After all, Comcast (for an example, picking an ISP just because; it could be another ISP depending on where you are) paid to install all these lines; why should they let Charter (for another similarly arbitrary example) come in and use their lines and take their customers, even for a rental cost?
Uh, I know you just picked names at random more or less, but comcast didn't have SHIT to do with the installation. Back in the day we used to sell the big ass C-band satellite dishes, cable companies were still building up to the current bajillion channel format, and a big part of the pitch was playing up just how freaking old all that coax in the ground is. Yeah, there are newer sections, and yeah, they keep having to put out new nodes and links and such, but if we were just using what they put in the ground you wouldn't see this message until tomorrow, if ever.
Fascinating stuff actually.
Dates from the late 40's and before.
There's some more reading if you're interested regarding a map of the tubes and such, plus some rather fascinating delves into history via a microwave relay site or just check out a more recent mapping project but yeah, got caught up playing with the perspective tool making that picture which totally wasn't worth it but it tickled my obsessive-compulsive buttons just right, so there it is.
No joke. The copper coax network is ancient, which is why the fed dangled shitloads of money in front of the likes of ATT, MCI, and various others in the 90s to lay obscene amounts of fiberoptic backbone cable, but the telecoms layed only a tiny fraction of what was promised, and squandered the money. Happened in the 90s, I remember.
the idea of supplying internet over coax was laughable until new signal encoding methods were created. same with dsl over pots.
the fact that this infrastructure is not managed as a utility is a major factor in why US internet is a big joke.
Yeah, I remember feeling really smart since cable companies literally use satellite dishes to pull down their programming before squirting it out over the copper. I mean, yeah, the full C-band dish install is a pain, getting them blown over sucks, and having to wait as it switches sometimes sucked, but man, that was like proto-dvr! Arguably the reason I didn't really care when dvr became a big selling point, missed your show last night? Flip over to the different time zone feeds, if nothing else you can wait a bit for the pacific feed to come in.
That map, btw, was meant to illustrate how much of the Comcast cable/internet stuff is sitting right on top of the old coaxial lines AT&T ran as a backup in case of nukes. Hell, we've had years of bullshit from them with the internet just putzing out and returning "hah, I got your ping right here, boyo!" until it decided to link back up and handshake properly an hour or five later. I suspect they finally got sick of us bitching and whatnot so they brought out a ditch-witch and reran a new node right on the corner, slapped fresh lines down the side of the house, and I wish I could say 89 Mbps up/12 Mbps down made up for their shit, but fuck that, slap another 0 on the end of those figures and we'll see about setting aside the blood-oath and call off the witch doctors.
If they had been forced to actually invest in their infrastructure instead of sitting on their asses until shit started getting congested and then "suggesting" we might want to think about not using all that internet we pay for.
Now they've jumped ahead a step and pre-emptively came out saying they're gonna do a 1 Tb cap+overage fees, and as they so graciously note, it isn't like
anyone should be worried about this, I mean, gosh, you'd have to watch streaming movies for 650 of the 720 or so hours a month to hit that much, or upload a bazillion pictures, or make a gajillion tweets!
I mean, yeah, that seems kinda like they're saying "hey, 1920x1080 is hip, right, it's not like anybody is going to start buying 3840x2160 screens, let alone make content for it, though... we do have these new 4k channel packages we could ring you up for, and I mean, if you felt like it we could look into that VR thing at some point, but come on, 8k videos aren't the sort of thing you just find laying around, are they?" in a rather underhanded fashion, to me anyway.Though, sadly the FCC didn't seem to have any suggestions about the whole quandry whereby you could pay for a month of say, 85 Mbps speeds, but only get a theoretical day or so before a little flag saying "whoops, all out of internet, come back next month unless you got more cash on ya" pops out of the top of your modem.
Author
Topic: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American: T+0 (Read 1419159 times)