European News worth a mention, and other tidbits.
A good story and more on Reed Hundt
All roads lead to the FCC
news.com
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ATM over ADSL in Japan to be provided by NEC
Publication Date: 13/08/97
Synopsis:
By the end of 1998 ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) multimedia communications technology over ADSL (asymmetric digital subscriber line) services will be supplied to domestic users in Japan by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT). Japanese users will be charged about œ60 a month. Internal trials are currently being undertaken by NTT. NEC will be introducing a range of chipsets. The company has already begun a design activity for 'VDSL' which is aimed at delivering 52Mbits/s 25Mbits/s each way).
In San Francisco next month Pacific Bell intends to start an ATM over ADSL commercial service for domestic users. In addition, a trial service is planned for the UK by British Telecom
Original Source: Electronics Weekly. WWW: electronicsweekly.co.uk
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Predictions for interactive TV in the 21st century
Publication Date: 30/07/97
Synopsis:
Datamonitor is predicting that by 2001 the number of households in Europe that are online-enabled with a PC and a modem will have grown from 3 million to 38 million.
This number includes those with other online retrieval devices such as web-enabled video consoles and NCs. By the same time, digital broadcasting will be reaching 14 million households. New digital programming and scheduling will underpin the launch of interactive services, in the first instance mainly by the satellite broadcasters.
Notwithstanding improvements being made to narrowband technology, digital broadcasting, cable modems and ADSL are the technologies which will predominate in the early 21st century in enabling access to broadband online services.
Original Source: Multi Media
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From April, but worth noting
Sweden starts to build digital TV
Publication Date: 17/04/97
Synopsis:
Riksdagen (the Swedish parliament) decided on April 9th to start digital TV investments. The network will be built by Teracom Rundradio (state-owned company to provide transmission network). The program development was allocated to Sveriges Television and Sveriges Radio, both public service companies.
Technology companies are Itelco, Philips and Nokia. The service will be launched in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Norrk”ping during March 1998.
Sweden will be among the first in digital TV. The parliament decision means also competition for Telia and Ericsson, who have planned to start cable-TV service using ADSL and VDSL technologies later during 1997.
Original Source: Tele-Select
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For those who may have missed it
Download white paper "An Interoperable End-to-End Broadband Service Architecture over ADSL Systems," From Microsoft at Supercomm 97
microsoft.com
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Anyone heard of EPL LTD. ?
Thought I mention EPL as I don't recall it being mentioned here before.
Besides I like their point of veiw.
epl.co.uk
"Because of this, new standards will need to be created or existing ones amended to take account of this situation.
Finally, there is an aspect which is outside the auspices of the regulation makers.
Interoperability. The DMT and CAP schemes are incompatible. Effort needs to be made to find a common ground in a similar way to the problems encountered by the analogue modem industry in their efforts to introduce a common scheme for 56kbps dial up modems.
The ADSL Forum is taking steps to address this issue, but no hard and fast measures have so far been taken to remove the obstacle of confusion which must confound the system engineers in companies such as BT and Kingston Communications.
If a decision were to be taken on the basis of technical evidence, then DMT would be the obvious choice for us all to follow.
Purely on the basis of performance, the upcoming DMT chipsets are clearly superior to their CAP counterparts and the future roadmap of increasing performance and flexibility of implementation makes DMT an appealing option if you need ADSL to coexist with ISDN.
I found EPL in this news story
www4.zdnet.com:80/intweek/daily/970707d.html
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If your interested in the WEB in Europe
wsj.com
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One of the reasons Why I'm interested in Storage Technology Companies
But suppose I suggested that by early next year we might have 3.5 inch disk platters weighing in at -- 20 Gigabytes per surface!?! That -- would fall under the "revolutionary" category.
And, the Rapidly Changing Face of -- Storage!
We're used to disk storage getting progressively more dense at consistently lower cost (indeed, 50% more dense per year at 40% lower cost, according to Seagate's Tim Chan.) We depend on it (consider that Office 97 takes just shy of 200 Mbytes for a full installation, and as we start working with, and storing, multimedia files, megabytes are like grains of sand on the beach.) So none of us bats an eye to hear that next week or month you can get more storage for less.
That's the evolutionary path. But, it may not be the path we follow.
In the small high-capacity drives common today, each platter within the drive might hold .75 Gigabytes of data (.375 Gigabytes per side), with multiple platters stacked atop each other to deliver a drive's total capacity (the heads move in and out between the platters).
So, given our "expected" 50% per year increase in density, by early 1998 we might expect to see each platter holding about 1.13 Gigabytes. But suppose I suggested that by early next year we might have 3.5 inch disk platters weighing in at -- 20 Gigabytes per surface!?! That -- would fall under the "revolutionary" category.
Yet that's exactly what Terastor is saying they intend to bring to market in that time frame ( terastor.com ), bringing "Near Field Recording" technology to erasable magneto-optical drives to deliver massive storage capacities, plus performance characteristics similar to today's hard disk drives!
Based on patents originally developed by Digital Equipment Corporation for a new type of "flying head," by Stanford University for a "Solid Immersion Lens," and by others from Terastor, they intend to "change the rules" on storage in the very near future. According to Terastor, products based on NFR technology will:
"...immediately begin displacing tape, magneto-optical, removable hard disk HDD) and optical storage solutions in many backup and archive applications. ... The resulting breakthrough is an order of magnitude increase in capacity and significant reduction in cost-per-gigabyte of mass storage."
There's very little additional information available yet on NFR or the products that are likely to result. But given that they expect to have products on the shelves in about a year, we can look forward to some interesting announcements if this comes to pass as Terastor expects.
And if it does, the rules will, indeed, change. For once, (if only for a fleeting while), we may find ourselves "ahead of the curve" with more free disk space than we know what to do with. With lots of spare capacity so everyone can sleep well at night knowing that they have a good backup. Oh, and all of those "new media" applications, driven by the new MMX processors, may find a fertile field of storage on which to place their movies, animated presentations, and, perhaps, types of information that are only now being conceived of as someone ponders "...now what might I do with all that storage?"
So, bring on those Office suites, those multimedia files, and those planetary databases.
For a few brief shining moments, we may be able to accommodate them, and with a bit of room to spare.
Welcome, to the rapidly changing face of computing.
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Shuttle Discovery Home Safe After A Flawless Mission
hq.nasa.gov
Delta launch on Sunday, Atlas on Wed.
JW@KSC |
