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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."
I would like an invitation, but you neglected to give your email address. Consider this a reminder to post your email address.
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
-h-
Great! Now my cable internet (courtesy COX cable, VA) can be unreliable ten times as quickly! I can't wait....
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.
Is this the beginning of Video on Demand?
Now, if we can make existing Tx and OC-xx, lines move data 10 times as fast we might have the bandwidth/throughput to support these faster cable modems.
If we can't increase the throughput of the backbone lines, this won't do average cable modem users much good.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
I have boxes filled with old modems, ISDN routers, and Ethernet hubs that are all perfectly functional, but useless to me. I have closets filled with old computers that run like a charm...
After reading this, I sent Cringly my shipping address. Do you think this is a bit too forward?
Cable modems are already capped. This just
means 10 times more unused potential. There's
no competition forcing providers to open up
those pipes.
I almost got excited about this, then I realized that the Cable companies couldn't manage a decent ISP if you held a gun to their heads (believe me, I wish I could). As someone who has had cable modems since '95, let me tell you it has not been pretty. After the recent @home fiasco, I have lost all faith that even if this technology ever comes about, that it will be even close to anyone's expectations because the cable companies will ruin it.
television is known as a medium for it is neither rare nor well done: on the plus side if they can pump that much bandwidth through those things maybe those cheap cable modem services will stop harking on you for wanting to split you connection between your home lan?
I believe sex is highly over rated... unless it involves me
How is the TV Geek from Beat The Geeks going to catch up?
.cig - what you do after winning a good flame war
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?
It seems that the last few articles cringley has wrote have been about technology that is facinating and very exciting. So when am I going to get my fuelcell powered car with my uwb radio, that takes me with my laptop with a solid-state harddrive to my personal airplane?
It's not the OS it's the user that sucks. If it's user friendly, you get stupider people. - clinko
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.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Sure, it would be a great technological advance. Unfortunately, as we have all seen, this really means very little. Espically in the ISP game. With the recent consolidation of ISPs into 3 or 4 major players, getting this type of thing out seems even more difficult. We can't even use the technology we have. Cable companies limiting bandwidth. DSL providers requiring you to log off every 2 hours. None of that is necessary to the technology, but those in charge feel the need to add these "features" in order to squeeze every last bit of cash out of the users. Not to mention trying to get them to roll something new out. Good Luck.
When I look at where we are headed, sometimes I just get more and more depressed.
Jason
He's totally creeping out the Great One, eh...
And, since this is going -1 Troll anyways, I might as well. The source of my evil and insanity
You do the math. Disgustingly yours,
Dupper the Perv
Wow, so the cable companies can now run 10 or more times the amount of homes on the same network segment yay! (and you know thats EXACTY what they will do too) :( (obviously this number will be lower if they are offering internet connections through the same wire, but you get the idea)
BTW the way many cable companies digital TV works, is that when you change channels your tv sends a signal up the wire saying that you want to see such and such channel. So they start to stream channel X down your network segment. So having the ability to run 500 HDTV channels would only mean that they can now run 500 TVs on the same segment YAY
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.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
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.
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
Why dont you can Katz and give Cringley a job?
I wonder what the ratio of katz-ignoring-slashdotters vs cringley-article-hits is.
This is similar to what modems do. AFAIK, they still don't run any faster than 3750 baud (Hz),
but they can encode up to 15 bits per wave to get 56kbit/sec. If the line isn't so quiet, they cannot distinguish all 15 bits, so the modems have to negotiate a constellation with fewer bits.
My question is how this will work with an ethernet-like collison detection system that AFAIK cable modems use. The jam signals could get ugly, and I'm not sure you can carry as my info on broadband as baseband systems. Or how cable decoders will cope.
These monopolies need some sort of major kick in the pants by the FCC to get this underway.
The more you know, the less you understand.
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 $10/month you pay for renting the modem, which doesn't sit well in a business plan.
---- Smokin' another sig.
Basically, they can already give me faster speeds but they are artificially capping it. So why would an article that says they could provide even more speed make me hopeful?
Really, does this guy have any shame? And what's all this about astroturfing for M$'s .NET initiative? It really isn't all that great, dude. You're just a marketing dupe.
Is your company running tools written by ma
"Where current cable modem users share a data pipe that can carry about 30 megabits-per-second, 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. That's enough room for 500 HDTV channels on the same cable that's connected to your house right now."
