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Planet Broadband
When I first received the book, my initial thoughts were focused on the cable Internet environment, but the book addresses the DSL side as well. This small book of 140 pages, including index, not only explains how the concept of broadband communication evolved, but also delves into possible directions it may head.
This book is clearly a history of how the concept of broadband was developed and the growth of the Internet that it has led to, not a how-to-guide suited to setting up broadband service. I can foresee future generations of children reading this book in a college course on Information Technology. When one considers that only three to five percent of the American public use any form of broadband services, the growth potential presented is unbelievable.
For me, a detail-oriented reader, it took about eight hours to read Planet Broadband. That may seem slow, but considering the topic and the scope of events occurring within the world of telecommunications, it's better than I expected. As I read this book, I would pause from time to time and comment to myself on how Yassini's predictions and descriptions of possibilities offered by broadband access are already manifesting themselves. Some of the concepts presented include virtual training (which many universities are now offering) and virtual meetings with individuals all around the world. While Yassini does point out that not everything is available on demand in this day and age, in time we will witness more and more bandwidth-heavy services that are.
Yassini points out the concept of being able to check the items in the refrigerator from work, or have the washing machine place a service call to the manufacture before you know there is a problem. These are features of a true broadband planet -- and perhaps time our children and their children will not know a world where analog modems are still used to connect to the internet. But as you read, you realize that while today is the birth of broadband, this book is more the introduction to tomorrow's internet. To prove the point that Planet Broadband is an introduction, my baby-boomer mother (who works in the cable industry in customer service) took the book from me and read it cover to cover one day and told me 'This is where we are going.' If a 50+ year old parent can see it, we know that the world will be there some day.
Near the end of the book, Yassini focuses on telecommuting and a comparison of that to working at the office. While he clearly points out that telecommuting is not for everyone or all the time, it has productivity advantages and will only grow with time. I think one of his best examples is in Chapter 6, where he recalls an MCI commercial depicting a woman working at home and changing a presentation on the fly for clients and co-workers halfway across the country. That image is an example of how the world has changed thanks to the advances of broadband.
This book is not designed for the IT world, but for the general public. Just the same, I would recommend this as an excellent addition to anyone's library and especially to individuals in the information technology community. For management or others it is an excellent resource to justify a telecommuting policy or practice, or a good reason why they should upgrade from the modem and narrow band to the world of high-speed Internet.
You can purchase Planet Broadband from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews. To see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Do we really need an entire book dedicated to the roots of a term like "Broadband?
The Bangels, They are a broad band, right?
you mean like a group of chicks?
Here in Brazil there are companies providing 128/64 DSL services and calling it "broadband".
This book is not designed for the IT world, but for the general public
/. if it is for general public? This is supposed to be for us geeks/nerds.
Seriously. Why is this posted on
When one considers that only three to five percent of the American public use any form of broadband services, the growth potential presented is unbelievable.
1996 called. They want their statistics back.
An effective signature identifies a particular user amongst a base of thousands.
"... a new book by Rouzbeh Yassini which answers the question of where the term 'broadband' originated ..."
Is it just me or does this sound like a great premise for, oh, say, a paragraph or two?
In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane. -Oscar Wilde
n/t
I'm shocked that it takes 130 pages to tell how the word "broadband" came about.
I don't think this one will sit on my coffee table!
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It is the title of a new book by Rouzbeh Yassini which answers the question of where the term 'broadband' originated and why is it used when discussing cable internet services."
Seems a little obvious to me. Even back in the days of modems, we used the term "bandwidth" to mean that "this much data fits in band during this time period". "Broadband" simply meant that we had a very wide (i.e. Broad) data width in band.
As for the author's "ideas" on what Broadband was supposed to mean, give it time. People are still getting used to having an always-on connection. It's going to take them awhile to adapt to the idea of plugging the bandwidth as a home utility rather than a feature of your computer. Which is actually a good thing, because the bandwidth doesn't quite yet exist to play true TV or Movies on demand. So this adjustment period gives us time to eat away at the problem by both creating better algorithms and lighting up some of our dark fibre.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I wish UK residential broadband was 1:1 rather than have to suffer this 25k upload speed even with a 2mb connection :(
Two Greek words: "broad", mneaning "a word", and "band", meaning "that has something to do with the internet."
ResidntGeek
People are still getting used to having an always-on connection. It's going to take them awhile to adapt to the idea of plugging the bandwidth as a home utility rather than a feature of your computer. As for the author's "ideas" on what Broadband was supposed to mean, give it time. This is actually a good thing, because the bandwidth doesn't quite yet exist to play true TV or Movies on demand. So this adjustment period gives us time to eat away at the problem by both creating better algorithms and lighting up some of our dark fibre.
Even back in the days of modems, we used the term "bandwidth" to mean that "this much data fits in band during this time period". "Broadband" simply meant that we had a very wide (i.e. Broad) data width in band. Seems a little obvious to me.
...it's a book dedicated to talking about a broadband connection.
Please excuse my rudeness, should I start snoring too loudly.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
some of the concepts presented include virtual training (which many universities are now offering) and virtual meetings with individuals all around the world
Wow, this guy is a true clairvoyant. I dont know where we would be if people like this man werent brilliant enough to come up with such UNUSUAL and CREATIVE ideas such as "Virtual Meetings".
Why stick up for big business?
Honestly who in the general public would want to read this. My guess is that it will just sit on a few college library shelve for a couple students over the next 30 years to look up a couple things in. What is the point of writing it?
Evolution or ID?
I support any book out there which entices people to use broadband. That is just that many more access points I will be able to leech off of.
