On February 27, 2015 at 14:50 khelms@zcorum.com (Scott Helms) wrote:
I am absolutely not against good upstream rates! I do have a problem with people saying that we must/should have symmetrical connectivity simply because we don't see the market demand for that as of yet.
It's push/pull. Lousy upstream bandwidth leads to remote siting of web hosting for example. From that we should conclude people don't want to host their websites at home? Similar statements have been made about remote backup. These glib declarations of what the market wants are just that, glib and not really based on much anything. Besides, it's a (rapidly) moving target. People once argued that 56kbps symmetric (dial-up) was plenty for the average user. Then when ISDN promised 128kbps many thought it was amazing and should be put into every home and we'd finally have the internet we dreamed of, a lot of it was deployed in Europe and Japan. As I remember EFF (and others) fought long and hard for broader deployment of 2B+D ISDN in the US. As some of us who looked into the technology kept pointing out it was an inherent loser, too expensive to deploy very widely and never intended or designed for raw bandwidth distribution. Its economics depended on the telcos "owning" per msg email fees (it was designed in another era) etc so it was more a give away the cameras and sell the film sort of technology, they had to "own", i.e., be able to bill, the whole stack (email, etc.) as then perceived. There is a strong tendency to rationalize the current state of the technology. -- -Barry Shein The World | bzs@TheWorld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD | Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool & Die | Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*