10 bits/hertz isn't too shabby a start for some "real parts" you can drop into a system and be off and running. VMSK/2 however can achieve over 90 Bits/Hertz today. Combine this with fractal based data compression and you could achieve over an order of magnitude higher bandwidth compression!
This would give customers over 1.5Gbits/sec with just using VMSK/2 over their existing cable with an ultimate system capacity of over 90Gbits/sec or 4500 HDTV channels. VMSK/2 is very achievable over cable since you can crank up the power levels enough to provide for an effective signal to noise ratio.
.
Quidquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
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.
Rainmaker's website who make the tech he's talking about. (Like no one would have found this link otherwise)
You got to wonder if this is one of the SEC sites.
Why not just have a weekly feature section that puts Cringley's column in the news submitions automatically.. The column is good _every_ week, guys. No need to submit what you deem specially worthy when you should be reading every week.
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
With all that extra bandwidth do you think they'll remove the "Thou shalt not VPN" provisions from their terms of service?
I hope that someday we will be able to put away our fears and prejudices and just laugh at people. - Jack Handey
... for those of us using a LAN/NAT to put multiple computers on 1 connection, then the bottleneck on a 10 GBit internet connection will still be our ethernet cards and hubs/switches/routers. And also, for a machine not on a NAT, with the modem inside, would most likely still take an enormous amount of processing power to recieve 10 GBits of data per second. (And to store it somewhere. Most computers have an IDE drive, of which the *fastest* transfer rate is 133 MB(its?) a second, which is another bottle neck even if you have a 1 GBit NIC -- I'm not sure about SCSI)
So it may sound nice (I agree, I'd love to have it), but a internet connection is only as fast as the slowest link in between Machine A and Machine B. (So on a 10 GBit network, you'd still be capped at the speed of your network card, which is usually only 10 MBits.)
Not to mention any caps that the ISP sets up (which is already happening on 1.5 MBit cablemodems)
Let's combine this scheme along with the one from a couple weeks ago where they compressed random data by 100x! You could fit 1000x the data over existing cable lines. ;-)
Josh Woodward
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.
/. 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.
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
They don't have to do that -- perhaps Taco could just work up a script that every time Cringley's "Current" page gets updated, it could post an article on Slashdot.
...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
.
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
http://www.terayon.com/cat.html?cat_id=9.1.1.2
Anyway, this is what my benighted cable system uses to give us cable modem without the muss, fuss and bother of installing modern fiber-optic plant. Believe me, it isn't very fun.
Maybe they can squeeze more speed out of the wires. Maybe. But you're going to suffer for it with lowered reliability. When you have to powercycle your cable modem every day to make sure you've got connectivity something is VERY, VERY WRONG.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
while i enjoy cringley columns, his mangling of the bottom layers of the OSI model made me cringe (pun intended).
encoding systems are physical (layer 1) technologies, not 2nd layer like he claims. he further states that ethernet and token ring are layer 3 technologies, which is blatently false - they are both data link technologies.
maybe i'm just being nitpicky....
I'm already downloading mp3's/divx movies/pr0n faster then I can listen to/watch/masturbate to them.
I'm wondering if the cable companies would even bother investing in the equipment to make this possible. Given that the phone companies can't provide any serious competition in this market and the barrier to entry for anybody else to do local loop service is too high, I can't fathom why an incumbent cable company would bother. They already make pretty good money off the services they provide, so why take the financial risk?
If the average consumer would be willing to pay a premium over their current service to get this upgraded service, it might make sense. But if a large group of consumers isn't willing to pay substantially more, there's no reason to bother unless somebody else is offering a competing service. Since there's nobody capable of that right now, there is no competition and therefor no incentive to innovate.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Brand loyalty is nothing against the power of 10X.
X10's brand loyalty isn't too crash-hot either.
"Einstein argued that [...] God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer." ~ Brooks
Goes down smooth and tastes great. Makes you 10 times stronger, smarter, and more attractive to women. Cures cancer, aids, is a method of birth control and can be used an industrial lubricant. Its Snake oil! Snake oil you say? That's right! Enough for every investor! Choc full of buzzwords and vitamins!
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
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.
I'd rather see advances in backbone speed than last mile speed, thank you. Cable modems are already capped at a fraction of their potential because of insufficient capacity at the ISP side. Give the ISP a couple of gigabit connections, open up the cablemodems to 10mbits, and I'll be perfectly happy, for a couple of months anyway...
