My last column on broadband data caps rubbed the wrong way my old friend Brett Glass, an Internet Service Provider in Laramie, Wyoming. “Your most recent article regarding ISPs and bandwidth caps is misleading and inaccurate,” wrote Brett. “I hope you haven’t joined Bob Frankston’s ‘kill all service providers’ camp, because it sure seems like you have… Our bandwidth costs are $100 per megabit per second and are going UP due to increasing charges for middle mile bandwidth from Qwest/Centurylink and the FCC’s failure to act on special access.”
“My situation is absolutely the norm. Bandwidth is expensive, and anyplace you have to use the (monopoly) telephone company to get to it — which is most places — it is getting more so due to lax regulation by the FCC. At the same time, users are cranking up the duty cycle, attempting to leave streaming running as they once left the TV or the radio on even when they weren’t watching or listening. Add that to the fact that unicast streaming is the most inefficient possible way to deliver media (millions of times less efficient than broadcast), and people should expect to pay much more, not less, for media to be delivered that way than for the same content delivered via an efficient mechanism. Don’t demonize the ISP! He’s trying to make technology and protocols work in ways they were never designed to and which they were intentionally made bad at doing”
I feel for Brett and for any ISP in his situation, but does that situation apply for most readers of this column? No. Your ISP is likely a Comcast or Verizon or some other enormous telco or cable company, not Lariat.net. The numbers I referred to in my last column were exactly right for huge ISPs and exactly wrong for tiny ones like Lariat. But that doesn’t make those earlier statements incorrect.
Last year Brett characterized himself to me as a telco, while this year he contrasts his operation with that monopoly. The fact is there’s class warfare taking place between big and small business not just on the Internet but everywhere. Maybe Brett is a little dinosaur. Certainly he has terrific challenges.
In the conflict between big and small I tend to come down on the side of small. We’re recovering from the worst recession in a generation and big companies aren’t doing a damn thing to help. They don’t pay taxes, they don’t create jobs, they don’t spend money, and as a result the economy is under-stimulated. Large U.S. corporations have restructured themselves to avoid taxation, they see their primary function as increasing productivity which means decreasing employment, they have their highest profits ever and are sitting on $2 trillion in cash that they aren’t going to spend.
In contrast to this, small and medium-sized businesses, which are responsible for all new job creation in this country, can’t get banks to loan them any money to fund those new jobs.
The priorities of American big businesses are completely screwed-up while small businesses are, for the most part, ignored.
ISPs like Brett bring the Internet to places where the big guys don’t want to be bothered. We have had over the years various programs to encourage the development of the rural Internet — programs funded to the tune of $200 billion — that have had little impact on service with the big companies just syphoning the money while leaving little guys like Brett to do the actual work.
Which class of ISPs do you think is viewed as “too big to fail?” Not Lariat, even though in many cases there is no alternate provider.
It’s a bad situation, but also a dynamic one. The problems Brett cites today will be exchanged for different problems down the road. He makes the good point of how inefficient unicast is for media delivery, yet unicast costs are continuing to drop (maybe not in Laramie, yet, but in larger markets) and it is easy to predict that even inefficient old unicast will eventually be cheaper per viewer than broadcast with its higher fixed costs.
So the situation is changing. It might not be changing fast enough to save Lariat, but that’s the nature of business. Brett has to ask himself whether Lariat is what he should be doing with his life just now?
No business has an innate right to exist.
In some respects this big-versus-small issue comes down to how you view your operation. Brett wants to be a telco but he doesn’t have the scale. Maybe his business would be better if he changed his point of view.
I’m reminded of an interview I did years ago with Jim Knopf, a pioneer of shareware software. Knopf’s company, Buttonware, published PC-File, a very successful shareware database. Just across town, Bob Wallace published PC-Write, a very successful shareware word processor. Both men were hiring at the time and Knopf told me about the help wanted ads they placed in the local paper. Knopf’s ad read: “software company seeks marketing professional.” Wallace’s ad read: “mail-order company seeks experienced salespeople.”
