"Its going to be a boring rest of the year for broadband. The IEEE EFM probably won't be far enough along by the end of the year to really say whether any "right" answers result."
Maybe boring to some. But it's a much needed respite to give IT staff and networkologists a period to regroup and make sense of things, while dispensing with the greater amounts of misinformation that were actually high hopes, if not absolute nonsense.
During the height of the craziness I can recall being asked for explanation, especially with respect to the e-hype b2b/b2c/etc. and how enterprise networking would be impacted. I had to take a really conservative stance on many occasions, which made me seem like a dolt, no doubt, because "everybody" had answers that they'd read about. I simply didn't know what to make of the chaos that was ensuing at the time. In retrospect, it wasn't the kind of chaos that derived from logical underpinnings. Hype seldom is. Rather, it was more like Gaussian noise and way-nonlinear distortion.
"Because all the infrastructure stuff is still developing, and/or in limbo, be prepared for a deluge of hype for residential gateways and home networks in the coming months. The analysts have to hype something or they go out of business; that seems like the most likely "next victim."
Can you point to some early signs? For a while gateways that incorporated firewalls made a lot of sense. Well, the firewall component did, in any event.
There were quite a few gateway products for dsl lines that were designed for dlecs that are now sitting idle. There are no more [viable or otherwise] dlecs to sell them! I suspect that some of these are made to order, with some minor retrofits, for consumer-level use. Of course, ILEC dsl is not the same as DLEC dsl, as we've discussed here in the past. ILEC DSL only supports a single user virtual circuit. DLEC DSL supports multiple, and most of the ones that are useful were symmetric, not asymmetric. |
