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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 (1480)	12/10/2000 6:51:15 AM
From: justone	Respond to of 46821

Frank: You post covered two topics- let me address the Cisco whitepaper first. I read the CISCO whitepaper on their headend cable system. CISCO had the first cablelabs compliant head end. However, I wonder if they have tried to bundle too many things in one box. If they keep this up they will have the cable version of a CO. What I found interesting is that they paid very little attention to the cablelabs features, and spent most of their time on 'differentiating' features- this means, to me, this is a marketing paper- nothing wrong in that, but you have be careful not to take their points at face value. In addition to the Cablelabs specified stuff, they bundle in: 1) ATM from the headend on to the network- how far CISCO has gone from IP! This is a good thing, but not really a differentiator. 2) RSVP and other unspecified QoS mechanisms which are beyond the scope of cablelabs and may introduce compatibility problems. 3) heading cashing - I don't get why they did this. A headend is probably only one of four or more in a cable office, and you would think that you want to cache by office, or even by region. For example, the TV listing web pages and advertising should be cashed: with the CISCO solution you have to have four copies in each headend, instead of one in a separate cache system. Also, it doesn't scale as well. Perhaps you will have micro local advertising, but I doubt that the head end is a good place to do it. 4) I do like the Committed access rate (CAR), which might better be called a 'data hog throttler' that allows you to limit user access speeds. As you and I have observed, a data hog will bring down any network. However, DOCSIS 1.1 will replace DOCSIS 1.0 headends. I note that Cable related equipment companies are not doing too well lately, and I wonder if that is because the big service providers are waiting for 1.1 compatible equipment? I wonder also if CISCO can compete in an open environment with anything like the dominance they have in enterprise routes. The additional features seem more of an annoyance than a benefit, to me. They are not doing all that great in telco, and a cable company is more like a telco than an enterprise. However, you should never bet against CISCO management.

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (1480)	12/10/2000 7:15:20 AM
From: justone	Respond to of 46821

Frank: The two web pages on "The Fight For End-To-End" are well worth reading. I particularly liked the following paragraph: Jerry Duvall led the broadband discussion. He presented a rather fascinating economists' view of the situation -- an economists' world being solely concerned with customers, producers and markets. Laws are necessary to enable markets -- contract law, commercial law, fraud law, and so on are needed in order for markets to function. He summoned up the ghost of Adam Smith with a brief review of capitalism: producers always conspire against the public to get more profits from them, only competition keeps them in check. Marketing, lock-in, monopolization, and predatory pricing are always used by producers. He denied that end-to-end represented any sort of a perfect competitive market, however, suggesting that customer wants cause problems -- in some cases, customers actually want bundles from a single provider, and may actually prefer non-end-to-end Internet access. From an economist's point of view, end-to-end is only a means to an end. The end in this case is creating value for the customer. If that involves end-to-end Internet access, fine. If it doesn't, still fine. The value to the customer is paramount, engineering elegance is secondary. This is what is happening in cable right now. They really aren't all that much concerned about data access rates- they feel if they can beat 56K they are ok. They are very concerned about issues that affect their bottom line. This is why QoS and security are focus more on protecting the network and its revenues than on subscriber quality or privacy. Also, they provide a contentless IP pipe only for data. For voice, and presumably video conferencing and VOD, they will offer a content service, not just an access portal. My guess is this is because the customers value this: a typical homeowner wants a simple phone to manage- they don't want to manage a SIP-based central0office-equivalent computer. End to end was an outcome of a contentless internet. As you try to use the internet for phone and video, you get a lot of problems. Since you are mixing quite different traffic on the same network, you need to start to put in protocol patches at every level, until you end with a mess. You no longer have IP, but an entire stack that must be compliant end to end. What a mess.