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Non-Tech : Binary Hodgepodge -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Didi who wrote (95)	6/6/2001 7:56:30 PM
From: ~digs	Respond to of 6763

Broadband Walks the Last Mile [Taken from the NOTES thread Subject 37468 ] If you want fast access from home, your only hopes are cable-modem and DSL services. Or are they? Some happy day the fiber-optic pipelines that circle your metropolis will branch all the way into your home. Until then, most of us seeking broadband connections will depend on the slower wires already found at home: copper phone wire carrying digital subscriber line (DSL) links or coaxial television cable for cable-modem services. But these twin pillars of "last-mile" broadband are being joined by wireless options, including two-way satellite services and cellular-like fixed wireless technologies. In the coming years we'll also see digital TV datacasting, wireless optical networks, and maybe even dirigibles spreading digital manna down. Ditching Dialup—Slowly By year-end, there will be 10 million cable modem subscribers worldwide versus 11.5 million DSL subscribers, according to Cahners In-Stat. While that's about double the number from the year before, it's only a fraction of the 400 million-plus Internet users worldwide. By 2005, the study predicts, only half of all U.S. Internet subscribers will enjoy broadband connections. So why the delay? For cable modem and DSL installations, it's the battle in the streets: roads need to be dug up, permits pulled and off-duty police hired. Do-it-yourself modem installation kits are streamlining the slow pace of hooking up new users, but technicians still need to be dispatched to activate connections outside the house, and providers must still invest millions in technical support. Wireless alternatives avoid the cost of digging up streets but require technicians to mount and carefully orient dish antennas. There's one bright spot in this struggle: it brings fiber-optic lines deeper into the neighborhoods. As a rule of thumb, the closer a home is to the fiber node where optical signals are converted to electrical, and the more fiber nodes that are deployed to serve each area, the higher the bandwidth you enjoy. As a result of this steady expansion of fiber, the 256-kilobit-per-second to one-megabit-per-second connections typical of today's consumer broadband should range from one to three megabits per second over the latter half of the decade. That's enough to permit applications such as video conferencing and video on demand, which perform poorly over current broadband networks. What's Fast Enough? Last-mile performance already outpaces the speed of an individual connection over the Internet at large. A typical broadband modem runs at about 600 kilobits per second, but that's the speed with which it connects to the service provider, not a typical site on the Internet. No matter how fast your modem, a variety of bottlenecks limits Internet access speed to an average of about 300 to 500 kilobits per second. That average should rise over the coming years, but due to soaring demand, it won't rise as quickly as the increase in last-mile performance. So you'll probably see only incremental speed improvements over the next few years. Moving up from 56-kilobit-per-second dialup connections to 500 kilobits per second is far more noticeable than upgrading from 500 kilobits per second to one megabit per second. As broadband providers focus on signing up new subscribers, they're not very interested in pushing your bandwidth higher. It All Depends on Your Connections Increasingly, the quality of a broadband service provider's connection to the Internet is becoming as important as the speed of the broadband modem. Many broadband providers tap content distribution networks to avoid key Internet bottlenecks, grabbing media straight from content providers. Going one step further, some broadband providers store streaming media on local servers, thus making it available to you, the customer, at tiptop speed. If the difference between local- and long-distance access continues to widen, broadband users may well spend more and more time sampling the higher-quality, but much more limited, content offered locally by the provider rather than suffer the lower speeds of the open Internet. The prospect of last-mile "super broadband" services that combine the visual quality of television with the interactivity of the Web is attractive to broadband providers, big media companies, advertisers and many consumers. Others see these "walled gardens" as a threat to open competition and diversity (see "Web Behind Walls"). Decades from now we'll look back at today's so-called "broadband" services and wonder how we could have tolerated such primitive experiences. In the meantime, here's what we can expect from cable, digital subscriber line, satellites and fixed-wireless and from further-out alternatives such as flying platforms. Eric S. Brown is a veteran technology reporter based in the Boston area. More: techreview.com