From: Brian Atkins (brian@posthuman.com)
Date: Fri Sep 27 2002 - 21:55:07 MDT
Reason wrote:>
> -->Brian Atkins
>
>
>>I believe one of the main problems is that the last mile of the Internet
>>was left to rot. Ok, not to rot, but certainly its capabilities were
>>unable for one reason or another to keep up with anywhere near the rate
>>of doubling of bandwidth capabilities of the Internet core. I believe
>>the demand is there if the last mile would be "opened up" properly.
>
>
> <hat:wirelessCTO>
> Capabilities unable to keep up? Hah. The major telcos simply refused to
Ja, hence my "for one reason or another"
> cooperate meaningfully with anyone who wanted to agressively wire the last
> mile. An ungodly amount of money was poured into connectivity businesses
> over the boom years. Every city in the US should look like Singapore,
> broadband in every home, if you compare money invested vrs population.
>
> A number of reasons for the network operator/telco behavior: 1) they could
> starve the broadband upstart companies so as to leverage their existing
> market share in this new market later on, 2) they saw VoIP + always-on
> connections killing the current lucrative long distance revenue model very
> quickly, 3) building out had uncertain/poor ROI, as compared to not building
> out, 4) wiring broadband is (fairly plausibly) supposed to eat into
> prospective-but-never-materialized wireless data market.
I can understand these reasons for a telco, but what about my local
cable company? Companies like naradnetworks.com are offering gigabit
speeds over coax, yet all my local cable company seems interested in is
how to get me to ditch my satellite tv for their lame STB that will
prevent me from skipping commercials. Why aren't they more interested in
putting the smackdown on the telcos? They could easily implement a true
broadband system that would completely blow away DSL.
I'm sure it will come later in the decade, it's just frustrating to have
to wait for them to build it when if there was a dumb pipe in the ground
that people on both ends could hook what they want into I could run
something like this right now. Instead we get to wait years for the
marketing schucks to figure what "services" we really want. And it'll
end up being suboptimal, guaranteed.
>
> Of course, all of that benefits people like me who are in the
> better-ROI-with-small-innovations-in-current-technology business. Still, I'd
> prefer to be in a world in which we'd just gone direct to broadband. Mind
> you, if you have the inclination you can set up high bandwidth
> 100-square-mile mesh networks right now using existing basestations, devices
> and software. I'm waiting for one of the major cities to be covered by WiFi
> by a single enterprising group using a few large basestations...then it'll
> get interesting. Sometime within the next 12 months, I'm guessing. 24 if
> regulators step in.
> </hat:wirelessCTO>
>
WiFi isn't fast enough. We really need speeds above 20mbit or so both
ways at a minimum to get anywhere near interesting.
-- Brian Atkins Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence http://www.singinst.org/
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