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Students Use 802.11g To Save Cable Industry
LiquidFun writes "Business undergraduates at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business have written an e-business case for one of their case competitions that describes how to use 802.11g wireless technology to distribute cable content, both interactive and broadcast, throughout the home. They mention features like video-on-demand, cable gaming, etc. and even provide enough of the technical specifications necessary to start believing that this could work. They even make available their PowerPoint presentation that they presented to judges from both Cisco & Deloitte Consulting. I'd say a pretty good job for third-year undergrads."
The 'future of cable' seems pretty neat, but with the people currently in charge, how long would it take before it's regulated and the consumer products have encryption (or some other way to keep you out and keep them in control) built-in?
"The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."
you have to write a case study to do that? isn't that like general knowledge?
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
I'm inherently distrustful of the ability of Berkeley students to grasp the hard realities of the real-world when it comes to business. I went to a less idealistic (and more politically/culturally moderate) business school, and I didn't grasp them well enough until I had a few years of reality under my belt. The technology might all be there, but that's rarely ever been the problem with any business.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
So now I dont need to go out to the switchbox or build a complicated cable descrambler, just airsnort and get to work on cracking encryption ^_^
How is this news? There are hundreds of other obvious cases just like this made for business classes. There's nothing significantly cool about this one.
If you think the Haas School of Business is politically/culturally/ideology wise in any way similar to the majority of the other departments on campus, sorry, it's not.
Most of the (undergrads & grads) are more concerned about landing a job at Goldman Sachs or McKinsey than righting any worldly injustices. Not to say that the majority of the undergrads are smarter than students in other departments (I got a minor there 3 years ago), but they'll work their ass off to impress the right people.
The Ethnic Studies department on the other hand could be counted on to explain how 11g is the tool of the white devil to keep the gay-american-indian-married-to-latinos movement in check by promoting cancer with CIA/FBI/NSA funding.
Ignoring when some idiot contractor decides to dig through the wire (which usually is not either the cable or phone companies fault), when is the last time you picked up your phone and didn't get dial tone?
Now consider how often your cable goes out?
Personally, I can't recall when I last had to call the phone company, yet I find I am calling the cable company at least 6 times a year because either the cable is out or the reception so bad nothing works (and lets not even talk about the number of times the cable modem has no signal).
While the Internet being unaccessible for 30 minutes periodically is not the end of the world, being unable to dial 911 because you cable is acting up again does not sound like an acceptable risk merely to have 1 company provide all 3 services.
This project is a plan to incorporate the three primary uses of the existing nationwide cable network, voice, data and video, into one convenient and easy-to-use package that will satisfy most consumers' communication needs at a fair price.
Business school translator: turn cable internet into propriatory equivalent of cable TV and pay per minute phone service. Don't believe me? Read on.
# A better infrastructure in the future that will act as a stronger barrier to entry for new and existing competitors.
No competitors, self explanatory. I suppose they mean monopoly rape when they say "fair price".
Also built into the new digital cable box is a small camera which would allow for video conferencing, perhaps with other cable customers, over the cable network.
Ha Ha we will be seeing more of these clowns, I'm sure.
Phone service will also be delivered through the cable network. The existing cable network can easily accommodate the added bandwidth for several voice-data devices, such as telephones, which currently operates over an RJ-45 line. With a nationwide network, the cost of providing long distance phone calls for consumers is greatly reduced. Essentially, calls to anywhere inside the US would essentially be "local calls" as it would not cost anymore on the side of cable companies to offer the service. However, cable companies can still charge competitive rates for local and long distance calling.
What a grasp of technology they have. Voice over IP paid by the minute, just like the expensive antiquated system it will replace. Let's pay for infrastructure we don't have!
Oh yeah, they want to own internet gamming too. I wonder if they recomend only letting xbox connect? No, not that smart, they recomend developing IR joy sticks.
I love their mathematical proof of profit. Was a large business venture ever launched without such promisses? As Ikaos pointed out, a total media monopoly would make money. It's just funny to see them write it out they way they did without considering operating costs! The great power point using brains who thought this up would probably recomend M$/intel to hit the estimated cost of $650/house. Way to go guys.
