Cringley On Bandwidth-Expanding Modulation Technology

jtappan writes: "Robert X Cringely has an article describing a new modulation technology that will allegedly allow cable modems to run 10 times as fast, and which will eventually allow existing cable networks to carry 500 HDTV channels."

Comments

This will make little difference... IF not be WORS

[carlcmc]

As long as the cable companies as still connected to the same T1s and the same number of home users have the machines on connected to bearshare.

Making the cable modem faster may be nice sometimes i suppose. BUT this does not mean that max throughput of the Cable company will expand. All it means is that it will be EASIER for LESS users to saturate a Cable companies bandwidth. They would be stupid to upgrade their existing clients or future users to a technology that will cost them more money in transmission costs. They already gripe about usage the way it is. Do you really think they will willing make it easier to suck up more bandwidth?

Wavelets wash back

[maggard]

Great - wavelets are back again; however this time not for compression but for high-speed signaling and to avoid interference.

Cringely reports the folks are about to set their design in silicon so we'll find out then but I'm not holding out a lot of hope. On the other hand the basic theory is pretty easy to test and apparently they've convinced more then a few folks who've apparently done their due diligence.

• If the signal propagates properly
• If it can be discerned from ambient noise and other channel's interference
• If the processing delay isn't too great
• If the chipset is cheap enough
• If the upstream folks roll it out

Etc.

ps To every first year student - think carefully before pointing out why this won't work. I expect that better minds then yours have had a look already so check your numbers and facts before posting please.

Re:Wavelets wash back

[Zeinfeld]

Great - wavelets are back again; however this time not for compression but for high-speed signaling and to avoid interference.

Reading the article I think that Cringely's biggest problem is that he does not understand how long it takes to get technology from a proof of concept to a working system.

With the Web it has taken ten years and counting to get this far. Idiot pumpers like Meaker and Blodget aside, Internet time runs at 1 for one with GMT at best.

I first heard about ISDN in the 80's, ten years later people started to get ISDN phone lines. Likewise with DSL the basic ideas were floating arround in the early 90s but are still not fully baked for deployment.

It does not seem unreasonable that people will be rolling out much faster cable networks in (say) 2010 or so. I don't think it is going to happen on any larg scale before then however. The DOCSIS standard has only just been developed and it will take at least 3 years for any radical redesign to make it into a spec and another 2 to get into production, then there will be the inevitable delay as results from trial deployments are assesed and so on.

What cringely and co miss is that athough the majority of the cost of a fully deployed system is at the consumer end s not where the killer costs lie. To roll out broadband access in a town you first have to buy lots of gear that typically comes with five or six figure price tags. You have to buy that gear whether one person buys service or ten thousand. The client end costs are not so much of a problem because each customer pays a subscription.

That is why the cable companies partnered with the losers @Home to deploy broadband. The cable cos were not prepared to gamble their capital on the success of broadband. @home was. Of course the minute that there was proof of the business plan @home became surplus to requirements

So yeah, wavelets, whatever, but at the moment the bandwidth in the last mile is not the bottleneck. Nor is the bottleneck in any of the pipes. There were four companies that deployed fibre backbones over the last five years, each of which has more capacity than the country could use before 2015. It is the switching capacity that is expensive and that comes down to pricey silicon and probably always will. If you have computing technology of power X you end up with switching nodes that require processing power of many, many X.

I don�t see how this helps anything

[G00F]

Camblemodems are able to run much faster than they currently do. They are told to run so slow for a few reasons.

1. Cost them money to get the big pipe for the users
2. Make you play well with others
3. They tailor the service for people who would not be willing to pay more for more bandwith.
4. They have a monopoly, so they can do what ever they want with very low risk of losing you to compitition.

I've downloaded 700k a second, and uploaded over 500k a second on the old lancity cablemodems in fremont cali years ago. Sicne then they have pushed cablemodems that they can control the speeds on. And they do, they slow them down hugely.

What's The Point (for cable modems)?

[John_Booty]

It's nice that ISP's could provide 100x faster service, but they're already capping the bandwidth they DO provide. I think this technology is solving a problem that simply doesn't exist in the cable ISP game.

That's not to say this tech doesn't have other, awesome applications. But I don't think cable companies are exactly going to be lining up to roll this out. :-)

Re:What's The Point (for cable modems)?

[myelin42]

Unfortunately true.

Here in New Zealand the main form of fast 'net access is ADSL. There are other systems, like the recently-featured CityLink, a 10M-1G (depending how much you pay for your link) city-wide ethernet, but unless you live in Wellington (or want to hack your routing and lose your connection every time it rains with a satellite connection), ADSL is pretty much the only way to get your fast 'net access.

The only problem is that the ISPs on the network seem to be chronically short of bandwidth. Xtra, the ISP associated with the local telecommunications monopoly, regularly has people complaining about it when they only get 4kB/sec out of their 128K DSL links.

