Why broadband will continue to fail in the US

With Google announcing it was going into the ISP business or at least into the ISP infrastructure business it looks like maybe we might see more broad band with the promised gigabit connections it might provide. But will this really solve Americas broadband crisis? Guess what IT WONT! Though Google would probably be the first one to go into the areas that are least served (leave and minor city and you can find under served areas) and claim the funds for it why would it? Would that really help them with their goals? These areas have been abandoned by the major ISPs look at Verizon selling off its rural phone lines. Why would they do this? Oh wait FiOS is more expensive to lay in the country and there just is not the money to be made there. So what happens? Well at lot of Americans still live outside the cities! So we get horrible broadband rate. Well lets look back at Google. Sure they could pull into these smaller towns an under covered rural areas but what would they gain? There would be no pressure (hell most of the major telecoms feel stuck in these areas) and at worst they will look like the bad guys as many of these areas are served by local companies that cannot afford to make needed upgrades. Now maybe if Google is just wanting to make the infrastructure this could work but still where is the pressure? It would be most good Google could do and sure would get great PR I mean I can read the headlines now “Google solves broadband issues the government could not!” ok it wouldn’t be that long but you get the drift.

Basically in the end I have this feeling that people outside of the major metropolitan areas are screwed. A year ago wireless was going to save rural broadband but Verizon has 3G in most everywhere but if you leave a city the towers are so sparse the connection is worse than dial-up. No one wants to invest in rural America which used to be seen as the heart of America. Now it has just been forsaken its paying for all the cities junk and never getting any investment.

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Is Time Warner a child?

Time Warner is acting like a small child now that it has failed to force people into a tier system on their network. Somehow Time Warner is claiming that its rollout of “wideband” (DOCSIS 3.0) was closely tied to its network tiering. Basically Time Warner has turned into a kid saying “Well if I don’t get my way then you wont get what you want” of course this is really just creating more of a problem for Time Warner. People want more bandwidth and would be willing to pay. But why the hell would you pay for a DOCSIS 3.0 connection if you could not use it? What is the purpose at a 50 mbps connection if you can only download 100 gigs? Did Time Warner really expect people to take a speed upgrade if its only useful for a small amount of time do to caps? The biggest problem here is they ware UPGRADING their network. With that in mind why would they need to cap it as there should be more of a capacity and they should be able to easily handle the added downloads. Of course once again its most likely Time Warner doesn’t want you downloading content from the Internet and circumventing Cable. Well in the end Time Warner fails. Hopefully Comcast will take the cue and find some way to move more into Time Warner’s territory. The last thing I would like to point out is I do understand network upgrades are probably not the most easy thing, but I don’t think bandwidth caps are going to make a transition any easier.

Links:

• pcmag.com
  

Time Warner backs off of caps

Today Time Warner backed off of their bandwidth caps do to the huge number of complaints and most likely the huge amount of damage being done to their name by the negative press they got through the whole thing. But is Time Warner really bending to the pressure of the people? Well I really doubt so directly. The real reason that Time Warner is backing off the cap is do to the fact that Congress was looking at possibly legislating against it. Like normal when the communications companies see legislation against them they back off hoping to bide their time. The thing here though is Time Warner doesn’t seem to realize that this idea will most likely never fly. We have gotten past the era of limited download amounts. Many Americans left that when they left AOL with it’s hours online you could have. Hopefully Congress will still pass a law banning bandwidth caps since this whole argument is just wasting money that could be better spent making a better infrastructure for the Internet.

Links:

• pcmag.com

Congress may solve cap problems

So in some good news on the ISP download caps. Congressmen have proposed a bill that would not allow bandwidth cpas. This should hopefully do good as it is pretty much a continuation of the whole net neutrality debate which I am was kinda won by those for net neutrality.

Links:

• Tom’s Hardware

Time Warner has gone crazy

So everyone seems to be talking about Time Warner’s horrendous caps (I even talked about it a bit yesterday) but the greatest thing was a wonderful find I saw on Tom’s Hardware today.  Time Warner is claiming that they have to raise prices because maintenance is to expensive. Well Tom’s Hardware found that according to Time Warner’s OWN Annual Report for last year their costs went DOWN and their revenue when UP. Wait how does that work Time Warner? How can you claim its for maintenance needs if your cost has been going down as you grow? I don’t think there is any way Time Warner can pull this lie off.

Links:

• Tom’s Hardware

Feinstein wants to allow network throttling!

So Democrats that are catering to the cable providers that want to allow network throttling are now trying the sleazy way of getting it legalized. Now this is the reason we cannot trust the Democrats having control of the house. They do things that the lobbyist say that sound good at first like “think of the children” but do not think at all of the consequences. The reason it should not be legal to throttle is because it in no way prevents child porn. This is worthless like New York forcing usenet offline on ISPs there. It’s stated as it’s all to prevent child porn but really its the MPAA and cable companies wanting to crack down. Now I personally don’t do anything illegal but I also don’t want to see a web where there are those who can serve up their sites faster then others just cause they have more money which this could easily lead to! Overall read this article at The Register!