Funny thing here in Canada, the Prime Minister Chretien promised
broadband to every house in every tiny town in Canada. That was
proclaimed about a year ago. But he's been overthrown in a coup here -
so who knows what will happen next.
- Harry
On Friday, September 20, 2002, at 06:44 PM, Matthew Rigdon wrote:
Hi Folks
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
-- -----------------------------------------------------
"The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are."
-Joseph Campbell
Matthew Rigdon
email@hidden
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