I don't think DSL has any chance of penetrating the home market
at the prices mentioned: $100-$400/month subscription, plus the
cost of equipment, plus the cost of an electrician rewiring the
house and installing new jacks.
I went through this already for ISDN. I pay CHF 52 (about $35)
per month service charge versus half of that for a normal phone
line, which makes sense. With ISDN, I can have two connections
going at once: two voice, one data and one voice, or two data.
It is 64 Kbit which doesn't compare to DSL, but is better than
the fastest analog modem, and better quality for voice than a
normal line. I need two connections anyway so that I can get
or make a voice call while I'm on-line. So might as well go
with ISDN since it costs the same as two regular lines, and
has some extra features.
The installation, however, cost me plenty. A visit by an
electrician to install the RJ-45 outlets, then a visit by
a phone company technician to attach the end-adapter, plus
I had to buy a digital phone. Total cost: about $1000. It
breaks down like this: about $135 installation fee from the
phone company, about $300 for the new phone (prices have
since come down), and the rest for the pricey labor.
I didn't do this merely for the extra speed - I did it because
I needed two lines anyway. The Internet is so bogged down that
the extra speed does me little good. I'm always waiting on an
overloaded server, or a bottleneck somewhere.
So DSL is currently way too expensive to achieve any significant
market penetration, and not much use if one had money to burn.
I would put my hope for Ampex in the video-on-demand over cable
modem area, if anywhere. Something you pay for by pay-per-view,
but you are not limited to a take-it-or-leave-it offer at a
scheduled time. Anytime you want, you select a movie from a menu,
and it get downloaded to you.
I can see a broadcaster, or cable company, having access to a
film library. Perhaps on their own equipment, or perhaps via
a dedicated super high bandwidth connection to a data warehouse,
a middleman between the film studios and the broadcasters or
cable companies. A film could be requested, retrieved from a
mass storage like an Ampex tape system, transmitted to the
requester and cached, then broadcast to the customer. Perhaps
memory will be so cheap someday that the customer's set-top
box will contain the cache, and he/she will be able to stop
and start and "rewind", as if the film were on a tape, when
it is only in volatile memory. The latter would only require
a few gigabytes of memory for a full-length film.
The data capability of the two-way cable modem connection
would be a secondary benefit. Fast Internet downloading and
uploading to be sure, but compelling only for computer
users. I'd rather watch a movie on my nice big TV screen with
Dolby Prologic surround sound blasting out in cinema quality
from my attached stereo system, than on my PC, which doesn't
have a sofa in front of it, and which becomes obsolete every two
years.
It is only video which is going to require Ampex heavy-duty
storage capacity, and I don't see that much being send over the
Internet in its current incarnation any time soon.
Cable modems, on the other hand, are coming into use now. My
cable provider is offering them in some parts of the service
territory, and slowing expanding the service. The video-on-demand
I described is something I imagined, not something being offered,
but it seems probably to me that something like that will sooner
or later be implemented. |
