Hi ftth,
re: ... entertainment" as the driver for more capable networks is a very disappointing outcome.
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One person's entertainment might be another's drudgery. Likewise, one medium's outside usable bandwidth potential (think fiber optics, RF <of late> and even black coax) is another medium's long term objective or improbable dream (smoke signals, copper wire).
It may just be that, in the vast majority of cases, superior capabilities have existed all along. I know that in the case of coax and fiber this is the case. Less so for radio, although relatively recent technological developments and deployment strategies, especially with respect to density and spatial parameters, have elevated wireless capabilities to near-par status with other media formats, at least for the purposes of satisfying those capabilities that end users yearn for today.
Maybe we need more self-interest on the part of end users seeking improved entertainment delivery platforms in order to counteract the self-interest of service-providers', whose efforts to limit bandwidth and privileges (rights?) through the use of restrictive network designs, policy enforcement and billing systems that wind up costing them up to 80% of total cost of provisioning, which can only be recovered through increasing the amounts billed to customers.
In keeping with the rising tide lifting all boats principle, I submit that it's a good thing that there is an insatiable thirst on the part of the citizenry for more capable entertainment networks that could be used to entice even a lame form of competition between territorial monopolists, lest we still be trapped using V.90 links, or worse, while yearning for the day ISDN finally comes to the neighborhood.
While mulling a reply to your observation, I split my attention between trying to locate on the Web a reference that illustrated a breakdown of use cases, and recollecting a group (collective) mental exercise I spearheaded about twenty years ago on the Compuserve Telecommunications Forum.
Dubbed "Total National Bandwidth", or TNB, the stated objective of the thread was to estimate the total amount of national throughput potential (a.k.a. bandwidth) across all forms of electromagnetic media,both active and standby, including wireline telephony, fiber-optic, cellular, Ham and AM/FM radio, military, residential, commercial, you get the picture. If a mechanism or system generated a baud or a harness-able Hertz, it was part of the analysis.
Only after several months of attempting to devise a taxonomy of all possible use cases to insert into this model could one come to appreciate the relative weightings of each usage group and the type(s) of facility they used. Proportions have certainly shifted since twenty years ago. Would anyone care to venture a guess how much of a shift has taken place? I've searched for a usage breakdown but thus far have come up empty. A nice graphic illustrating a cross-sectional view of usage statistics would be interesting to discuss. Only, which silo(s) do you go to for such data? The ITU? FCC? The Internet Society? Some powerhouse vendor with a toolshed of axes to grind?
FAC
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