On Wed, Mar 02, 2005 at 09:05:47AM -0600, Ben Kochie wrote: > > HA! Are you KIDDING? "upgraded to 1.5mbit" is a joke, their > infrastructure has supported those speeds since they've had G.DMT. The > only thing they have done was lower their insane prices to slightly less > than insane. > > The same thing goes for the cable companies, the capacity has always been > there, they just bumped up the limits to LOOK like they were doing > improvements. > No, the DSL upgrades required infrastructure upgrades on both DSL and Cable sides. On the cable side the bandwidth *wasn't* there, they had to upgrade to DOCSIS 1.1 and QAM256 service (which meant replacing a LOT of modems that MediaOne/AT&T handed out years ago) The cost of bandwidth also went down, which allowed them to offer more bandwidth at the same cost. You of all people on this list should know that bandwidth isn't free, or necessarily cheap. > At the same time they enact restrictions to limit what you can download.. > You of all people should know better. Such as? Do you think that a government owned network is going to have a ToS that allows you to download child pornography and copyrighted materials? Those are pretty much the only things Comcast disallows. http://www.comcast.net/terms/use.jsp > Nope.. you're wrong, the city of saint paul sold off the cable > infrastructure 20 years ago. Most of the other cities did as well. That was rather stupid of them, but what do you expect? Inver Grove Heights (the city I live in) still owns their cable network, on one of the public access channels it regularly broadcasts a PSA asking that anyone having *any* problems with their cable (from a customer service standpoint) contact the city. > > Again, it's already there, and it has been handed over to various companies > > to do what they wish with it. Perhaps you should be contacting your local > > city council or state representatives to promote a law that forces them > > to share the *existing* infrastructure before wasting money on yet another > > that will be abused in the same way. > > I don't see it, and that is one thing I have talked to reps about. Most > of what I've heard from the city of minneapolis is they have some fiber, > but nothing that comes close to servicing residential use, only city > building infrastructure. Obviously they do not have fiber in the ground to every home waiting to be plugged in. They do already have what I would consider a large fiber deployment that goes to the scattered government buildings. > >> The city builds the roads, the businesses provide the taxis. > > > > Let's not bring the poor quality of Minnesota's roads into this. > > you havn't seen poor quality roads till you drive in the bay area. MnDoT > is amazing compared to the stupidity of CalTrans. Yeah, StarTrib reported that by 2030 MN DoT will have all of the 494/694 loop up to (at minimum) a whopping three lanes! Way to plan for.. 5 years ago. But that's another thread waiting to happen on another list. -- Matthew S. Hallacy FUBAR, LART, BOFH Certified http://www.poptix.net GPG public key 0x01938203