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From: Mark Conrad on 20 Jun 2010 03:48 In article <timmcn-C88A8B.22321519062010(a)news-1.mpls.iphouse.net>, Tim McNamara <timmcn(a)bitstream.net> wrote: > > What sort of DSL speeds do you guys in the big cities get? > > 1.5 at my house. Slow, for broadband by modern standards but good > enough for me. Qwest wants too damned much for upgrading. What bugs me is that a lot of other countries have deployed fast fiber optic networks, while the USA lags behind. Anyone know why ? Seems to me the cost would be low, so my guess is that there are political reasons delaying fiber optics. Mark-
From: Geoffrey S. Mendelson on 20 Jun 2010 09:44 Michelle Steiner wrote: > In many other countries, the phone system is run by the government; in the > US, it is run by private enterprise that has little to no competition. > > There are some functions that are better run by the government than by > industry, even though the majority of functions should be in private hands. > Actually it had started in the late 1990's. Remember the telecom boom? Telephone companies merged (i.e. WorldCom) and raised lots of money to run fiber optic cables all over the major US cities and they did. If you look at the mid 1990's telephone rates, people were happily paying $.14 a minute for voice on cell phones and $40 a month to the phone company for unlimited landline modem calls (data). The speculation that fueld the boom was that people would be willing to pay cellular voice rates for cellular data. If you figure 56kbps on an async line is 5k bytes per second or less including overhead, that would mean the average user would be pay $.14 for 300k bytes of data or about a dollar for 2 megabytes. As we all know lead ballons only fly on mythbusters, and this was a lead ballon of the biggest possible proportions. It simply never got off the ground. The telecom market crashed, which lead to the race for the bottom (almost free landline/VoIP calls) and lots of included cellular minutes as long as they got a monthly fee from you to lock you in as a customer. Lots of fiber "went dark" and I'm sure a lot of it is now unusable as it was not maintained and the electronics at each end are obsolete. Now the telecoms are loath to invest in consumer communications, or expand their network out of the big cities. Geoff. -- Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm(a)mendelson.com N3OWJ/4X1GM I do multitasking. If that bothers you, file a complaint and I will start ignoring it immediately.
From: George Kerby on 20 Jun 2010 11:04 On 6/20/10 2:48 AM, in article 200620100048074289%aeiou(a)mostly.invalid, "Mark Conrad" <aeiou(a)mostly.invalid> wrote: > In article <timmcn-C88A8B.22321519062010(a)news-1.mpls.iphouse.net>, Tim > McNamara <timmcn(a)bitstream.net> wrote: > >>> What sort of DSL speeds do you guys in the big cities get? >> >> 1.5 at my house. Slow, for broadband by modern standards but good >> enough for me. Qwest wants too damned much for upgrading. > > > What bugs me is that a lot of other countries have > deployed fast fiber optic networks, while the USA > lags behind. > > Anyone know why ? > > Seems to me the cost would be low, so my guess is > that there are political reasons delaying fiber optics. > > Mark- You're right, it's *still* all Bush's fault. The Anointed One will fix it - between rounds of golf and that bothersome oil thingy.
From: Tim McNamara on 20 Jun 2010 11:39 In article <200620100048074289%aeiou(a)mostly.invalid>, Mark Conrad <aeiou(a)mostly.invalid> wrote: > In article <timmcn-C88A8B.22321519062010(a)news-1.mpls.iphouse.net>, > Tim McNamara <timmcn(a)bitstream.net> wrote: > > > > What sort of DSL speeds do you guys in the big cities get? > > > > 1.5 at my house. Slow, for broadband by modern standards but good > > enough for me. Qwest wants too damned much for upgrading. > > > What bugs me is that a lot of other countries have deployed fast > fiber optic networks, while the USA lags behind. > > Anyone know why ? > > Seems to me the cost would be low, so my guess is that there are > political reasons delaying fiber optics. In those other countries, it is often the government which builds and operates that infrastructure. In the US, we believe in having private enterprise do this. The problem is that we also have granted monopolies to broadband providers (e.g., phone companies and cable companies) and so they have little intrinsic motivation to innovate, upgrade and compete. It also results in ridiculously high prices for broadband service because there is little competition to bring down costs. It's also expensive to build a fiber optic network and run it to 100,000,000 homes and 20,000,000 businesses. The city of Minneapolis actually succeeded in getting city-wide wireless Internet installed- one of the few cities to actually make that happen despite many trying- but it is operated by a single private company which has a monopoly. So in Minneapolis you have several options- cable broadband (usually Comcast), phone line broadband (Qwest) or wireless (USI Wireless). In my neighborhood in St. Paul, which neighbors Minneapolis, there are two broadband options- Qwest and Comcast. -- That'll put marzipan in your pie plate, Bingo.
From: Mark Conrad on 20 Jun 2010 12:28
In article <slrni1rmi3.jfd.gsm(a)cable.mendelson.com>, Geoffrey S. Mendelson <gsm(a)cable.mendelson.com> wrote: > >> DVD-9 (dual layer DVD) is a much better choice. > > > > What's wrong with just dumping the video on a > > hard drive, bypassing DVD-9 altogether. > > Two problems, I leave them to you do decide if it matters. > > The first is that hard drives are fragile. They need to be shipped and stored > carefully. If you expect to play an hour or more of video off of one, you > probably will have to get a 3.5 inch ine rated for constant duty. The little > 2.5 inch laptop/backup drives get too hot for long term use. Not to worry. Small cool-running robust SSD drives will be out soon. I already run an internal 512-GB SSD in my new 17" MacBook Pro. Insignificant price of that optional drive was $1,300 USD. ....all paid for by the taxpayers of this great country, for welfare leaches like me. > The second is that they are atractive. If left sitting on a counter, > they tend to say "steal me". Naw, SSDs can easily be disguised as a flattened turd. > I expect so. Does the US allow "videotaping" operations > for educational purposes with the patient's permission? Yeah, but the patient would have to sign off so many medical release forms ahead-of-time that he would expire before he finished. Heck, when I go into the local medical clinic here to get my temperature taken, I have to sign so many release forms that I think I am buying a house. Lawyers follow doctors around here hoping they will make a mistake, so they can sue their pants off. > You don't need to control the satellite, just the data. > Encrypted satellite video has been around since 1985. > Enctypted data transmission goes back > to Julius Ceaser's days, and is very common now. Good point, and it is not like anyone had physical access to the satellite itself. ;-) > ...if you want to be at the forefront > of cardiac medicine, Hebrew. :-) Don't blow my cover, few people here know I am a jay Jewish Negress cursed with a bushy black beard. Actually, I know nothing medical at all, so who is better qualified to tell the medical industry how to run the show. Mark- |