As is the seperation of church and state, so should it be with the service from the pipe. Evil things happen when those who control everything attempt to limit and filter what we should be able to perform.
All cities/towns/municipalities should push for a buy out plan of the cable companies, and telco operations within their limits so that they may own their own network medium,( copper, fiber, HFC, etc.) and lease to own the network to the residents/businesses, and allow for up keep costs within a taxable situation not based at all on the usage of this unmetered network. We can own our own homes. Why shouldn’t we be able to own our own pipe, and choose where it gets physically and logically connected to? Yeah, what a pipe dream, eh?
Once we all own the network, then we have a form of free communication, or atleast we’ll be able to do whatever we please over the network within it’s interconnections. We should be able to host securely using our own servers, and services from our home connections.
Of course the current situation shows, our network providers don’t want us to be able to freely and easily provide this from our expensive home connections, where all we’re able to do is stuff our faces at 8-10mbps, while attempts to speak are limited to a measley 768kbps.
Now in attempts to stranglehold their ancient business models, they want to tell us who we can speak to and where we’re allowed to go, and maybe our traffic might not get to the destination we chose to send it! WTF? If we make a phone call is the bandwidth we get not synchronous and with prompt arrival at it’s destination, and not filtered?
Cable while originally seeming to be a broadcast method to those connected is now a two way street, and their currently business models are ancient and outdated for a civiliation craving to speakout at speeds only a few years ago completely unheard of. The Telco’s figured they can get something out of the already exisiting copper running in mass to our homes, but of course the “super fast” speeds advertised are for those living close to the Central Office, or those willing to shell out some serious cheese, to bring in a T circuit or dig their own fiber. Ideally we should all have fiber optics built into our homes and business like water, and sewage. I beilve it to be a form of network technology that will rarely become outdated, in that changing the light bulb so it can blink faster and in different spectrums should be considerbly cheaper than developing new and interesting ways to send signals through copper cores. It’s interesting to see that the majority of infighting between the two competing topolgies have quieted down some. Cable being a pipe shared to a neighborhood, while DSL and other telco services limited to their only their upstream connection. Both would rather not admit that the access is always going to be limited to an upstream connection. So why not just make this upstream limitless compared to the actual number of users on either end? I think something like that could be obtained with a mesh like structure of connections between sites. Hmm, I forgot to bash a little on wireless. Well, mobile phone/wireless companies have their own turf really, considering how is it possible for a cable company to compete with someone who is “connected” without being connected. Ok, well I suppose satellite services compete with terrestial based wireless services, but as each have a considerably smaller amount of shared bandwith availible in their medium of choice (air), than fiber/copper, the customers will generally be left with slower links than those directly connected.
While I’m busy ranting, another thing a big problem with is transparent proxying. While understandably it does allow for bandwidth saving, I do not appreciate the lack of communication that this is infact happening when if not before you use their network. Proxy should be an alternative that a user is allowed to select for a possibly quicker experience.
Ok, i’m done for now. I’m hungry.