Here's a clue stick: all of the above services are available now at no additional cost besides privately owned equipment. Figure out ways to offer these services without fucking your customers, who you so deridingly call "consumers" of the shit you would like to push.
PS, Star Office can save your M$ presentation as HTML and your .DOC paper in PDF or HTML so that anyone can look at it and you won't have to rewrite your work in Front Page. It's cheaper than all that monopoly priced Micro$oft stuff too.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Packet loss rates for 802.11 can become atrocious when you do something as simple as close a door. It might not be so great if every TV in the house needed line-of-sight to the 802.11 transmitter to get decent picture quality.
Problem 1: UDP and Congestion
One of the benefits of using a protocol like TCP is that congestion control can (and has been) added in. UDP, on the other hand, has no means of congestion control. The morale of the story is that all programs in your entire neighborhood using TCP could grind to a halt if your neighbor decides to use all 3 of his TVs at the same time.
Problem 2: Privacy
So, now anyone with a 802.11-equipped laptop and a packet sniffer can figure out what I'm watching? Even if it's "encrypted" as they say it is, what algorithms are they using? How are they handling key distribution?
Problem 3: Security/Theft
"Security is taken into account to ensure that no bandwidth that consumers pay for is stolen. The signal broadcasted by the wireless router to all devices would be encrypted to the receiver. Each receiver would have a unique identification address that associates it with a specific receiver. Therefore, if one receiver is reported missing by a customer, that receiver is able to be deactivated before the cable company replaces it. For computers, a closed Access point could easily be setup to ensure that data bandwidth is not misappropriated. This security system makes certain that only paying customers have access to appropriate content."
What in God's name does the above mean? Once the signal is out over wireless, anyone can grab it. And, once it's over ip, you can tunnel it to any of your neighbors.
Also, what if someone packet spoofs the video server with your address to start sending a new channel? How could you even detect that this was happening? Or, if someone wants to DoS you, they can just spoof a request for a whole bunch of channels.
Some of these problems are sovable, but there is not nearly enough "technical detail."
Blatant Fallacy: Cable Gaming
Move all the processing to the server and just broadcast the image? In the current model, server and client exchange minimal information about the state of the world in very compact formats. In their model, the client sends minimal information and server sends streaming video! This is hardly more efficient, especially since the cable company now has to have a gaming-class computer sitting in their office for every single customer who wants to play games at the same time! Oh, and what about lag? Do you really want to wait 100ms-1s for the command to be sent, processed and sent back? The lag would be horrific. I'm afraid that with current prices and technology, distributing tasks like graphics rendering are cheaper.
Grar, I can't stand these guys who dream up this crap and then pretend its possible.
Um, did you even read the article? It talks all about End User marketability, specifically for home users with broadband. I don't know where you get the campuses thought from, cept maybe because a bunch of college students came up with this idea. Personally, I think that this is just the kind of killer-app that makes broadband viable. I especially like the idea of video-streams-on-demand. An application like this might also make a fiber-to-home product viable, along with a later-generation wireless technology. As was said before, very impressive from a bunch of college students.
There's a cable company that's doing the same.
I'm sure either could bundle gaming and/or a 801.11g wireless access point if they felt like it.
However, they didn't ask the most important question, why do people pick DSL over cablemodem when both are available in the same area, and the more technically knowledgable they are, the more likely they are to pick DSL?
The cable company is too interested in telling people what we can and can't do with our bandwidth, and even that restricted-use bandwidth is shared between all the cablemodem users in a neighborhood, putting users at the mercy of their neighbors when trying to get the download speed one is paying for.
The business model discussed here is one I'd be even less likely to buy as an end user than the current one.
The other obvious point is. . . while I can imagine using broadband for VoIP local toll and LD calling and probably will when I am in an area where DSL is available, I can't imagine it as my only telephone access, if the cable breaks down and takes my phone out with it, just how am I going to report the problem to the cable company?
Cable is less reliable than phones are and putting all my electronic communication ability in one basket doesn't really appeal to me.
Not bad for a bunch of college students, I guess, but while I could imagine this getting funded and those kids becoming the new suits at a new startup, one would hope that VCs have more sense now.
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