The Spirited Back Nine ...

[ford91exploder]

ISPs are expanding their buildout at an escalating pace, primarily in the core though. Transit links that were 1Gbps in 2004 were upgraded to 10Gbps links in 2008 and 100Gbps links over the past few years. The number of POPs, or peering points is also going up radically but so is the volume of traffic from customers. Many customers might not notice the changes in the core but would if it wasn't being done.

I know about the core work - much of that core work is to support Abilene (Internet2) and the NLR (National Lambda Rail) and MPLS VPN's for corporate dark fiber replacement. The POP's are largely used for corporate interconnects not last mile access.

The LARGE ISP's who own the last mile are STILL using decade old equipment and not building out new capacity instead relying on caps and extortionate overage charges to attempt to squeeze out the last drops of revenue from their obsolete plant and equipment.

We have AT&T attempting to say 4meg down 256 up is 'Broadband', Verizon not doing any more FIOS rollouts in favor of the 10GB LTE packages, Comcast booting users who use more than 250GB, TWC saying 5 GB (with a hard cap) of data is more than adequate for the average user.

No I don't see the small business/personal internet access market getting better in the US without the US Govt getting involved, And that's too bad because the Govt generally makes things WORSE.

UK/EUR have a superior model where the cable plant is owned by one entity responsible for maintenance and provisioning and ISP's compete on price and services and your ISP can be easily replaced if they become abusive as it's a matter of simply changing the provisioning in the central office.

 

[matt9112]

Well, fall weather is why I love Boston. Days like today are so great...
View attachment 73273
Taken on Bay State Rd View attachment 73274
Taken from the top of BU College of Arts and Sciences building. My bio class was analyzing CO2 emissions with a device on the roof...such a great day to do it!


(Though after this...it's all downhill )

As nice as that is and trust me I love new england fall as much as you do..I was born here I canot justify the bitter cold and snow coupled with the trampling of my second amendment for foliage. But I do enjoy many aspects of Boston and I will miss it...but I miss freedom more.

 

[ford91exploder]

As nice as that is and trust me I love new england fall as much as you do..I was born here I canot justify the bitter cold and snow coupled with the trampling of my second amendment for foliage. But I do enjoy many aspects of Boston and I will miss it...but I miss freedom more.

Ah yes - The Peoples Republic Of Massachusetts, Strange how far it has drifted from the cradle of liberty to advocacy for tyranny.

Note to Massachusetts - There is no such thing as a philosopher king and there never has been.

 

[lazyboy97o]

Nah my main point and maybe I didn't express myself enough but if Parks & Resorts, Interactive have to keep cutting costs then some of the other divisions can start to trim the fat ... if TWDC cares that much about appeasing Wall Street.

It's not so much that those groups have to keep cuttings costs so much as that is an easy way to help profits. The Studio is overseen by Studio people who understand and advocate for movie making. For Walt Disney Parks and Resorts and Disney Interactive, what they do is just amusement parks and video games. If you dont care about the product then you don't fight for it.

 

[Lord_Vader]

Trouble is the price of transit keeps going down, VZ wants to charge customers $10/GB, Right now the price of transit for a 500TB commit is between $0.02-$0.06 per GB so that 250 GB which Comcast marks as your monthly download cap costs between $5 and $15 dollars at most. Transit is even less than that for larger volumes of traffic so the BRAVO-SIERRA argument that bandwidth is expensive is a baldfaced lie.

I've been involved in internet routing for longer than I care to admit to and I've built and managed more than one AS

Makes two of us... As for costs, transit costs are higher for smaller ISPs and are not going down. The costs may be going down very slightly from a per Tb perspective but have been driven up nearly 100 fold over the past 10 years as a result of user bandwidth demand. The reason ISPs offer unlimited bandwidth is because it is a very large shared resource but the resource is limited in most areas, some more than others. Using your example above, Comcast offers a 50Mbps package for $40.00/month here which means if I hit my cap their take is dropped to around $25 not including any of their expenses which is why the cap is in place. When discussing net neutrality, all the components need to be considered and why ISPs are doing what they are doing has to be part of the rationale. I am of the opinion that ISPs should be completely neutral, Sandvine and Procerra have no place in an ISP network except for analytics and should never be used to inject or restrict any traffic.

My household today uses close to 200Gb per month on a slow month, when laptop or phone OSs need upgrading and/or we stream a lot of content it goes way up from there and we are not in the minority around our neighbors and friends resulting in my ISP carrying a lot of traffic that costs them real money.

