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From: tedm@agora.rdrop.com
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: [Q] ISP :new to ISDN : Pointers?
Date: 29 Jun 1996 07:25:54 GMT
Organization: Symantec Corporation
Lines: 142
Message-ID: <4r2lq2$2rn@symiserver2.symantec.com>
References: <4q5815$h7l@news.corpcomm.net> <Pine.3.91.960618005848.5013D-100000@fog.cs.odu.edu> <4q6ijt$rsv@hops.entertain.com> <31C9C03C.22722C64@lambert <4qqh9s$ec@anorak.coverform.lan> <4qub5k$7nf@hops.entertain.com> <31D3725F.199410B7@lambert.org>
Reply-To: tedm%toybox@agora.rdrop.com
NNTP-Posting-Host: 198.6.34.1
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In <31D3725F.199410B7@lambert.org>, Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> writes:
>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).
>
[some deleted]
>
>] 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.
>
[more deleted]
I don't agree with this. Don't forget that the cable companies are in the
content-providing business, and the content they provide is entertainment.
The Ted Turner view of the Internet is a commercialized, glitzy place
where you click a mouse and a commercial pops up.
Look, during the Great Depression, who made money? The Movie and gambling
houses. People were willing to spend their last dime on entertainment, forget
eating! Why do we pay millions to sports figures who go into a court for
2 hours and toss a ball around? It's Entertainment.
The Internet grew up on information providing, not entertainment providing.
The Telcos are a lot closer to understanding this than the cable people ever
will be. You may have a pilot project going in because your lucky enough to
have a few smart guys in at TCI, but once the subscriber base gets going
TCI is going to be looking at it as a captive market for value-added-services.
For example, you want to play Network Doom, or Network Mech-Warrior
with your friends down the street, well great, oh by the way our routers block
such traffic unless you pay for our "extended servicing" plan. (Bend over and
we will "service" you, Har Har) And, since you _already_ have that cable in
there for data, how about an extra $10 a month for television programming?!?!
>] 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-).
>
[more deleted]
The large Telcos like GTE & AT&T long ago bought up all the significant
cell phone providers. They realized that control of the last mile was crucial.
It is obvious that the Telcos are aiming wireless traffic to be voice-only.
They are never going to allow flat-rate service into the wireless market,
they simply aren't interested in the airwaves being locked up by a continuous
circuit data pipe.
I can tell you what the 20-year dream of the Telcos is. It is that everyone
will have a phone number, phones will be replaced by mobile phones in
watches, and everyone will have a phone number assigned to them. All
calls will be measured service. The PUC will be unable to control rates because
all of the existing backup land wire. If some bleeding-heart liberal starts
whining about the poor old people who cannot afford cell-phone-wristwatches
and thus need the government to come in and take over rates, a-la PUC, the
Telcos will simply give them a land-line telephone for nothing.
The existing land-line infrastructure will be then be free to be converted over to
exclusive data usage. This will be great for us data-heads, because we will
end up with a situation where the Telco's make the bulk of their money off
the wireless voice circuit revenue stream.
Personally, I'd rather see 3 or 4 parallel sets of wire coming to my house, owned
by competing companies, than a single set of wires that the government owns.
That's all we need, more government in there retarding the growth of the
InfoBahn.
Just out of curiosity, how many of you know what the going rate for government
network workers are? I recently was changing companies in my field, during
the process I got a call from a recruiter who had a government position open.
I had to laugh when the recruiter told me they were only offering $22k a year
starting wage, I had just come off a job paying more than double that for the
same work. Apparently they had been trying to fill the position for 4 months.
With wages like this I really don't want any government agency (at least here,
that is) interfering with the operation of the telephone company, as it guarentees
a high percentage of them are going to be simply not knowledgeable enough to
effectively regulate data service providing. Pricing regulation is fine, it doesen't
take a rocket scientist to understand that. The thought of turning over the
data cable infrastructure to those folks makes me shudder.
>
>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
[more deleted]
That is because you run with graphics enabled. I do all my web-surfing with
graphic turned off. It is amazing how fast the pages are loaded. It is also
much more pleasant to look at, and I can immediately tell if the page is garbage
I have also discovered that web pages that look terrible with no graphics are
usually put together by people who have nothing to contribute to the Web.
What most of these guys have forgotten is that the graphics are simply an
aid to the basic material that should already be there. If the site is built
backwards, in other words the written material is an aid to the graphics, it
is usually because the material is so sparse that it is worthless.
>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?
[more deleted]
The PUC will get you eventually anyway. Here in Portland OR we have a situation
where the Portland carrier, US West, is lightyears behind the times. At the
Western end of the Portland city limits is the City of Beaverton, which is served by
GTE. GTE actually submitted a request to the PUC last month to be allowed to
do flat-rate charges on ISDN. Meanwhile, US West has had so many customer
complaints (their ISDN pricing is much higher) that the PUC has threatened to
fine them within six months unless the level of complaints drops. In fact, some of
the muckety-mucks at US West have been booted out over this, that's what kept
the company from being fined.