Re: [funsec] Not so fast, broadband providers tell big users (fwd)

[Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike () swm pp se>]

On Tue, 13 Mar 2007, Joel Jaeggli wrote:

> sell you 100/24 vdsl2 for around 80euro a month.

100/10 over CAT5 ethernet (and also 100/100) is available here in Sweden 
for around $35+tax in quite a lot of places. Weirdly enough it's more 
commonly available in places where the real estate owner has a harder time 
renting out apartments, because it actually brings people over who 
wouldn't normally considering living there. Competetive advantage.

Real estate owner will pay up front for the CAT5 cabling and will then 
bring in one or more ISPs to provide IP connectivity and switches (well, a 
lot of different business models are available). Real estate owner invests 
a few hundred dollars and gets more apartments rented out, the ISP has to 
bring fiber into the building/area and can then reach a lot of people with 
highspeed connections that give high take rates.

Some ISPs that prefer CAT5 do so because of less maintenance and that the 
VDSL(2) equipment is actually more expensive than CAT5 cabling+ethernet 
switches in a lot of the cases.

I think it's weird that cable(coax) is the premium service in the US, 
because here it's considered inferior to DSL, and it's the service you get 
when you don't care about performance and quality. Just the other month 
there was some kind of disruption on the cable system where I live, and 
when I called in to report it they first asked me to go check with my 
neighbors (beside me, and both upstairs and downstairs) before they would 
even take my fault report. Then they had to coordinate a time when both I 
and my upstair neighbor could be home from work at the same time so the 
technician could try to find the fault. Ended up me having basically no TV 
(almost unwatchable) or Telephony (cable modem wouldnt link up) for 10 
days. I'm glad I had my internet connectivity via other means. I'll take 
star topology all days of the week, thank you.

So to sum it all up, my take on the US problems is that there is too 
little competition in the market place. LLUB has brought a lot of 
competition into the marketplace here and to compete with the LLUB 
offerings, some other ISPs go directly with infrastructure to the curb or 
even directly into homes in some of the cases.

--
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike () swm pp se