Neither, I think.

The phrase "the economics just don't work for the programmers" refers, I assume to the those who are 'program directors', and trying to balance the cost of content, the cost of delivery, against the returns from 'viewers' and from advertising.

The problems they face with broadband are that it doesn't scale well as a delivery mechanism. If I'm programming radio, then it doesn't cost much more to deliver to the second 10,000 people over the costs for the first 10,000 people. The costs go up very slowly in comparison to the returns.

But for broadband, the content providers don't give out broadcast-style rights. They figure since you know how many viewers you have, right down to the last digit, they should get a slice from each one. There is no economy of scale. And delivery doesn't scale either. My second megabit/second doesn't cost much less than my first megabit/second.

What this means - for better or for worse - is that right now, you can't have a *mass* market for broadband networked content. Internet radio is ideally suited to "stations" with an audience of a few dozen at a time. Major media is interested all right - but without a *mass* market, the economics don't work for them.

Download still holds possibilities over streaming, largely because you can aggregate downloads more easily than you can aggregate streaming. But that requires getting around both big medai paranoia AND end-users' demands for instant gratification. It's also automatically "user-generated programming", and therefore is a big black box to broadcast-style programmers.

That means that the 70% of broadband going "to peer-to-peer and user-generated programming" is happening because that's the only thing that exists. There is nothing else to go to that demands a broadband connection. It's like saying that 70% of SUV drivers drive on the roads, and wondering why that is. Just because you can go off-road, it doesn't automatically mean that driving off the roads is useful or interesting.

The most interesting quote from this article oddly only appears in the print version, not the online version.

"With broadband customers today, 70% of their usage goes to peer-to-peer and user-generated programming," says Paul Zwillenberg, CEO of kpe media consultancy. "The entertainment-led subscribers and the mass market are not there yet because the economics just don't work for the programmers."

Is that because the early adopters are the more technically clued in and therefore more likely to seek out alternative content, or is there really in fact little interest from everyone in broadband content from the major media players?

Here goes the free advice - judge accordingly.

Never, never, plug your computer directly into a broadband connection. Maintaining a PPPoE connection and dealing with your computer is a job best handled by a dedicated SOHO router - should be less than US$100. That should also get you a printer port/ server on it, and will let you locally connect two or three computers.

For a few bucks more (well, say US$200) you can get a wireless access point/router/print server, and a wireless LAN card for your laptop.

Either wired or wireless should give you some basic firewall capabilities - nothing fancy, but better than a direct computer-to-net connection.

Yes, you can still run a server if you get a an appropriate router.

In Canada, the one big advantage of DSL is that Bell does support 3rd party ISPs. Rogers should be doing this as well, but ... well, they don't. You can hunt around for an DSL ISP that lets you run servers, and believes they are selling you bandwidth. Such an ISP will be very upfront about this, and they WILL have bit caps, and they will NOT use the word "unlimited" except in very restricted circumstances.

High-speed providers - cable or DSL - face a major problem. Upstream bandwidth is mucho pricey. That $50 for 1.5 megabits/second is a real deal! Their business model *always* depends on oversubscribing the bandwidth, and anybody who understood the industry has always known this. Their major flaw was using the word "unlimited" - the service wasn't, isn't, and never will be unlimited.

Their other major flaw is forgetting that they are selling you 1.5 Mb/s burst down, 128 kB/s burst up, 5GB/month total, and always on. Those restrictions on servers mean that the only thing the service is good for is browsing at high speed, or shipping large amounts of data up and down. And for them, those are potential problems. They've painted themselves into a corner. The geeks Cory know may be thinking more along the lines of low-bandwidth, always-on, home servers, that do things like security monitoring, rule-based mail forwarding to your cell-phone, and remote reprogramming of the vcr. I'm not going to take a use policy that forbids the very things I think are most valuable!

The reason content *might* help is that they can bring one copy down to their network, and then charge multiple users for bandwidth to receive it. Once again, it only works if the content is oversubscribed. That means that they have to pick content that users want, and that is a task I can't imagine any ISP being up to.