It was clear to Knopf that Wallace had written the better ad because it was based on reality rather than ambition.
The reality among Internet Service Providers is that their market has matured. Cable companies and telcos today make more profit from providing Internet service than they do from television or telephones. Scale has become everything and Brett Glass is just another customer to squeeze.
Fortunately I think the market is ripe for another transformation and transformations are never led by big companies. It’s time to change the world… again.
It’s a good point to make that no business has an innate right to exist. It’s also true that no big corporation has the right to demand loyalty, kick sand in the face of the little guy and vacuum-up any incentives going. Sadly that is what happens.
There was a BBC News article today and it made me sad:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14340470
It may, on paper, be true. However big corporations don’t have to fund military activity in far away places or look after the needy and poor on a national scale.
These big companies should be more… socially conscious.
Ok, ok. It’ll never happen. BUT I am the one with loyalty to SPEND. I’d like to see a reason to place my (small) trust in one company or other…
Rant over..!
The big difference between Apple and the government is that Apple has to entice us to voluntarily pay for what they offer whereas the government takes a huge chunk out of our paychecks against our will to grow their own inefficient wealth redistribution bureaucracy. Their job should be limited to protecting us from those who would otherwise conquor or kill us. Rant over.
RonC wrote: “Their job should be limited to protecting us from those who would otherwise conquor or kill us”. i.e. Huge Mulitnational Corporations?
The corporations still have to provide a service that we choose to purchase. For example, Apple, which has more money than the government. Apple cares about their money because it’s theirs. The government doesn’t care about their money because it’s yours and they can always hold a gun to your head and demand more.
Ronc,
It is still possible to be victimized by a corporation if I buy none of its products or services.
Ah, we’d have to define the word “choose”. As to gun to head bit….I would refer you copyright extremes, patent holders, and the like. See IPOnLine Act, with its federal enforcement arm for ostensible copyright holders. And so to be coming to your town..the rein of the ISP, as noted in this post. And behind it all the ruling in Citzens United that allows literally unlimited funding from hidden sources.
@Paul: True. See Monsanto 🙁
Government has a larger role to play that just National Defense. Perhaps you think you would be better off in a place with no central government like Somalia? I think you take a lot for granted: https://www.tvnewslies.org/html/day_in_the_life_of_joe_middle-.html
I agree with you completely. The government is all about preventing lawlessness; that is its job. See below for further clarification of my view.
Really?? And what laws would those be (without government meddling, of course)?
Typical straw man.
Somalia *had* a government. That government succeeded in causing a war, famine, and a lot of misery. So it failed.
What happened when the government went away is rapid economic growth (did you know that Somalia has more cell phones per capita than any other African nation?) and… life just went on. The people here are far more prosperous compared to when they had the government, even with the aggressive war being waged against Somali by Ethiopia (funded by US, of course). There are some very puzzled OECD reports about how well people managed to do by themselves without the usual overlords to goad them around.
Now, it is by no means a heaven on earth. Population there is mostly uneducated, tribal, and lacks competitive skills to thrive in the global economy. But the point is, when you compare apples to apples, people in Somalia are much better off than their neighbors with their internationally recognized thugs-in-power.
Actually, there’s another, more relevant, example of anarchy in the recent history – former Soviet Union after 1991. When the government disappeared, for all practical purposes, Russia enjoyed a phenomenal economic recovery, from the brink of hunger and starvation (I still remember the rotten potatoes which were about the only food available) to a livable (to Western standards) place in a matter of a few years. As it happens, the people there have no clue and happily elected themselves a “strong” government, which then proceeded to rob them blind. Still, it feels much freer there than in US, where you can’t even wipe a backside without a permit.
