the future of broadband Thread

[Henry88]

[quote]The slow death of DSL will cause the rapid rise of expensive broadband for underserved areas if Verizon’s Fusion home broadband service is any indication. Verizon on Tuesday launched its long-planned home broadband service powered by its LTE wireless network — trading slow in-ground copper for expensive airwaves on its end. And the consumer? They trade unlimited slow broadband from a wire for faster service that’s going to cost a pretty penny.
So what is this wireless panacea?

Verizon’s HomeFusion Broadband uses Verizon’s LTE network to offer homes broadband speeds of 5-12 Mbps for downloading and 2-5 MBps for uploading. For most users, this will be better than the older DSL speeds, which are about 6 Mbps close to the node but slow as you travel further away from the telco’s central office. Verizon will pop a small a cylinder packed with antennas on the side of your house in order to deliver the service, which comes with the same caps and pricing plans Verizon currently offers its cellular customers. And that’s really the rub.

All of the plans are usage-based, which changes the broadband paradigm from one of limited bits to limited bytes. Verizon’s plans begin at $59.99 of monthly access for 10 GB of data, and there is a $200 installation charge. If you consider that an hour of watching Netflix consumes about 1 gigabyte, you’re looking at about 8-10 hours of TV a month.

To be fair, Verizon says it is marketing this as an alternative for consumers in broadband-limited markets, where DSL or satellite might be the only options. In the case of satellite broadband, consumers also have caps and limited plans that cost a lot, so this compares somewhat favorably to those. But so far, HomeFusion Broadband will be available beginning later this month in Birmingham, Ala., Dallas and Nashville, Tenn., which are not exactly satellite country. Additional markets will follow.
So what’s this about the death of DSL?

Verizon may have started out as a collection of wireline telephone companies, but it has been rapidly abandoning its legacy copper by selling off its DSL businesses to Frontier Communications, Fairpoint and even the Carlyle Group. The plan, as we said back then, was to get rid of high-cost copper lines and come in later with wireless broadband that delivered better speeds. From an economics perspective, Verizon spent between $19 billion and $22 billion laying fiber to 16.5 million homes in the last few years. But it has invested a total of $22.3 billion billion in the last three years building its wireless network, which covers more than 285 million customers (all of that is not LTE spending and coverage). And those customers are likely to pay more per month and get less in terms of the data they transmit over the network.

AT&T seems to be learning from Verizon’s tactics. It recently hinted that it would sell its unimproved DSL lines (“unimprovedâ€

[canofhumdingers]

[Henry88]

[Henry88]

[Tom R VanSlambrouck]

[canofhumdingers]

No, a data cap is not about speed. It limits how MUCH you can download, not how fast you can download it. And from what I've read, it sounds like my uverse is limited to 250 GB per month. I'm gonna have to dig out my paperwork and read the fine print. But having no tv service & using Netflix a lot concerns me on even a large data cap. Based on their calculation that 10 GB equals 6 hrs of Netflix, a 250 GB limit per month means I get 5 hrs per day of Netflix. That might sound like enough, but consider that would use ALL of my Internet for the month up. Now think about using the Internet for other things like web surfing, downloading music or other large files, gaming, etc & there starts to be a problem. Especially if, say I had a family of 4 who all use the Internet for their own purposes. 5 hrs of Netflix a day is plenty for one, but what if you've got 4 people who all watch different stuff? This is going to become a huge problem very quickly I think.

[Tom R VanSlambrouck]

[Henry88]

[The Giant Pacific Octopus]

[king_ghidorah]

[The Giant Pacific Octopus]

[Tom R VanSlambrouck]

[The Giant Pacific Octopus]

[Tom R VanSlambrouck]

[Jinzo Ningen]

My BFE location dictates the use of satellite in order to rev up past dino-speed dial-up service. Unfortunately I have WildBlue/Dishnet, which has the assinine rolling monthly bandwidth limit of 17Gb per MONTH. Netflix? Forget it! It totally sucks donkey shlong. I live in hope of someday getting enough towers out my way to hook up to wireless.. something...ANYthing but satellite service. EVerytime it rains or snows... out she goes! ACK!

[Henry88]

[Tom R VanSlambrouck]

So it turns out I do have a data cap on my internet Charter says I should use more than 200GB a month after that they start throttling (slowing down my speeds) 200GB might seem like a lot but considering I have over a dozen devices running off my service I can easily hit that cap thankfully I haven't noticed it yet.

Also four or five years ago when I was taking a A+ certification course through my last school my teacher mentioned a guy out in Colorodo had an experimental internet that would run through the power lines thus providing cheap and super fast internet.

I haven't heard much about it since then but some research might be in order.

[Henry88]

[Henry88]

[Henry88]

http://qwest.centurylink.com/legal/high ... 080811.pdf

Drop down to page 16 section 17 "Arbitration"

[The Shadow]

Ugh. Mandatory Binding Arbitration -- you have no legal recourse if the arbitor finds in favor of the company even if they're in the wrong.

It's an entirely messed up arrangement too as arbitration is really intended to deal with entities of similar size I.E. individual to individual, big company to big company, etc. Unfortunately far to often companies are using it as a means of dealing with legal matters with customers.

I read somewhere online a couple years ago about a study someone did on arbitration centers and they found that something like 90% of the time the arbitors found in favor of the company as they were regular customers, so to speak. Though I have read some Mandatory Binding Arbitration horror stories where the individual was ordered to pay the cost of the arbitration.

[Henry88]

[Tom R VanSlambrouck]

[Henry88]

[Henry88]