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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.
Rural America is fun fun fun.
I guess it really is time buy stock in the adult entertainment industry... mainly web sites ;)
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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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.
Now, what about latency and QoS?
And there was way too much mention of IPTV and you-know-who, with their "the future may run through us alone" attitude, in that article for it to be palatable.
One little mention of broadband over the power lines (BPL)?
Interesting since Google just made a huge investment in it.
Execute? [Y/N] _
...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.
And what will Qwest customers get?
Why, they get the shaft!
Qwests idea of fiber to the curb is to leave a bran muffin on your sidewalk every day for just $50 a month.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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
end users always seem to not be able to understnad this. There's only "cost" with a DS3/OC-3 because you're leasing it from someone else. These big ISP's own their own pipes, then have peering agreements with other providers. They don't have to "buy" a DS-3, they only have to slap some hardware on either end of their fiber to make it a faster pipe. It doesn't cost them "more" to up end-user speed unless they're breaking peering agreements, which isn't likely.
And the cable companies will still only give you 32kb of upstream.
what sig?
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.
Be thankful that you even have DSL. Real rural Americans have no broadband options available at all. To us, hopping in the car, going into work, downloading to CD/Flash, and driving back home is the closest we get to broadband.
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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What I'd like to see is better utilization of bandwidth within the cable/DSL network infrastructure. It costs cable/DSL providers MUCH less to provide high speed connections between customers in the same local topology.
If you had 100Mb/s to everybody within your local area it would make things like high speed videoconferencing or sharing of high bandwidth content between friends and family VERY fast.
Problem is that current caps on cable/DSL lines dont' descriminate between transfers between two people on the same cable/fiber segment and going out beyond the border router and down that T3/OC-3 or whatever out to the commercial internet up provider. As a result you are capped at communicating with the person accross the street when you really could communicate with them at blazing speeds.
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.
It would be nice if they put 100Mbit to the end user -- but my personal experience with SBC and Verizon warns me to not believe all the hype. They regularly throttle connections -- and hosting any kind of service is typically a NO-NO. Thus they lost me as a customer (both residential and business grade).
:)
... at home no less. They're towers used to be at 45Mbit and were since upgraded to 100Mbit (or better I believe) with the option to upgrade my antenna coming next month (to 45Mbit -- at my expense for the equipment, but I *own* it then :).
:).
:). I can think of the last time my Internet went down -- it was about a week ago with golf ball sized hail falling from the sky. I was out for I believe 3 minutes, probably while a bunch of routers had to re-sync for whatever reason. Previous to that I can't remember.
:]. Of course there is the cell phone -- and honestly it is in my head to go for the cell in an emergency. If both VoIP and cell fail then there may be bigger issues at hand -- and running down the street naked yelling "FIRE!, FIRE!" will certainly bring help. :)
The sad thing is that they're just _now_ getting to this. I've had 10Mbit (symmetrical) for many, many years now ($50/mo) through a wireless connection. Yes, that is a solid 10Mbit and I regularly see 800-900K/sec (up or down) if the remote site can handle it. A good test has always been downloading something from Apple.
Yeah, I said upload. My ISP has no issue with me hosting my own website, email server, heck camera video feeds too
Why are the bells lagging to badly? Sure, the wireless connection (being shared) doesn't *always* give 100% throughput as many others may be tapping it hard at the same time; 8pm isn't a good download time, but gaming isn't a issue... (~10-12 ping on Quake or better -- yeah, that's me you love to hate
I will say that it is rock solid enough to have taken the POTS then ISDN line away from the Bells too -- all VoIP over here (through the ISP no less
Yes, 911 works as expected [tested, thank you
In four years: half all Verizon DSL users should have fiber
It seems high speed internet is causing a sharp increase in incontinence.
While its not being offered on their web site, depending on where you live, you can get 7M down / 1M up (technically 876k) speeds for 50$ a month. For me, it was only 10$ more than my 1.5M service. Mind you, its a basic service. No email, no newsgroups, no web hosting.
While 7M speeds arnt as good as the fiber service, its much better than what Comcast is offering in Seattle, which I believe is 4 meg down and 40k up for 45$ a month.
Call them up.
Read this 1999 article about SBC's 'Project Pronto'. " According to SBC, when the expanded deployment program is completed [in three years] customers will be able to receive minimum downstream connection speedsof 1.5 megabits per second, with more than 60 percent eligible to receive guaranteed speeds of 6 megabits a second." Right.
SBC's new "Project Lightspeed" isn't about the Internet at all. It's just cable TV, implemented using Windows Media 9 over DSL using Scientific-Atlanta set-top boxes. The system doesn't use the Internet at all. It has its own infrastructure, which is a Microsoft-implemented multicast implementation.
It's not about Internet access at all. All you can get is what they want to send you. Lightspeed will block access to Internet video.
What are ordinary people going to do with 100Mpbs next year that they have such a difficulty doing now?
...
Older computers that run Windows 98 that a lot of people still use, probably can't even handle a consistent 100Mbps stream.
You're missing the point (as is probably most everyone else here) on why the TelCos are doing this buildout. Once they hit 25 Mbps, they can start offering full quality HDTV service over the lines and compete with cable like never before. They will be able to supply Phone, Internet and Video on one service. That is their main reason. 20 Mbps for TV, 5 mbps for internet and ~11Kb for phone. If they really want to have fun, they can start doing Video Phones on their networks for about 1Mbit total.
Chanel Changing times for the TV will be a little bit longer than with DTV, but that is because it is using the multicast on the network and has to tell the router/central server to send it the bits. However, this will mean a third competitor in the Cable/Satelite market. It will also mean a second proper competitor in the broadband market.
Once they get above 25Mbps, then they can start increasing the quality of the TV they offer. 15-20 Mbps is really the minimum you need for HDTV. ~45 Mbps will pretty much garuntee you great quality no matter what is on the screen.
One final comment on the prices of OC-3s. The TelCos are generally some of the companies that own various backbones that the internet here in the US is made of. They can charge themselves whatever they want for access.
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They already have this!/ index.html
http://bbpromo.yahoo.co.jp/promotion/adsl/regular
I think it equates to around $40/month for the 50mbps connection. Doubt we'll ever get that good of a deal here.
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.