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Cisco Patents the Triple Play
Aditi.Tuteja writes, "Cisco was recently granted a patent on a 'system and method for providing integrated voice, video and data to customer premises over a single network.' Sound a lot like 'triple play?' Yes it is. The patent, which was filed back in 2000, describes a system that would allow consumers to receive all of their home services through one service provider instead of two or three. The patent's wording seems broad enough to cover nearly all existing implementations of triple play, and some are worried that Cisco will try to wield the newly granted patent against such providers as AT&T and Comcast. If such a thing were to happen, progress on AT&T's Project Lightspeed could slow even more."
Insightful?
Who *didn't* think we were going to get all our services over one wire once digital bandwidth became great enough?
It's all just data. They might as well have patented a "novel method" for sending HTTP, FTP and SMTP data over the same wire.
The absurdity of this patent is mind boggling. All a network does is move data. Voice and video may be encoded as data, but this has absolutely nothing to do with the network.
Why don't I just patent moving web pages over networks. Or, moving mp3s over networks. (Now there's an idea for the RIAA...) Just how obvious does something need to be for the folks at the patent office? Moving DATA over a NETWORK? How novel...
This just goes to show that everything should be encrypted. Only then can fairness, and the end-end nature of the Internet be restored. As soon as the ISP's can peek at your data, you may as well bend over.
I prefer to call it "Ménage à trois". :)
Instead of 3 concurrent streams, what about a single datastream.
We call that the network layer.
Converter box or software separates the single datastream back into the 3 (or more) original feeds.
And that would be the transport layer.