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Back in 1999 I was hired by a company in Houston, TX known as AccelerNet to come in and rebuild their existing ISP solution, as they had no idea what they were doing on the backend. They literally had an ISP in a box setup, and needed some real infrastructure designed by someone who had actually worked for a large ISP. The owner had made his money in cellular during the late 80's and early 90's, and he saw the Internet as the next big thing. Since he was in Houston, and there is a considerable amount of urban sprawl with subpar telco/Internet access, he devised a plan to use cablemodems over the air. He got funding and applied for an experimental license from the FCC to use UHF channel 43 in Houston. The system was essentially a cablemodem setup, with each cablemodem plugged into a single channel UHF antennae instead of cable run through the ground. The problem with this type of system was that you could receive packets, but not send. However, each Hybrid Technologies cablemodem had a serial port and ethernet jack, so you could use a wired connection for the return packets. With a 33.6 modem connection, you could reach top speeds of ~850Kbps. This was due to a combination of latency and overall bandwidth for the return packets. With an ISDN connection, download speeds reached between 1-3Mbps, depending on whether you had a 64 or 128Kbps connection. I consulted with the company after I left for a Fortune Ten company in early 2000 due to VC funding issues, but I continued to use my 3Mbps connection for free since I continued to consult with them since I had built their infrastructure. I believe they sold to a large regional ISP in Dallas sometime in 2002 or 2003 who immediately decommissioned the UHF technology for more traditional connectivity.

Here's an article from Broadband Week from April of 2001 that goes into some detail about it. So while all these heavyweights may be getting into it now, they're 12 years behind a little company from Houston, TX called AccelerNet who pioneered the way and spent considerable lobbying dollars to get two-way UHF transmissions going.

Yeah, WHATEVER, SBC...

I'm still waiting for SBC's Project Pronto.

Where'd that go? Well, it went nowhere fast

Sometimes I wonder if SBC says these things just to scare away their competition.

The general buzz is that SCO's grasping at straws because they expected IBM to buy them out. Hence, SCO turns around and starts making trouble in the hopes to force IBM to buy them out.

News.com LWN's article, which references a News.com article, seems to point to this as well. They go a step further poking that IBM will buy out SCO, then toss them in the dumpster.

We all know the fact is that SCO's business has all but vanished. Their business model now is chasing after patent royalties. From my recent experience with patent hungry Gemstar and their failed buyout of DIVA which resulted in Gemstar being fined $40mil, the patent-chasing business model is doomed to failure and only results in animosity towards the patent chaser.

SCO is just making noise to (1) get in the headlines, and (2) drive up their value before getting bought out.

Being provided by the cable company is not the biggest problem. It's their salvation. If it comes with your digital cable box, it's already there. You don't pay the fee for the channel guide, the cable company does. (yes, I know we will pay for it, but it will be less and included in our cable bill.) The only downside to this I see is that you can be sure there will be no commercial skip. They know who their customer is and it is not us; it's the channels, and their customer is the advertisers.

Related articles:

http://www.adage.com/news.cms?newsId=36471

http://www.broadbandweek.com/news/010122/ 010122_through_pvr.htm

this clip is from Business 2.0:
<clip> Ultimately, however, 3G and Wi-Fi should be able to coexist. "The technology is actually very complimentary, because they are not truly competitive technologies," King says. "I expect that mobile carriers will purchase some Wi-Fi providers, and we'll start to see some integration." </clip>

I had exactly the same idea for how to do this (with distributed signature databases) in '93 when I started a well known ISP.

http://www.broadbandweek.com/news/020318/020319_bi z_pangrac.htm

-Waldo Jaquith

Comcast cable in Arlington/Alexandria VA (right across the river from Washington D.C. for the geographically challenged) already has VOD. Errr, to be more correct, is getting it as we speak. Random digital cable customers are getting 'invitation cards' in the mail, offering them the chance to test the service. It looks very neat, and I just ordered digital cable specifically so I can hopefully test it (I needed to get my cable modem turned back on anyway). Reminds me of those commercials by the electronics company (I forget who) that use the old Beatles lyrics: You got to admit it's getting better, getting better all the time

QUESTION: Hi. You talked about broadband and that it was at about 10 percent of households, and that brings to mind streaming media, and I would appreciate it if one of you could address the various aspects of streaming media with regard to where Microsoft is right now compared to its competitor, and where it's expected to be with respect to its competitor in, say, nine months, and then how streaming media plays out in terms of the lawsuit, what kinds of ramifications might be expected.

MR. GATES: ...The second area, the video area, is the tougher of the two, because that really does require this high speed connection. And most people at work have high speed connections. So you can take a little news clip or video conference, and use that quite easily. In the U.S., as I mentioned, only 10 percent of homes have broadband. Actually, in Korea it's 40 percent of homes, but the U.S. is close to being second among broadband penetration. We'd like to see that go up. Of course, the key element of that is that the price has to come down somewhat from the $50 a month in order to see the wider spread usage.

Yup, lasers. Though i have no idea how harsh atlantic weather would effect transmission.

here is some more on laser broadband, and here and here.

also:
these links have some additional information about H.R. 1542

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,43709,00 .html

http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1004-200-5881148.html

http://www.broadbandweek.com/news/010507/print/010 507_news_tauzin.htm

_f

This is correct. I found a link that talks about Qwest's deployment of vDSL that it aquired with US West. They are currently holding back deployment some to bring their costs down to the point where they are actually making money on the service.

I remember hearing a US West executive talking about the service on the radio (some NPR show, I think) a while back. As near as I could tell, only one "channel" was coming down your line at any time (no tape one channel, watch annother possibilities). It did have one kinda cool feature, when the phone rang, the Caller ID info would appear on your TV.
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