Screwed up ISDN? Do you know when ISDN was developed and for what purpose? It's been there for over 10 years; who used it? Why should I pay a premium for a 64Kbps circuit that takes a extra pair of condition copper when I can use a modem over the analog system at 1/2 the speed and now by 56K modems. It was there, but again, who used it? Hell I can get T-1 access for a better economy of scale than an ISDN circuit. Besides, what does it cost to deploy? What the cost of equipment? Poor Europe, after years of wretched communications, upgrades to ISDN and its obsolete in less than a year by Wintel. Gates better get worried, the competition won't be from the US but Europe, they'll develope software that economizes B/W.
Do you have any idea how much money it will require to replace that "ancient copper"? What do you propose it be replaced with; fiber? Where was Billion $ill when AT&T proposed in the late '80's to the FCC (Federal Communication Commision, yes the ROBC and LDS are ciontrol at the fed, state and local level, who controls or regulates Billion $ill) when they proposed entering the cable TV service? Their proposal was fiber to the curb, the best of all worlds. That was back when DARANet was moving to NSFnet and controled by IBM & MCI....oops there one of those dreaded telco's doing nothing. Who do the ISP's tie into....SF, Chicago, NYC and Washington DC (forget what these are called in the Net hierarchy) controlled by who...the telco's.
Do you look at the balance sheet's of the ROBC's? They certainly don't make the money that MSFT does. They pour it back into the service. It doesn't run itself. When was the last time your phone didn't work?
Before the INternet was apart of Billion $ill's vision of making his first trillion, the very industry that you are critizing were building the INternet pipelines. They ARE the infrastucutre now and in the future as far as the backbone. Did Gates know that the Net was going to be this behemoth four years ago?????
As for Chairman Billion Dollar $ill, Teledesic is outdated before the "birds" fly. That's when it comes home to roost my friend, when McCaw takes $ill to the woodshed and explain the facts of life about the laws of Physics. Besides, have the Teledesic folks told you what the charge will be? 2002, ROBC will have deployed xDSL, cable will have deployed HFC and LMDS will be ramping up service. With all these competing services, you think Teledesic will make any money? Besides that, do you know what happens to a signal in rain; rain fade algorithms notwithstanding? Funny, but a rain drop is about the same size as a 11 GHz wavelength. What Teledesic's frequency? In wireless B/W is very finite.
One other truth about communications, it doesn't always work in reality like it does on paper or a computer model. Theory and real world are too different things. Only one law is absolute; Murphy's.
Now what do I do; satellite is a very big part of it. I'm a consultant engineer with over 25 years expierence and I work briefly on a data project for the Department of Defense back in the '70's. What was that agency again....ARPA.
Yes the networker's should be hung out to dry for more of the problem with the net. Seems Sprint's Cisco system puked on it's shoes on the 3rd.
As to what does the browser or software have to do with it. Two simple examples:
1. In a spreadsheet, Excel if you like; I call up a corporate template for an expense sheet. That has a certain size, say for arguement sake; 200K.
I fill in my name and a couple of days of expenses and save it. What is the resultant size; 250K. What did I save; the information and the template. Why am I sending the template to a corporate beancounter that already has the template?
Compound that by 200 folks on Friday turning in expenses. That is 200- 200K templates sent; repetitively.
2. With browsers, especially IE 3 , I hit refresh; what am I doing when I do that?
I request the page and graphics sent again. Why am I recieving a vast majority of info that I already have in cache? Why can't it just send the change? Alot less
bandwidth used. Now I'm not a software person, but these bitch session lately from Gates and Grove are counterproductive. They can do more in compression at their end. Look at the difference between gif's and jpg's. Why can't the computer compress/decompress the webpages? That would be economizing the bandwidth. You better believe that another bandaid to get more on the piplines will be done by compression by the telco's. Digital TV is, that is what MPEG and MPEG-2 are; compressed video. That's what they are sending from Mars. |