True (easier to sature trunk lines), but consider this; during 'quiet hours' when traffic is lighter, now the lone porn surfers can have faster access. During congestion nothing helps (but bigger pipes), but off-peak hours faster last copper/coax mile eq does help end users. Of course burstiness of traffic increases as well, but that shouldn't be much of a problem.
:-P). The only cause of this I can see is people sucking up more and more bandwidth on the frontend that the provider hasn't allowed for.
Similarly, if traffic prioritizing is done decently, the fact that some clients have faster local connection shouldn't make situation worse for those with slower connection. So, faster cable modems shouldn't necessarily make it harder for others, provided capacity is fairly shared, not by end systems but by routers doing QoS queuing.
You've hit the problem a lot of the High Speed ISPs are facing - backend provisioning a high speed network.
Sympatico used to (and seems to still be) provisioning thier Central Offices with a single T1, so your 968K connection would get choked as soon as more than 20 people were connected to the same CO. I was just speaking to someone with thier DSL service and they explained that it gets slower during peak hours (so much for thier "Always fast!" advertising angle
QoS is a possible solution, but it could get un-weildy very quickly, especially if it's not secured properly. (Dude, I hax0red the Cisco and now I reseverd myself the whole pipe! I am l337!) A better solution would be to make sure the backend can handle more than the capacity of all the frontend pipes aggregated in order to keep QoS exposure to a minimum.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
History has shown that given a choice between transmitting the same number of channels at higher quality and transmitting a larger number of channels at the same quality, broadcasters will choose the latter every time, because they make more money that way.
We will never, ever see widespread HDTV in the US. We'll be stuck at NTSC resolution for the rest of our lives. Heck, if they could convince people to live with 100x100 digital video streams, they would, just so they could squeeze even more channels out of the same bandwidth. They drool at the idea of 50 million channels of shopping and other crap. Picture quality? What the heck is that?
Free Hans!
Nobody said you'd be constantly streaming 10Gbps all the time and saving it to disk. To me it's more about how quickly a page downloads, not how much stuff I can download overall. How much time do you spend reading a page vs. downloading it? Take this comments page for example, I would easily spend 5 minutes reading everything. As it is, the page only takes 5 seconds to download, but, if that could be decreased to near instantaneous I'd love it.
An entire web page and all its related files (even graphic/sound/flash heavy pages) could easily fit in most modern PC's RAM. Stream it all direct to RAM and pop it up on the page? Why save it to disk at all? For your cache? You wouldn't need a cache if you connection were that snappy. And just think, we could actually stream streaming video instead of spooling streaming video... No disk involved.
I could see ISPs moving away from limiting your instantaneous banwidth (i.e. capping you at 1.5Mb/sec) and moving towards capping your average bandwidth (i.e. 5Gb/hr). I mean, so what if I choose to eat up my hourly bandwidth allocation (say, by downloading several linux distros simulataneously) in 0.5 seconds instead of an hour? (Technical issues of me saving off that much data that fast, aside.) The overall useage from the ISP is the same. OK, so maybe it takes me 2 seconds instead because there are 4 people queued up ahead of me with big downloads. It would still be very snappy in comparison to today's setups.
Ohh a question just at the right level for an ask /.
What this means is that they will throw 10x as many people on the same wire. duh...
Whatever became of the data over power line system that was so cool like a year ago? Did they figure out that it was too expensive?
does anybody actually believe time warner and the rest of the cable providers will give users a fatter pipe to the internet without jacking the price to high hell? the chips to do this may only cost $10, but i guarantee you the cable providers will label it "platinum" service and charge triple what they do now. oh well, for a link that fat, i might pay it.
I'm a wireless engineer, but I have no idea what wavelets are. I've seen some arcane journal articles where wavelets are seen as some kind of boon to mankind for every technical problem ever posed. For example, wavelets in Nuclear Fusion, wavelets in EM simulation, wavelets for curing cancer. How real is this?
I've broken the code.
True (easier to sature trunk lines), but consider this; during 'quiet hours' when traffic is lighter, now the lone porn surfers can have faster access. During congestion nothing helps (but bigger pipes), but off-peak hours faster last copper/coax mile eq does help end users. Of course burstiness of traffic increases as well, but that shouldn't be much of a problem.
Similarly, if traffic prioritizing is done decently, the fact that some clients have faster local connection shouldn't make situation worse for those with slower connection. So, faster cable modems shouldn't necessarily make it harder for others, provided capacity is fairly shared, not by end systems but by routers doing QoS queuing.
I'll be in contact.
J.F. Nash, Jr.
