Hi Jay, some very interesting stuff, thanks.
... how do you think my cable will hold up when people start trading billions/trillions of bits of DVD data on @HOME's network?"
It's another example of an unexpected, new application that doesn't fit the 1996 vision upon which your network was built. It's going to be a serious matter that may spawn yet another tier of service, or one that might be administered in some fair-waited queuing technique so as make it take longer to download, for the purposes of keeping the channel open for others.
In other words, it may be throttled in a way to abide by the dictates of overall traffic dynamics on a given segment at any point in time. Today, for the most part, these traffic management capabilities don't exist on cable networks. And where they do exist, they haven't been invoked, at least not that I'm aware of. But they are available.
In the end, however, if you have a majority of users doing this and other still-to-be-unveiled applications, even sporadically on average-sized coaxial cable segments, you may very well be looking at performance on a par with a 2B+D ISDN (115 or 128 kb/s), or 56kb/s modem, if not worse. But when the channel is relatively idle, naturally, it will take place in accordance with straight arithmetic prediction.
FAC |
