[Novalug] OT: Broadband penetration

Clif Flynt clif@cflynt.com
Tue Jul 6 11:07:20 EDT 2010


Being another fella livin' in the sticks, I see a bad pattern in
broadband providers.

All of them are trying to cherry-pick the most lucrative markets: the
big cities and large housing developments.  They end up fighting a
competitive war against rivals who can provide pretty much the same
service (limited by technology) for about the same price (limited by
cost of maintaining the technology.)

In the meantime, anything outside of a population center is ignored or
left to a provider who can multiplex their infrastructure (sell cable
TV or phone service on the same wire as the data service).

The fact that nobody can make a profit in the hinterlands indicates
that the cost of maintaining the technology is higher than the return.
(I won't quite believe that anyone is willingly ignoring a profit 
center, though I easily believe that marketting depts are selling the
idea that "If we can get 90% penetration against 10 competitors in DC,
we'll make more money than if we have 100% penetration outside
Warrenton.")

One glitch for the wireless solutions I've seen to date is that they
require line-of-site between base-station and user.  3G networks might
be reasonable, but the available bandwidth is barely adequate for the
number of voice conversations going on, and the Fair Use policies are
not designed for a small business user who likes to download 4G Linux
distros once or twice a week.

So, is there a technology (femto-cells?) that might make areas where
there are 10 houses, 3 hills and 300 trees per square mile viable?

Clif
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