The guy wrote a book to describe where broadband signaling came from?
It's passing different signals on different frequencies over the same wire -- multiplexing of sorts.
DSL is a broadband service - voice and data on different frequencies on the same wire. Cable is the same idea -- different frequencies carrying the different data.
Why does he need to write a book to describe something that's been around since as long as electrical signals have been?
dial-up
I remember when "Broadband" was used to refer to everything from a PRI to ISDN.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
I seriously doubt that the analong modem will go away anytime soon in favor of "broadband" devices. Much like everyone predicted the floppy would go away, here we are in 2004 still using them (although fewer people rely on them as each day goes by). There are people in remote areas that will probably never see a broadband provider in their rural neighborhood and they will rely on a 56K modem for their internet access. There will be a few people that may think that broadband isn't necessary because they only use the internet for email and the occasional stock quote, news, or whatever. There are 2 other factors that the providers themselves need to address before there is a more widespread broad band uptake: Price and Availability.
BB right now is too expensive for what it is. if the price of BB can come down to something more reasonable (ie $15 per month) then people would consider it over analog, but it's availability in all areas will keep that from becoming a reality. No matter how cheap it gets, if it's not in your area, you're stuck with a modem.
I think we'll see BB overtake analog in about 10 more years, but it'll be another 10 or so before we see the analog modem go away completely.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
An insignificant blue planet called Rigel 7, not so far from earth.
Wash that down with a cup of Java, which looks as though it has 10 year old chunks of crap floating around in it.
Hey this is fun!
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Does anybody really want the Washing Machine to call its own repairman? Ok, maybe if there was a new Washing Machine firmware update. But, repairmen are expensive and come at inconvenient times -- I don't want somebody trying to charge me $60 for a missed appointment that my Whirlpool made on my behalf. Heck, the thing's broken and who in their right mind lets a broken washer spend their money?
Then there's the idea of having the refrigerator keep track of how long things have been in the refrigerator: how does it know what's in there? Is it going to recognize the 3-day-old leftover lasagna or the jar of homemade jam? What happens when my little girl decides to stick her baby doll in there? I really want a fridge to tell me which shelf the mustard is on, not when I'm almost out of milk -- that I can figure out for myself.
Traditional household appliances are not good users of broadband networks. Now, if I can remotely program my TIVO to record Law & Order so I can download it and watch it later from my laptop, that sounds good.
Broadband - the final frontier.
These are the voyages of Microsoft Internet Explorer.
Her five-year mission to explore strange new worms,
to seek out new exploits,
to boldly go where no browser has gone before.
[/kirk voice]
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
This book is not designed for the IT world, but for the general public. For management or others it is an excellent resource to justify a telecommuting policy or practice... I agree: after 15 years of fulltime coding,, reading something like this is refreshing,, it lightly takes you back to when we dreamed about what it would be like having something more than a 2400, and all the cool things we can do with it. It's easy to get too focused and lose the ability to imagine the end users perspective. My two cents, i reckon it might just be worth reading it.
Broadband is basically referring to the encoding of information onto a carrier signal for transmission over a given medium. Say FM Modulation.
Baseband would be transmitting the data over a given medium, say Ethernet over copper/fiber without any carrier signal, just the raw data over the medium itself.
The term broadband was then later adopted in telecommunications lingo to mean broad bandwidth, or lots of bandwidth. Where to a telecommunications person from back in the day (or a purist), it would mean a communications method employing a modulated carrier to transmit the information.
I checked this out at FOLDOC, and got a simple definition in two short paragraphs. Unless the author thinks he needs to describe in great, redundant detail every service now used over broadband, I find it hard to see how he got past ten pages or so, even with a long section guessing what might be done with it in the future. I don't think I'm going to bother buying it.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
MediaOne was the company that really popularized the term "Broadband". They spent a lot of money on vague television ads circa 1997/98 that generated all this hype about what Broadband was going to mean to the world but without explaining what the heck it really was. This was around the time that they were spending megabucks upgrading the coaxial network for cable modem service, starting in and around Culver City, CA (where I now live).
They could have just said it was high speed internet but they didn't.
Part of the reason might have been that MediaOne was planning on offering all sorts of proprietary services through their stream besides just a raw internet connection, but that never really happened.
AT&T bought out MediaOne and became AT&T Broadband, etc....
It wasn't mentioned in the review or any of the followup postings that I could find, but Yassini could be considered to be the father of the cable modem. He was responsible for leading a team in the development of open standards and certification of the DOCSIS Cablemodem specifications.
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" -- Dr. Strangelove
Looks like broadband isn't for everyone - but wait, there's a rebuttal!
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
and they don't want it back
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I remember when there were two types of network cabling.. Baseband and Broadband... then one day Broadband just meant "fast."
http://www.hawknest.com/
http:://live.markiza.sk when she is visiting.
(need a reason to hate a mother in law? I had to load freaking media player 9 for her to watch it)
the faxt is, the bandwidth is there.. yer average tv has 300 scan lines? blown up across the entire tv? if you expand markiza to full screen, it looks like crap- pixellated and blocky... but at 320X240 or so, it's very detailed, only to small to see well..
it's not quite there to play video over broadband at the requirements of a computer monitors resolution, but I firmly think it exists at television resolution today...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Funny, I remember when "Broadband" was used to refer to anything that was not "Baseband", ie, anything that only used part of the available physical spectrum for transmission.
All's true that is mistrusted
Maybe in order to understand mankind, we have to look at the word itself: "Mank ind". Basically, it's made up of two separate words- "mank" and "ind". What do these words mean ? It's a mystery, and that's why so is mankind.