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Technology Stocks : The *NEW* Frank Coluccio Technology Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (486)	7/21/2000 5:22:12 PM
From: MikeM54321	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 46821

"Instead, these services will be available via the set top box under a separate operating system. And of course, these new channels that will be accessible through the set top box will not be sharing bandwidth with cable modem spectrum." Frank- This brings up something I've been pondering lately as I've delved into TV land. Say you do the above. Say it's works incredibly well. Then what is to keep the hundreds of millions of content providers, ISPs, anyone and their brother with a iMAC and digital video camcorder, from going to the FCC and crying Foul! If successful, and they are allowed/forced onto this new network diagram you describe(full blown bandwidth to the STB), I think that the Mother of all Pandora's boxes(pun intended) just opened up. It will turn the ENTIRE broadcast world UPSIDE DOWN. Not that I don't personally like it a lot, but I'm not a member of any NAB, MPAA, RIAA, or MSO for that matter.<vbg> I just think it's very dangerous territory we're talking about here and I can't imagine this can't be seen by anyone involved in trying to make this happen. So I see DELAY, DELAY, DELAY written on this plan. Don't you think others of the above named groups see this same thing too? -MikeM(From Florida)

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (486)	7/21/2000 10:03:04 PM
From: ftth	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 46821

re>>:"...and Cable Modem approaches, which are entirely contention based. And where some cable modem approaches are slightly different than pure contention based, they nonetheless vye for the same downstream bandwidth even though there may be arbitration tricks taking place somewhere in the head end." First, I assume you meant "upstream" since there is no contention in the downstream. It is scheduled, but there is no access contention. There is only one accessing station (the CMTS) so contention is not an issue. And in general, since proprietary cable modems are both fading away, and not publicly documented as to their operation, we can skip them in this discussion (but there are almost certainly proprietary modems that are mostly contention based). DOCSIS, on the other hand, is NOT mostly contention based. It falls more into the PDAMA (packet demand assigned multiple access) camp, where contention transmits are only used for requesting a reservation (and are very small packets--something like 6 bytes). The bulk of the upstream traffic, percentage wise, is in granted (non-contention)timeslots. Going forward with DOCSIS 1.1, contention slots should--in theory--become an even smaller percentage of upstream bandwidth utilization since there is a lot of flexibility in pre-assigned or dynamically assigned traffic shapes which utilize unicast polling or pre-arranged periodic grants that don't require any reservation bandwidth whatsoever. But hey, efficiency can only take you so far. Much greater bandwidth is required, ultimately.