<br><br><p><DEFANGED_div class="gmail_quote">On Dec 11, 2007 12:48 PM, Michael Mol <<a href="mailto:mikemol@gmail.com">mikemol@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" DEFANGED_style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<p><DEFANGED_div class="Ih2E3d">On Dec 11, 2007 12:34 PM, Don Wood <<a href="mailto:dond@standalelumber.com">dond@standalelumber.com</a>> wrote:<br>> <a href="http://desktoplinux.com/news/NS2414535067.html" target="_blank">http://desktoplinux.com/news/NS2414535067.html
</a><br>><br>> I believe most of this.<br><br></p><DEFANGED_div>This line got me to lose interest:<br><br>"While all this has been going on, broadband Internet connectivity has<br>become almost as easily available as cell phone coverage."
<br><br>Grade A bull. Much of Muskegon county doesn't even have DSL, and<br>there are no estimates for when it might be rolled out. When I lived<br>in Muskegon, I used 56k dial-up. I know lots of people *in Grand<br>
Rapids* who can barely afford dial-up, much less broadband. Should my<br>living arrangements change, I'll likely be dropping back to dial-up<br>myself.<br><br>All the buzz is about Verizon's 20Mb/s FIOS, or Comcast's demoing
<br>150Mb/s connectivity. The controversy over how the FCC measures<br>broadband coverage seems like a distant memory. Read/Write Web<br>recently had an article talking about the coming Internet slow-down,<br>saying "It will be like the bad old days of dial-up."
<br><br>It's amazing how many people fail to realize those "bad old days" are<br>still here for a huge demographic. It brings to mind people's wonder<br>at the beginning of the Atomic Age. Nothing really changed (Where are
<br>all the nuke plants now? Why are we having a debate over coal plants<br>in Kansas?), people just thought everything was different, somehow.<br><br>If you really wanted, I bet you could make a killing with webservices
<br>catering to low-bandwidth customers. Ditch flash, video and large<br>images, and focus on text content. There's a huge peasant class on<br>the Internet right now that nobody seems to remember.<br><font color="#888888">
<br> </font></blockquote><p><DEFANGED_div>Any number of these points would make<br>for a fine discussion. e.g., you can't site<br>a power plant or a transmission line in most<br>areas today. "Not in my backyard," and
<br>the lawsuits that go with them. So MI and<br>other states are down to single digit generating<br>reserves. But wait until the lights start to flicker...<br><br>Anyway, satellite Internet connectivity is <br>available anywhere satellite TV is. Not cheap,
<br>at about $62 a month, it is now about 1.5Mbps<br>down and 128 Kbps up. I suspect there are <br>byte quotas for each day.<br><br>But it is the case that bandwidth in general is<br>getting scarce now. Most of the fiber laid in
<br>the heady dot-com 1990s was never activated.<br>There's a lot of potential capacity out there in<br>the form of fiber backbone, but rather less<br>actual capacity. <br><br>I suspect one can indeed watch for ever
<br>greater bandwidth congestion now for a <br>while until someone figures there is a profit<br>reason to expand the capacity. Data traffic<br>is almost pure profit for outfits like Comcast,<br>so they will let us suffer slowdowns until
<br>some other company gets on with it and then<br>start advertising wonderful new capacity... :-(<br><br> -Bob<br><br></p><DEFANGED_div></p><DEFANGED_div><br>