Ronc, with all due respect, you have no idea of the consequences of what you are proposing. The kind of urban blight and lawlessness that would visit the US if there were no social contract with the poor would absolutely leave you hunkered down in your own personal concrete bunker. Sorry to say it, but most people making the kind of argument you put forth are just blind to the realities of life on the street, not to mention the overwhelming advantages simply handed out by birthright to people like me, born in a white, upper-middle class family.
The US began to see its biggest advancements in its economy, industrialization, and technological innovation as a direct result of public education and the New Deal.
Obviously we need police at the federal, state, and local levels to keep order
both within and outside our boarders. That’s why we have the military, the coast
guard, CIA, FBI, federal and state prision systems. We also have numerous
federally backed programs for advanced research to keep us ahead of those
who would conquor or kill us whether local or foreign. This is all necessary and
good to protect ourselves and our allies. The problem is when we look to
government to provide everything else in an inefficient manner while
simultaneously taking away the incentive to work, think, or plan for the future
from our fellow man. Government should enable peaceful interaction among its
citizens, not control every aspect of it.
Ron: could you define the “everything else”? While I agree the government you describe is a terrible one, I’m not seeing how that describes our current government. Specifics, please.
So if the US came to be effectively a police-state, you would be OK with that?
Another thing I find amongst people making these arguments is the oft-repeated idea that government programs “[take] away the incentive to work, think, or plan for the future from our fellow man.” But I never get specific examples of individuals doing this. This is an imagined situation. How many people do you know *personally* who choose not to work because they receive Medicaid or disability? What are their names? What are their phone numbers? You are imagining this situation. When people are given the opportunity to work good jobs and receive fair salaries, they generally take those opportunities. I am not making this up.
@Mark: I live on the eastern shore of maryland and I can tell you that all you have to do to see who is benefiting from a socialistic gimme agenda is to sit outside of the Welfare office. Driving in there, you see a majority of the vehicles are no less than 3 years old….this is NOT the employee lot. You watch these people get out of these cars in shoes that cost more than I make in 3 days, talking on the latest cell phones, carrying Coach purses. You follow them in and they tell the clerk that they need to increase their food stamps, energy assistance, rental disbursement, daycare support and cash assistance because they just had another child and neither themselves nor the father of their child has worked in 3 years (by choice).
My hispanic neighbors live no less than 3 families in a 3 bedroom house. Their combined income is 3 times what mine is, again they have all the latest and greatest. They get all of the government perks because they are a “minority”, I know for a FACT that at least half of them are illegal (Saw the guy that delivered their “papers”, police did nada btw) and have all their money to spend.
Personally, I prefer to work (and work da** hard) for what little me and my family have and yes, it sound like I am jealous, and maybe I am, but this is why the system is broken and why we need to revamp the function and focus of our government from the ground up.
/rant off/ thank you for listening and you will now be returned to your regularly scheduled broadcast 😉
But Mark, that is what the current government was pushing the past two years. a socialist state. BTW, the “statists” (socialists) are not Liberals by the classical definition. By the classical definition, Libertarians and (much badly maligned) Tea-party are classical liberals.
Somewhat peripheral to the article, but rural residents are getting screwed by the telcos. And they get it in two ways. Paying more to get less. In my rural sphere, when I inquired about an ad I received from Qwest offering a faster connection for less money, I was told they couldn’t deliver the higher speed to me and as a result I didn’t qualify for the lower rate. Secondly, in being forced to grant easements to telcos and other formerly regulated monopolies, so that they can use our land for free to make their money. At one time the easements were granted to offset urban subsidies of rural consumers – but not now. I would like to see enlightened PUCs release lands now subjected to “Public Utility” easements back to the landowners – so they can negotiate a lease payment to offset their new higher utility costs.
Note that the lease payment has already been negotiated and was settled at $0. You are free to raise the payment to $50/mo and they are free to raise your monthly bill by $70/mo to cover the higher cost to provide service to you, the increased taxes from the higher revenue, and the added administration costs of keeping track of all the new lease payments.
