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Next-Gen Broadband Primer
Aaron writes "Broadband Reports has a good read on the real deal behind next generation broadband deployments. In four years: half all Verizon DSL users should have fiber, half of all SBC subscribers should have 10-20Mbps DSL, and one tenth of all BellSouth customers should have 50Mbps DSL. At the same time cable companies should begin deploying DOCSIS 3.0 technology in 2006, eventually bringing 100Mbps speeds to end users."
BBR: While we're only starting to see DOCSIS 2.0 deployment, and the higher speeds it can bring (Adelphia & Cox 15Mbps), DOCSIS 3.0 should only be a few years behind. Do you see the cable industry having any trouble keeping up with these bell plans?
DB: The "15 meg" speeds Cox is offering where they compete with Verizon fiber are mostly advertising. It's really 38 meg shared among 100 or so users, the same speed as the current services advertised at as 3 and 7 meg. That's too much oversubscription to deliver 15 meg most of the time, if even 5 or 10 people are downloading on the node. To regularly get past today's 5 meg or so, you need to bond more channels, which is what DOCSIS 3.0 offers.
DOCSIS 3.0 is real, mostly agreed, and the key vendors have the details and are making equipment for 2006. It's a shared 160/120 or higher, easily expandable to a shared gigabit. Real speeds to users will often be 20-50 megabits. It was developed to compete with higher speed DSL in Asia. Early in 2005, the U.S. cable companies realized Verizon was serious about
fiber, and pushed CableLabs and suppliers (Cisco, Motorola, Arris, Broadcom) to get DOCSIS 3.0 ready for the U.S. ASAP, and 2006 is realistic
with some pricey gear.
I will believe it when I see it. Depending on your home area, overselling of bandwidth can be a real problem. I have seen both DSL and Cable
providers routinely claiming speeds "up to". 5mpbs but real speeds are usually in the 3mbps range. Of course, the cable/DSL providers claim that "few sites allow you to take full advantage of your maximum bandwidth", which is a pile of horseshit, plain and simple. 92% of their userbase will believe that while the 8% that don't the broadband companies don't
want on their networks anyway.
While highspeed connections are great, I want to know where this backend bandwidth is coming from and who's paying for it? T3+ downstream speeds for only a tiny fraction of the real cost? I will be that 30+ megabits is nothing more than a pipe dream/marketing ploy. The real speeds we will be seeing are in the 10 to 15 range for "premium" members and will likely come with heavy "unadvertised". monthly caps. They want you to see webpages come up lightning fast (which happens at 1mbit) but they don't want you to actually see 10GB of torrents come in a day. They will still be catering to the 92% of their userbase that is the "mom and pop e-mail
and CNN checkers". The people who would really be excited about paying higher fees and getting the advantages of the massive bandwidth will end up with ToS violation warnings and slower than expected speeds.
We'll continue to make do with 50K/sec. upload speeds.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
With these speeds and wide accessibility, why is Google investing in Broadband over Powerline technology?
Judging by the tiny speed increases for broadband over the last few years, I'll believe this when it comes to fruition, which probably won't be for another 10 years or more.
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
... as they throw their shareholders money at broadband-over-power-line providers who are busy trying to force the 60-Hz powerline distribution network to carry broadband signals on the order of 1 MBPS.
For the money they are spending, the power companies could run fiber, scale their speeds up in the future to compete with these higher-speed providers, and not pollute the entire HF spectrum. Instead, they are going to trash a very real natural resource and end up with a hopelessly-uncompetitive system even if it does work.
Google loads fast enough for me as it is. Make my internet cheaper in 4 years, then i'll be happy! ;)
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The question is: At what cost? I would not want my provider to shovel DSL [and associated costs] down my throat when I do not need all that speed. I only do email, slashdot and online banking on the internet. My current service which is cable restricted to twice the speed of dial-up is more that adequate.
I am not talking about Slashdotters who will put spinners on their Cable Modems and will overclock the cpu to the limit, but about ordinary people who still only use their computer to look at web pages and write email. Will 100Mbps provide 50x better experience than 2Mbps? I would rather them lower the cost by at least by 50% that would be much better.
Older computers that run Windows 98 that a lot of people still use, probably can't even handle a consistent 100Mbps stream.
A long time ago in America, railroads used fluff pieces like this to justify to their investors that they needed more money to stay competitive.
