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To: Amy J who wrote (166318)	6/14/2002 1:09:47 PM
From: tcmay	Respond to of 186894

"Hi Tim, RE: "it forced a standard which was inflexible" "One more thought on this comment...I doubt the IP standards get impacted by say 10-year old fiber, since fiber is just glass that doesn't know anything about protocols and standards. I loosely say IP runs over anything, wireless, fiber, etc. But it's just the terminal ends controling the conversion of packets. So, 10-year old fiber wouldn't impact innovation of any standards (maybe speed based upon glass composition (?) But regarding standards, if anything impacts innovation of IP protocols and standards, it would be only the terminal ends, right? Doesn't it boil down to, how easily can terminal ends be replaced at a low cost? (I'm definitely getting out of my area of expertise here.) Wireless sounds easier, but too bad it's congested and low bandwidth. " Well, in your first reply you shortened my quote to the quote you give above: "RE: "it forced a standard which was inflexible"" Recall that my actual quote was about the French Minitel system: "And it set France back many years. It squelched competing systems, it forced a standard which was inflexible, and it presumed a model for how French users would interact with it which was just plain brain-dead. (It presumed a model where Minitel would be used for "ordering groceries" and "making airline reservations." Minitel was crummy for doing what Americans were doing with their dial-up modems and PCs and was worse than crummy for using the Web.)" This is about the dangers of top-down, government-directed programs. Now, you are asking how this sort of thing could happen with fiber? First, I don't know. Which is the most important point. But what I _do_ know is that I am skeptical of calls for government to supply food, or energy, or bandwidth. I see no particular reason why government should supply bandwidth to Oracle or Intel, or to college dorms, or to thee and me. (And, as noted, it will be exorbitantly expensive to lay fiber out to people living on the farms and ranches across America...do we tax them and then not give them fiber?) Second, what might come along to make fiber less attractive? For starters, there's Jack Valenti and the recent "content control" over digital media. This will make the napstering of videos and movies dramatically more difficult...not many people are buying PPV movies on satellite, in proportion to their normal viewing, so a lot of the fiber capacity may be "dark" to most households. Third, the increase in mobile uses may be more important to most people than raw fiber capacity. Remember, I'm not knocking fiber. I'm saying that a National Program to Lay Fiber will primarily benefit a certain number of companies, perhaps even yours. This is not reason enough in a laissez-faire economy, as ours is supposed to be, to forcibly collect taxes to dole out to fiber companies. --Tim May