Of course, if I am the only customer being served off the easement on my land, it makes no sense to “negotiate” a higher lease. But if they cross my land to serve others, it might. But I didn’t negotiate a lease – it was settled before me, during a time when monopolies were highly rate-regulated. They aren’t now, and if the telcos and other utilities now get a “do-over,” I should too. And the amounts might not be trivial – one neighboring ranch has over 90 miles of property, tying several communities together. They might negotiate a lot of money for the value of their easements.
You do have a point but historically inheritance has always been a part transfer of ownership. We inherit both the advantages and disadvantages of the property that were previously negotiated. Keep in mind the customers ultimately have to pay for service whether it’s paid for by a contrbution of land or by a general rate hike for all customers. Considering that the only real high-speed internet bandwidth available to me is via cable, I’d be glad to get together with others standing in the way of extending the east coast’s FIOS to California. Verizon can have all of my land that they need to give me a piece of fibre.
Why do people move to rural areas to get away from the crowds and noise and taxes, but yet expect the same services at the same prices?
I don’t know anyone here who expects the same services for the same prices. The cost of serving the rural areas demands a higher price – and we who live here pay it. But why do urban residents expect rural landowners to provide services (such as land easements) for free? If you want your bits transported over my land, you should expect to pay for it, instead of using the government to force me to give up the use of my land for free.
@Charlie: and complain about the stink when they look past the trees and find their new country home is next to a hog lot. you know, due diligence would have had you walk back to the fence if you smelled something fishy when the slick from the real estate company brought you to the home for first showing.
fact is that the larger operations are more efficient in broadband because they can consolidate the traffic on their own facilities. the tier 2 and 3 providers have to get the midline and end point for their own connections to a meet from the larger operations. this will always put tier 2 and 3 at a disadvantage unless they are incredibly efficient, make up individual customer losses up in volume like Our Government Inaction does, or combine to make their own tier 1 or tier 1-1/2.
the latter is being done with rural telco development money in many areas, in response, just about everybody is petitioning the FCC right now to retool the rural development rule and use that pot of billions to push broadband to underserved rural areas. hey, all the kids have gone cell, and the landlines are going away, got to do something with the facilities. why push landline when it’s dead meat?
that’s the battleground for the next year.
there always is one.
disclaimer: I was The Connected Internet when it had just gone from a 56K backbone to a T1. I get paid by a big telco. but in the end, everybody cleans up each other’s messes, providing a chunk of fiber or a local line crosstown to complete a customer’s circuit. it’s routine.
Bob,
I totally agree that the smaller companies provide most of the new jobs and are more deserving than the bloated giant companies are. Which brings up the question — whatever happened to the Cringely Startup Tour?
Yes Bob! We are eager to see the footage from the Startup Tour!
The reason the big companies are sitting on all that cash is because they have no idea when the government is going to decide to pack it up their pooper, as BT learned to its sorrow. The motto of the American government, state and Federal, is “Let’s find some deep pockets and go on a raid!” That’s also the reason that the money they *are* spending is in Washington, on lobbyists, trying to keep out of the crosshairs. Having the Obamassiah go on TV every fifteen minutes and say “Hey, let’s spread the wealth around!” certainly doesn’t help.
The reason that small businesses aren’t creating jobs isn’t because banks aren’t lending — hell, banks are essentially getting free money from the Federal Reserve, which is why mortgage interest rates are down near what my parents paid for theirs back in the 1940s — but because (again) they don’t know what the true cost of an employee is going to be until the government quits pissing in the economy. If Congress would just go home for six months we could get this recovery back on track; uncertainty is the enemy here, and creating uncertainty is about the only thing that the government does reliably well.
