Next-Gen Broadband Primer 274
Aaron writes "Broadband Reports has a good read on the real deal behind next generation broadband deployments. In four years: half all Verizon DSL users should have fiber, half of all SBC subscribers should have 10-20Mbps DSL, and one tenth of all BellSouth customers should have 50Mbps DSL. At the same time cable companies should begin deploying DOCSIS 3.0 technology in 2006, eventually bringing 100Mbps speeds to end users."
I'll believe when I see it... (Score:5, Insightful)
DB: The "15 meg" speeds Cox is offering where they compete with Verizon fiber are mostly advertising. It's really 38 meg shared among 100 or so users, the same speed as the current services advertised at as 3 and 7 meg. That's too much oversubscription to deliver 15 meg most of the time, if even 5 or 10 people are downloading on the node. To regularly get past today's 5 meg or so, you need to bond more channels, which is what DOCSIS 3.0 offers.
DOCSIS 3.0 is real, mostly agreed, and the key vendors have the details and are making equipment for 2006. It's a shared 160/120 or higher, easily expandable to a shared gigabit. Real speeds to users will often be 20-50 megabits. It was developed to compete with higher speed DSL in Asia. Early in 2005, the U.S. cable companies realized Verizon was serious about
fiber, and pushed CableLabs and suppliers (Cisco, Motorola, Arris, Broadcom) to get DOCSIS 3.0 ready for the U.S. ASAP, and 2006 is realistic
with some pricey gear.
I will believe it when I see it. Depending on your home area, overselling of bandwidth can be a real problem. I have seen both DSL and Cable
providers routinely claiming speeds "up to". 5mpbs but real speeds are usually in the 3mbps range. Of course, the cable/DSL providers claim that "few sites allow you to take full advantage of your maximum bandwidth", which is a pile of horseshit, plain and simple. 92% of their userbase will believe that while the 8% that don't the broadband companies don't
want on their networks anyway.
While highspeed connections are great, I want to know where this backend bandwidth is coming from and who's paying for it? T3+ downstream speeds for only a tiny fraction of the real cost? I will be that 30+ megabits is nothing more than a pipe dream/marketing ploy. The real speeds we will be seeing are in the 10 to 15 range for "premium" members and will likely come with heavy "unadvertised". monthly caps. They want you to see webpages come up lightning fast (which happens at 1mbit) but they don't want you to actually see 10GB of torrents come in a day. They will still be catering to the 92% of their userbase that is the "mom and pop e-mail
and CNN checkers". The people who would really be excited about paying higher fees and getting the advantages of the massive bandwidth will end up with ToS violation warnings and slower than expected speeds.
As for us TimeWarner/RoadRunner users (Score:3, Insightful)
Goodie (Score:4, Insightful)
Judging by the tiny speed increases for broadband over the last few years, I'll believe this when it comes to fruition, which probably won't be for another 10 years or more.
Someone should tell Google (Score:2, Insightful)
For the money they are spending, the power companies could run fiber, scale their speeds up in the future to compete with these higher-speed providers, and not pollute the entire HF spectrum. Instead, they are going to trash a very real natural resource and end up with a hopelessly-uncompetitive system even if it does work.
I think I'll be ok (Score:5, Insightful)
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the pertinent question (Score:1, Insightful)
The question is: At what cost? I would not want my provider to shovel DSL [and associated costs] down my throat when I do not need all that speed. I only do email, slashdot and online banking on the internet. My current service which is cable restricted to twice the speed of dial-up is more that adequate.
100Mbps (Score:5, Insightful)
I am not talking about Slashdotters who will put spinners on their Cable Modems and will overclock the cpu to the limit, but about ordinary people who still only use their computer to look at web pages and write email. Will 100Mbps provide 50x better experience than 2Mbps? I would rather them lower the cost by at least by 50% that would be much better.
Older computers that run Windows 98 that a lot of people still use, probably can't even handle a consistent 100Mbps stream.