(This is for 'JetStart', the 128K rate-limited DSL which comes for US$30/month. Even that is saturated! You can get 8 Mbit downstream with JetStream, at a horrible cost, e.g. US$250/month for 3 gigabytes of traffic).

What would be very cool would be if a provider took this up and used it for local point-to-point connections, say if I wanted to connect my LAN with my friend's one, over on the other side of town. Or a business link - a 10X speed boost would be much appreciated!

Hey Taco

[SubtleNuance]

Why dont you can Katz and give Cringley a job?

I wonder what the ratio of katz-ignoring-slashdotters vs cringley-article-hits is.

They won't improve cable modems.

[Xife]

Cable modems will keep the same data rate, they'll just decrease the bandwidth by 10X and put a bunch of HDTV channels in the remaining bandwidth.

Of course it will be years before that happens because users that own their cable modems and will be resistant to buying a new one for the same data rate, and the cable company will have to replace the modems for people who rent. This will reset the break even point for the extra $10/month you pay for renting the modem, which doesn't sit well in a business plan.

Anyone remember Transmeta?

[timholman]

After reading the article, I checked out Rainmaker's site. These guys have a theory, some patents, and some simulations. What they don't seem to have is any working hardware that proves this 10X bandwidth increase can actually be achieved in residential cable systems.

Does this remind anyone of Transmeta, who promised processors with a fraction of the power consumption at higher speeds? Everybody loved them when all they had was a press release. The actual product didn't work as advertised, and now they've faded away.

If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. 10X uber-bandwidth schemes sound suspiciously like 10X uber-compression schemes. I'll reserve my enthusiasm when I see working hardware.

VPNs

[bubblegoose]

With all that extra bandwidth do you think they'll remove the "Thou shalt not VPN" provisions from their terms of service?

Cringley's weak spot

[baka_boy]

I'm not even going to try to evaluate the technology Cringely keeps rolling out week after week: IANAP (I Am Not A Physicist), and between the UWB debate last week, and now wavelets for networking, I'm throwing in the towel.

However, he keeps talking about how all these new technologies are going to roll out any day now, with no increase in cost. That's simply wrong. From the cable (or telco, ISP, etc.) point of view, they have basically no reason to drop the prices on their current services more than a pittance -- people are still queueing up on six-month waiting lists for good ol' 256Kbit DSL, so why should they turn around and offer 1-10Gbit for the same price?

You could argue that competition will drive prices down, but that would be naive as well. The telecommunications market isn't open: it's a cabal, just like the recording industry, and other favorite /. demons. Collusion between the few big players will keep any new technology carefully overpriced until the last possible drop of profit has been squeezed out of the old.

I don't mean to sound snide but...

[JoeShmoe]

...if Slashdot is going to be posting nearly every single article that Cringley writes (five times this past month) shouldn't he basically get his own Slashbox or topic?

I mean, I know Slashdot is a user-submission site but of given Cringley's anti-Microsoft pro-techi slate I think it's a given that someone's going to be submitting everything he writes. Shouldn't Slashdot be somewhat discerning in which articles they post? If I wanted to read everything he wrote I would just bookmark his site (as I have done). To see it posted on Slashdot every week seems, I'm sorry, -1 Redundant.

How about we just link this and be done with it?

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/

- JoeShmoe

.

Re:My favorite quote...

[Anonymous Coward]

Worst. Gimmick. Ever.

Modems are maxed out

[BeBoxer]

Modems are basically completely maxed out given the contstraints that they operate under. Your math assumes getting 10 bits per hertz (realistic) and getting 56KHz (unrealistic). The phone system is designed to carry voices, not binary data. As a result, it's optimized for the frequency range of the human voice, which only extends up to the 3-4KHz range. In fact, unless you live in the sticks and are calling your neighbor, it is almost for certain that your call is being carried digitally. If so, it's being sampled at 8Hz meaning that due to Nyquist you can't send any frequency higher than 4KHz thru the phone system. Period. You'll notice that if you figure out the bits/hertz that a 56K modem sends, its as good (~8 bits upstream) or better (~13 bits downstream) than what this company is claiming to get.

Basically, they have a system which works as well as a phone modem. Not too suprising really, I suspect that the fundamental limitations on signal and noise are pretty similar for the two different kinds of copper wire run to your house.

Re:Boost or stomp cable providers?

[GreyPoopon]

Or, is this what cable providers are looking for, a high bandwith solution cable of sending multiple HTDV channels as well as very high-speed broadband.

