The real Gigabit Challenge is getting ISPs to think like tech firms

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.

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!

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.

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