A 33.6kbps modem runs about 3 kilobaud, with an 11 bit per symbol QAM constellation.
A 56kbps modem runs 8 kilobaud, with 8 bits per symbol. The telco digitizes voice at 8 bits per sample, 8 ksamples/sec, and the modem actually is just using that. However, the phone company "bit-robs" the signal, taking a few bits here and there to do in-band signaling on the line, hence why the modem cannot rely upon getting all the bits, all the time.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Currently I have cable Internet from cox.net and cable TV but my upload speed is always around 20 KBytes/sec which is very slow and from what I hear, it is because cox is limiting the upload speed. A cable modem 10 times as fast as the current speed would be nice as a base network but when will they be able to provide you that speed?
Will the cable companies actually be able to pay for their backbone bandwidth if they provide us more bandwidth? Excite didn't prove it but hopefully just because they were a little bit ahead of the time.
Bandwidth prices for dedicated speed to backbones are very high.
A T3 costs ~20000$/month and thats 45 mbps.
Yeah, they can let 500 customers share their 45mbps T3 and be able to turn a small profit but 45mbps/500 users = 92kbps so every user gets only 92 kbps dedicated bandwidth. That's nothing if you consider you have 10Gbps running into your home.
Why is bandwith at the backbone level so expensive when so many research papers prove it can be done for cheaper? Who is pricing that stuff?
But you're too late. He recieved mine no later than 3 weeks ago.
This is a guy whose job is that of technology commentary? He claims that the primary difference between ethernet and token ring is layer 3. If I had the authority to, I'd force him to take remedial classes.
Current cable modems have separate downlink and uplink signals, running on different frequencies. Only the uplink signal has any need for collision detection; the downlink signal all comes from one source (router or switch), so there's no need to worry about collisions.
I can't claim I have a good idea of what they're trying to do here. But if they're proposing a system that can run over a broadband line, with a separate downlink and uplink, then they would simply apply the new modulations to the downlink. You might also find some way to apply the technique to the uplink, but it's nowhere near as important.
If they're proposing something closer to Ethernet, then they'll need to rebuild the system from scratch. I have no idea what they'll do to avoid collision problems.
Maybe he's got an off-by-one problem in his brain.
Isn't just allegedly doing this... they're real. The have 5 separate patents on their signal transmission technology. And what's even better is that this tech can be used to improve not just cable, but DSL and Wireless(!) - all in all it's just a really cool modem.
But, does that do me any good if the ISP's line is to slow?
I have roadrunner, which is basically a 11mbps connection to an OC3. Say I have 111mbps cable, that means there connection would have to be 10 times faster for it to do me any good, doesn't it??
IIRC somebody was actually working on
this. The setup is closer to a modem
than a NIC though.
Were that I say, pancakes?
because they're utterly irrelevant, as many posters have well pointed out. The real question is: can this or something like it be easily applied to the optical backbones that have already been run. Otherwise, long distance band is still going to be the primary cost to the ISPs and no one will pay any less, even if we do get this 'upgraded' service. This is great locally and all, and I guess that TV watchers should be happy, but cable data to the home won't go down till long distance bandwidth gets cheaper.
You know, Cringley puts out good articles and all, but does Slashdot really need to link to every single one every time there's a new one?
This isn't really a story anymore. Slashdot should just have a permanent link or perhaps even one of those little SlashBoxes that points to recent Cringley articles.
That's right! Its theorized that the key to cold Fusion is in wavelets!
In addition, the government has proved that wavelets, when properly applied, are responsible for keeping George Washington alive all these years in a secret location.
Since your a wireless engineer, I take it you know how the Fourier series and transform works - the ultimate idea is that a series of circular functions of various frequency, amplitude, and phase (sines or cosine functions).
Wavelets work similarly, except that instead of sines or cosines as the basis, a bandwidth limited function, such as rect (not used that often) is used as the basis for the series. There are a few obvious advantages to this (there are some other not quite so obvious ones that I won't get into).
1) Different basis functions can be chosen for different domains based upon which function most compactly represents the desired signal. (For example, it is impossible to perfectly represent a triangular wave by Fourier transform, but quite possible with some wavelets).
2) More data can be fit into a single stream since all the waves are localized (unlike sine and cosine, which are infinite).
The long and short of it is that it is a very good frequency transform.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
You are not being too nitpicky. Cringely is an idiot^Wjournalist, not an electrical engineer.
