I think the lack of comments on Inscrutable Multivendor Specifications is because nobody can make sense of them, except perhaps for contestants in the Obfuscated Coding contest....
... though I don't discount coax at all. Coax is neat because it hybridizes the flexibility of radio spectrum with the space division inherent in fiber and other transmission media. You basically have 750 MHz or so to play with on every block. Most is the same broadcast, but there's plenty to work with. Alas, the upstream is too constrained by US standards, and it's probably too late to fix that (HFC plant is already built to support downstream Channel 2 at 54 MHz). Terayon's S-CDMA sort of helped, though to hear Motorola's side of the story, it was a kludge that didn't work any better, in practice, than QAM and other, less exotic, modulation. So by requiring DOCSIS 2.0 devices to support it, even if in practice they used QAM, S-CDMA raised the cost of higher bandwidth on coax. Ah, standards, gotta love 'em.
Glass is nice too, but having seen how FiOS uses glass to provide service inferior to copper, I don't get all cargo cultist about it. Yeah, I recognize how Corning et al in the FTTH Council have a vested interest in it, but there's also a Tobacco Institute, and I don't have to take them seriously either. |
