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

To: Dennis O'Bell who wrote (3895)	9/7/2001 12:36:37 AM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Respond to of 46821

Hi Denis, The bitband.com site is very quick tonight, and it seems they've installed a new look to it. Give it a shot. re: will this work from a concrete engineering/network (and business) perspective, That's a difficult question to answer in general terms, and one that is probably best left unanswered unless we discuss a specific implementation, and put some bounds on the range of potential variables. Best effort over the Public 'Net is still a dubious prospect, in my opinion, unless the chosen ISP _AND_ the last mile provider are both overprovisioned. However, if the cloud is relatively clean (uncongested), but the end user is struggling to suck bits through a low-speed straw (dialup or low speed dsl, etc.), well, it's not going to work to anyone's satisfaction, unless it's one of those download and play type of things, in which case you just let it download overnight and hope that you don't lose session while you're asleep;) But the latter scenario would not be acceptable for streaming media with only limited buffering. On the other hand, if streaming video is supported by a robust last mile platform (such as vdsl, or ftth, or a growing number of Ethernet-in-the-First-Mile <EFM> and ATM PON options), and administered by a service provider who has designed their host site/head end in an optimal manner, then it would very likely fly. These are oversimplifications, of course, even in the idealized states, because the loop might be used for multipled purposes, in which case it's a matter of doing the arithmetic to see how much b-w available for the real time (or near-real-time, or streaming) components. Which calls to mind other variables that might have to be taken into account, depending on the provider's religion: QoS and prioritization. Yes, I think that this is the sort of thing that will lead to general purpose bandwidth (especially if it eventually proves feasible over the public Internet), just as I believe that other forms of multimedia and voice will be similarly influential to the same end, as time goes by. That is, if I'm understanding what you mean by general purpose bandwidth. Would you care to define this? "Couldn't a lot of this VoD stuff be handled with content stored at catv headends?" Absolutely, and this is actually what is taking place, where MSOs are offering VoD. Instead of employing FTTH or VDSL they are using similar schemes on upper spectrum on their HFC systems, which terminate in, and are controlled by, the set top box. FAC