:-)
I, too, was cringing when I read the article. He JUST DOESN'T GET IT. Layer 1 is what defines token ring and ethernet, not layer 3 (network addressing). Even if this rainmaker technology wasn't a scam, layer 1 is where you define both the physical medium and the signal modulation that works best with the medium. Changing TV cable modulation would cause tons of knock on effects, with cross channel interference, harmonics, parasitics, and probably Nyquist reflections cancelling out other channels.
And I know far too much about QAM, as it is used in modems. QAM has existed for decades. It isn't used on cable systems because there is no way to keep the signal clean enough to recover a tight constellation on grungy, up in the air exposed to the elements cable systems. Shannon's limits on recovering signals from noise get slowly pushed back from time to time, but his model is still sound. Its not going to be replaced by wavelets or whatever the scam buzzword of the week is.
As for costing US$10, HA! The cable companies would have to replace their entire HFC plant, and every repeater, splitter and signal booster to work with signals that filled each 6MHz channel with wall-to-wall noise. Most of the cable companies offering internet have just placed a little piggyback backchannel filter around each of their repeaters to get a single channel back to the HFC headend. They haven't replaced all the repeaters or much of anything, and they still grumble about the cost.
Nope. rXc deserves to be kicked around for this shameful piece of drivel. And slashdot is just the place to do it
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
I have the strangest feeling I'm going to get a notice in the mail from ATT stating that they have to come out and replace my cable modem for the 3rd time this month. But hey I get 3 days free and free games with Reak Arcade (that would mater for me how?)
In Reston, Va, and I haven't had any trouble yet. Two or three outages in the past year, neither of which lasted long, and good tech support.
Best Slashdot Co
I did a post similar to this on a past story but i think that this could be good, out where i live it is either the 20 channel, slow cable or the expensive dish, this might bring up competition and bring prices down. man it sucks being 16 and livin in the country
We seldom regret saying too little but often regret saying too much.
64 QAM and 256 QAM are the standard modulation schemes for digital cable and HDTV over cable in the USA.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
If this "new modulation technology" gets my @home cable modem running 10 times faster than it is now... I'll still be at 0 Mbs
I've been trying to get a refund for the past six days but nobody's answering the phone.
I love it. I used to order 2 more IP, but I made do with a closet server/nat router. I run webserver on it for my boy scout troop with PHP and mysql. As well as an FTP server. I'm in highschool, so after I finish a report around 2 AM, I just save it to my home dir (on the server using nfs) and goto sleep. I just get it through ftp and print it out next morning at school.
I haven't had any problem what-so-ever with them. I get >200KB always downloading from kernel.org.
Hmm. Current spec (DOCSIS 1.1) downstream symbol rate is 5.360537 Msym/sec 256QAM, more than 40 Mbit/s, and not 30 as Cringley writes.
Anyway.
latency is not a problem for the WWW, it's a problem for other things (ie, online gaming, telnet sessions...). people confuse WWW with internet way too much nowadays.
----
All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
We need legislation to split provising of packet services (Which can be a licensed monopoly, like a telco) from content services.
Lots mroe about this
This, coupled with widespread adoption of XP, should pretty much finish off the net. I'm getting bored with it anyway...
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.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
That's true for Cable TV, so Cable TV cables are already relatively clean.
This is probably one of the reasons they are focusing on cable TV. Most other existing wired technologies (phone, ethernet, speaker wires, etc...) tolerate reflections much better, so the infrastructure has a lot more of them.
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(from the article)
Each time the power is turned on, it sends one bit down the wire, giving us one bit per hertz,
and later...
to trick an electrical signal into carrying more bits of data per hertz.
WHAT THE FAHRTS? Does he even know what Hz is? I assume he's using it as a shorthand for "cycle" (in the first misuse) and "second" or "unit time" in the second case.
Whatevuh.
Everyone who is asking for a Cringley Slashbox or something to tell them when the new column is only need look as far as their account settings. It has been there for quite a while.
The top slashbox on my page belongs to Cringley, and is echoed constantly by another link from the main page. In that respect it could be the most unnecessary slashbox available.
Easy! We just sell 'em about a dozen of these new Rainmaker chip thingies, and then they can install them in series on their phat pipe! Man that would rock!!
"If you create user accounts, by default, they will have an account type of Administrator with no password." KB Q293834
while i enjoy cringley columns, his mangling of the bottom layers of the OSI model made me cringe (pun intended).
Your pun would be funnier if you spelled his name right.
"And like that
like those that brought us webvan.com and pets.com?
The bandwidth is already available on the backbones. Shitloads of fiber running through the country. What we don't have is enough switch processing power.
