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

To: ftth who wrote (7213)	5/25/2004 8:41:25 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 46821

ftth (the person), thanks for that thorough and inspiring reply. Granted, FTTH (the access method) only offers speeds marginally better than DSL and cable modem, but this is so because it's been throttled to a maximum level not to exceed a given signalling rate, and not because of inherent limitations of fiber. I know that you know that; I wanted to clarify for lurkers and to set the stage. And as you go on to say, despite the greater speeds that could be made available, the limitations are then a function of the terminal equipment (PCs', appliances') data acquisition times and processing capabilities. What's the old adage? Anything over a handful is wasted? "Is broadband an unfettered capability with broad economic growth as its central goal, or is broadband just a distribution channel for entertainment-centric businesses? The current thinking on the part of those carrying the big sticks is that it's the latter. They will claim it's the former too, but it is not possible to get both under the current incentive structure of the industry. It's just not possible." While I agree with your first conclusion (the latter being more influential), I'm not quite sure that it is not possible to have it both ways due to "today's" incentive structures, alone. Someone has merely to find the right combination of application elements and codify them in order to make it happen, which will be viewed as something akin to how revolutionary Archie, Veronica, Gopher, and the rest of the mob of indexers were, followed by Andreesen's browser, some dozen or so years ago. In a flash we went from decades of text to a new era of graphics, consuming orders of magnitude more bandwidth in order to convey essentially the same messages, as witnessed by the hockey stick effect in b/w utilization during the 1995-96 time frame, only now it was prettier. I find what Google's been doing to be very interesting, attaching appliques and new frills around its core product, for example, adding value in the process. How do they tie these together at a price that one cannot refuse, while making their bundled offering indispensable to users once' they've tried them? In contrast, as someone stated here over the past couple days, with public network transoceanic telephone calling down to 1 cent per minute to some locations overseas, where is the incentive to use a VoIP client on a PC? Of course, voice happens to be down to 1 cent per minute (where that rate does actually apply) because of VoIP, in the first place. That is, VoIP has become the protocol of choice by international carriers. They use it primarily on their WAN segments, steeply reducing their capex and opex costs associated with hardware and channel rentals, respectively, which allows them to complete calls over the public (global) switched telephone network (P/GSTN) for dirt cheap, as opposed to the user speaking into a microphone attached to a PC, or as opposed to using classical $witched-circuit approache$. FAC frank@fttx.org