Ken, you're getting a little wild here. Various xDSL stuff that runs on telco twisted pairs can get up close to 10mbit/second, but it falls off with distance from the CO. But, the bandwidth is dedicated. Cable modems are different, they can get similar speeds but there's always some degree of channel sharing. If the new fiber-optic backbone is in place, the sharing level is pretty low. To my knowledge, all the cable systems are asymetrical also, with much reduce bandwidth outbound relative to inbound.
Cable guys have been upgrading to fiber for a few years; xDSL is just beginning to role out. In both cases, we're stuck with monopolies trying to squeeze the money for the upgrades out of the existing rate base. I'm not picky about the monopolies I dislike.
As for phasing out EIDE for SCSI, I don't think so. EIDE is not so great, but what's in the pipe is firewire for high bandwith and USB for low bandwidth. Of course, USB has been around for a couple years, but it's not supported very well in software. Now whose fault could that be? Anyway, it's supposed to work good in the OS formerly known as Windows97, so it won't be as bad as the 10-year wait to run 32-bit programs on a 32-bit processor, from the 386 introduction to the Win95 launch.
Cheers, Dan |
