Everyone so far seems to be pretty bullish on @home's future, so I am going to come in a play the advocate. I have been following @home's progress for about 8 months now because I thought the prospect of the company were great. However, in my research I have found many problems with @home's tech.
1. @home is taking way longer and is spending more money than ever thought possible to roll out the capable modems. the tech is just not as simple as thought to believe. They do have some big guns backing them. i.e. Kliener Perkins, TCI, Netscape which gives the company a strong base, but...
2. Cable modems are no longer at the forfront of technology. ADSL will beat Cable modems hands down for effeciency, power, and security. A cable modem has a shared bus, so while it is capable of speeds of 10mbps, which is very fast, if there are even 20 people within the neighborhood on the same bus, the speeds are already down to 500kbps. This does create a serious problem, because for real time video -- there has to be at least 3mbps transfer rate. While an ADSL modem can already do 6mbps DEDICATED and works over existing phone lines and because the lines are shared you run the risk of security. This however is only downstream, but then there is upstream. A cable modem will not be able to go upstream unless the cable line is replaced with a two-way line, which again is going to be cstly to replace all cable lines in america. ADSL, already can transmit 20x the speed of a 28.8 or roughly 600kbps.
3. @home company is really a service provider to the internet, but is attached to TCI and this is why they are doing their service with a cable modem twist. This creates problems because the tech is not superior to ADSL. For @home to be successful they have to detach from TCI - which owns 75% and venture with ADSL technology. Besides ADSL won't even compete in a few years when their is VDSL (50Mbps).
Finally, I have spoken to @home and they are really playing of full, real time video. Why? I think because they know they cannot do it. The overall infastrucutre of the network seems awesome, just the wrong type of modem trying to be deploid.
I do remain optimistic that the company could be successful with a few changes, but until they detach from TCI, I will remain very speculative in their product.
IMHO
Jack |
