OK, I read the release and maybe I just had a "flash" of insight.
I was once involved in a competitive sales challenge to sell a small network of terminals for remote office access to IBM mainframes. At that time, IBM's approach was to install an expensive terminal controller connected to inexpensive dumb terminals over a local coax cable. The WAN connection was over 4800 bps modems and leased lines. HP's approach (a very small player at that time) was to build in the controller intelligence into each of the terminal, and to display the data in real time.
HP lost the deal due to the appearance that the IBM approach was faster, even over the same 4800 bps leased line! How? The controller would cache the page of data, and only when the full page was received, it would display it over a coax cable to the dumb terminal and very high speeds. This "flash" of data after waiting 2-3 seconds seemed faster to the customer then seeing the screen paint for the same 2-3 seconds that it took to receive the page.
Now, nearly 20 years latter, @Home is building "a distributed, intelligent network that uses sophisticated caching and replication technologies to create a high performance parallel Internet". To the consumer, the "flash" of data would make the network connection appear much faster then other ISP's (even other cable operators), when in fact, it is being delivered by a caching server on @Home's local intranet (the "parallel Internet"). This is also a benefit to the media sources by offloading the delivery of the content to @Home's caching servers.
Now I may be making some big assumptions here, and that the article you posted is about @Home. IMHO, the appearance of a fast network over a congested internet may depend on the more on the use of caching servers (speed, content, hit rate, etc.) and marketing agreements to cache the content, then on the technology used for the "last mile".
This sounds like the type of agreements that cable companies know how to make, and technology companies such as @Home know how to deliver. Is the real value of the "content" in the delivery?
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