
The real Gigabit Challenge is getting ISPs to think like tech firms - iProject
http://gigaom.com/2013/02/03/the-real-gigabit-challenge-is-getting-isps-to-think-like-tech-firms/
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henrikschroder
What a weird article. The reason Intel pushed faster and faster chips, cheaper
and cheaper is because they're selling items, not service, and they have to
keep selling chips year after year, while facing competition. They do it,
because otherwise they'd go out of business.

Unlike US ISPs, which face almost no competition, and will remain in business
as long as they provide some sort of service, charge just below exorbitant
rates for it, and keep the service level just above the minimum needed to
avoid consumer mutiny. It's not like people have a choice, and therefore they
stay.

Asking major US ISPs to change their mindset is completely futile, they have
no reason to do so, because their current strategy extracts the maximum amount
of money from the market, and the minimum service upgrades they do keep them
updated and not completely obsolete. The _only_ thing that can make them
change is competition. Most of you are americans, you apply this principle
ruthlessly in most areas of society, but why do you have a blind spot for
telcos and cable companies?

Meanwhile, my city hooked up my apartment building to the municipal fiber
network last year. I volunteered to do the project for our housing co-op, so I
called up a bunch of local ISPs, some small, some big, and got offers for our
building. Some of them were good, some were bad, some were cheap, some were
expensive, some were flexible, some were rigid, and ultimately I picked one
and recommended to our board. And a week from now I'll enjoy 100/100mbit for
$30/month along with everyone else in my building, and the cost is fixed for
five years. After that period, we're free to re-negotiate the contract and
pick another ISP if we're unhappy, but you can bet your ass that the one we
picked are gonna do all they can to keep us happy, so they keep us a customer.

Competition tends to force companies to do that.

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Retric
Intel is only competing with AMD so it's not really an issue of competition
it's a question of the quality of that competition.

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tcdowney
Don't forget ARM.

With mobile device sales taking an ever increasing share of the market, Intel
cannot afford to miss out on this front.

This is definitely driving Intel's recent push towards efficiency.

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sgt101
This is a dreadful article. The graph (which is used to underline the premise
of the piece) is mislabled. The lines are the wrong way round. How do I know.
I shall tell you.

WDM capacity world wide is rising as per the white line.

Cost per mbs-1 is falling as per the orange line.

These are facts. Labelled properly the graph is correct.

It is simply stupid to think that WDM capacity is falling, and the author
needs to be - well, I will not be silly and intemperate!

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josh2600
I looked at that graph like four times before I could even start to understand
how somebody could make that mistake...

The whole premise of the article is expanding capacity and falling costs and
he describes the graph as exemplifying this and then when I look at it I feel
foolish.

Glad to see I'm not the only one who noticed that.

The debate has never been about aggregate capacity (not since the 1900's), but
rather about last-mile access, and will continue to be until last-mile access
is liberated; which may never happen.

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jsz0
Look at it from the ISP's perspective. Most are not doing metered billing
(yet) so they have little to gain from customers having faster Internet
connections. They certainly aren't getting a penny from the companies that
are/will be making money using the fat pipes to customer's homes. What's in it
for them? They will do it if they must to remain competitive but will wait as
long as possible to see if new technologies will allow them to push the old
infrastructure further. The technology to do 1Gbit/sec (download) speeds on 30
year old cable systems is on its way to market now.

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shalmanese
nitpick: Intel made 2.5Bn of profit in Q4 of last year. Annual profit was
11Bn.

