Hi David, what we have here in the making here, potentially, is another tragedy of the commons. Is the Clearwater system already supporting a robust proprietary service, like ATHM or RR, on the same channel on which they would propose to stuff the newcomers? I don't think so.
No one ever challenged the technical feasibility of actually integrating all feeds onto a common channel. That can be done. But if this is the course to be taken at this point in time, the current HFC limitations being what they are, then it would be a rather dubious victory, at best, because ATHM and RR themselves will at some point run out of capacity the way things stand today, if they don't move quickly to take care of their own provisions.
All of this suggests that if you lump on an unrestricted number of additional ISPs at the same time, potentially hundreds of them per locale, and on the same channel(s), then things would only get proportionally worse, and a lot sooner.
Beyond the congestion factor, there is also the concern of this: how many ISPs can control security, multimedia, future voice services, and link level functions with the DOCSIS architecture at the same time?
The MCNS/DOCSIS design, lest we forget, was designed around the basic legacy assumptions that stated that the MSO or local cable operator would be the facilities based "interactive services" provider over the black coaxial cable.
These interactive services I'm referring to were those quaint shop-at-home, remote educational, etc., applications that the MSOs were grasping over during the early days of the "visionaries."
The Internet was a sudden, and pleasant surprise, but the basic prior design assumptions never really went away. In order to change the administrative control aspect of managing the account, and to avail the necessary amount of bandwidth in a pluralistic setting, the frequency spectrum allocation plan, and the head-end/modem specs each have to be re-written, IMO.
A draconian alternative does present itself, however, if the cable operator is agreeable to forfeiting additional program TV 6 MHz channels, in order to accommodate ISPs. How likely is that to take place, however, beyond the first couple of sacrifical gestures? And if that were to happen, it would do very little for the upstream direction, until radical changes were effected in the HFC design.
Ironically, it would seem to me that for the AOL-GTE trial to be even credible, it would need to, by arithmetic definition, preclude any type of existing ATHM or RR from sharing the same last mile channel, from the outset. Yeah, that makes some sense, if you think about it. That is, if the sharing applies to GTE's or some other indpendent's territory where ATHM and RR haven't any operating partners.
This is a pretty slick move on their part, wouldn't you say? That is, to highlight this integrated capability in a relatively virgin and congestion-free environment, eh?
Comments welcome.
Regards, Frank Colucco |