The only problem with your assertions is their falsity. Corporations have never made more money, period. Taxes have never been lower (post WWII), period. Corporations have never made more money by not making things (finance activities), period. Companies don’t hire when they can meet demand with current staff, period. There is falling demand because the Koch’s, et al, have succeeded in convincing the pencil neck Hatfields and McCoys that all government fiscal policy is Bad, period. The financial mess that the Federal government finds itself in was caused by the Lunatic Right (Clinton gave Bush II both a surplus and warning about Bin Laden), period. Off shore money sits there because corporations hope to pull the same scam they did in 2005 (they got amnesty, and did none of the expansionary tasks they said they would), period. Median income fell under Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II. It rose under Clinton, period. And so forth.
In sum: you don’t grow an economy by concentrating wealth. Has never happened and never will. You may like to have greater concentration of wealth, but don’t for a minute lie about why.
++
I would like for the US Congress to propose and pass a law similar to the Canadian one that states a broadcast licenser “may not broadcast … any false or misleading news.” (See https://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/statutes-lois.htm). Perhaps then we will get news and commentary that will not lead to the situation where the “Koch’s, et al, have succeeded in convincing the pencil neck Hatfields and McCoys that all government fiscal policy is Bad, period.”
Thank you for an excellent refutation of the “Uncertainty” myth, especially pointing out tax rates as % of GDP are at their lowest point since the end of WWII. We all need to re-read our Keynes, increased aggregate demand is the fastest way up and out of our current situation.
The laws of physics don’t depend on an arbitrary distinction between “big” and “small” companies. Brett’s point “unicast streaming is the most inefficient possible way to deliver media” should be addressed separately from the issues of socialism vs. capitalism.
“Fortunately I think the market is ripe for another transformation and transformations are never led by big companies. It’s time to change the world… again.”
What cracks me up about you is your apparent need to defend all things capitalist.
So what, the author makes a couple valid assertions, namely the big co’s aren’t helping anyone out but themselves (in inverted pyramid fashion as well), the fact that the “little guys” are literally doing all the work, while those in positions of power (within large corps. esp.) in companies are abusing their positions more than ever before, the fact that historically there’s never been an executive responsible for a great break-through….
And you want to turn it into a capitalist vs. socialist debate, to quote you loosely. Stop riding your high “capitalism-is-better-don’t-ask-questions” horse, try to face up to the facts, if you dare, and finally, try focusing on the topic of the article, instead of going on about consumers being the ones in the end buying from companies. We know.
All net new jobs are created by new companies (<5yrs), not necessarily small companies.
https://www.kauffman.org/uploadedfiles/high-growth-firms-study.pdf
I’m glad to see someone else besides myself is aware of this. I am so sick and tired of hearing politicians proclaiming that “mom and pop” small business is “America’s job creation engine.” They don’t have a clue as to what they are talking about. The typical small business creates crap minimum wage jobs. America doesn’t need any more hardware stores, dry cleaners, bakeries, etc. What it needs are new, innovative businesses that may start out small, but will grow significantly. The typical small business that politicians love to chatter about doesn’t qualify.
Brett is right about the middle mile issue. We call it the local loop. We have four different telco’s providing OC-12 or higher connections into our data center. All of them have POP’s within a few miles of us. To buy use their Internet we need a connection between us and the POP, the local loop. For some providers the local loop charges are higher than the actual Internet pipe. The local telco has a monopoly in local connections and makes us pay through the nose for our connections to the POP’s. To make matters worse, several years ago we financed the installation of a fiber loop between us and 3 of the POP’s. We had two sets of 96 fibers installed, one set goes in a loop in one direction, the other the opposite direction. Each fiber is certified to OC-192. We paid to put in the fiber and are being charged the same local loop rates as someone who doesn’t already have any fiber to their building. Again a very lax FCC is allowing this stuff to happen.
Since we set up our data center for lots of Internet bandwidth there has been at least an 8x increase in the capacity our telco gets over their network. With each upgrade of their network gear, they get more capacity on the same backbone. Do we see any of these cost savings in our rates? Definitely NOT.
