Equipment Makers Want Telecoms to Upgrade Networks
Amidst press conferences from Apple and Nokia today announcing more devices that will tap already strained telecommunications networks, there's another narrative emerging – hardware manufacturers pushing for a dramatic revision to how we organize the Internet. Huawei and Alcatel-Lucent, two companies that help build the physical backbones of the Internet, each think they have just the idea to pitch big ISPs.
It's no secret that telecom companies do everything they can to keep customers from using too much data: throttling, packet inspection, global slow-downs, tier pricing and more are all strategies that these companies use to help manage the total bandwidth they have to carry and manage.
Huawei's proposal is that instead of the rocky relationship between content providers like YouTube, Amazon Prime and Netflix, the two powers could cooperate for mutual benefit. The company's CTO, Daniel Tang, suggests revenue sharing between the two. Content providers could stream as much HD quality video as they wanted, providing there were people willing to pay for it with ad revenue and subscriptions. In exchange, telecoms would have a bigger incentive to actually build out the requisite networks to support that higher data usage.
Some tiered pricing would probably be necessary, but it's certainly a novel approach. Instead of trampling on the concept of net neutrality, it treats content-heavy services as partners – not adversaries. Daniel Tang stresses that it would take work and that these services would need to add enough value to convince customers that this path is a viable option. If it worked, it'd have huge potential benefits in terms of service quality with the possible downside of increasing total cost to consumers.
Alcatel-Lucent's approach to this same problem is a bit different, focusing on more distributed networks and hardware to reduce the total draw on bandwidth resources. With crunched wireless spectrum and increasingly tapped-out network back-ends struggling to handle the rapid adoption of mobile, tablets and countless other Internet-ready "smart" devices, one option is to use a distributed network that takes the traffic and keeps it away from the core infrastructure unless absolutely necessary.
Fiber optic skeletons feeding to high-bandwidth, local wireless options would keep the Internet from becoming too centralized and relying on a handful of Internet Exchange Points or IXPs too much. Much like distributed power generation, these kinds of ideas carry with them a huge bonus to network security. Having many individual networks that connect where necessary protects consumers from terrorist attacks, power outages or any number of complications upstream.
In the end, both of these strategies and more may be necessary to keep network traffic from becoming too overwhelming. Projects like Google Fiber are excellent, but they are enormously expensive and full rollout of that infrastructure will be slow-going yet, especially in North America where the land-to-people ratio is relatively low.
Hopefully, we'll figure out something soon though, because I live in a downtown area, and during peak times I regularly find my Internet almost unusable – despite having the highest tier package available. I'm sure I'm far from alone here, too.
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In Romania one thing we do have is fast cheap internet and yeah, it's very nice to have 100 Mbps for 10$.
It's all because one company invested in a fiber optic infrastructure and is very efficient.
It seems to me that US telecom companies are a greedy and incompetent. Sure you can blame it on the low population density and other stuff but if you look for excuses you'll find them.
What would be needed is real competition and willingness to bring fast internet to the people but some companies don't want to or they don't know how to.
This is because you have DSL, which was always a gimmick to begin with
This is because you have DSL, which was always a gimmick to begin with
Unfortunately, with people like myself who find themselves surrounded by 1000's of acres of cornfield, DSL is all I can get.
We don't even have cable running down our road. Everyone on the block has to have satellite TV.
In Romania one thing we do have is fast cheap internet and yeah, it's very nice to have 100 Mbps for 10$.
It's all because one company invested in a fiber optic infrastructure and is very efficient.
It seems to me that US telecom companies are a greedy and incompetent. Sure you can blame it on the low population density and other stuff but if you look for excuses you'll find them.
What would be needed is real competition and willingness to bring fast internet to the people but some companies don't want to or they don't know how to.
I have AT&T DSL because cable costs are so high they are not affordable and those are the only two choices here. AT&T keeps raising prices. Tell me how internet access costs more as years go by with more paying customers for identical speeds? They just kept slicing up the same pizza for a decade. AT&T has over sold our area so the only speed available now is 756k DSL. You call and they try to get you to upgrade to U-verse which costs even more for the same speeds of the old DSL service, and on top of that you have to pay all they're ridiculous setup fee's. Its is no secret how bad the US internet is and why.
Anyone that has ever called AT&T knows how bad of a company they are, I never had cable but I assume the same. Everything is your fault, and its all good on their end. But they'll gladly offer to check it out and charge you huge fee's for it.
They will hardly change due to the fact that most ISP/cable companies also own all the rights and content and know that they offered better internet services then they would greatly affect their cable services. If customers got decent speeds and bandwidth then services like Netflix would thrive even more and result in far fewer cable subscribers.
At least give Google credit by trying to move the infrastructure forward. The other ISPs are either too stubborn or purposely delaying to expand. Google fiber may be expensive now, but they will put the pressure on current ISPs to compete again or risk losing share. Either way added competition will give people more options and hopefully better services and prices in the future.
This is because you have DSL, which was always a gimmick to begin with
"This is because you have DSL, ..."
1. I didn't know DSL has tier pricing.
2. Such a tech writer would have known DSL is not the best choice. He or she would exhaust all other options before going to the "gimmick". And surely doesn't need someone preaching about it. It's probably like a high school physics club freshman trying to teach gravity to Albert Einstein.
3. By the context, when the writer said "the highest tier package available.", he most likely have real high speed internet. At least I would not write that way if I have DSL.
This is because you have DSL, which was always a gimmick to begin with
"This is because you have DSL, ..."
1. I didn't know DSL has tier pricing.
2. Such a tech writer would have known DSL is not the best choice. He or she would exhaust all other options before going to the "gimmick". And surely doesn't need someone preaching about it. It's probably like a high school physics club freshman trying to teach gravity to Albert Einstein.
3. By the context, when the writer said "the highest tier package available.", he most likely have real high speed internet. At least I would not write that way if I have DSL.
It sure as hell does in rural land, speed and prices are all relative to how much the telecom's can drain from customer's. Out by me 'high speed internet' starts at $40 for a 512 line, costs us $60 for a 1mbit line (we only actually get 896). No competition mean's no incentive.
I remember having the "same" DSL service years ago at two different locations. The first one was awesome (fast, stable, reliable). The second was great as long as it did not rain. The wiring between my place and the CO needed to be replaced because it was so old. A similar incident happen with cable: a wiring fault between my neighborhood and the CO caused intermittent failures with no common causes (time of day, weather, number of people online, ...).
What is this about add revenue? They want more money?
And the American government will do the same without even need to riddle any hardware...