>>Good video transmission needs 10 Mbps of bandwidth.<<
Assuming that cable modems of the type that ATHM uses will be successful, and they will, how much of that 10 Mb/s do you think you will have at your disposal once your cable section is fully populated?
>>How are Baby bells out to achieve with a slow ADSL line?<<
If your answer to my first question was about 1 meg, it would be about right, or a little optimistic during traffic periods, but then that is still only a draw with DSLs. Until, of course, either discipline realizes the inherent limitations of their existing platform designs, and decides to upgrade yet again.
>>Even if they overcome the technical hurdle, do they have the MONEY to scale up to 1 million subscribers? <<
Yes. Far beyond that. Is it cost effective? Not always, and will be determined on a case by case basis. But it preserves the customer base. Will it stifle progress? Again, yes. But such is sometimes the artifact of JIT competition.
Most MPEG deployments (even the ones being used in digital TV only require a fraction of the 10 Mb/s you referenced. Commercial delivery can be sustained by 1.5 Mb/s, 3.1 Mb/s and 6.3 Mb/s flows, depending on the type of content and the degree of image motion. OTOT, streaming video of the type we are discussing here, or many other forms of non-commercial TV grades of payloads, can and are being sustained at sub-T-1 levels, which means at speeds below 1.5 Mb/s.
In other words, you will not be taxing the full potential of the 10 Mb/s pipe to your home with these forms of delivery. The greater problem will be one of total usage on the cable segment in the neighborhood, and not simply what the total bandwidth [e.g., 10 Mb/s] rating is on the collision domain.
In MOST DSL deployments, these contention issues do not exist on the subscriber side of the central office-based DSL access multiplexer, or DSLAM. And in these instances, the DSL ISP must worry about other factors looking upstream, just as the MSO would: That is, congestion at the edge looking towards the backbone.
Regards, Frank Coluccio |