Our Internet service is headed for the same mess as we’ve seen with oil prices and the mortgage/banking debacle.
I’m not a fan of large corporations, but Bob’s blog post is one of many posts and articles that have been misleading in the same way. They all talk about how much cash corporations are sitting on, but they fail to mention the amount of debt they have. Most large corporations are deep in debt. For example, General Electric Company has $136 billion in cash, but $472 billion in debt. Verizon Communications Inc. has $7 billion in cash and $54 billion in debt. Comcast Corporation has $2 billion in cash and $40 billion in debt. These are very unhealthy ratios. So, they are not going to spend their cash to “create jobs” or anything else unless they have a very good internal reason to do so, since they need that cash to service their debt and operate the company.
There’s a lot of money around for big companies. The uncertain economy has employees on the run and frightened into working long hours for flat or sliding pay, but because the corporations are getting good productivity from them there’s no incentive to hire or spend. Here’s where the trouble starts.
Wall Street has no emotional maturity. Remember that study with the five year olds who were told if they didn’t eat the M&Ms for five minutes they could get double? Recall how some could sit and collect while others went straight for the candy? Yeah, there’s not a lot of patience on Wall Street, which puts a lot of pressure on executives to pump that money out to shareholders and leave the companies with no M&Ms.
People can claim it’s The American Way, or Good For The Economy, or How It Always Was, but it isn’t good for the long-term health of the companies and not good for the health of the economy. It actually drives a wedge between the well-being of the stock market and that of the larger economy, and that dissociation is a large part of the gap people are recognizing.
I’m a pretty moderate guy in most respects. I’m not an ideologue lefty or righty, I believe most things are cyclical to one extent or another, and there are multiple ways to get most things done. In fact I tend to oppose monoculture and monopoly in general because I fear the vulnerabilities that develop in such cases. These days I think the supply side pendulum has swung past where it should be and needs to come back a ways to remain effective. When there isn’t anything for piled money to buy, then we should stop piling it and start moving it around. Later, when we get enough money flying around the system again, we can return to the task of baling it and seeing how high it stacks.
Cris —
the cyclical nature of booms and busts in the economy is quite puzzling (after all, why would everybody make the same mistake, like being overly optimistic, at the same time) – unless you consider the role of the only party which has a monopolistic power over the economy. Which is the Fed (in US) and US Govt which supports it.
The booms and busts are *created* by the monopoly of the government on the monetary supply (and its abuse of that monopoly). (Look for “ABCT” for the only economic theory which actually explains business cycles without resorting to mumbo-jumbo about “animal spirits of the market”).
As much as I agree that we currently have way to much government meddling in the economy, I can’t endorse economic anarchy. Those of us who had parents who came of age during the Great Depression, but did not jump out a window because they had no money to loose in the first place, have heard the stories about the natural boom and bust cycles and failed banking systems of that era. In response, the government imposed “regulation” not complete control. Regulation is simply a set of rules to play by, like a cooling off period when the market drops too fast. These types of rules don’t raise taxes or cause taxpayers to pay for the mistakes or poor planning of others. But they do maintain order and smooth out the suicide-inducing anarchy that an unregulated “natural” market can cause.
I keep seeing the 2 trillion stat. Companies are sitting on this big pile of cash, sure. What do they spend it on.
People get the image of a greedy Scrooge McDuck and a gold coin filled swimming pool. The problem is a lack of creative thinking at the top. I suppose because the top is full of money people who can’t think of any thing to do with the cash they have.
A Bell Labs sort of pure R&D lab would be great, and better than pissing away the money on a make jobs program. What would make a big company want to do something like that? Tax incentives seem pointless, as the tax burden on a corp is small.
A big government money program just get siphoned and no real work gets done. These govmnt programs where the money moves into the corp, and nothing real gets created piss me off. I feel like I am the only person who cares or is paying attention. I’ve seen it in telcom, smart energy, biofuels. Pisses me off.
