Bill,
Re -- Two way infrastructure bottlenecks.
Infrastructure includes many things,
-- 2 way signal amplification,
-- Modifying Hubs/Routers for encryption, management and billing in apartment complex's and cable ready community housing (This is no triveal requirement)
-- The fiber to the curb installation.
-- Services and Support infrastructure -- the local cable installer needs to be retrained to install cable modems (not everybody is as smart as the 3com duds)
Esssentially there are two ways cable modems operate
1. The type 3Com is selling which requires a telephone line for upstream transfers (i.e requests/queries -- low bandwidth data travels over the telephone, while web pages graphics -- high bandwidth data travels over the cable). This is also called telco-return.
These type of cable modems are awkward, and the requirements here is the Cable and telco's and ISP's work together. The necessary responsibilites and the money is divided among them in some fashion. However the issue of control between the cable and telcos are still present with this type of scenario.
2. Two way cable transfers. Both queries and web pages travel over cable.
Cable essentially was set up for 1 way transfers. For 2 way, in addition to the signal propogation, unused lower frequencies carry upstream traffic. These lower frequencies (without appropriate amplification) also have interference from other low frequency RF, thus causing data loss.
In both cases, Cable is ill equiped to transfer huge amounts of data from the Regional Centers (head ends) to the Backbone, and back. And broadcast data of all the web pages from everyone in the community combined (currently only a few users are involved in the trials, and in many cases have been satisfied with fibre to the curb)
Also there are issues such as security (you dont want to see your neighbors web pages)
There are many other issues, and currently no "real" standards exist.
Cable modems despite what Barrons says, is a couple years away (i.e for anyone to make money out of). The technical issues have mostly been solved.
Bill gates has invested 1 billion in comcast, and there are other companies such as @Home making this happen.
Stockman |