 

[ABQ]

(connection to the "international network" is usually capped to 25Mbps for each line. So using bitorrent will always max my 100Mbps line, but youtube can only do 25Mbps)

Used to suffer similar awful service from DSL companies when only TELMEX(prodigy), aka the giant Mexican Telecom monopoly, controlled 99% of the internet.
Thanks god for competition.. I think we're in better shape than some US regions now.

Also, agree with you on the wireless. Wireless is more "finite" due of its frequency limitations.

Nice to see the Love Boat put a kick butt server in there in Puerto Vallarta. Thank you Captain Stubing.

 

[Lord_Vader]

I know about the core work - much of that core work is to support Abilene (Internet2) and the NLR (National Lambda Rail) and MPLS VPN's for corporate dark fiber replacement. The POP's are largely used for corporate interconnects not last mile access.

The LARGE ISP's who own the last mile are STILL using decade old equipment and not building out new capacity instead relying on caps and extortionate overage charges to attempt to squeeze out the last drops of revenue from their obsolete plant and equipment.

We have AT&T attempting to say 4meg down 256 up is 'Broadband', Verizon not doing any more FIOS rollouts in favor of the 10GB LTE packages, Comcast booting users who use more than 250GB, TWC saying 5 GB (with a hard cap) of data is more than adequate for the average user.

No I don't see the small business/personal internet access market getting better in the US without the US Govt getting involved, And that's too bad because the Govt generally makes things WORSE.

UK/EUR have a superior model where the cable plant is owned by one entity responsible for maintenance and provisioning and ISP's compete on price and services and your ISP can be easily replaced if they become abusive as it's a matter of simply changing the provisioning in the central office.

I can't argue about AT&T, they cannot provide service above 1.5Mbps to my home and I live in an upper middle-class neighborhood in a fairly dense population area and they are not investing. Verizon realized they we bleeding capital on their FIOS deployment and without higher price points the service isn't profitable. Comcast, well anytime you deal with the devil and I have no experience with TWC at all and don't intend to. Telco's generally funded business cases based on 15-20 year cycles in the 80's and early 90's but we all know that was flawed math but today budgeting doesn't hold up to support the price points necessary to be competitive, we raced to the bottom and that is what we have today.

The US Gov't is very involved with several initiatives to expand broadband (10Mbps and up) that also help ISPs upgrade their plant through direct partial funding and tax incentives.

Other ISPs are investing in their networks, we are investing (albeit no nearly enough to meet demand) very heavily in the network but cannot keep up.

 

[5thGenTexan]

I will throw my infrastructure situation out. I live in a rural area where getting ANY service was kinda iffy. Close to the end of the construction on our house I found out that I could indeed get Verizon DSL (copper) at maybe 3Mbps. I could get HughesNet or some similar satellite internet that would be slow and expensive with a data cap. We also had the option of Verizon LTE here (sold by the local electrical co-op), but I read many reviews that it was sketchy and has data caps. We were ready to move into the house and still had no internet. I called the co-op one last time and they had just started offering a WiMAX plan. We can get up to 10 Mbps, unlimited with no caps for $59.99 a month. Sometimes I get 10 Mpbs . It is by no means perfect, but I felt it was the best option for what was offered. The best part is, if there is an issue I can call and I actually talk to someone in a office that is 10 minutes away. The office is local, the techs are local.

 

[Lord_Vader]

I will throw my infrastructure situation out. I live in a rural area where getting ANY service was kinda iffy. Close to the end of the construction on our house I found out that I could indeed get Verizon DSL (copper) at maybe 3Mbps. I could get HughesNet or some similar satellite internet that would be slow and expensive with a data cap. We also had the option of Verizon LTE here (sold by the local electrical co-op), but I read many reviews that it was sketchy and has data caps. We were ready to move into the house and still had no internet. I called the co-op one last time and they had just started offering a WiMAX plan. We can get up to 10 Mbps, unlimited with no caps for $59.99 a month. Sometimes I get 10 Mpbs . It is by no means perfect, but I felt it was the best option for what was offered. The best part is, if there is an issue I can call and I actually talk to someone in a office that is 10 minutes away. The office is local, the techs are local.

WiMax is a good/mature solution for a new company rolling in. VZ/AT&T cannot afford to offer WiMax b/c of a combination of cannibalization and relatively few gains to be acheived.

Rural markets are ripe for growth and many times are the highest bandwidth users due to lack of local shopping and entertainment options too but are too spread out to justify new investment. With inter-carrier compensation being eliminated over the past few years on traditional voice lines rural carriers have been hit very hard and have greatly reduced their spend in the last mile as a result.

 

[EPCOTCenterLover]

I want to verify something Spirit said. I have a small, boutique blog that focuses mainly on Disney park history and concept art. My stat tracking program reveals the Walt Disney Company clicks into my blog several times a month. Amazing they would waste their time on a guy like me with no influence at all. They need to spend their time on someone/thing else.

