On Tue, Mar 13, 2007 at 03:45:07PM +0000, Chris L. Morrow wrote:
On Tue, 13 Mar 2007, Roland Dobbins wrote:
On Mar 13, 2007, at 8:17 AM, Chris L. Morrow wrote:
what business drivers are there to put more bits on the wire to the end user?
BitTorrent.
which uses all available bandwidth on the user link, and can/does play nicely with other user apps... It's not a reason for $TELCO to want to add more BW to your link though.
I suppose what I was asking is: Is there a better/faster/cheaper alternative to your 2 incumbant solutions $TELCO || $CABLECO ?
If there were then I bet $TELCO || $CABLECO would drop prices and speed up links... since there isn't I think we're all lucky we're not still using a 110baud coupler modem :)
This is part of the "perfect storm" puzzle (basically, "access monopolies are weakened or cease to exist"). See http://www.1-4-5.net/~dmm/talks/apricot2007/perfect_storm for the most recent incarnation of this stuff. Long story short is that this (the whole situation with access networks) is perhaps the most controversial/weakest part of the story.
And on-demand DVR-type things which I believe will grow in popularity. Of course, most of those are overlays which the SPs themselves don't offer; when they wish to do so, it'll become an issue, IMHO.
again, these are user apps that depend on the higher BW available, they don't drive the business to change, really. It seems to me that currently the DVR/on-demand folks are basically walking the ledge hoping that as they bring new features the telco's/cableco's will play nice and add bandwidth to make these services 'work'... That might not last, there certainly is no real reason that $TELCO || $CABLECO would be driven to change, aside from 'goodness of their hearts' or 'hey maybe we want to increase BW so we can offer a spiffy DVR-ish thing to our customers and get more revenue on our flagging last-mile circuits?'
Its hard to say. There's a relatively new (well, last Feb) paper by David Levinson and Andrew Odlyzko entitled "Too expensive to meter: The influence of transaction costs in transportation and communication" [0] that tries to use economic theory and some historical perspective (in particular, on the funding and congestion models for roads) shed some light on this. Its worth reading as it gives some insight as to where all of this may be going, but as usual, its a cloudy crystal ball. --dmm [0] http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metering-expensive.pdf