Connectivity woes in Boston

[Jerry Feldman]

There is a good reason why cable companies want to restrict the use of 
servers. For the most part, the cable is set up with a big pipe to your 
system and a very small pipe from your system out. This is why 
Mediaone initially set up 1.5Mbps download and 300Kbps up. It has to 
do with the repeaters and other hardware. This is one reason why the 
cable companies are sticking to residential internet service. With digital 
cable and digital phone services increasing, chances are that cable will 
be available as a business service and that the reverse channel 
limitations will be removed in the future. 

There are some economic reasons why they don't want to allow full 2 
way service. T1 and other services currently sell for significantly more 
bucks than cable. 

As far as DSL is concerned, it is a copper technology with limited 
expansion capability. But, I think the limitations are more economic. The 
phone companies have been very slow to develop high speed networks to 
consumers. ISDN virtually died on the vine because the phone 
companies tarrifed it out of the reach not only for consumers but also for 
many businesses. The phone companies are using their monopolistic 
advantage to limit or prevent the loss of their traditional markets. ISPs 
were registering themselves as phone companies so they could provide 
DSL to their customers, and the phone companies were very late with 
joining the DSL bandwagon, and then by using some practices to cause 
ISPs to lose business. I do think that the regulators will step in. 

On 10 Aug 2001, at 9:02, Randall Hofland wrote:

>     DynamicIP DHCP lease or not, I find all this "connectivity"
> discussion most
> interesting. While I wait impatiently for my own fast connection to
> materialize
> so I can set up my own operation, I seem to see that the service
> providers are
> working diligently to block the use of such connections for anything but
> the most
> mediocre and limited of home surfing options. Meanwhile, Verizon seems
> to be
> determined to prevent other options for home based e-commerce businesses
> unless
> they are overly costly and burdensome.
>     As such, I am beginning to lean towards oppressive regulation of
> telecommunications providers (baby bells and cable media companies in
> particular)
> so that they are absolutely forced to open up their backbone networks to
> other
> competitors rather than allowed to bleed to death those same competitors
> as they
> seem to have successfully done over the past few years.
>     The open availability and reasonable pricing of internet options is
> so
> essential for small businesses in particular. We must ensure that a
> megacorporate
> mentality doesn't overwhelm that freedom. As such, I am curious just how
> many out
> there in BLU land have found their services for external users blocked
> for some
> reason by the broadband ISPs and the how's and why's it was done.
> 
> TIA
> 
> 


Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Associate Director
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org
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