 

[Mike S]

I want to verify something Spirit said. I have a small, boutique blog that focuses mainly on Disney park history and concept art. My stat tracking program reveals the Walt Disney Company clicks into my blog several times a month. Amazing they would waste their time on a guy like me with no influence at all. They need to spend their time on someone/thing else.

One can only wonder how many clicks this forum gets from TWDC.

 

[FigmentJedi]

New Shanghai Disneyland art and announcement of a Toy Story Hotel

http://disneyandmore.blogspot.com/2014/11/shanghai-disneyland-release-new-artwork.html

 

[alphac2005]

I think that is an insane opinion.

John Lasseter is, truly, the closest thing to Walt at TWDC ... someone who cares, a creative with vision, and someone who not only led Pixar to being the top animation company on the planet, but then helped lead a rebuild of a near death WDFA that only resulted in Frozen.

The company would be far, far lesser sans JL.

And, understand this: his influence on P&R is often greatly exaggerated by fanbois. Not because he doesn't care or because Iger and Co don't want his input, but because he only has so much time. The only resort he has had significant input on ... again, the ONLY resort ... is DLR. And the major projects he had input on (BVS and CL at DCA ... well, I think they turned out just swell).

Losing John would be a huge blow to the company, devastating even.

Not exactly a riveting publication, but Wired had a really nice cover story about Walt Disney Animation and essentially how Lasseter not only saved, but has launched into into another excellent age of animation for the studio. It seems that no matter where, his passion radiates and you can see that he simply has that X factor that so few have.

 

[lazyboy97o]

I want to verify something Spirit said. I have a small, boutique blog that focuses mainly on Disney park history and concept art. My stat tracking program reveals the Walt Disney Company clicks into my blog several times a month. Amazing they would waste their time on a guy like me with no influence at all. They need to spend their time on someone/thing else.

But are you able to distinguish where in the Company the views are originating? Can you tell if it is someone tasked with that over a wide-eyed intern or someone on vacation?

 

[ford91exploder]

WiMax is a good/mature solution for a new company rolling in. VZ/AT&T cannot afford to offer WiMax b/c of a combination of cannibalization and relatively few gains to be acheived.

Rural markets are ripe for growth and many times are the highest bandwidth users due to lack of local shopping and entertainment options too but are too spread out to justify new investment. With inter-carrier compensation being eliminated over the past few years on traditional voice lines rural carriers have been hit very hard and have greatly reduced their spend in the last mile as a result.

Interesting that you say that rural carriers are reducing spend - mine is TDS who is busily replacing copper with fiber - used to have 1.5 Mb/DSL now have 1GB fiber much of which some of which is used to deliver TV,

It would probably be more accurate to say that rural ISP's who think their customer is Wall St are reducing spend.

 

[Cody5294]

New Shanghai Disneyland art and announcement of a Toy Story Hotel

http://disneyandmore.blogspot.com/2014/11/shanghai-disneyland-release-new-artwork.html

I don't see Toy Story Playland in the new concept art

 

[EPCOTCenterLover]

But are you able to distinguish where in the Company the views are originating? Can you tell if it is someone tasked with that over a wide-eyed intern or someone on vacation?

No, not really. I haver tried to dig further, but that information is not available to me. I'm sure that is intentional. I have seen Disney from both Ca. and Florida, though.

 

[EPCOTCenterLover]

One can only wonder how many clicks this forum gets from TWDC.

Hopefully a lot! And I hope it changes the way they invest in WDW!

 

[mahnamahna101]

Here's a random tidbit from OrlandoUnited on KidZone's future (rumored to be the next big addition after Kong):

"Back to the topic and things that could actually happen here...

Looks like this project may need to change focus, and therefore have a completely different timeline than originally thought. Sometimes working with a third party just doesn't work out and you need to looks somewhere else."

 

[BrerJon]

It's not so much that those groups have to keep cuttings costs so much as that is an easy way to help profits. The Studio is overseen by Studio people who understand and advocate for movie making. For Walt Disney Parks and Resorts and Disney Interactive, what they do is just amusement parks and video games. If you dont care about the product then you don't fight for it.

It's often said that movies are such an inefficient way to make money that anyone just in it for the dollars would stay well away. For that reason even the most uncreative, meddling execs are usually film fans and trying to make a product better, even if they mess up. Everyone working in the industry, from the top down, loves movies.

In contrary, you don't get the impression those running P&R do so because they love theme parks, just because it's an easy way to climb the Disney corporate ladder. Jay Rasulo didn't bat an eyelid being moved to finance - a true theme park devotee would have been mightily annoyed.