Re: The embarrassment of American broadband

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Brett Glass <brett () lariat net>
Date: April 27, 2009 2:07:17 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net, "ip" <ip () v2 listbox com>
Cc: bill.stewart () pobox com
Subject: Re: [IP] The embarrassment of American broadband

Bill Stewart writes:

> What David, Brett, and Jonathan Seff's Macworld.com article are
> really disagreeing on is how fast "broadband" is or should be.
> People like Brett, who sell wireless service to remote areas,
> and telcos that sell cheap low-end DSL as well as faster service,
> and maybe still sell IDSL in remote areas,
> think that anything faster than dialup is broadband.

Actually, as an engineer, I understand that in truth NO service except  
cable modem service is truly "broadband." ("Broadband" -- the antonym  
is "baseband" -- refers to unidirectional and/or bidirectional  
communications which are done via frequency division multiplexing over  
a shared, wideband medium with multiple taps.)

That being said, the key issue in rural areas is getting users decent  
service that they can afford. If 1 Mbps costs $100 to $500 at  
wholesale (not counting the cost of the last mile), then the user who  
can afford $30 per month can't and won't pay for a 1 Mbps connection  
with 100% duty cycle. Hence, a combination of duty cycle restriction/ 
oversale and bandwidth throttling is economically necessary to provide  
that user with affordable service. It's not a matter of "think[ing]  
that anything faster that dialup is broadband;" it's a matter of  
creating the best and most useful service possible, given the  
available inputs. Speed isn't everything; utility is.

> Yeah, Korea and Japan and even Sweden have really fast
> cheap service - but are they doing anything interesting
> with it besides TV, downloading movies from Pirate Bay,
> and occasionally looking at the produce at their
> neighborhood grocery store?  Where are the cool apps
> that drive new connectivity?  For dialup, it was email,
> and for low-end broadband, it was Napster and the web.

Exactly.

> I'm more interested in what you can do with the service
> than I am with absolute speeds - the big applications for
> speeds over ~1 Mbps are television and its competitors,
> which are intellectually uninteresting even though they
> may be important market drivers and may cost less than satellite.

Actually, television costs far more to deliver via IP than via  
satellite -- and is staggeringly less efficient to deliver that way.  
Any isochronous bulk data delivery -- such as "streaming" of audio or  
video programming -- is best done via a broadcast medium.

> On the other hand, I really object to ISPs that won't let me
> run any kind of (non-spam) server on my home machines,
> or which limit my monthly download, both of which are
> bad habits, one learned from cable modem companies
> and the other learned from Australian ex-monopolies.

As mentioned above, these are not "bad habits" but rather constraints  
which are necessary to allow economical price tiers. We do offer  
service options with fewer constraints; they simply have to be priced  
so that the income covers our costs. An ISP should (in fact, must!) be  
economically sustainable, or it will ultimately fail and leave  
customers stranded.

> The reason Brett objects to the cost of wholesale bandwidth
> he has to buy, and therefore to heavy bandwidth users,
> has a lot to do with why he's standing out on customer
> roofs in bad weather installing antennas -
> it's because he wants to provide good service
> but lives way out in the middle of nowhere
> instead of somewhere warm and civilized.

Actually, we'd be standing on customer roofs even if we were in a more  
densely populated area, because wireless is more economical than cable  
or fiber ANYWHERE.

Also, Laramie is not "the middle of nowhere," nor is it in any respect  
uncivilized. It's a city of 28,000 people, a two hour drive from  
Denver, Colorado, with a world class university campus. And it's a  
wonderful place to live. Our goal is to improve the quality of life  
still further by supplying first rate high speed Internet -- both in  
town where DSL and cable are available and in outlying areas where one  
can get neither.

--Brett Glass





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