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Non-Tech : Amati investors -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ratan lal who wrote (28492)	11/8/1997 5:38:00 PM
From: Stephen D. French	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 31386

This is an interesting interview from Vint Cerf - one of the pioneers of the internet: netinsider.com (here's part of this interview) Vint Cerf SVP, Internet Architecture, MCI SCHINDLER: Plenty of bits on the backbone, but a small pipe to the household. Which solution do you favor for that last mile? CERF: It depends on where you are in the country. The cable modems which have been demonstrated work quite well, but they work best when the cable system has a hybrid fiber/coax network to support it. Not all cable companies are prepared to make an investment in hybrid fiber/coax, and as a result, they may not be able to support that solution. The telcos, working with our old friend twisted-pair copper have demonstrated up to 52 megabits on relatively short hops, down to, let's say, a megabit or 1.5 megabits as far as 18,000 feet, which covers 95 percent of all homes on twisted pair. I have left out things like point-to-point radio links, which also might be a solution to the problem. There is even something quite exotic. Power companies may decide they want to have the ability to control appliances on an appliance-by-appliance basis, because they will save money, not having to build excess power generation, if they can control the appliances that are the most energy consuming during periods of peak load. If you could save several billion dollars by not having to build a power-generation plant, you might spend some of that money on optical fiber to go to someone's house, then turn around and resell the capacity, which you didn't need to control an appliance -- and you only need a few bits per second for that. We could have some surprising solutions become available that might not have been anticipated.