Re:100Mbps (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a chicken and egg thing going on- With more out there, people want higher speeds, but with higher speeds, more will be created out there---
Real world example- I used to work for a newspaper website, a big one, and in late 90's early 00s our big problem was that with slow load times and dialing in (5-10% of people had broadband) it didnt make sense for people to read the paper online from home as it took too long. With broadband, it does. Once everyone has the capacity, it will make sense to oofer more video on demand etc. The real money is in the 99% of users that don't know much tech, just from a #s standpoint.
Railroads Arguement (Score:3, Insightful)
Because everyone needs faster trains right? Well as history has shown, yes to a point in time when a disruptive technology comes along to do the job cheaper/better in one way or another.
Off-Topic:
I'd be interested to find some non-marketing stats on how many homes have computers in America and the breakdown of dialup/broadband.
Re:100Mbps (Score:3, Insightful)
What are ordinary people going to do with 100Mpbs next year that they have such a difficulty doing now?
Simple -- download and play HDTV shows and movies on demand and buy music and other pay-per-use bandwidth-intensive high-quality content. This is *really* what the broadband providers have always been counting on as a business model and is where the real money is.
Besides, I could have asked the same question 10 years ago when you had a 14.4 modem and were waiting to a full minute to download a graphics-heavy web page.Re:I'll believe it when I see it! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Someone should tell Google (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think BPL would work in places with other options, but for rural America, it is the best option at this point. Google knows what they're doing.
DDoS Possibilities (Score:5, Insightful)
That is, of course, unless the bigger pipes grow at a rate proportional to the smaller ones. That also assumes symmetrical links for the home connections. Oh the irony of a 100 mbit / 128 kbit connection.
Re:100Mbps (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, ubiquitous speeds on the order of 100 Mbps will change everything.
Right now, with a one-megabit DSL connection, it's possible for me to use a Terminal Services client at home to run basic apps like Outlook and Perforce on my machine at the office. It's slow, clunky, and not especially pleasant, but it works, and it beats the hell out of juggling multiple email clients (and
At 10 megabits/second, this process will still be slow, but not all that clunky, and a lot less unpleasant. More apps will live on my machine at work, without having to be duplicated at home.
At 100 megabits/second and up, the distinction between remote computing and local computing will disappear entirely for most users. Software and services subscription models for commercial applications will actually make sense for PC users for the first time. The client operating system -- be it Windows, Linux, MacOS, what-have-you -- will shrink to almost zero-importance.
And Microsoft will either be bankrupt or they'll own the inner planets, depending on whether the entire company goes down with the sinking Windows/Office ship.
Since the entire Internet will be one huge client-server network at that point, worms, viruses, and malware won't be a concern for most users. Monopolization will be. Whose machine is going to run and maintain 99% of your applications? If you think you're married to your software vendor now, you haven't even met her daddy yet.
So true, sadly. It's a conflict of interest. (Score:3, Insightful)
It would be nice if more companies realized that the internet is not one-way communications, and that its real strength lies in allowing everyone to both create and share content. Of course, considering that Time Warner is a media company at its core, they have a bit of conflict of interest with providing lots of upstream bandwidth as long as they continue to fear file-sharing.
Re:Goodie (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:100Mbps (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure a lot of traditional technologist call this stuff bells and whistles and fluff. But in reality computers are here for our own benefit. So if we want to use our spare bandwith and cpu cycles for our enjoyment we should be able to. (On the same note as a technologist I would like the ability to turn it off so I can use the speed as I choose)
Re:This just in... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd love to be able to set up WebDAV or have streaming video from home to wherever I am. I can't do it because most providers (and all the providers in my area) don't have fast enough upstream speeds and don't allow servers
The justification of lack of server support is twofold. First it's that you shouldn't make money off of their service unless you overpay for a "business" connection. (Which is BS. Bandwidth is bandwidth.) The second is that you'll use up everyone else's bandwidth, which is also BS. If they can provide 100Mbps downstream, I'll take 50Mbps BOTH WAYS for the same price. Fair's fair, right?
