On Tue, 29 May 2007, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I really, really wish they would actually do GigE to each house instead of the infernal DSL or Cable modem. I met a youg man who used to be a VP at AT&T and he did a study about bringing GigE to each house. It turned out to be cheap to do and AT&T had a good start at the infrastructure to handle that kind of bandwidth. So he wrote up the report, talked it over with some people and of course it was killed. I'm beginning to think that I should wear a vertically gray striped shirt with a number of the back as part of the "Bandwidth Gulag" that the communications have put us in. We suffer and they laugh.
Don't be so pessimistic. It will happen, because all the major players want to be first and biggest to score the "triple play" -- delivery of phone, internet and media to the household. Because data is delivered in bursts -- it isn't enough to deliver a movie at playing speed (on umpty channels they need to be able to deliver a MOVIE that you can watch or not watch until later in a few seconds -- they'll get to gigabits to the household in -- at a guess, three to five more years (anybody with better numbers?). At least in some cities, towns, venues. They're running fiber down the country road that leads past my neighborhood as I type this -- I've been watching them bury fiber throughout Durham for the last three or four years. The phone company isn't even bothering to upgrade its DSL equipment (which is totally obsolete) because I'm pretty sure that they're never going to replace it. It won't happen all at once because it is expensive, it may make a stop or two at 1.5 Mbps or 45 Mbps along the way, but it won't be that long now. As you say, once the fiber is there (even if it isn't all the way to "the household") there isn't much point in being stingy.
At this rate we'll never see full streaming to the desktop. My only hope at this point is either Google will figure it out or perhaps Steve Jobs will force the communications knuckleheads to actually do the right thing (not that I'm a Jobs fan by any means). Or perhaps Jim Lux will develop a new high-speed downlink from satellites to get streaming video (maybe some kind of P2P cluster in space set up where you get feeds from multiple satellites). What the hell, I can dot my roof with small dishes if it means I can watch Grey's Anatomy when I want to.
No, I think that they'll have fiber running to households in decent numbers starting in maybe 2010. And whoever gets there first "wins". rgb
Jeffrgb BTW, if I sent you my google string, you'd have to send me the recipe for your ribs, right? Although all the spoilsports on the list have fixed it up so that there's no point anymore...Well, I can perhaps send you the recipe, but we have to be careful so that the Kanasas Cit Barbecue Masters don't come looking for me. I see those guys that lokk the "Da Bears" fan club from the old SNL routines tracking me down.
-- Robert G. Brown http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/ Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305 Durham, N.C. 27708-0305 Phone: 1-919-660-2567 Fax: 919-660-2525 email:[EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
