Still trying to get my site up!

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

>-----Original Message-----
>From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
>[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Gerard Seibert
>Sent: Tuesday, June 28, 2005 4:26 AM
>To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
>Cc: Garrett Cooper
>Subject: Re: Still trying to get my site up!
>
>
>On Mon, 27 Jun 2005 21:43:08 -0700 Garrett Cooper
><youshi10 at u.washington.edu> wrote:
>
>>
>> I say get rid of the ISP and find a better one. Any ISP that actively
>>blocks port 80-a port which should be allowed as a backup port for
>>programs-isn't really setup correctly and I doubt that they have all
>>of your best interests in mind when making decisions.
>
>>-Garrett
>
>********** Reply Separator **********
>Tuesday, June 28, 2005 7:12:05 AM
>
>Getting a new ISP is not really an option. They are my local cable
>company. Ipso facto, they have a de facto monopoly on cable in this
>region. I cannot simply shop for another service.
>

Do you have DSL in your area?  Also you can get an offsite webhost for
about $10 a month.

>Actually, they are a pretty good company. Their service is good, and
>they are willing to work with me on most issues. They will even sell me
>a static IP is I am willing to fork over $25 additional each month.
>
>In addition to port 80, they also block port 25. This sort of behavior
>is becoming an industrial standard now with cable companies.

Yes that is true and with the recent US Supreme Court ruling it is
going to get worse.  But you also probably don't understand the politics
behind it, either.

The US Supreme Court lawsuit was funded primariarly by Verizon, behind
the scenes, with assistance from some of the other telephone companies.
While on the surface it appears to have failed, in actuality like many
Supreme Court rulings it helps both sides.

For the cable companies they get, obviously, the ability to do whatever
the hell they want without having to open their networks.

However the telecommunications companies get something too, and that is
the ability to federally regulate the cable companies.

Previously to the ruling, regulation of the cable companies was on a state
by state and county by county basis.  With lots of money, the cable companies
could easily quash any local attempts at regulation of Internet services
by the local cable franchise granters.

Now with the ruling, regulatory control of the cable companies has
been effectively turned over to the FCC.  (If you don't understand why
this is, read the decision)  Thus all that is necessary is for the
telecommunications lobby to get cable regulation bills pushed through
Congress, which they could, based on the level playing field premise.
The FCC will probably try to prevent this from happening by preemptively
issuing their own regulations, but don't forget that the FCC got regulatory
control over the telephone companies though an Act of Congress.  The
same thing is now in the future for the cable companies.

Now, the cable companies know all this too, and they of course don't
want it to happen.  So what they are doing now is making absolutely sure
that their price and service structure is equal or slightly higher than the DSL
providers.  As a result of this you do not have situations where
a telecommunications company dumps 5 million bucks into a metropolitian
area to put in DSLAMS and gets no subscribers, because everyone is using
cable since it's $10 cheaper a month for Internet service, or because
everyone who wants a server gets a cable connection and uses dydns.

Doing this then gets the market split between cable and DSL, which removes the
impetus for the telephone companies to heavily fund regulation legislation
in the US congress.

Every broadband supplier in the industry, both Cable and DSL, knows that
the biggest obstacle to growth of broadband is that there is no "killer app"
that forces users to switch to it.  A decade ago, the "killer app" was
e-mail and web surfing, that literally forced every computer user to
get an ISP and dialup account.  But today, the existence of the cut-rate
$10-a-month dialup providers has created a situation where the majority
of home Internet users are still on dialup modems.

So, while it may seem on the surface that if either the cable company or
the telecommunications companies could get a lot of market share by undercutting
each other, the effect would be that the other would run to Congress with
a pocketful of money to do nasty things.  And the market gain would be only
transient because most users have shown that when it comes to broadband they
don't give a shit about quality of service, all they care about is what is cheaper.
The second the company that was doing the $10 undercut ran out of money, and
put their rates back, all the users they gained would go back to the other
provider. It's kind of a mutually assured destruction sort of thing.

The DSL providers in most areas have one thing that hampers them that
the cable companys don't - they are distance-limited from the CO.
So in any given metro area you have holes in DSL coverage, where the
cable company is the monopoly.  To offset this the DSL providers tend
to give away things like static IP's and such.  That increases their
penetration in the coverage areas, so the result is you have blotches
of area that are mostly DSL, and blotches that are only cable.  Thus,
the balance of power is maintained.

Ted