A re-post from the ATHM thread:
----
>>I suspect that you forget that the vast majority of people will be more than thrilled
with the ability to have the equivilant of better than a 10BaseT LAN connection to the
internet.<<
When will the vast majority of people be thrilled? Perhaps now many are thrilled
because they're received a temporary reprieve from the drudgery of their prior experiences using 28 kb/s modems. But that wont last for long, unless they learn to live without many of the emerging capabilities requiring of upstream capacity. And when
uptake reaches the next plateau, congestion will rear its head up, and the new wait will be for the arrival of Lightwire.
Is that when they will be thrilled, when Lightwire is delivered to the vast majority of users? Do you know how long a wait that will be?
I think that it is very telling, although in a not-so-clear-to-the-naked-eye kind of way, that T and their other MSO peers now find it necessary to examine ways of administering triage -- improving throughput -- to a system design that isn't even fifty percent deployed, yet. This might say something about their ability or inability to properly project users' needs, OR it might have something to do with a more fundamental quality surrounding motivation, and where that motivation is pointed.
Yes, I know.. the Internet caught everyone by surprise. But the Internet caught everyone by surprise about two years ago. It didn't stick its head up just last month. The corollary to this, however, is that "now everyone knows better," right? Think again.
>>The bandwidth is too valuable to waste simply to remove the cost of ever cheapening electronics.<<
Optical bandwidth is not a scarce resource that needs to be preserved, least of all through circuitous means. On the contrary, bandwidth within optical strands approaches surreal proportions which we will probably never fully tap during the short term. Especially, it is not so scarce or expensive that it must be preserved at the cost of preserving legacy designs which were intended to support coax.
The legacy designs I speak of, in fact, came into being because of the scarce supply of bandwidth on coax. You are suggesting that we preserve those designs because their underlying electronics have come down in cost. This is a classic example of how a well-intentioned engineering objective with momentum behind it can present a brick wall to progress. If one were to extend this line of thinking, then we could assert that we don't need to increase bandwidth at all, and get by with less and less bandwidth all the time, simply by improving the compression algorithms that we have at our disposal. Why pull fiber at all? Maybe those cable modem approaches of sending data over coaxial cable, exclusively, are right on the mark? Not.
Perpetuating the use of coax, anywhere in the outside plant, isn't only inelegant, but I've come to consider it as a form of veiled ploy, one which uses arcane economic analyses for its own self-justification. It's a tactic whose principal effect will be to continue the artificial restriction on the supply of bandwidth to end users. And yes, inertia's got a lot to do with it too, along with theological interests which have been vesting for the past ten years.
Neither T nor any other service provider is overly enthralled by the prospect of selling their most valuable product (which now happens to be bandwidth delivery) at ever diminishing unit prices. Service providers know that lowering costs to the user for increasing supplies of bandwidth is the trend that they must follow, and competition, particularly from upstarts, is forcing their hands to come down in those prices (which is the same thing, in effect, as stabilizing prices while increasing throughput).
But it does not work in their best interests to become overly zealous in this practice, i.e.m coming down too far, or opening up the floodgates too wide, lest they wind up giving the store away for free.
So, if they seem perplexed at times regarding how they will get more bandwidth to their users, then look again and keep the following in mind: Their consternation is not because they do not know how to give more for less. I know some engineering students who could show them how to do that, if they were to ask. Rather, they are perplexed about how to provide less while giving the appearance that they are striving to provide more for less.
And in T's case, since they are now turning their attention back to their carrier model, they must maximize on their pipe provisioning revenues wherever possible.
-----
You mentioned rewiring the entire home with fiber if fiber were to be pulled to the home. If that ever came to pass it would only be at the election of the homeowner.
When fiber is pulled to the side of the house it enters a device which has multiple outputs associated with it.
Those outputs will be (and are, where ftth currently exists, even if only in pilots at this time) principally, coaxial outputs to the set top box for legacy TV; an RJ-11/12 jack for voice in a way that resembles today's Network Interface Device; and various options for data, including 10/100 BaseT, and optional fiber interfaces for all of the above at some time in the future. Fiber will probably be available on the data side for 100BaseT or Gigabit Ethernet, and then for video and other forms of data later on. So, there is no need to be overly concerned about "rewiring the home with fiber." Where FTTH begins to be deployed, existing in-home wiring will continue to handle bandwidth quite adequately. The major difference being, there will be a lot more of it. Bandwidth, that is. |