I also worry that changes to the taxes to try and get the money into job creation will just move the cash into other countries, along with the jobs (example, IBM).
Asking a corporation to spend money and make jobs is naive. They have to actually do something, not pay people to show up. The company needs to believe there is an upside to the spend.
Any suggestions? Bob?
Doing more with fewer people works best when most businesses don’t, the large gains come out of the hide of more generous employers, the rub is, not everyone can be a mosquito. I think large businesses know perfectly well that domestic hiring will grow the market, but individually, they’re afraid of looking like a chump in front of their peers. A social problem, insoluble by tax cuts and bureaucratic reform alone.
The market has always had the power to reduce the involvement of government in society, by satisfying a need first. Sadly, few do, and the rest subsequently whine when government steps in, but the remedy is there, if they have the will.
Truth simply stated:
“No business has an innate right to exist.”
Yep. And no man has an innate right to income. Even if he works hard.
This is, basically, the rejection of the primary tenet of Marxism – the idea that the value of goods is in the labor which went into them. (The labor theory of value *is* absurd; it is very easy to find counterexamples which falsify it).
The only logically sound theory of value is that the value is purely subjective; this theory of value gives rise to Austrian school of economics.
What one of Brett Glass’ competitors did when faced with the same high-priced bandwidth: https://www.wirelesscowboys.com/?p=24.
Brett would write many fewer angry retorts if he stopped classing his business in with “ISPs” and realized that the increasingly despised class of ISPs is in no way intended to include his business. If you had meant to refer to Lariat.net in your original article, you would have used the term “small ISPs” or even “small wireless ISPs” or some other discriminating title. It must be disappointing for you to be calling out Brett’s enemies and to have him yell at you because he mistakenly thought you were calling him out at the same time.
When most Americans refer to ISPs, they’re referring to the over-sized near-monopoly behemoths that make Brett’s life and our lives miserable at the same time. So it would be kinda cool if Brett could avoid taking offense at such remarks. Because most of us are really rooting for the small guys, like Lariat.net.
I find it interesting the Brett & others have levied the charge that “[they’re] trying to make technology and protocols work in ways they were never designed to and which they were intentionally made bad at doing”.
Yes, TCP was not designed for broadcasting or live-casting audio or video streams. But they seemingly forget about the Multi-cast protocols that were designed to do just that – yet every ISP has them disabled so no one can make use of them even if they wanted to.
(And yes, I realize the pain that Multicast is as I work with several applications that do use them on a local network, and the dumb switches on the network just flood everything else with the multicast packets. But the ISP networks are not typically full of dumb switches.)
So instead of bemoaning the whole situation, try to do something about actually fixing the problem!
I say that the time is ripe to reinvent (kudos to Cringely on that one!). Funny, Television Broadcasting has been saying that for far too long, and yet still have the same (wrong) instinctive reaction. So, just for giggles, I will step out on a limb.
We need to have a way to “broadcast” in this internet age in an efficient manner 😉 [I believe that means multi-casting is not the solution] I think it is easy to figure out what a majority of people want to watch. The statistics are all there. Couple up storage with broadcast, and it is easy to fill up the ‘sweet spot’ of content wants.
Anyone got a bright idea they want to sell?
@Mark A Aitkin: I’ve been trying to sell this one for 12 years or so, and it isn’t flying. but it would be nice.
you have LLC2-SNAP headers in the Ethernet frame. they set the service. traffic can be directed by the headers without too much trouble. RADIUS can use them for billing.
so every provider gets a header ID (yeah, you could do that with IPv6 easily, too.)
somebody with atomic weapons and unlimited power mandates that every home has a fast connection, never mind who provides it, and here’s the pot of money for these areas that don’t have that ability.
now, every data request you send, you get charged for the bandwidth you use as RADIUS counts it.
