New Zealand than it does to call next door.
But you have this vast industry which is based on getting licenses
from the government to provide a service. The government regulates
the prices you can charge, etc., so that it costs more to call
farther away. Long distance companies make their money by convincing
us that we have to spend more money to call people a short distance
than a long distance away (and when you get into the weird
contortions of in-state calling, it's even worse. How can a call to
Orange County from LA cost more than a call from LA to Texas?).
Along comes broadband. Suddenly, the internet has enough speed to
provide reliable voice over IP. Now my call from LA to New Zealand
costs the same as the call from my apartment to the one next door.
If everyone in America had access to broadband, long distance would
disappear. And there's too much money involved for
telecommunications companies to let that go. We all know what
happens when money and politics get involved. So the telecomm
companies have done everything they can to prevent household
consumers from getting access to broadband. They've been trying to
years to have internet access billed per minute, just like regular
phone service. I'm amazed that Congress has thwarted that here (in
Europe, as many of us know, that battle was lost). Even now,
broadband companies with large groups of subscribers are starting to
limit the amount of aggregate bandwidth you can consume per month
(Roadrunner in Texas, for instance, check slashdot) and many of the
larger providers, who are owned by media companies, are threatening
to start filter out certain ports carry P2P protocols. Since they
won't grow without the tech people who want all of these things
(unlimited bandwidth, all open ports, etc), they still provide those.
But as soon as enough people get it, don't think they won't crank
down the bandwidth you can consume (sorry we changed the contract, no
we didn't consult your lawyer, you don't have enough money to
actually fight us), filter ports that provide services they don't
want you to have (any wide-spread VOIP program would get wiped out,
don't think they won't, a lot of ISPs already block ports. Earthlink
blocks any SMTP requests outside of their network, preventing you
from using a non-Earthlink SMTP server to send mail. They claim they
do it to prevent spammers from hacking email servers from their
network).
So, in a nutshell, broadband is a pipe dream (pun intended). Yes, we
have the technology. We don't have the legislation. And in the
world of the future, legislation is everything.
Kind of long, anybody who actually read all of this, thank you for
indulging me. I'd love to hear any thoughts on this. I'm not going
to call myself an expert, it's just my two cents. So far, the real
world evidence seems to bear out what I've said. I'd love to be
proven wrong, though.
Later,
Matthew
--
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"The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are."
-Joseph Campbell
Matthew Rigdon
email@hidden
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