"And like that
If you find a previous I, Cringley "What I want for Christmas / A Supercomputer in every garage" http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20011227. html you will see he makes note of an even more exciting technology, not involved directly with the cluster, but with networking.
Ultrawideband is what it is called, and instead of sending a modulated signal in a stream on a single frequency, the data stream is broken up and broadcast over different frequencies at the same time. The idea is not new, 'spread spectrum' cordless phones do it, it's just another application of multiplexing.
What makes ultrawideband interesting is that because the bursts are so short and spread across frequencies instead of on one frequency, the FCC is saying that they will classify it as acceptable noise and not regulate it, if at all. The plan is to use frequencies below 60GHz, but I only include that because I remember it. Also, it doesn't really matter, due to the very small utilization of a single frequency.
More information, as well as some papers on company sites can be found at www.uwb.org (the ultra-wideband working group)
That is all.
certron
fair.org counterpunch.com truthout.com indymedia.org salon.com
eff.org guerrilla.net debian.org gentoo.org
$10 a chip
:)
152 million chips to be replaced
=
$1.52 Billion in potential profits
1) POTENTIAL. Like other posters have said, cable companies cap (limit) the amount of bandwidth users can have. There is little incentive on their side to get this.
2) PATENDED. When you hear people say market share, this is what they're talking about. Rainmaker is at the forefront of a ground breaking technology, so their the first to the treasure chest.
My only hope for this is that cable companies will implement it. I understand that they have no incentive, however if they did they may raise my cap to say 2mb/1mb dl/up. So technically they've increased my bandwidth, likely will increase my bill, and still have extra bandwidth for other customers.
its not going to happen soon but hey it might
Absolutely right! I meant to say "symbols", not "bits" per constellation or transition! Serious brainfade.
I'd quote their website but I can't seem to connect to it right now... heh.
Point is, we pay more for what is guarenteed to be less, and there is no other choice here. Time/Warner is the only cable company and DSL here is through Verizon, and judging from seeing the people who have it (and they live a few blocks from the CO), i dunno why anyone would take DSL at all. 56k is cheaper and seems to run the same speeds. I hope the extra money goes into more bandwidth/improving service and not into Time/Warners advertising budget.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Talked to one of the city government people involved with the franchise issues here in San Jose. Seems that AT&T doesn't want to make the billion dollar investment to upgrade the infrastructure to support cable modems, and no other cable company is willing to either which is why San Jose (and many of the other surrounding areas like Campbell which are part of the same system) will NOT see cablemodem service for MANY years - if ever.
Those of us out of reach of DSL are totally screwed. As far as "project Pronto" goes (PacBell's extended distance DSL) it's 7 YEARS off for my area (South San Jose).
Sprint broadband (wireless) discontinued service (they sucked anyway, I tried them too.) Seems that sprint doesn't have a f-ing clue how to do wireless right.
So here I am in the heart of Silicon Valley with overpriced, slow IDSL at $120 / month as my ONLY realistic option for "high speed" internet (if you count 3x modem speed as "high"). Next to that is $1000 / month for a T1.
So the utility companies are NOT going to help us here. This is where the government needs to step in and wire the city since no company is willing to spend the bucks.
So while the technology exists for high speed cable, DSL, wireless, fiber, etc. don't expect to see it deployed in your lifetime.
I slipped into dyslexia reading that last word -- it appeared, for just a second, that he was talking about the power of pop-under advertising.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Call me stupid but this sounds like Rainmaker is simply using the Wavelet transform to simply spread this putative 170Mhz client-bandwidth signal with a roughly 6-chip PRN sequence (6x170Mhz~=1GHz). This would have the effect of spreading the signal over the 1GHZ bandwidth available while dropping the signal by about 40dB. This is very close to the 48dB SNR (I think this is the correct figure) NTSC broadcast signals standard. What is so special about this? If this is really true, the implication is that multiple access is somewhat limited by the length of the PRN sequence (only some fraction of n^6 where n is the levels per symbol per chip). Is there some special properties Wavelet coefficients have over other sequences that give this phenomenal processing-gain (and therefore cross-signal immunity) that would allow much higher multiple access than one would expect from this type of back of the envelope calculations?
When cable companies went in and set up shop, most municipalities gave them exclusive access to the areas they were building in. That's why the huge capital outlay for wiring up all of those houses made sense. I
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
There's much handwaving on the Rainmaker site. The big claimed advantage of this approach is that it has greater immunity to impulse noise. That's nice, but is that really the limiting factor on data rate now?
