 belawrenceThey'll never let you in
join:2000-08-06
Santee, CA
 ·Vonage
| Do you honestly believe that companies like AOL Time Warner and Comcast are going to open their lines to other ISPs? If they did then cable internet access would be just as bad as some DSL, as the RBOCs are forced to let competition sell services on their lines. Coax may have great bandwidth potential, but i'd like to see how it would stand up to carrying multiple ISPs, like the RBOCs must do, as well as both analog and digital cable tv service. BTW, I am aware that Time Warner cable is starting to offer Earthlink service in some areas, which is basically being done to keep the regulators quiet. |
 dru
join:2000-09-14
Corona, CA | reply to EXASITECH
Sure. Find me a cable company that I, as an ISP can buy connections to serve my customers and I will be in the cable business. Nobody doubts it is a viable technology, and one that, in my opinion, offers a number of practical advantages (read: more economical than "pronto") especially in rural areas where many subscribers are miles from the CO.
Yep, I would buy cable connections in an instant over DSL. But they are not available in MY service area, so I am forced to use the only alternative to get to my customers and that is DSL. We can argue that DSL is better for security, but with SBC and their infernal BCG most if not all advantages of DSL are out the window. If I am going to have to share a connection and bandwidth of a BCG box, might as well take cable - it's cheaper to deploy and is more universally available.
There is no overwhelming technical reason why Cable companies could not resell collocation space in their headends and individual connections. It's been done, been demonstrated, and I myself have identified several easy workarounds to those few problems that are cited.
SBC and the other ILECS may be disingenuously anti-competitive in their conduct. But the one thing that rings true in various rantings of SBC employees is the basic question - why does SBC get hammered for the same practices that seem to be invited, encouraged, and accepted among the cable networks?
And why do cable companies so arduously fight to keep other ISPs out, even if these ISPs are willing to pay handsomely? I have a few theories:
1. Cable companies don't want to lose control of "their" customers. People want bandwidth, and the freedom to explore possibilities of that bandwidth. But for cable companies, it's not about bandwidth, but content. They have always had a tight control of content, and the holy grail is premium content via pay for view or the movie channels. Allowing another company to buy a wholesale pipe into their wired homes and living rooms is an anathema to the cable culture, even though the actual impact of selling wholesale channels to ISPs would be a win-win profit center, especially if there were mutual non-compete agreements (The last thing most ISPs want to do is get into the traditional TV business).
2. Cable networks are ever worried about available bandwidth, and feel that selling to ISPs would squander valuable channel space. Here the cable companies do face regulatory and contractual challenges that in all fairness to them, are real concerns. Many modern fiber-cable hybrid systems not only carry internet and 200+ channels of digital compressed video, but are still required to carry a complement of 50-60 analog channels for legacy "cable ready" sets per local franchise agreements. Even if they could offer free set top boxes (which would reduce loss to theft) most cities and counties refuse to relent. Add to this the must-carry FCC ruling that means the system must carry all local channels within 50 miles, contractual and licensing ties (In order to carry the popular Sci-FI channel or ubiquitous CNN they have to also carry 5 other channels nobody ever watches, and of course there's the shopping channels that they get spiffed on sales. So even though these cable networks may have bandwidth to burn today, they are reluctant to give up a single megabit to outsiders. Even though cable has tremendous data carrying capabilities (a single 6mhz TV channel yields 36 megs full duplex, nearly a T3), many cable companies are loath to devote a single TV channel's space to broadband, let alone reselling more to other companies.
3. Everybody including membership warehouses, home improvement centers, coffee houses, telephone companies, and even cable TV networks think they can cut corners or making an extra buck by being an ISP, even though few understand what it takes to be a good one. While they may have money to throw at a network, they usually misjudge the demand for support, the need for sophisticated OSS and billing systems, and the cost of training and keeping good people who keep their sanity and don't lose their cool when they are yelled at at 3 AM. Cable companies have a completely different operation, corporate culture, and workforce that is completely different than specialized ISPs. Cable companies, with their home consumer based vision of the internet don't understand the engineers and techno-geeks that constantly tweak and tune in a routine that every well-run IP network needs to function. With just a few exceptions, cable companies rate poorly in customer service and satisfaction compared with companies that specialize in business class IP services.
The bottom line is, they could resell space on their networks, but don't. Many could also partner with CLECS to compete with the telcos head on and provide dialtone via cable (Cox does this well in Orange County, CA) but most do not.
Yes, the modern cable systems have the right technology to deploy wide scale broadband services to homes, and quite literally, But like their brethren at the ILECS, they have not wised up and looked at the big picture for the future.
Someday, cable companies will wake up and realize they can't directly compete with the economies of scale offered by Dish and DirecTV for traditional entertainment and video channels. At the same time they will discover they sit on a powerful technology - a broadband gold mine of interactive and wholesale bandwidth resale opportunities that satellite and wireless networks can never match in capacity and scale. Even if the bandwidth is there, the latency renders satellite and many wireless networks unusable for many applications. |
Reviews:
 ·Verizon FiOS
| reply to EXASITECH
Well then tell my cable company to stop boosting services on the lower population end of the county and move to my end.
I live in Northern VA and have DSL, I would have originally rather had Cable after seeing how well RoadRunner worked (offered by Cox 5 miles to my left), but Comcast has yet to offer anything in my area except shoddy service (would get Direct TV or Dish but Apartment complex won't allow it). Digital Cable launched last year sometime in my county and has yet to move beyond the area around the Comcast Main office, Cable Internet available for over 2 years now is still in the same boat. I have called them and been called by them and the Rep told me that all of the wiring has been finished and the Testing Completed. But they won't turn it on.
So now I have Verizon DSL and it has only gone down once. The service I have seems to vary greatly from the horror stories others have experience, I think in part due to the fact that I am in a prior GTE area.
Cable will not replace DSL, My ping is a lot lower with ADSL then my friends Roadrunner account, I don't slow down around 6pm when everyone gets home from work (most nights I'm not home by 6), and my download speed on 768/128 is fast enough to be comparable mostly due to the fact that a lot of sites will not pay for the bandwidth to support DL'ing at anything over 120kbps and when I hit 88Kbps on most (downloading Red Hat 7.2) the time differance wasn't enough to worry over. |