at this point, with Uncle collecting a little something to get the backbone construction cost back, and all carriers in the way getting a taste of the action, you have universal reach and universal access. you want to stream the Crying Babies (tm Wendy’s) concert, whoever has a stream running, you get the multicast based on your request. somebody’s router knows there is one running on port 17009, card 3, jack 6, and you get it, with billing going to (somebody) with paybacks to (networks 1,7,55,324, et al.)
your router tables are going to be big as a barn door, but it would work.
which means every provider is a multicaster.
somebody else can write the RFP, and buy off a Congresscritter to write the bill for the carraige point. I don’t have the time. I got a basement gut and rebuild to finish, then two cars’ suspensions to fix before winter, and two ham transcievers to get fixed.
All natural monopolies should be co-ops.
Companies should be able to own sites and content but not the wires or frequencies that deliver them.
What the big media companies have done is basically bribe congress to allow them to own natural monopolies and charge rent. In Europe, some bankrupt governments have sold the roads people need to get to work.
The lack of real competition has already turned them into slum-lords. Here in the US where the internet was invented, we now have the highest cost and lowest average speed of any developed nation.
All utilities should be co-ops.
How about a mandatory maximum work week of 55 hours for ALL employees of businesses with more than 20 employees for both exempt and non-exempt positions. This would push hiring and STOP the abusive practices of a great deal of the business where efficiency is driven on the misery and over work of the employees.
How about learning some economics?
A business is only interested in keeping employees whose marginal value to the business (i.e. how much additional income the employee brings) exceeds compensation of the employee.
Restrict the hours, and the marginal value falls; so the businesses will either have to fire the less productive employees, or to reduce their salares.
The brilliant ideas like minimal wages or hours restrictions simply cause unemployment.
If I use 10 Gigabytes at 5 Megabits/sec per month, what is the cost to Lariat at $100 per megabit per second?
Answer: $3.09
That was last months usage by the way.
And for this I pay Charter $50/month plus taxes and fees.
Charter… who pays a lower bulk rate and has infrastructure largely in place via their cable television business. And I bought my own cable modem or they would still be making money off the rental of that ( fees that covered the cost of the original probably ten times over) and I pay for the power it uses. And I strongly suspect Charter sniffing every damn packet so they can sell ‘business intelligence’ to marketers out the back door all the while defending the related costs for that equipment vis a vis ever increasing monthly charges as the price of doing business in provision of user experience improvements.
I don’t doubt the Lariats of this world have trouble competing wherever they might get their foot in the door in the first place, but I certainly do question what we are obliged to pay in relation to what we are getting given pre-profit core costs in provision across the board.
THE LAWS OF BUSSINESS – The large super corporations that make up %5 of all business have all the power. This is because the super corporations of the world can purchase political power and influence through campaign contributions that the remaining %95 of business cannot do individually.
If the fight were between the top %5 of business and the remaining %95 then of course the top %5 would lose because as a group they do not even come close to equally the other %95 in anything be it number of employed or taxes paid or even revenue generated. The reason these few corporations can wield so much power, control and influence despite their representing only a small percentage of the whole is because individually they are greater than any business in the %95 group.
This is easily shown in the fact that many of the fortune 500 like GE pay little to no Corporate taxes. If the smaller %95 of business were able to act as one single entity then the other %5 would not be able to wield such control and power over the rest but that’s not how the world works. And so the end result is that those business who employ less, pay less taxes and make up less of the GDP are still in the majority in the area of power & control and will always be so long as the system is as corrupt as it is.
Currently GE along with the rest of the fortune 500 are lobbying (that’s a fancy term for bribery ) for another corporate tax holiday so that what little corporate taxes they do pay they can get out of paying all together leaving the burden of corporate taxes to the remaining mid to small sized businesses in America.
Bob,
I would surely appreciate it if you would publish the audio version of your blog to iTunes / podcast more frequently.
Thank you,
Bob
It’s a good point to make that no business has an innate right to exist.
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