[GRLUG] Linux desktop marketshare

[Bob Kline]

On Dec 11, 2007 12:48 PM, Michael Mol <mikemol at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Dec 11, 2007 12:34 PM, Don Wood <dond at standalelumber.com> wrote:
> > http://desktoplinux.com/news/NS2414535067.html
> >
> > I believe most of this.
>
> This line got me to lose interest:
>
> "While all this has been going on, broadband Internet connectivity has
> become almost as easily available as cell phone coverage."
>
> Grade A bull.  Much of Muskegon county doesn't even have DSL, and
> there are no estimates for when it might be rolled out.  When I lived
> in Muskegon, I used 56k dial-up.  I know lots of people *in Grand
> Rapids* who can barely afford dial-up, much less broadband.  Should my
> living arrangements change, I'll likely be dropping back to dial-up
> myself.
>
> All the buzz is about Verizon's 20Mb/s FIOS, or Comcast's demoing
> 150Mb/s connectivity.  The controversy over how the FCC measures
> broadband coverage seems like a distant memory.  Read/Write Web
> recently had an article talking about the coming Internet slow-down,
> saying "It will be like the bad old days of dial-up."
>
> It's amazing how many people fail to realize those "bad old days" are
> still here for a huge demographic.  It brings to mind people's wonder
> at the beginning of the Atomic Age.  Nothing really changed (Where are
> all the nuke plants now?  Why are we having a debate over coal plants
> in Kansas?), people just thought everything was different, somehow.
>
> If you really wanted, I bet you could make a killing with webservices
> catering to low-bandwidth customers.  Ditch flash, video and large
> images, and focus on text content.  There's a huge peasant class on
> the Internet right now that nobody seems to remember.
>
>

Any number of these points would make
for a fine discussion.  e.g.,  you can't site
a power plant or a transmission line in most
areas today.  "Not in my backyard,"  and
the lawsuits that go with them.  So MI and
other states are down to single digit generating
reserves.  But wait until the lights start to flicker...

Anyway,  satellite Internet connectivity is
available anywhere satellite TV is.  Not cheap,
at about $62 a month,  it is now about 1.5Mbps
down and 128 Kbps up.  I suspect there are
byte quotas for each day.

But it is the case that bandwidth in general is
getting scarce now.  Most of the fiber laid in
the heady dot-com 1990s was never activated.
There's a lot of potential capacity out there in
the form of fiber backbone,  but rather less
actual capacity.

I suspect one can indeed watch for ever
greater bandwidth congestion now for a
while until someone figures there is a profit
reason to expand the capacity.  Data traffic
is almost pure profit for outfits like Comcast,
so they will let us suffer slowdowns until
some other company gets on with it and then
start advertising wonderful new capacity...  :-(

    -Bob
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