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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (54545)	4/5/1999 9:17:00 AM
From: gnuman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

MB, re: Cable Internet Access Something bothers me about the expectations for cable service. In most coax wired communities cable resembles a LAN environment. As such there are questions regarding performance vs the number of subscribers/users on line. One would expect some serious contention issues and degrading performance as more and more users come on line. While initial reaction to cable service has been very positive, this should be expected with few users. On the other hand, service over the phone is quite independent of the number of users on line. Unlike cable, the local phone switch resembles a "Star". While the performance is limited to about 50kHz, (much higher if you can use DSL), this is pretty much available regardless of the number of connections. One way to look at it, the cumulative band-width of the wire into the local phone switch is significantly higher than the available band-width of cable. For example, my local cable provider has 230,000 subscribers and the capacity for 120 channels, of which about 100 are currently dedicated. Assuming that 20 channels of band-width are available for internet services, I get about 120mHz for this function. The net available bandwidth per user is inversely proportion to the number of users actively on line. So those active periods when a few thousand people are on the net could degrade the service below what's available by phone. I think this makes the case for DSL as the more likely future of broadband access. To make the situation worse, most cable company's are talking about adding new services like movie download. Can you imagine the result if a thousand subscribers are trying to download movies while you're trying to use the net? Will cable company's steal bandwidth from the net to provide these new services? Until fibre optics and some sort of multiple "Star" configurations are implemented by the cable providers, I see problems going forward. I also can see why company's like Intel and Microsoft are heavy investors in DSL technology. The first real test will happen in California. It will be interesting to see the impact of hordes of users converting to services like Road Runner. My cable company provides the following caveat in their literature. "The speed at which RoadRunner will deliver Web sites and other Internet content to your computer will vary, depending on the Web sites you access, the amount of congestion on the internet, the speed of your computer, and the number of people in your neighborhood who are also downloading information at that instant. However, compared to alternative, RoadRunner will win hands down." While I have no doubt it will win "hands down" in the early stages, is this really the solution for the next century? This is just my uneducated view, and if there are readers who can punch holes in this, please do.