ISPs have profited massively from many many Moore iterations while consumer bandwidth is stuck on below 1990 technology.
Make no mistake, the technical side of this has only gotten cheaper. That's before you consider the "investment" necessary to resolve the vast majority of Netflix bandwidth issues is connecting a cable from one router to another in a CIX.
Of course when you do that it becomes blatantly obvious that ISPs have oversold and overbooked capacity dramatically as we get closer and closer to the last mile to the customer. Now they don't want to pay up to actually provide what they have sold.
> ISPs have profited massively from many many Moore iterations while consumer bandwidth is stuck on below 1990 technology.
On one hand they don't have to compete in many place so ISPs are close to being a monopoly so they can keep charging $80 for < 1Mpbs if they want.
At the same time Moore iterations don't dig trenches and lay fiber between cities. Also frequency spectrum doesn't grow with Moore's law either.And in many instances it is still mostly a shared resource. Cable companies usually have groups of houses share the upstream bandwidth.
Of course none of that ever makes it to the consumer, investment is stagnant or down and all this tech ends up achieving is accommodating higher Internet penetration (and customer counts).
All this cable infrastructure previously wasted on free to air crap has turned into a veritable gold mine with no further investment and tech again making up for all the growth so you don't have to spend any.
Sure, Moore isn't helping dig trenches but he sure has been tremendously helpful in turning that ole shitty copper wiring financed by Uncle Sam into a lot of green.
This is completely ignorant on two fronts. First, the neither POTS nor cable was "financed by Uncle Sam." Second, new headend equipment isn't free, and DOCSIS upgrades have gone hand-in-hand with node splits and pushing fiber deeper into the HFC network.
> ISPs have profited massively from many many Moore iterations while consumer bandwidth is stuck on below 1990 technology.
On what planet? I did a speedtest.net run the other day on LTE and got 150 Mbps down/20 Mbps up near a strip mall in exurban Maryland. That network did not come cheap.
The effective bandwidth of that network even on some unobtanium 50 GB plan is <1 Mbps and that's before we get into latency and packet loss discussions.
That's like saying the "effective speed" of a 777 is 45 mph because that's the maximum average speed over a month accounting for refueling and servicing. Or that the "effective battery life" of a MacBook Pro is 70 minutes because that's how long you can run it at full tilt. It completely ignores the typical customer use case.
I feel nerdsniped! The utilization rate of a major airline 777 is ~12 hours per day. If the ORD-LAS flight I took today is representative, average in-transit speed is 331mph, so the average speed of a jetliner isn't 45mph, but rather... 165mph?
Hmm, I think that figure could be off by a decent amount though depending on what exactly is measured by "utilization". Taxiing, for example, or sitting at the gate with an hour delay.
I think the best way to figure this out is to conduct a little study: set up a script to monitor a representative sample of planes on FlightAware for a while.
Taxiing is included in utilization time, but also in my average transit time (I just took the nautical distance traveled and divided it by the actual transit time).
Moore's law has not held for long-haul bandwidth for quite some time. Moore's law is for semiconductors and that has little to do with signal efficiency.
Make no mistake, the technical side of this has only gotten cheaper. That's before you consider the "investment" necessary to resolve the vast majority of Netflix bandwidth issues is connecting a cable from one router to another in a CIX.
Of course when you do that it becomes blatantly obvious that ISPs have oversold and overbooked capacity dramatically as we get closer and closer to the last mile to the customer. Now they don't want to pay up to actually provide what they have sold.