Not that hard I guess.
Data caps are the only reason you have affordable consumer internet because they allow a significant amount of oversubscription which matches the mostly-idle bursty behavior of consumers.
You can get leased lines from ISPs with no caps easily. You just won't like the real price that comes with guaranteeing a customer that kind of bandwidth.
Back in the day, we used to take a dim look at companies who amassed horizontal or vertical monopolies, and broke them up. Well, they're like the replicators from Stargate SG1 and have reassembled into something even uglier.
And yet when we discuss this, you fall back on caps and justification by contention ratio... But why are their services zero rated, eh? Of course we know why - it's to kill the opposing services like Netflix, Hulu, or others... except for their services!
Logically, the actual lines should belong to the people (government). The money We've(royal) paid has been above and beyond what it would have cost for a REMC-style internet-ification. I don't want the US or State govts being ISPs themselves, but muni style arrangements have worked out well in the past - except when Comcast and ATT haven't lobbied them out of existence.
I mean there is also the fact that TV and broadband run on entirey separate infrastructure that just happens to share a physical wire. On FiOS, for example, TV is a separate wavelength of laser and is a broadcast signal, not an IP signal.
The whole concept of separation seems like a dodge. Is there any real advantage to using separate equipment for TV vs. using the same hardware resources to provide more data capacity and using IP multicast? Or is that what they are doing, and just doing it on separate hardware in order to claim separation?
No, a huge part of the cost is the active equipment, which also requires maintenance and upgrades. Have you priced aggregation routers with 10G ports recently?
> Is there any real advantage to using separate equipment for TV vs. using the same hardware resources to provide more data capacity and using IP multicast?
Yes, injecting the TV signal as RF over glass is vastly simpler, cheaper, and more reliable than using IP multicast. There is also the fact that it pre-dates streaming services, and is an outgrowth of the analog CATV distribution systems that were in places for decades before streaming Internet TV.
At something like $1000/port, for 100 Mbps symmetric broadband customers that's $10/customer divided by the oversubscription ratio, per hardware refresh cycle (say three years). The percentage of the customer's monthly bill rounds to zero.
And the maintenance cost may be significant, but it also shouldn't really be proportional to the traffic level.
> Yes, injecting the TV signal as RF over glass is vastly simpler, cheaper, and more reliable than using IP multicast.
It just seems like the opposite of how everything else is going. Virtualization, SDN, etc. Get everything running on the same kind of hardware so everything is fungible, failed hardware can be swapped out with universal replacements, idle resources can be reallocated to other workloads without changing hardware, etc.
> There is also the fact that it pre-dates streaming services, and is an outgrowth of the analog CATV distribution systems that were in places for decades before streaming Internet TV.
This would be easier to believe from Comcast than Verizon.
If you're only building enough active equipment to support 100 mbps service, then your point about sharing capacity on the fiber itself with RF TV is entirely irrelevant--you've got nowhere near enough active equipment to exceed the capacity of even a single pair of wavelengths.
Compare that to something like Comcast's Gigabit Pro. Each user gets their own port on a 10G aggregation router. The CPE is a Juniper ACX-2100. And you need a beefy router after that to do traffic shaping. (Due to the way the traffic policing works, Comcast will happily deliver 25MB at 10 gbps before the policer kicks in, which completely overwhelms any consumer router you put after the Juniper.) That's thousands of dollars per user in active equipment--and you're still using just a single pair of wavelengths.
> It just seems like the opposite of how everything else is going. Virtualization, SDN, etc. Get everything running on the same kind of hardware so everything is fungible, failed hardware can be swapped out with universal replacements, idle resources can be reallocated to other workloads without changing hardware, etc.
There is nothing cheap, simple, or reliable about SDN. Flexible yes, but not those other things. It takes enormous amounts of hardware to, e.g. build an SDN switch with VPP that can compare to a $1,000 Juniper 10G switch.
RF over Glass is super easy and cheap. You get a feed from a head-end, and you inject it into a passive fiber network. There is no IP, no routing, nothing active in the delivery network until you get to the CPE.
Either way, it doesn't mean they aren't competing. Legacy TV business hates Internet video, even though they know well, they are finished and either they'll go bust or they need to switch to Internet video themselves.
Early on (1998-1999) ISPs axed their newsgroup servers. Nobody paid them for those CDNs. But soon after, CDN companies paid ISPs to install their content.
Money. Its all about money.