On 02/26/2010 03:10 PM, Paul Bosworth wrote:
I think a lot of people often forget that ISPs are actually businesses trying to turn a profit.
Bearing in mind that the facilities that exist in much of the rural united states are actually there because we collectively payed for them rather than simply: waiting for the right set of economic incentives to exist or leaving people to suffer. It not unlikely in some cases that the economic incentive for universal service may never exist may never exist in some reasons which doesn't mean that we shouldn't do something about it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Administration#History
At my last job we built out a fiber to the home ILEC in relatively rural Louisiana. This means that we had quite a number of customers that didn't meet the density requirements for deployment. Using made-up numbers for the sake of discussion, lets assume that a customer provides $1/month for service. If you can place deployment in a highly-dense area you'll make a lot more of those $1's per month with that investment. When you start deploying further to the edge you really slide into the "we're not even breaking even on this" market. Obviously anyone that has a job for profit knows that this is a no-no.
As telcos deploy high-density technologies (fiber, metroE, etc) they can pull the legacy technology (xDSL, T1, etc) and push that to the edge. Unfortunately the edge is always going to get the hand-me-downs but it's better than nothing. My wife is from a tiny town in central PA (the vortex between Pittsburgh and Philly) and her parents have had dialup until last year, when the local telco finally pushed DSL to their location. They only draw 1.5meg but it's better than the 56k they were paying for.
As they say in vegas, "It's just business, baby."
On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 5:51 PM, Crooks, Sam <Sam.Crooks@experian.com>wrote:
I had good luck getting my dad some form of broadband access in rural Oregon using a 3g router (Cradlepoint), a Wilson Electronics signal amp (model 811211), and an outdoor mount high gain antenna. It's not great, but considering the alternatives (33.6k dialup for $60/mo or satellite broadband for $150-$200/mo) it wasn't a bad deal for my dad when you consider that the dialup ISP + dedicated POTS line cost about as much as the 5GB 3G data plan does.
Speed is somewhere between dialup and Uverse or FIOS. I get the sense that it is somewhere in the range of 256 - 512 kbps with high latency (Dad's not one for much in the way of network performance testing).
-----Original Message----- From: Michael Sokolov [mailto:msokolov@ivan.Harhan.ORG] Sent: Friday, February 26, 2010 3:35 PM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Locations with no good Internet (was ISP in Johannesburg)
Daniel Senie <dts@senie.com> wrote:
Better than western Massachusetts, where there's just no connectivity at = all. Even dialup fails to function over crappy lines.
Hmm. Although I've never been to Western MA and hence have no idea what the telecom situation is like over there, I'm certainly aware of quite a few places in "first world USA" where DSL is still a fantasy, let alone fiber.
As a local example, I have a friend in a rural area of Southern California who can't get any kind of "high-speed Internet". I've run a prequal on her address and it tells me she is 31 kft from the CO. The CO in question has a Covad DSLAM in it, but at 31 kft those rural residents' options are limited to either IDSL at 144 kbps (not much point in that) or a T1 starting at ~$700/month. The latter figure is typically well out of range for the kind of people who live in such places.
That got me thinking: ISDN/IDSL and T1 can be extended infinitely far into the boondocks because those signal formats support repeaters. What I'm wondering is how can we do the same thing with SDSL - and I mean politically rather than technically. The technical part is easy: some COs already have CLECs in them that serve G.shdsl (I've been told that NEN does that) and for G.shdsl repeaters are part of the standard (searching around shows a few vendors making them); in the case of SDSL/2B1Q (Covad and DSL.net) there is no official support for repeaters and hence no major vendors making such, but I can build such a repeater unofficially.
The difficulty is with the political part, and that's where I'm seeking the wisdom of this list. How would one go about sticking a mid-span repeater into an ILEC-owned 31 kft rural loop? From what I understand (someone please correct me if I'm wrong!), when a CLEC orders a loop from an ILEC, if it's for a T1 or IDSL, the CLEC actually orders a T1 or ISDN BRI transport from the ILEC rather than a dry pair, and any mid-span repeaters or HDSLx converters or the like become the responsibility of the ILEC rather than the CLEC, right?
So how could one extend this model to provide, say, repeatered G.shdsl service to far-outlying rural subscribers? Is there some political process (PUC/FCC/etc) by which an ILEC could be forced to allow a third party to stick a repeater in the middle of their loop? Or would it have to work by way of the ILEC providing a G.shdsl transport service to CLECs, with the ILEC being responsible for the selection, procurement and deployment of repeater hardware? And what if the ILEC is not interested in providing such a service - any PUC/FCC/etc political process via which they could be forced to cooperate?
Things get even more complicated in those locations where the CO has a Covad DSLAM in it serving out SDSL/2B1Q, but no other CLEC serving G.shdsl. Even if the ILEC were to provide a G.shdsl transport service with repeaters, it wouldn't help with SDSL/2B1Q. My idea involves building a gadget in the form factor of a standard mid-span repeater that would function as a converter from SDSL/2B1Q to G.shdsl: if the loop calls for one mid-span repeater, stick this gadget in as if it were that repeater; if the loop calls for 2 or more repeaters, use my gadget as the first "repeater" and then standard G.shdsl repeaters after it. But of course this idea is totally dependent on the ability of a third party to stick these devices in the middle of long rural loops, perhaps in the place of loading coils which are likely present on such loops.
Any ideas?
MS