I would say that this is exactly what they are looking for. It gives them:

1. Much more bandwidth for an existing cable modem connections. This provides leverage against the argument that DSL always tries to use against the "shared connection" issue.
2. Less need to build out as much in new areas to meet anticipated capacity requirements.
3. The ability to send many many more channels down the same line, making customers feel happier even though there still won't be anything worth watching.
4. The ability to meet Federal proposals on pushing HDTV without angering older customers who want to wait for their TV to die before they switch.

Re:Great!

[Mr Z]

Actually, Cringley gets it wrong. Modulation happens at the PHY layer, not the LINK layer. So either this is a crock of s**t as big as what ZeoSync was stirring, or Cringley has his head up his arse. Notice that that's not an exclusive-or.... both could be true.

This link pretty much covers it. I'll quote the most relevant bits:

1. The Physical Layer describes the physical properties of the various communications media, as well as the electrical properties and interpretation of the exchanged signals. Ex: this layer defines the size of Ethernet coaxial cable, the type of BNC connector used, and the termination method.
2. The Data Link Layer describes the logical organization of data bits transmitted on a particular medium. Ex: this layer defines the framing, addressing and checksumming of Ethernet packets.

So, in other words, the Physical layer is where signaling happens. (This is where QAM and this wavelet snakeoil are relevant.) The Link layer is where PPP, SLIP, and Ethernet Packet encapsulation happen. (Not Ethernet signaling, just the 802.3-or-whatever framing spec.)

--Joe

1024QAM

[$pacemold]

If a new application, operating system, computer, or piece of networking equipment comes along that has 10 times the performance at the same price or the same performance at one tenth the cost, it doesn't matter who makes it, that product will take the market.
...
Rainmaker customers will get 170 megabits-per-second or more. With wavelet modulation filling the entire one gigahertz capacity of coaxial cable at 10 bits-per-hertz, the ultimate capacity of the system is 10 gigabits-per-second for each segmented subnet.

10 bits-per-hertz sounds like 1024QAM, but to get 170 Mb/s you have to have 17 MHz HDTV channel... Nowdays the plain 256QAM cable modem can get 40 Mb/s on 6 MHz channel, or, in theory, 136 Mb/s on 17 MHz.

Looks like in reality there's only 25% performance improvement. Cringely, hold the purchase!

Just give me a pipe

[uberdave]

Just give me a pipe big enough for one or two HDTV channels, a couple of two way audio channels, and a 100-1000Megabit/sec TCP/IP.

The way I see it, cable companies are doing things wrong. Instead of bundling an internet channel within their video channels, they should be sending video on demand channels over an internet pipe. One cable, or fibre into the home, into a box that splits out a number of phone lines, a number of video channels, and a number of ethernet lines.

The problem is that the infrastructure is not there. Of course this scheme would cause telco vs cable wars, ISP vs. telco wars, etc. Our bright shiny future gets pushed back a few more years.

Re:Not with Cable companies at the head.

[patchmaster]

I've been with six different ISPs during my time on the Internet, including a major phone company, two small, local ISPs, and two giant, international ISPs. Of all these, my Time Warner/Road Runner service has been far and away the best, both in terms of reliability and of service provided (email, newsgroups, etc). And that's not even considering the speed. I know a lot of cable companies have done a very poor job at providing Internet service, but they aren't all total dunces. Time Warner took their time with it, but from what I've seen over the last couple years they've done it right.

Cable is wrong topology

[Martin S.]

Cable Systems have the wrong network topology to become the long term solution to the requirements of a broadband society.

They are rings and as such will always suffer from the contention being too close to the customer, leeches will always have a very negative impact.

Star based solutions such as xDSL offer much between solution. The bandwidth becomes more dedicated and contention is moved up stream, where the capacity can be managed in a much more effective way. Over time the 'last mile' is reduced so the xDSL become a bigger pipe, until ultimatly we have a star made from fibre rather than a fibre ring. Everbody wins, consumer, supplier, society.

Works in principle

[starrmpic]

I am sure the folks at Rainmaker are extremely accomplished scientists and engineers (Cringley's mistaken remarks about Layer2/Layer3 are no reason to doubt that).

Having said that, there is a wide gap..change that to massive gap between theory and practise. First and foremost, who (i.e, what service revenue) will pay for the headend equipment. Even the most dynamic of companies is not going to invest in technologies if there isnt a good ROI. Leave alone the fact that cable companies are monopolies within their markets with little real incentive to do anything.

We could extend this argument further and talk about the studio infrastructure and the back-bone infrastructure required to produce and transmit so many HDTV channels...but lets stick to the technical aspects. Head-end gear is still relatively doable. The real problem lies in the hundreds and hundreds of amplifiers, repeaters and other devices along the cable plant with nuances of their own
- what frequency spectrum are they able to transmit
- what snr
- what does their spacing have to be
- how clean are the interconnects
- what is the quality of the cable

Im sure these questions are still keeping the Rainmaker folks awake at night.