Re:100Mbps (Score:3, Insightful)
High mandwidth != low latency.
VNC and X are fine locally, but laggy remotely; and the lag is pretty constant from 56k dialup to 100mbit lan...
Upload speeds? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Qwest customers? (Score:1, Insightful)
10: Notice no bran muffin on sidewalk
20: Call Qwest wondering where your order is
30: Quest will claim the order is lost and that it's your fault
40: Quest will claim the new order has been entered
50: GOTO 10
People will expect exponential improvements (Score:2, Insightful)
Here's some dates for "home"-grade telecommunications common in the USA. If anyone has exact approval dates for modem standards, that would be useful.
1960s - 300 bps
Early/mid '80s - 1200
Mid'80s - 2400
Mid/late '80s - 9600
Around 1990 - 14,400 symmetric
Early/mid-1990s - 19.2, 22.8, 33.6
late-'90s - 53Kbps/down 33.6/up
2003 - 3MB/sec over Cable
2005 - 6MB/sec over Cable
From the days of 1200 being popular in the early/mid '80s to the days of 53K being popular in the late 1990s was about 15 years. In that time speeds went up 44x. That's about 5 and a half doublings. Moore's Law would suggest 10 doublings, so growth in the dialup era lagged. Hardware-based modems did get a lot cheaper though. I don't count "softmodems" because it's an apples-to-oranges comparison.
It's a bit too soon to tell what the growth rate will be with broadband, as we've been at it for less than 10 years in most areas. However, my cable maximum speed is only about 4x what it was at initial rollout 5-7 years ago, which indicates a doubling every 2.5-3.5 years. Copper-DSL rates haven't grown all that much - if you lived next to the central office when your telco first started offering DSL and you bought their top-tier package, you are probably still getting similar speeds, on the order of 1-2Mb/sec. However, more customers are provisioned for higher grades of service than 10 years ago, thanks to more fiber-to-the-neighborhood or similar in-the-field infrastructure improvements. Both cable and DSL subscribers are paying a lot less than they were though.
Re:100Mbps (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, in their current incarnations. This a pie-in-the-sky kind of prediction to begin with... we are multiple decades away from widespread, economical 100-megabit access. Almost nothing will look or work like it does now. My point was, the change is going to be a bigger one than just the usual "more games/movies/pr0n" commenters were suggesting.
I never bought into any of that "the network is the computer" bull-hockey myself until the first time I failed to notice I was typing on my machine at the office. At that point it was obvious that we're only a couple of orders of bandwidth-magnitude away from not caring where our apps live.
Re:DDoS Possibilities (Score:5, Insightful)
Bingo. That's exactly the kind of scenario you will see. Broadband providers don't want you providing content to the internet, they want you consuming content. The upstream is only to provide requests for content.
If you want a symmetrical 100mbit connection, try banding together a couple of T3 lines. Good luck paying for it!
Re:I'll believe when I see it... (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, they are going to price it where everyone must have it - at current broadband prices you'd be stupid not to have DSL or cable in America - but also where the law of averages mean they make a profit. Also, any ISP looking to sell these amounts of bandwidth are hoping their customers are the savvy type.
They want people who are looking to enjoy this [google.com] type of service or other legal download-for-pay outlets like iTunes. Now with things like VoIP and the growing amount of legal online media sales, it only makes sense to offer faster services. More video over broadband is coming and is already here, you can even Starz through RealPlayer. Winamp has had "Internet TV" for years now and streaming media quality is rising too. Didn't I just hear something about Google launching video?
The market has been there for years. It's a shame we are just now getting into it.
Mod parent up (Score:3, Insightful)
Remember that often, the company that produces movies/tv content, is the same company that delivers it to your home via cable tv/interet. This company has no interest in allowing you to compete with them in the content production business.