Someone recently asked me about stand alone video servers that could serve up a web page of their security cameras over the internet. I'm sure you could build one with linux and a cheap camera for like $10 and some pocket fuzz...or legos for cheaper...But for anyone who wants a compact complete solution...here are some of the products I found. I hope someone finds them useful.
m l
Axis 2400 $1250-1650
Serves 5 video inputs.
http://www.axis.com
Axis 240 $900-950
Older discontinued version of the above, no info on web page, but seems to be still available through some dealers.
http://www.axis.com
Axis 2401 $750-1000 (I've seen a ton of demo models for $635)
Single video input server
http://www.axis.com
PelcoNet Video Server $1375-1750
Single video channel
http://www.pelco.com
Tango II $1200-$1650
Serves 4 Video inputs
http://www.silent-witness.com/products_tango.ht
http://www.gyyrcctv.com
Netgator 104 $1000
Serves 1 video from 4 Video inputs with optional cable.
http://www.darim.com
Flexwatch 200 $1130
Single channel
http://www.flexwatch.com
Flexwatch 300 $1650
6 Inputs but can control 36 of their flexcameras
http://www.flexwatch.com
listen. i dont understand this fascination with cringely at all. _yes_ he has been there, done that and probably has very good contacts and ok call him a great guy BUT please dont even pretend that he can be in tune with what is happening technically in the industry or academicia.
writing _tech_ articles for the naivete is _easy_ , put in the correct words and have a good source and explain things simply . yes thats what he does and does it good BUT then slashdot isnt serving the same tech naivetes.
please, sincerely, the more i have been seeing it the more i have felt that posting cringely articles is totally out of place here.
i am a graduate student in CS and now starting my EE degree too and from where i stand most of his aticles look like an eyewash [or] candy to the masses.....
Vikram
yeah...but DWDM *ONLY* operates on optical carriers. Besides DWDM is jsut a glorified version of FDM - Fequency Division Multiplex -which is of course precisely what good old analogue cable uses anyway!
So when someone visits my pages I serve at home on my xDSL connection with 64k upstream and he/she has a cable modem that is 10x as fast as it is currently... the time gain for them will be exactly....
(calculating like a madman)
0%
:-b
I also took the liberty of creating a few other topic icons I thought Slashdot could use, and posted them on the same page.
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.
how much is enough?
_ __ __
here is an excerpt an a question-answer session with bill joy that all this talk about 10G made me think about.
What about bandwidth?
It's coming. In Aspen, where I live, we have a spread-spectrum 1-megabit T1 wireless network which we put in ourselves. This network covers the whole town. It operates as our LAN, except we put antennas up on the mountains so we, and others, can go anywhere in town and be on it. It was just an experiment. There is a cab driver in town who has a wireless T1 in his taxi and a laser light show and all this gear and MIDI on board. He is truly wireless. But by doing this time warp, we discovered a discontinuity. There is a break point in bandwidth around a million bits, or a megabit, per second. If you get below a million bits you notice the lack of speed. But with anything above 1.5 million bits you hardly notice the increase; the difference between 2 megabits and 10 megabits is negligible. It is really surprising.
the rest is here.
and yeah, i'd rather have decent, ubiquitous, wireless too.
_______________________________________________
...vividly encapsulates that post-Watergate/pre-punk/coked-up moment when you could trust no one, least of all yourself.
OTOH those 100:1 ratio losless compression ideas are not sound, there are strong reasons to believe that, that is impossible. Promoters have no partially successful product, say, that can compress all files under 1MB with average compression of 100:1 but fail with larger files.
I can't judge whether Rainmaker's idea is more like transmeta's dynamic compiling+low power cpu or I-forgot-who's multidimensional snake oil. But it can't be possibly like both.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
RAIN MAN TECHNOLOGIES
'500 Channel wavelets... Go back to cable... buy this stuff... Who's on first... "
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I think this company got a wonderfull PR department and all their claims about the advantages of wavelets are a big myths. So don't hope to get this wonderfull chips to soon in the future :-). It is possible to prove mathematically that wavelets offer no advantages in linear timeinvariant (LTI) channels.
Technically you are right. The ISP owns the wires. However, imagine that the phone company would not allow usage of modems on their lines. Actually, you don't have to imagine. At one time ATT allowed only ATT approved equipment attached to their phone network. If ATT's monopoly was not broken up, there would be no Internet.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
If there's a bandwidth glut, you would think that bandwidth would be getting steadily cheaper. This does not seem to be the case. Therefore I find your argument of a glut unconvincing or at least unsupported.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
You mean like THIS?