My preference would be to try and break the "instant gratification" cycle, but do it transparently and under user control. A request list - at the ISP - holds registered requests with a scheduled time. I put a request on the list. If nobody else wants it, it comes off my bandwidth allocation. But - if two others ask for it, then we should each pay only 1/3 of the allocation. And - since you have that always on connection, when the request comes down, it can be delivered to youi as it comes, so the ISP doesn't even need to have massive storage on hand. They can bring the item down overnight when their upstream bandwidth is at low utilization. Whatever mechanism is used should also close the cycle, and let the original source of the download know how many times it was requested. (This is a simplified version of a multicast backbone.)

Now - this would be a much harder sell than "unlimited web browsing at high speed", but it also makes transparent use of resources. It causes your users to self-structure their use of your resources so that everyone benefits - the ISP, the info provider, and the users.

There are solutions out there, but the high-speed providers are going to have to start being a lot more creative than they have been to date.

Content? We *had* content! It was called Napster, and then it was called Aimster, and then it was called Audiogalaxy...

Oh and yes, I live in London and it took exactly a year for the cable company to install my broadband connection. When I first ordered it I had to explain to the customer service rep what broadband meant.

I would have to agree with Cory... I had DSL with SBC Ameritech, SBC being the largest provide in the state of Wisconsin. I changed my home phone number 6 months ago. The home phone is also your DSL Account number... A week ago, some one noticed that the account numbers didn't jive and instead of contacting some one (me), they disconnected my DSL Connection with out any notice. After spending hours on the phone with Tech Support convincing them that all 5 computers in my house with different OS's did not just happen to stop working all at the same time & that the problem was on their end, they then preceded to tell me that it would take 4 weeks to get it reconnected... I told them to just send me to the Sales department so I could cancel

I've had line items in my household budget for "Dog" and "Broadband" for a while now. I'll probably get "Dog" first, because the headaches of being a stepdad for a canine sound more tolerable than the headaches associated with getting broadband installed and going.

I have to chime in with Cory, but with a caveat. Nearly all the geeks I know in Ottawa have DSL, but that's because Ottawa has pretty new telco equipment and several small companies offering DSL service at competitive prices, including one lean operation that is a four-person DIY "no tech support, no email, no hosting, don't care about servers" place without even a Yellow Pages listing.

DSL service from these guys is good. DSL from Bell Canada? Not as good but really not terrible either.

Friends in NYC and SF have a terrible time, and most of the geeks I know there don't have DSL. From what I can gather the problem in the US and the UK is the providers thought they were selling soap, ie, web browsing, to a dim populace, and were caught offguard by the complexity, especially given the poor physical plant equipment that was previously taxed to the limit by cost savings rationalization.

The real reason DSL sucks so much in the US? It's because CO placement and copper routings were done in a manner that tested the limits of copper for >voice<, not dsl data, because over-engineering was considered a luxury. The telco engineers had tunnel vision, not looking towards the future, and those placements back when saved the carrier a few CO locations. In those days stretching the limits was thought to be "efficient use of resources" and now it's biting the carriers where it hurts.

I got my DSL hook up from Freedom to Surf. BT man sorted out the socket (came within 7 days.) I plugged in the USB modem and installed the drivers. Click connect - success first time. I know some people are having nightmares with installs but it really was that easy for me - just don't order DSL direct from BT.

I've just signed up to increase my cable modem bandwidth to 1mbps. (What most people don't know is the high-priced -- £35 a month, US $50 a month -- tarriff is going up to 2mbps in November, when the ordinary Telewest customers get their bandwidth doubled to 1mbps.) The service has been a little intermittently flaky, but is generally getting better, except that Telewest have a policy of using transparent HTTP proxies (which is costing them more money than it's saving, but I digress). If I had a single PC, it would be trivially
simple; instead, I feed it into one of the ethernet ports in my firewall/NAT box and supply a household LAN. It's *still* far simpler than configuring a leased line, and it's a third the price I was paying per month in phone charges for dialup at 33.6Kbps.

Remember, in the UK you pay per minute for calls. If you keep dialed in permanently, even at minimum rate you'll be paying about £200 a month. The all-you-can-use deals cut this significantly, but you end up paying 15-20 a month for a narrowband feed. With broadband starting at 25 a month, it's worth doing a little bit of learning.

