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Technology Stocks : Wind River going up, up, up!
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To: Allen Benn who wrote (1263)6/10/1997 10:03:00 PM
From: Richard M. Smith   of 10309
 
Allen,

HDTV market is on the one hand a separate market from cable
and computers, but also is pretty clearly linked. Given that NTSC
broadcast will be ending in 8 or so years, I wonder if current
TV industry players have enough time and money to worry about making
new HDTV sets play nicely with digital cable and computers. Maybe
all they can do is to do build new HDTV sets and upgrade the
existing broadcasting and distribution networks. This might
play into Bill Gate's hand where they cede the computer
and Internet side of things to MSFT.

Here are my toughts on a couple of points you made.

I personally have some pretty serious doubts about the
success of cable modems.
They face a number of big technical challenges which
cable companies don't seem to want to discuss. I attended CES last Jan. in Las Vegas, and spoke with most of the major cable
modem vendors at the show.
Motorola made the point that something like 90% of the
cable systems in the US are wired for one-way operation only.
This means that the cable operators need to make an investment
in their networks in order to carry data. It is unclear if
they are willing to make this investment (see below).

The second problem is security. In typical rush-it-out-the-door
fashion, many cable modem vendors have totally ignored privacy
and security issues. For example, here in the Boston area
the particular brand of cable modem choosen by the local
cable company allows anyone with a TCP/IP sniffer program to watch
the packet traffic of their neighbors. Oops!
I expect when this issue is raised publically, there is go
to be have to be re-engineering efforts to fix the problem. This
re-engineering will result in a delay in depolyment of
the cable modems. PC Week and the Boston Globe have already
talked about the security issues with cable modems in the past
week.

The third problem with cable modems is the bandwidth problem. Cable companies are trying to cram too many people of the same
leg of a network. The result is that the network slows
down as more people discover cable modems. Because of
the poor security on cable modem networks it is possible
to measure this problem today. A friend of mine already
discovered that packets from people many miles away are
showing up at his house. The cable companies are basically
trying to treat an entire city as one big LAN, and it
ain't going to fly.

Cable companies themselves are in pretty deep dodo, and it is unclear
how much of a role they can really play in the transition
to HDTV. The basic problem is that they borrowed too much
money and DirecTV, et. al. are eroding the cable company's
customer bases.

Richard
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