The Internet (or at least the network of tubes it runs through) has eventually gotta give as our collective demands grow, and there are signs of this happening. There is a limited amount of bandwith and until that problem is relieved we are heading steadily towards a point where our stuff just won’t fit. A while back Comcast said it would stop allowing users to use Roku or similar devices. Now, in England, T-Mobile has slashed the amount of bandwith its customers can use to levels that would allow normal broadband use down to something more like email with the occasional attachment levels. Meanwhile, the newish Microsoft Phone uses bandwith when it is sitting there doing nothing (why does this not surprise me?) and for this, customers are being charged. Too bad the FCC was gutted by the last administration, perhaps they could find us some bandwith. Like, for instance, the entire AM band. We’re not really using it for anything important, are we?
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LOL!
Put preserve Radio 950!!!11!!
Why can’t we just get commodity internet service already. You pay your money, you get X GB at Y Mbps. You need more? You buy more. Instead we have to put up with the death throes of a failing industry.
And isn’t this anti-competitive, especially coming from the same players who sue municipal governments for setting up their own local Wifi?
MetroPCS does it too, now; see:
http://www.freepress.net/press-release/2011/1/11/public-interest-groups-call-fcc-investigate-metropcs-internet-blocking
It is the loopholes introduced in the FCC’s December ‘Net Neutrality’ order, which allow such anticompetitive behavior.
itzac in the previous comment gets it right what we should demand: “commodity internet service…You pay your money, you get X GB at Y Mbps.” But the big ISP (who actually only provide the ‘last mile’ of connection to your house) want to extract payments from content providers:
“The phone and cable companies that control access to the Internet for most Americans want to get rid of Net Neutrality, the rule that prevents them from discriminating against online content. They want to become the Internet’s gatekeepers, deciding which sites go fast or slow and which wonâ??t load at all â?? based on who pays them the most.” (From
http://www.freepress.net/media_issues/internet ).
So if you want to keep the equal access to the Internet, please educate yourself about ‘Net Neutrality’ and such, e.g. at http://www.savetheinternet.com/ , and write letters to the FCC (in the vain hope that might help).
P.S. I am not affiliated in any way with the web sites quoted, but they seem to give a good introduction to the problems. The first web server in North America was a few offices down from mine at the time (offering access to a particle physics data base); I am not opposed to commercial development of the Internet, but hate it being taken over by a handful of companies and turned into a version of cable TV.
Um, bullshit. To both parts.
The overload of the Internet has been predicted over and over again for something like two decades now, and it hasn’t come any closer to happening. Capacity is built out as demand increases. Is it inevitable that demand ever overtake capacity? No. It is likely? No. The situation is largely self-correcting. We’re a long, long way from reaching physical limits here.
Nor are ISP caps signs of a bandwidth crunch. In the examples cited above: Comcast just doesn’t want Internet TV competing with their own cable TV offerings. T-Mobile may or may not actually have bandwidth issues (with its radio spectrum — not the Internet), but most mobile providers are just seeking the maximum return on the minimum investment in infrastructure. There’s lots of room, but these companies are already insanely profitable, so they can’t be bothered building out.
The myth of the bandwidth crisis is promoted by companies who want to offer metering as a solution to a nonexistent problem, so they can make more money.
You said it so that I don’t have to.
Yeah, i agree with Nemo: unregulated, the providers (wired or wireless) would reach understandings, written or just unspoken, to milk the public for as much as they can with as little investment as they can (see your post on minimum wage).
The whole “bandwidth crisis” is just so the republicans can bulldoze over any net neutrality regulations in US so they could rip the public and kill any competition. And whatever you vote there, usually goes for the rest of the world a little later, so we would appreciate a little care.
I am disappointed that Greg fell for the provider’s doom and gloom. It’s just a lack of investments in infrastructure from their part, so the CEO’s could get their big bonuses or the money could be invested in “content delivery” schemes and so on.
Nemo, we have limited bandwith because of what we have in play. That is not bullshit at all, but a real problem. As you say (and we are not in disagreement here, really), capacity gets built out as demand increases. The problem we have, however, is the rights and initiatives to build out capacity is an arena of exploitation. We are about to become owned by a very small number of companies or a monopoly.
The myth of the bandwidth crisis is promoted by companies who want to offer metering as a solution to a nonexistent problem, so they can make more money.
Yes, that is the point. Yes, it is all bullshit.
Paladin: I am disappointed that Greg fell for the provider’s doom and gloom.
Sorry to disappoint you.
There is, in fact, a limited amount of bandwith because god is not on our side and the laws of physics apply. There is a limited amount of bandwith because FCC regulations divided up the bandwith a long time in a way that has little to do with how it should be given today’s needs. There is a limited amount of bandwith for me personally (and maybe you) and a lot of other people because Comcast has already priced me out of the market as a consumer (for non-internet delivery) and is about to shut down my broadband access to the alternatives to their products.
And, in the context of all three problems: Actual physical limitations, regulatory limitations, and very evil business practices, I’ve given two examples of limitations (on bandwith) being imposed on customers, and one example of a fairly typical Microsoft absurdity.
(I wonder if you two guys don’t get my facebook feed where I’m frequently posting on this issue? If you did, you wouldn’t be saying what you’re saying and you’d be focusing your spanking on the real bad guys instead of your favorite blogger.)
Yeah, I’m not a Facebooker.
My Senator is really into this. Everybody should go here and do this:
http://www.alfranken.com/index.php/splash/fccopenletter
The AM band? That would be fine if you didn’t mind sharing bands with other people with a resulting 80bps effective transmission rate. Then there’s the issue of carrying that collapsible antenna with you – some people might sue after a relative snags a power line with the antenna and gets toasted.
As for bandwidth – modern optical fiber can at least network the USA and Canada. In fact the submarine copper cables are slowly being supplanted by submarine fiber optic cables. If you’re talking about the airwaves – well, they’re crowded. Getting a license to operate radios in the non-military bands outside the ISM bands is a real bitch; I doubt that any more bands will be released as ISM. There’s already a lot of fighting over some bands freed up by the demise of analog TV. There are still people talking about using bands in the high GHz range, but at the moment most engineers roll their eyes at the mention of those radios because the atmospheric attenuation really cripples the use of those bands.
Sorry, don’t have a FB account. I don’t intend to let my boss see drunk photos of me posted by my stupid friends, and so on.
On the bandwidth limitation:
Wireless, yeah, kinda. There are more frequencies that could be used, better compression techniques, more sensible wireless radios and so on. Not near the theoretical bandwidth by some orders of magnitude, just for the frequencies used right now. So it’s just a lack of investments that’s holding us back.
Wired (coper or fiber): oh please! Did we convert all the available silicon into optic fiber? Did we lay cables all the way to the mantle and can’t go deeper? It’s just that some lazy companies can’t be bothered to pull a second line between two points, and upgrade the switches. Oh, and then they can complain about the problems caused by the evil regulators and low-bandwidth their competitors into the ground.