So now how exactly are we going to get 500 HDTV channels when we can't even get 500 LOW Definition channels, and the ones we have are full of mostly crap?
Someone needs to re-evaluate the problem.
Frist of all this article is simply bulllshit , seems like a SEC fake site. But feels good to think about it.
:)
Let's day we do get 1-10Gbit in our homes. Then why would we the the ISP to root all the trafic ?
Couldn't we decentralise the network ? (more then it is today) Bypassing the cable company and routing the traffic ourselves ?
For exemple : 10 users get cable company A sevice and cable company B service here's your 100 Gbit gateway, repeat this and you'll get a new inet.
I mean with this kind of tech let's nationalise the fiber network and make a consistent architechture to let envreyone enjoy their bandwidh without the (*$@(* cable company.
Moreover with 1-10 Gbit in your house it's likely that prices of bandwidh will fall dramaticly. Didn't he say that this tech could be user on any phy network ? So your ISP gets the same augmented amount of band you do ! (the only problem beeing hudge switching costs)
It's fun to dream
But it would be much nicer to nationalise the network infrastructure. (don't fear for big brother he's got much better chances of comming up on AOL AT&T , UUNET )
Do what you wilt shall be the whole of the law Love is the law, love under will Capital drives the will of mankind
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.
Slashdot looks deep within my heart and assigns me a number based on the order in which I join
But the should still get a Cringley icon. I recently suggested photos having to do with Dave Letterman and got modded down for it. Because of that evil moderation I won't reproduce the links of the photos, but those willing to do the research will find that they are strangely similar. Dave and "Robert" that is. We don't know his real name do we? Could it be ...... Letterman???? Perhaps twins separated at birth?
Lasers Controlled Games!
1 GB/s not so spetacular?!?!
Damn, my *home* network runs at 10mbps. 1Gb/s internet sounds like a dream. but, I live in the woods. probably pretty common there in USA, no?
``If a program can't rewrite its own code, what good is it?'' - Mel
Um, the local loop alone for a t1 is in the $300's since you still have to get it from Pac Bell (We are talking residential here - no competition like there is in the heavy business areas where all the fiber companies have pipe under the street.) Those $450 T1's don't include the local loop, and invariably are actually burstable circuits meaning that you get a T1, but if you use it alot, your bill is more like $1500, not $450.
Satellite has WAY too much latency for telecommuting. 3 seconds is intollerable. It only works well for the casual web sufer. 400K is still slow in my book as well. Satellite is like cablemodems - you share bandwidth and the bandwidth is VERY limited. Not a good long-term solution (install is quite expensive too. Check directpc.com for prices.)
Note that most T1's are provisioned with sdsl ALREADY and have been for years. That doesn't mean that you will get sdsl for adsl prices. sdsl is very much like frame relay - you pay for the bandwidth you want. A full circuit is provisioned and is rate capped. Note that sdsl as "SDSL" is NOT AVAILABLE due to the same distance problem. Try and order it and you will know. Basically, even though they CAN use repeaters, they won't use them unless you order the line as a T1, and then pay T1 rates.
Note that I have talked to a few neighbors about sharing a T1 or 3 (I have a cisco router with 4 T1 ports sitting in my garage already) and doing the 802.11b thing, but it's still pretty expensive unless I can get 20 - 40 people to share the costs which is hard to do. Equipment costs are still high to get that many people online. THe problem with this is that you have the issue of the person with the T1 moving - then what?
So ROFLMAO all you want - until you REALLY do ALL the research and find out ALL the issues and true costs and availablity, you don't have a clue.
Note that most companies LIE about availability. You only know when you order it and they tell you "Oh. I guess it's not available to you. Would you like our dial-up service?"
Pac Bell is NOT Bell Atlantic, Qwest, or any other company. They don't offer the same services. When they do, it's not at the same price.
BTW, my circuit IS business class, and business class is ALWAYS more expensive which is why my IDSL 144K line is $120.
How does one amplify these wavelets without distorting them with group delay and linearity problems?
Seems to me that nobody has put much thought as to how this stuff ought to scale up. Oh yeah, I forgot, this stuff was supposed to ride on existing infrastructure. Riiiiight.
Don't throw your money at these guys yet; I smell some half baked bullshit here.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
Your troll would be more interesting if it were right. Check the title of this story.