On Tue, Mar 13, 2007 at 03:45:07PM +0000, Chris L. Morrow wrote: > > > > On Tue, 13 Mar 2007, Roland Dobbins wrote: > > > > > > > On Mar 13, 2007, at 8:17 AM, Chris L. Morrow wrote: > > > > > what business drivers are there to put more bits on the wire to > > > the end user? > > > > BitTorrent. > > which uses all available bandwidth on the user link, and can/does play > nicely with other user apps... It's not a reason for $TELCO to want to add > more BW to your link though. > > I suppose what I was asking is: Is there a better/faster/cheaper > alternative to your 2 incumbant solutions $TELCO || $CABLECO ? > > If there were then I bet $TELCO || $CABLECO would drop prices and speed up > links... since there isn't I think we're all lucky we're not still using a > 110baud coupler modem :)
This is part of the "perfect storm" puzzle (basically,
"access monopolies are weakened or cease to exist"). See
http://www.1-4-5.net/~dmm/talks/apricot2007/perfect_storm
for the most recent incarnation of this stuff. Long story
short is that this (the whole situation with access
networks) is perhaps the most controversial/weakest part
of the story.
> > And on-demand DVR-type things which I believe will grow in
> > popularity. Of course, most of those are overlays which the SPs
> > themselves don't offer; when they wish to do so, it'll become an
> > issue, IMHO.
>
> again, these are user apps that depend on the higher BW available, they
> don't drive the business to change, really. It seems to me that currently
> the DVR/on-demand folks are basically walking the ledge hoping that as
> they bring new features the telco's/cableco's will play nice and add
> bandwidth to make these services 'work'... That might not last, there
> certainly is no real reason that $TELCO || $CABLECO would be driven to
> change, aside from 'goodness of their hearts' or 'hey maybe we want to
> increase BW so we can offer a spiffy DVR-ish thing to our customers and
> get more revenue on our flagging last-mile circuits?'
Its hard to say. There's a relatively new (well, last
Feb) paper by David Levinson and Andrew Odlyzko entitled
"Too expensive to meter: The influence of transaction
costs in transportation and communication" [0] that tries
to use economic theory and some historical perspective
(in particular, on the funding and congestion models for
roads) shed some light on this. Its worth reading as it
gives some insight as to where all of this may be going,
but as usual, its a cloudy crystal ball.
--dmm
[0] http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metering-expensive.pdf
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