Maybe we're just spoiled in Vancouver but the cost of braodband here is almost the same as the cost of a dailup account. I used to have a DSL connection via Telus (the local phone thugs) but switched over to Shaw Cable for a cable modem connection.

My main reason for getting a broadband connection is that it is always on. I do (or did until recently) a significant amount of web development at home and for me having to either keep a metered connection open or to constantly open and close a modem connection was just a pain is the behind.

Content was, and is, a non-issue for me. I just want a permanent connection.

Out here in the hinterlands (northwest Arkansas, which, though lacking in wiredness, is a fast-growing, robust economy, thanks to Wal-Mart and Tyson Foods, which are located here), we've had spotty DSL coverage for about 2.5 years, and some cable broadband for about that. I had SBC's DSL in my apartment, and it took an act of congress, plus three weeks, plus a LOT of research to get it going. When the installer showed up and saw my iMac, he had NO IDEA what it was. I showed HIM how to install it on a Mac. It used Enternet, which was buggy as hell under OS 9. When we moved into our house two years ago, we didn't have DSL or cable access in our neighborhood (located, ironically, in the middle of town). About Xmas this year, we got cable broadband. I made one phone call, the cable guy came out to put a new cable drop in my home office, and I was up and running. Easy, easy. I can't imagine why anyone here would use DSL when cable is this easy and cheaper by $10/month.

I've actually had 4 different broad-band connections in 3 different houses in the past 7 years.

1. ISDN - got this for work in '95, only because I worked with a guy who was a total ISDN geek, who knew _exactly_ how to set up my ISDN box _and_ what settings to tell the phone company to use. Mostly, I used it as a really clean modem line.

2. DSL - 2 different houses, 2 different phone companies, using a non-phone-company ISP. Always worked well, the only hassle was the 1 or 2 weeks to get the phone company to turn on the line in the first place. Oh, and shopping for an ISP who served my area took a little on-line research.

3. Cable - just switched from DSL to cable, because it was cheaper and faster (we have 2 cable providers here, competition is a good thing!). We've had it about a month, the only hard part was finding a day when a cable installer was available and someone could be around to let him in. Easier than signing up for cable TV, as there are fewer choices to make.

Of course, this is in LA, near Pasadena, which is a pretty wired place.

I'm not having any of these sorts of problems here in Vancouver Canada. I called my cable provider once, got my cable modem set up by them in 3 days. I avoided DSL because the phone company said it would take three weeks to get an appointment.

As for the first paragraph of the write-up...yes, broadband does need content. If I could get TV over broadband I would (I sit in my computer chair to watch TV anyway). If I could get the equivalent of a radio that gave me complete channel control with thousands of audio programs and music, I would. These are things I would pay a small fee for as well, but no one is providing me what I need. Either the quality of the signal is awful and painful to watch/hear or the content is so minimal that I can't find the stuff I want to access.

My cable experience has been just like Wiley's -- plug it into the back of my switch and go. Very little problems.

The few months I had DSL were a nightmare, though. As Cory noted, PPOE and PPOA are difficult enough, but it was impossible to find anyone in tech support at the baby bell that knew anything about PPOE (which they were using). In fact, most of the DSL support people I talked to at the baby bell had no idea what PPOE was much less help me with configuring my system.

The other thing holding broadband back -- which I don't understand at all -- is price. I think $50/month for a 1.5m connection is very reasonable but when I tell most people how much I pay for broadband they are generally shocked. Probably assuming that since their dialup is only $14.95, why wouldn't broadband be just $14.95 as well.

I can't live without my cable modem. And all I had to do was have the cable company turn it on and I plugged it in. bam. I've got an IP address.

Half the geeks I know, period. My point is that there are tons of people who *already want broadband* who haven't gotten it because of the stupidity of the phone company. These "early adopters" are the best potential evangelists for broadband to their friends and relatives; and right now they're telling their unskilled friends *not* to get broadband because it'll take forever and will require shit-ass crashware like Enternet.