CB, thanks for the personal acknowledgements, and for letting me know that I'm not the only one who occasionally suffers from shock effect and syndromes nervosa. Little consolation to you, I know, but you have a lot of good company.
You said a few things that need clarification. Rebuttal first, and that is that your views are indeed important, for if it is not for the consumer and the business user that these proposed advances are intended, then I must ask: For whom?
Your views, and the views of all screen slaves who twiddle for minutes or hours on end while awaiting lengthy downloads, in other words, are of paramount importance. Now to get the word out to the regulators, and more importantly, those who hold the keys to the first- and last- mile kingdoms.
>>It really makes me envious when I access internet using a T-1 line, but I am not willing to pay for one. Also, I understand that if we all had a T-1 line, we would be back where we started. <<
Before I reply to this in a more general way, at work I access the net over T1 links, soon to be upgraded to a fractional T3, and sometimes the response is great, sometimes it really sucks due to congestion on the LAN and in certain other bottleneck areas in the environment. In short, then, a T1 is not always a solitary solution, but it sure helps.
As much as I hate to admit it, that last statement you made concerning "we would be back where we started," would probably hold true in many instances for some period of time, if all of the loops suddenly allowed T1-like speeds or higher, since sizing of the overall network is not achieved simply by opening up the last mile. Witness what I stated about the T1 in my place or business. Stress also exists in the innards of the 'net, aka its core, but that stress is currently limited by its inability to sieve through to the outside where end users are.
Once the floodgates are opened to end users by making higher speed lines more accessible and affordable, an implosion of sorts may result, whereby routers and switches in the core of the 'net may be called upon to deliver at ten or a hundred or a thousand times the speed at which they were previously accustomed. They would in this case clearly be overwhelmed, and the bottleneck would simply shift to the network's edge and core, instead of the last mile and residence.
Caching may help to some extent, but not to the extent that its proponents may think, I'm afraid, because there will be much more content in the future that will be dynamically created, perhaps live video or interactive data, say, as opposed to lending itself to repository-like status which would be ready for direct pull-down.
I found your reference to FON's ION particularly amusing, in a perverse way, and I suspect that the other two answer-backs to this service genre by ATT and MCI, namely INC and On Net, respectively, will be met with a similar level of punctuality.
I'd like to add my views on the effects of such end-to-end delivery schemes such as the just mentioned Big Three overlay nets, and what they portend for the Internet as we know it in general, in a later post.
By the way, before you go chipping anymore teeth or hurting yourself in other ways, have you ever had your desktop setup checked or optimized by an engineering type, or better yet, a high school techy geek who is adept at PC hacking?
You may have something minor that is wrong on your modem settings that is causing you more grief than you should otherwise expect. If you haven't yet, then I suggest that you check it out... No guarantees, tho.[smile]
Frank C.
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