From: Frank A. Coluccio
Saturday, Sep 5 1998 11:15AM ET
Reply # of 1248
Hi Byron, yes I read that article when it was published. Thanks.
Frank, here's a link, gimme a bit of feed back?
btw, you prolly saw this already
};-D
Byron
saxophone.agora.com
The direct implications, as they relate to ordinary users getting more bandwidth, aren't
altogether clear to me. It will facilitate e-commerce, perhaps it will aid in reducing waiting
times for many or stem the increases in waiting times. But discrete bandwidth acquisitions
by end user organizations are still very costly and cumbersome to come by, even for very
large organizations. Sometimes especially for very large organizations, lately, because in
many instances their requirements are so humongous that the old infrastructure that was
serving them was exhausted, and satisfying them often requires -especially when newer
data-oriented CLECs get into the act- new street cuts, trenching and the general
construction of fiber builds, whereas smaller orgs are satisfied by the carriage that was
out there, already.
The ensuing bandwidth glut, as it is perceived, may be the sole province of the service
providers themselves for a great while longer, as they continue their displacement of
proprietary private line networks with those of shared characteristics (ordinary open
Internet sizing, VPNs, extranets, etc.) until access technologies and the obliteration of
local exchange carrier intransigence on the subject make it simpler for users to acquire it
for themselves. Transparency across the continent to me means nothing if I have to suck
with all my might to get a graphic out of my CO on 77th Street in Brooklyn. My three
blocks of restricted twisted pair copper between my home and the CO make all of that
transcontinental bandwidth meaningless to me, in other words, from an apparent
perspective.
Many of the immediate implications of these baronesque undertakings, which are greatly
facilitated by DWDM and other developments in photonics/optics, are purely SP
backbone-related, serving the purposes of facilitating reduced waiting times on the WWW,
and peering trunks/links between SPs, and the internal inter-nodal links of the SPs
themselves.
Very little of this, however, addresses the needs where they are most profoundly felt, and
that is, of course, in the last mile.
But in some ways this too provides for a certain level of equilibrium, because despite the
last mile being as clogged up as it is, there are huge increases in the numbers of end points
coming on line every day which serve to increase the aggregate levels of flows in the last
miles across the country, nonetheless. If the backbones and core network node capacities
did not scale accordingly, then the sucking sounds would be caused by vacuums in the
opposite direction.
This may be a departure in the character of this thread, but I must point out that not
everything goes onto the Internet cloud. Far from it. And even a lot of what does go onto
the cloud must be prepped in such a way that requires large pipes from the end user to
SPs, and sometimes those SPs are not local to the user, necessitating leased lines
extending over great distances. In this market area, it's still a game of arm wrestling and
haggling with carriers to get bandwidth that still costs more than most lay people would
believe.
When you come right down to it, and as I point out in my upcoming white paper on the
subject, titled, It's Not the bandwidth, Stupid, It's the Ports, the capital costs to the
providers per Gigabit are being reduced, dramatically, while their pricing per unit for said
bandwidth and the pricing for subscriber end-point provisioning are holding their own,
borrowing from legacy pricing structures, or they are beginning to decline in some cases,
but not proportionately to the reduced costs that the SPs themselves bear. It's primarily in
the new techs such as cable modem and DSLs, and primarily by the upstart data CLECs
and some of the more progressive cable cos, that we are beginning to see a significant
reduction in charges for bandwidth.
--------
I'll attempt to get to your other post later today or some time over the w-e.
Hope You and ALL have a great Holiday Weekend!
Best Regards, Frank Coluccio |
