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Technology Stocks : AUTOHOME, Inc -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ahhaha who wrote (9328)	5/9/1999 4:18:00 PM
From: E. Davies	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29970

Ok I'll wade in and show my ignorance in hope of teaching others. This ignorance is despite a great deal of effort to the contrary. >>That in itself would seem headache enough to preclude most ISP's from even undertaking the task. You mean MSOs. No, I meant ISP's. I understand Franks comments to mean that each ISP wanting to use the cable network would need to build/lease a data feed to each individual headend in the field. I picture a headend serving several hundred homes so there would be a great number of headends. Right or Wrong? >>That is essentially duplicating the fiber half of the HFC network isnt it? And wrong concept here. What do you mean by "fiber half"? I understand that "hybrid fiber-coax" means that the network is coax in the local loop from the home to the headend and fiber connecting the headends and the MSO "intranet" together. Right or Wrong? >>In other words that the MSO runs the local connection and the ISP handles the services like e-mail and content. The MSO is the physical existence. The ISP is the virtual existence which uses the physical body to live. An ISP has physical equipment does it not? Does not @home own (or at least lease) the servers that provide local caching for instance? The routers that connect the MSO network to the "Internet" and to @homes "intranet"? The servers that provide the "services" (e-mail, web pages, content etc..) Right or Wrong? I think you're looking at @Home as though they were a physical entity. They're virtual. They're an ISP. The MSO doesn't take its data anywhere. It just sends it around its own local net or up to or down from the big cloudy Internet My dial-up ISP is a physical location where they have modem banks, servers and routers to connect them to the internet backbone. They allow me to join one form of physical link (modem over copper) to the broader internet cloud. Your implication here is that the MSO owns and manages the network that connects together all its head ends and directly ties that network to various internet access points. I didnt think they had that level of sophistication. Right or wrong? In many ways my question boils down to: "What is an ISP anyway?" If its just a mail server hung on the internet anyone can do that! Who is currently responsible for control over the customers modems, the MSO or @home? Neither. The customer. You should be in control of your computer else it may bite you. Does CBS or TCI control your tv? Cable modems have features that effect the network that are controlled through the network, otherwise you would have a completely unmanagable situation. Who controls those features? >>Finally because I'm out of time-- do you know what % of "upgraded" wires will have the bandwith 750Mhz-1Ghz available? It isn't so much the nature of the composition of the wire assuming fiber <clip> What is out there, coax, can carry one-way. For interaction you need two way and that requires HFC, a hybrid of fiber Fiber has way more than 1Ghz bandwidth. I was referring to the coax wires that run past the homes in an HFC environment. Coax is bidirectional in current use as the upstream data runs on that coax. I understood Franks statement to mean that the 750K-1Ghz bandwidth (available on certain quality of coax wires) is also intended for bidirectional use. It occured to me that that frequency could do a lot to solve the problems of the overloaded upstream if it was available for internet data. Eric