Because everyone needs faster trains right? Well as history has shown, yes to a point in time when a disruptive technology comes along to do the job cheaper/better in one way or another.
Off-Topic:
I'd be interested to find some non-marketing stats on how many homes have computers in America and the breakdown of dialup/broadband.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Is there any consumer broadband provider out there who doesn't use the qualifier "up to" in advertising their speeds? DSL providers (in the past at least) were notorious for claiming that, but still throttling connections, while cable companies have often oversold their lines so that the theoretical limit is almost never likely to be hit, or even approached.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Has anyone considered the implications of a DDoS involving a zombie army of machines with 100 mbit uplinks? This could spell disaster for just about everybody except those with the absolute fattest pipes. It takes an awful lot of hosts to swamp an OC3 now, but that's with hosts that rarely have a half megabit uplink, if that. It would be frighteningly easy to swamp the heavy links with a few 100 mbit links.
That is, of course, unless the bigger pipes grow at a rate proportional to the smaller ones. That also assumes symmetrical links for the home connections. Oh the irony of a 100 mbit / 128 kbit connection.
It would be nice if more companies realized that the internet is not one-way communications, and that its real strength lies in allowing everyone to both create and share content. Of course, considering that Time Warner is a media company at its core, they have a bit of conflict of interest with providing lots of upstream bandwidth as long as they continue to fear file-sharing.
I'd love to be able to set up WebDAV or have streaming video from home to wherever I am. I can't do it because most providers (and all the providers in my area) don't have fast enough upstream speeds and don't allow servers
The justification of lack of server support is twofold. First it's that you shouldn't make money off of their service unless you overpay for a "business" connection. (Which is BS. Bandwidth is bandwidth.) The second is that you'll use up everyone else's bandwidth, which is also BS. If they can provide 100Mbps downstream, I'll take 50Mbps BOTH WAYS for the same price. Fair's fair, right?
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
The heck with download speeds, I want more upstream speed. I'm in an SBC area very close to a Remote Terminal, but in an older neighborhood with no alleys and lots of wooden fences which is unlikely to get fiber. Right now I get 512K up out of a possible (with regular ADSL technology) 640K. If they use VDSL, that can go as high as 2.3M up. I think I'll be happy if I can get 1.5M (esentially a full T1) up.
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"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Too bad the following "code" occurs:
10: Notice no bran muffin on sidewalk
20: Call Qwest wondering where your order is
30: Quest will claim the order is lost and that it's your fault
40: Quest will claim the new order has been entered
50: GOTO 10
Customers won't demand a huge increase in the growth rate, they'll assume growth will be similar to past growth rates.
Here's some dates for "home"-grade telecommunications common in the USA. If anyone has exact approval dates for modem standards, that would be useful.
1960s - 300 bps
Early/mid '80s - 1200
Mid'80s - 2400
Mid/late '80s - 9600
Around 1990 - 14,400 symmetric
Early/mid-1990s - 19.2, 22.8, 33.6
late-'90s - 53Kbps/down 33.6/up
2003 - 3MB/sec over Cable
2005 - 6MB/sec over Cable
From the days of 1200 being popular in the early/mid '80s to the days of 53K being popular in the late 1990s was about 15 years. In that time speeds went up 44x. That's about 5 and a half doublings. Moore's Law would suggest 10 doublings, so growth in the dialup era lagged. Hardware-based modems did get a lot cheaper though. I don't count "softmodems" because it's an apples-to-oranges comparison.
It's a bit too soon to tell what the growth rate will be with broadband, as we've been at it for less than 10 years in most areas. However, my cable maximum speed is only about 4x what it was at initial rollout 5-7 years ago, which indicates a doubling every 2.5-3.5 years. Copper-DSL rates haven't grown all that much - if you lived next to the central office when your telco first started offering DSL and you bought their top-tier package, you are probably still getting similar speeds, on the order of 1-2Mb/sec. However, more customers are provisioned for higher grades of service than 10 years ago, thanks to more fiber-to-the-neighborhood or similar in-the-field infrastructure improvements. Both cable and DSL subscribers are paying a lot less than they were though.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Remember that often, the company that produces movies/tv content, is the same company that delivers it to your home via cable tv/interet. This company has no interest in allowing you to compete with them in the content production business.