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From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: [Q] ISP :new to ISDN : Pointers?
Date: Thu, 27 Jun 1996 22:49:19 -0700
Organization: Me
Lines: 170
Message-ID: <31D3725F.199410B7@lambert.org>
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Darryl Watson wrote:
] ADSL is great for home use, if you can get it. That's a big IF in
] the States.
TCI has pilots which have been going for a year, and they have
laid fiber for wide deployment of cable modems. There will be
wide scale deployment of www.athome.com technology late this
year in Phoneix (just up the road).
] <rant>
] The World is ready for high bandwidth digital communications.
]
] Who will step in to supply that rapidly rising demand?
The cities will claim the wires as "public infrastructure"
under eminent domain. Then they will license their use for
maintenance plus some fee. Then the people will choose who
they get their service from based on the service they can
get, rather than by registered monopoly/fiat based on local
ownership of wires by one company or another.
The money is not in the pipes, but the telco's just won't let
go of the idea.
8-).
] Cable companies with 10mbit/sec modems? Not! They can't even get my
] cable TV order right, and they've been in the business for 20 years!
] How are they going to handle, say, 100,000 subscribers who want
] to surf the net at 10mbit/s, all at the same time? Will any of
] those customers even see close to that bandwidth when they
] are competing with each other for access to the internet
] through the same provider? I don't think so. And asymetric
] uploads are inadequate for businesses.
The character of the net must change. Connection to services,
rather than servers, and data vaulting and brokering of
request/vault destination pairs to minimize traffic.
I don't give a damn *where* the next 1024 frames of "Indiana Jones
and the Temple of Doom" comes from, on where it gets to.
] How about phone companies? They've got coppper to just about any
] consumer who wants it, except in places like India, where there just
] isn't an infrastructure that can handle stringing all that wire. The
] solutions like ADSL (which is asymetric, and VERY distance-limited)
] is not, by and large, available to a significant proportion of the
] population. ISDN? It is becoming increasingly available, but still
] isn't available to any Joe Blow or Josephine Blow who wants it.
] ISDN is a good standard which almost everyone agrees on, but the
] phone companies don't want to sell it, because it cuts heavily
] into their frame relay profit centers. So the phone companies
] (who are much better suited to handling the data service
] business than any cable company will ever be) will squat on the
] 'public networks' as long as possible, without providing a
] reasonable solution to the scream for greater bandwidth, and
] will effectively block anyone else from resolving the 'last mile'
] problem.
I have to laugh at "Frame Relay Profit Centers". A 24x7 FR 64k
would cost me less than 1/5th of a 64k ISDN. And it scales
fractionally to various DSx speeds.
Other than that, I agree with most of what you said. The thing
that is nailing them is that they are holding onto expensive
network access technology (circuit switching) to keep metered
rate billing in place (message units). All of their accounting
is set up for that, and they don't want their business commodotized
by pipe size.
It doesn't help that Intel is lobbying for low flat rate ISDN
tarrifs (for now) so they can sell their ISDN dependent technology,
which can't meet its price break at current ISDN prices and
deployment. By dropping the profit on ISDN, all they will do
is disincent upgrading the old hardware to 5ESS or better
switching, or if that's there, then not buying the ISDN software
from AT&T (about the same cost as the switch upgrade for the
software...).
] How about wireless solutions? Supposedly, there are plans by various
] corporations to loft satelites which can serve as many as 500,000 T1s
] to customers anywhere on the planet. The two questions that come
] to my mind are: when? In 2001? What about NOW?
Motorola needss $210M to deploy. Bill the Gates is talking
about competing, which has frozen out their investment. You
should follow the news more closely. 8-).
] And the other question is, by the time these wireless solutions
] are implemented, won't the actual demand for services greatly
] exceed the capacity of such satelites? My guess is that demand
] is, and will, greatly exceed supply for YEARS to come.
Yes, of course. It will prevent the services from being
commoditized.
You have to realize that "the information superhighway" is
ghettoized by bandwidth. As higher bandwidth becomes barely
affordable, applications which utilize it are built. It takes
about a T1 to conduct a full duplex video conference sufficient
for attending meetings remotely, the break-point for most
serious telecommuting at the consumer level. The things which
operate now over 28.8 with compressiion are toys, nothing more.
It has always been this way. Rememebr when 2400 baud modems
were ~$1000 and UUCP was the usenet transport? Who was able
to participate?
The net is, and will be, for the forseeable future, biased
toward sites with higher bandwidth. I can hardly *believe*
people "surfing" ("slogging") "the web" at 28.8. I don't have
the patience. For some things, like server push animation
(the crappy PC equivalent of "postage stamp sized PC video
on demand"), I think a T1 is slow.
] Other soutions? I can't speculate, as I haven't heard of any viable
] ones yet.
]
] An an ISP, my single greatest headache is the phone company.
] No matter where I turn, they are in the way, and ain't moving.
] I yearn for a high bandwidth digital solution which uses plain
] copper wire, and which will not require the phone company to
] do other than provide POTS service. If such a solution would
] come along, they would no longer be able to slow down the
] development of digital communications in this, or any other
] country. In other words, I need to be able to deliver at
] least T1 bandwidth over 24 gauge copper wire reliably to a
] distance of 30 miles or less. Anyone, if you hear of a real
] product which can do that, let me know, please!!!
Frame Relay.
Drop a T1 to a FR cloud ($400/Month to you).
Sell 46 64k connections to the cloud (50% overcommit).
Amortize your costs over 46. Say $12/M for lossage + overcommit.
Add your bandwidth costs. Charge me $160 a month and take
60k or so as profit.
If you are clever, drop the T1 from your NSP directly to the
cloud, and just administer the accounting from your end. More
profit for you.
] I think that in the next 5 years, the single most viable
] higher-bandwidth solution is going to be ISDN, at least,
] in the US. Unless, of course, someone comes along with a
] better solution that has a short implementation schedule.
If I were the telco, and I were interested in short term
profits and amortizing my old equipment over the remainder
of the lifetime of the universe instead of its useful lifetime,
you can be damn sure that if a flat rate ISDN tarrif went
in, I'd simply refuse to deploy. Why should I do something
that will eat my short term profits?
The PUC can tell me what I'm allowed to charge if I want to
offer a service, but it can't make me buy the software.
Terry Lambert
terry@lambert.org
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.