From: Reason (reason@exratio.com)
Date: Fri Sep 27 2002 - 23:15:36 MDT
--> Brian Atkins
> Reason wrote:>
> > -->Brian Atkins
> > <hat:wirelessCTO>
> > Capabilities unable to keep up? Hah. The major telcos simply refused to
> > 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.
Cable/DSL are just different ways of getting from the backbone to the end
user. To hook up to the backbone, you have to deal with the large data
carriers. The cable companies are in the media network space, while the
backbone companies are in the telco space. If cable looked to be eating the
telco business in a meaningful way (such as VoIP, for example), you can be
sure that cable companies would start finding it hard to strike deals with
the major data carriers.
On the other side of the plate, cable networks are under pressure from media
networks and content owners not to allow usage that will destabalize the
current business model of delivering stuff that's easily copied while
treating it like stuff that isn't easily copied. Most cable companies are
the embodiment of content owners desiring another, better pipe to deliver
paid content to subscribers. Accessing the internet is a side-effect; they
wouldn't go to the effort of providing that functionality it if they thought
that a walled garden service could compete. Attention economy and all that.
> 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.
Yup. Trust me, it isn't any prettier from the inside. It's the end result of
government-protected monopolies with no incentive to innovate or introduce
better services simply because people want them. Without competitors, the
telcos sit around like slugs. One of the reasons that the wireless telco
technology has been advancing in comparatively huge leaps and bounds is that
wireless carriers can compete with each other in the same geographical area,
unlike the fixed line telcos. If you look at a country like the Philippines,
in which wireless outnumbers landlines and is growing at 300,000 subscribers
per month, the two dominant, warring wireless network operators roll out a
new application every month. They have upgraded networks in major overhauls
twice in the last year, and introduced three major new innovative network
infrastructure components in the same timeframe. One of them rolled out GPRS
before Cingular, Sprint and AT&T did. Compared to that, US carriers are
sitting still.
> > 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.
Um, 802.11g will go up to 54Mb/s and is backwards compatible with 802.11b.
You can expect to see the first equipment fairly soon. I don't keep tabs on
those manufacturers, so I couldn't tell you when. The standard was passed in
January, so figure Q2 next year maybe.
What is it that you can't do at 20Mb/s that you're so hot for?
Reason
CTO, VIPMobile
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