Stewart Alsop On Broadband
Stewart Alsop's current column in Fortune details his back and forth with broadband access to the home. Although he started as a fan of DSL, he's moving over to the cable camp.
I have to say I'm not convinced and in fact, think cable creates a bad dynamic for the future development of the Internet. I'm just not a fan of asymmetric broadband access. Cable tends to have significantly more downstream (to the home) bandwidth than upstream and performance for most day-to-day applications (i.e., web surfing) certainly is better on cable. But this asymmetry creates a dynamic that discourages the development of applications that serve content back to the web -- in fact, most cable ISPs prevent their customers from operating web servers on their home networks.
By limiting the back channel, broadband over cable has the potential to push the Internet more and more towards becoming a one way medium. Such a thing happened 80 years ago with radio. While it's unlikely that history will repeat itself, we need to push for symmetric broadband networks. Only that way can we keep building the Internet into a medium in which every consumer can also be a producer.
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Many-to-many communication. Citizen control of a remote political process.A new culture and a new economy. Sound familiar? Such was the hype for a technological revolution 75 years ago - radio. (Via Ventureblog) This goes along with the other articles ... Read More
Stewart Alsop's current column in Fortune details his back and forth with broadband access to the home. Although he started as a fan of DSL, he's moving over to the cable camp. I have to say I'm not convinced and in fact, think cable creates a bad dyna... Read More
I've finally caught up with my (short) stack of Fortune magazines. Here are some articles that I think are worth a read, as well as some non-Fortune material. (Note to self - stop subscribing to magazines that give away their... Read More
My local cable company in Munich, Germany offers a server package with decent upstream bandwidth and a fixed IP address. (1024 kBit/s Upstream, 550 kBit/s Downstream, €99.95 a month)
http://cablesurf.de/produkte_tarife.cfm (website in German)
Not in my suburb, though, unfortunately - apparently it needs an upgrade to their routing gear or something
In Japan, looks like DSL (or called ADSL here) will be the dominant broad band delivery means. I'm in Japan now, and I can tell you that there are Yahoo sales people on practically every downtown street corner here giving away ADSL modems and all the cables you need. It even comes with a plug for your regular old housephone to make it a broad-band phone. How cool is that? Makes you realize that NTT was very clever to lay so much fiber perhaps, predicting that their phone business was doomed with advent of broadband. hmm.
The sales people are pretty persistant, almost annoying, and moreso when I watch them push the ADSL gift bag on little old ladies walking by. It comes in a pretty red gift bag and promises free access for first 2 months.. (and that's at 12mbps or something wild like that (i think my piddly dsl back in the US is a small fraction of the speed.) TV and movies on your PC in Japan? I think very soon. The latest laptops here have gorgous screens.
there are also ads on TV and other places making all this broad band stuff look very cool to have. they sure know how to market technology here. lucky for Japanes tech companies, movie star and tv stars are actually believable on TV ads here.
even their yahoo home page button bar up top has the BB link first now.
http://www.yahoo.co.jp
Strange, that's the opposite of my experience. I've had both cable and (A)DSL and cable has always been far more symetric. My current DSL provider (Pac Bell) caps upstream data at about 132k. With Time Warner Cable I saw about 500k both ways. Both providers have rules against home servers.
There's a basic problem with any form of DSL: the final mile. If you're not close enough to a CO, or if you have 30 year old cable in your house, you are out of luck. Cable might be the only high-bandwidth solution if you're stuck like that.
I get typically 2.5Mbps downstream, I don't worry too much about the outbound, it isn't important for what I'm currently doing.
And then there's the issue of who becomes your ISP. Our local RBOC was bought out by Qwest and service took a serious drop. They started offering DSL, but, as I said, it didn't work at my house. A couple of years ago Qwest sold their DSL operation to Microsoft/MSN. Service took yet another drop. I have heard that Qwest is going to be buying it back, but considering their current troubles, I'm not holding my breath.