To: elmatador who wrote (8797 ) 10/7/2000 8:33:31 PM From: Frank A. Coluccio Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 12823 My not believing that something is going to lay down and die is by no means the equivalent to my believing in its superiority. There are lots of mediocre and mundane aspects of life, and those which are patently banal in nature, that are deemed by the masses to be better than nothing at all, and they survive the test of time. And then again, there are some things that actually deserve to die but don't. For the latter, tune in to any commercial TV program any night of the week, and see what I mean. If you are lucky, you'll catch a debate between the presidential candidates... and, well, I digress. But the example which I cite, i.e., banality in TV, makes my point rather nicely, I think. DSL, like CM and FWBB, will meet the present level of user expectations, provided that users stay within service providers use policies. However, they will not meet the same users' expectations at the next plateau of Web content richness, in another one to two years. They will, instead, experience increasingly restrictive SP policies (related to throughput, and types of services that are permitted), and tiered pricing. The tiered pricing structure will frustrate those who will not pay, making more capacity available for those who will pay, but these sorts of tactics only serve to delay the inevitable, at best. No service provider wins the race by supplying less capacity over time. The bandaids that I cited don't cure the ailments, which are, like I said earlier, congenital in nature. And the SPs of CM and Wireless will employ other schemes which utilize edge caching, they will encourage local caching, proprietary compression algorithms and background streaming of push content to CPE storage media as alternatives to the real time experience. Increasingly, non-fiberized solutions will have to economize by using every available bit in the providers' spectrum allocations, whether they are being accessed real time or for future localized reference. I foresee this being accomplished using available capacity during periods of non-real time activity, on an instantaneous basis. These cm and fwbb technologies don't die. They'll just get old and require geriatric treatment. One such means of treatment that makes sense in wireless is through the use of intelligent antennas. In HFC cable modem systems, they can go to a lightwire architecture. For DSL? Move closer to the central office, I suppose. I'm only three blocks from mine, and I've been guaranteed 2 Mb/s both ways. To wit, my existing pairs to my home didn't meet noise criteria upon the qualifying tests, and Verizon is in the finishing touches of adding a new block cable to accommodate my SP's guarantee. Can't ask for more than that, except to see it actually work.