Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (11763)	10/15/2005 5:45:06 PM
From: fred g	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 46821

I think the lack of comments on Inscrutable Multivendor Specifications is because nobody can make sense of them, except perhaps for contestants in the Obfuscated Coding contest.... ... though I don't discount coax at all. Coax is neat because it hybridizes the flexibility of radio spectrum with the space division inherent in fiber and other transmission media. You basically have 750 MHz or so to play with on every block. Most is the same broadcast, but there's plenty to work with. Alas, the upstream is too constrained by US standards, and it's probably too late to fix that (HFC plant is already built to support downstream Channel 2 at 54 MHz). Terayon's S-CDMA sort of helped, though to hear Motorola's side of the story, it was a kludge that didn't work any better, in practice, than QAM and other, less exotic, modulation. So by requiring DOCSIS 2.0 devices to support it, even if in practice they used QAM, S-CDMA raised the cost of higher bandwidth on coax. Ah, standards, gotta love 'em. Glass is nice too, but having seen how FiOS uses glass to provide service inferior to copper, I don't get all cargo cultist about it. Yeah, I recognize how Corning et al in the FTTH Council have a vested interest in it, but there's also a Tobacco Institute, and I don't have to take them seriously either.

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (11763)	10/15/2005 5:50:12 PM
From: fred g	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 46821

BTW I posted this on Light Reading in a somewhat dated and obscure article about IMS testing: The Rube Goldberg concoction called IMS makes little sense, except as a way for hardware vendors to sell lots of complicated, expensive gear that requires lots of maintenance, customization, and other costly services. It violates Occam's Razor in many ways, and certainly has no demand-side (consumer) pull behind it. But I think I finally can make sense of the model, thaks to the msforum artwork. IMS is a reprise of the European ISDN "Teleservices" model from 1984 or so. As a few graybeards may recall through their fading memories, Europeans tried to standardize "teleservices", which were layer 7 applications that ran inside an ISDN. Some of the teleservices envisioned were videotex, Telefax 4, X.400 MHS, and "mixed mode" that combined teletex, telefax and voice onto a single "call". The whole idea of teleservices was so blatantly in contradition to the FCC's structural separation (Computer II) rules that the newly-minted RBOCs were forbidden from even talking about them, and the US ISDN world totally ignored them. Europe, though, continued to draw pretty pictures, which were implemented shortly after all of the worlds' computers converted their networks to OSI and their source code to Ada. IMS is almost as useful as the teleservices were, and will sell almost as well. Unfortunately, the current FCC favors the idea, as it has gone back to 1960s' models of computer networking, disclaims any notion of layering, disclaims common carriage, and will allow formerly-common carriers to intercede in subscribers' data flow, if it allows them to increase prices and profits. So the US carriers will spend big on this hoping that the political climate stays favorable to them long enough to force this abomination on the public.