Making Last-Mile Ethernet A Reality

vannevar writes: "Is that erbium-doped fiber you're smoking, or are those bandwidth crack-heads in the Ethernet First Mile Study Group turning up GigE fiber to the garage? Of course, no good deed or innovation goes unpunished, but at least someone is busting knuckles, carpal tunnels, wallets, and reputations to make Gigabit Ethernet To The Home a reality." You may remember this earlier mention of the same concept, but rather than just ideas and proposals, here are pretty pictures and delivery speeds that might even make non-Californians want to relocate.

Comments

I'm not sure if I understand

[daviddennis]

I checked out a whole bunch of fuzzy pictures of what looks like a rather drab neighborhood, but couldn't find anything about how they did it or how much it cost.

I can hardly blame them for being self-congratulatory in tone - they deserve it, surely - but some explanation of how they did it seems to be in order for those of us who would just love to do likewise.

As others have quite rightly said, the fact that their server survives a slashdotting is pretty impressive. I see they even have video! Now is that cheeky or what, even if the Linux system I have at work can't handle it :-(.

So tell me, how was this done? What's the history? Something like JWZ's DNA Lounge chronicle would seem to be in order, and I couldn't find it. Can some kind soul point me to that?

Thanks.

D
(who lives in Los Angeles and is stuck with iDSL :-( ).
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Content providers

[the_tsi]

As if content providers didn't have enough problem
s as it is, with hits coming in at innundating rates, imagine what they'll have to do when the limiting factor on all data transactions becomes the bandwidth of their hard drives and memory in the servers? I mean, "last mile ethernet" may sound great, but who's going to upgrade the backbones to multiple OC-4098 circuits to handle the new traffic? And what do the providers do once they've spent their entire start up capital on their own gigabit connection (you know, something with more QoS than Ethernet and therefore a higher pricetag) just so people don't bitch about their service being slow?

It's a double-edged sword. Rapidly increasing the bandwidth at the fringes of the Internet instead of the core is going to cause some serious problems and side-effects.

-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...

Skeptical...

[mjh]

While I would be one of the people who would try and sign up for this service, if it were available at my house, I find myself frustrated by their literature comparing the relative speeds of DSL, Cable Modem, etc. The comparo is here

This guy does a naptser download to compare the relative speeds of DSL, Cable and GigE to the house. While I agree with the basic conclusions (that symetric is going to be better than asymetric, and that GigE will be faster), some of the things he says stretches credibilty, and for obvious reasons.

It's just *NOT* a good test to use Napster as a mechanism for determing the relative speed of a first mile infrastructure. Or for that matter, any internet connected service. There are WAY too many variables in between me and the end site that I'm connected to on the Internet to be able to say that the underlying first mile infras is the problem. In particular the remote site may have an over subscription problem. Or the available internet bandwidth (beyond the first mile) may not be sufficient. NONE of these type of problems indicate anything about the capabilities of the first mile infrastructure.

If you want good tests for the first mile, stick a server on the other end of the first mile and do bandwidth tests to that. Otherwise, it's just useless hype, and it doesn't really tell you anything. The conclusion that a DSL or Cable modem really doesn't offer any speed advantages over a regular modem is just plain wrong.

That page, with its gross inaccuracies, would make me skeptical, as a customer as to whether or not anything provided by this organization would be reliable.

$.02
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Hey great...

[artemis67]

I got gigabit ethernet to my home!

Now if only I had some fricken power to run my computer...

Interesting thought

[wmulvihillDxR]

What saddens me is that although advances like this are made and some markets get a really fast connection to the Internet, there will always be more apps that come along and suck that bandwidth down. For instance, what would happen if everyone got the 1000Mbit connection to their doorstep? After downloading all the porn ever created,what will people use the bandwidth for? Yeah it would kick ass to play Q3A or Tribes 2 on the network with very low ping times, but what's to prevent another game or application (like Video over IP or something) to come along that stresses even this network?

I suppose we will all eventually have these kind of connections, but by the time it reaches my little community, it will be slow relative to the applications out at the time.