To Me The Price is Right

Would I pay $4,000 to $10,000 to have my house made fiber connected? Heck yes.

Having experienced in my Sacramento home just how good SureWest's fiber to the premise service is (50 megs up and down for $200) there's a portion of the buildout recovery in the monthly price. I already pay Cox Communications $119.xx a month for Cox Business Internet and that gives me 15/1.5 but usually better. If Cox would offer me fiber I'd be thrilled as the next standard of DOCSIS 3.0 will supposedly offer more speed, but a fiber build will mean even more speeds and lower latency. That's the key in my book.

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[AustinTX]

Austin TX has surprisingly slow "broadband", though it is densely packed with tech industries and Techies who want it. I dream of someday having FIOS here, but I’d have to clandestinely share it with my neighbors, to split up that hefty monthly bill! However, that wouldn't be too hard, using the PC firewall and spools of Ethernet that I already have. ;)

One thing that aggravates me about DOCSIS 3.0 articles is that it is being heralded as the solution to bringing faster speeds to people's homes. The fact is, DOCSIS 1.x/2 technology is already faster than most of the service tiers which the cablecos plan to offer under 3.0. While the baseline speed of the local loop is (only!) 4x faster with 3.0, what it mainly brings to the table is offloaded constraint and control features (purported as QoS or "network management") for the ISP. As usual, the ISPs haven't seriously overhauled the network; they're simply planning on cheaply stretching out the old, existing pipes further. This has got to be the real reason the cablecos are so thrilled about rolling 3.0 out.

ISPs always oversell the max bandwidth they are able to deliver. While cablecos have, say, 100 customers provisioned (capped) at 5Mbit/s (which is what I get with my ISP-provided 1.1 modem) sharing a 38Mbit/s loop today, they'll have 100 customers provisioned at 50Mbit/s sharing a 152Mbit/s loop after the upgrade. The odds are that fewer customers will be able to enjoy their suggested "as high as" speed simultaneously, but you can bet ISPs will charge everyone top dollar.

Not to drift too far off-topic, but IMHO a related aspect doesn't seem to get enough attention. ISPs are always giving us their pity stories about "network hogs" (customers who, *gasp*, actually use the bandwidth they've contracted for), various FUD regarding network congestion, and the impossible burden of upgrading their networks at the customer's every whim. As I’d long suspected, a backbone provider's rep (the CEO? I’m still looking for the link) recently admitted that a fully utilized network costs only 15% more to operate than a fully idle one. That percent could include anything, from handling trouble tickets to syslog storage space. Network neutrality is not a burden to networks, but it is a barrier to generating billable "service events".

Throttling customer's connections and threatening disconnection has the effect of scaring people from using the service they were promised, and making them more complacent. Non-complacent customers tend to actually do something when they're unsatisfied. ISPs will bill customers dearly for streaming a Netflix movie, but the bandwidth used to deliver their own TV service is expunged. A non-neutral network would also allow ISPs to double-bill Netflix extra for being such a "big consumer". Most ISPs only pretend that they suffer from network congestion. Amazingly, there are already bandwidth stock markets established throughout the world for the purpose of speculating and trading in bits as though they were limited in supply and consumed in the process of sending them. By maintaining the pretense of a state of emergency, ISPs create an artificial shortage, by which they can point fingers away from themselves, and still reap higher profits. *cough* OPEC *cough-cough*

In the last decade, the government shoveled billions of taxpayer dollars into the telco's money bins so that they could upgrade and extend their networks. As usual, no promises were required, and *shock* that money has simply disappeared. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve already paid for fiber into my home, and ISPs haven't delivered it. Instead, they're making a steep profit from the existing, fully-paid for infrastructure, and show every sign that they intend to keep doing this for a long time. Minor improvements like DOCSIS 3.0 come with Faustian conditions, and make ISPs a disproportionate profit and provide them with unearned PR.