Re: Study Gives High Marks to U.S. Internet - New York Times

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Matthew Tarpy [tarpy () tarpify com]
Sent: Wednesday, April 09, 2008 1:21 PM
To: ip; David Farber
Cc: brett () lariat net
Subject: RE: [IP] Re:      Study Gives High Marks to U.S. Internet - New York Times

Hi Brett--

I find myself in the unusual position of disagreeing with you (I tend to find your viewpoint on NN more along with mine 
than others).

I would say that it's not that we're denying the existence of WISPs, rather, WISPs do a poor job of advertising their 
services, and those that do, have tended to over-promise, and under-deliver (Boingo's mesh metro network, anyone?).

I lived in Campbell (right next to Saratoga) for a couple years in the late dot-com days, and my apartment complex had 
an 802.11(a) to WISP connectivity option for us as we couldn't get DSL or cable (and we really were in the heart of 
Silicon Valley), and the WISP had atrocious up-time and performance issues...the WISP WAN network would go down at all 
hours and even with one or two users on the local 802.11 network, we were lucky some days to get more than 10k/s 
download speeds. And then, when I moved 30 miles south to Gilroy (Garlic capital of the world!), I was able to get 
1.5Mbit DSL from PacBell the day after I moved into my apartment.

Even today, living in Chicago-land, I honestly couldn't tell you if we had non-cellular broadband options (and it's not 
for lack of trying to find); Comcast continues to deny the existence of repeated connectivity issues where my cable 
modem drops almost daily the connection, and I have to call their CSC to get them to do a remote reset. I think they'd 
be more interested in helping me fix the problem if I had a reasonable alternative to threaten to bolt to.

It's not the fault of consumers that service providers are either unable, or unwilling to invest in getting the message 
out about their products and services.

--matthew

-----Original Message-----
From: David Farber [mailto:dave () farber net]
Sent: Wed 4/9/08 11:51 AM
To: ip
Subject: [IP] Re:      Study Gives High Marks to U.S. Internet - New York Times


________________________________________
From: Brett Glass [brett () lariat net]
Sent: Wednesday, April 09, 2008 12:41 PM
To: rberger () ibd com
Cc: David Farber; Ip ip
Subject: Re: [IP] Re:   Study Gives High Marks to U.S. Internet - New York Times

Robert, and everyone:

Why is it that so many people seem to deny the existence of wireless
broadband providers? (Susan Crawford and others have even done so in
their testimony before bodies such as Congressional committees
and the FCC.)

I have been to Saratoga (played there with the Celtic Band Avalon Rising
when it started 17 years ago) and I must say I would be extremely surprised
if there were not several wireless operators like my own doing business in
that area. In fact, I've just done a quick Web search and have found one:

http://www.bullpenwireless.com/

--Brett Glass

At 09:31 AM 4/9/2008, David Farber wrote:


> ________________________________________
> From: Robert J. Berger [rberger () ibd com]
> Sent: Wednesday, April 09, 2008 11:29 AM
> To: John Markoff
> Cc: David Farber
> Subject: Re: [IP] Study Gives High Marks to U.S. Internet - New York Times
>
> Any assertion that the US has world class internet connectivity for
> the majority of its Citizens is bunk.
>
> I normally live in Saratoga, CA, part of Silicon Valley, and where I
> live I STILL can not get ANY consumer broadband service. No Cable
> Modem, no DSL.
>
> For the next few months, I am living in downtown San Francisco in a high rise
> apartment building set among other high rise apartment buildings right
> next to a major telecom hub and though we have DSL, its not
> particularly fast or anything.
>
> This is the kind of location where in other countries such as Japan or
> S. Korea they have fiber to the building and ethernet to the
> apartments at 100M - 1G.
>
> Instead we should have a baseline attitude more like Professor Payne's
> as per the earlier post on IPer's list:
>
> "Sadly broadband speeds in this country aren't really broadband at
> all. I won't be happy until every home has a one gigabit per second
> connection," he told BBC News.
> He added: "If we were able to afford to dig up the road in the 1980s
> to roll out cable TV then we can afford to do it again."
>
> But this time horizontally divested so that the people who own/control
> the pipes do not own/control the content.
>
> Rob
>
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