 espaethDigital PlumberPremium,MVM
join:2001-04-21
Minneapolis, MN
kudos:2
 ·Clear Wireless
| reply to axiomatic
Re: It is about making money said by axiomatic:I don't know. I'm still very skeptical. How is it that 15 years back they had no problems paying for these (MSRP $89,500) cards when TW was offering "unlimited" bandwidth for $29.99? The network scaling is completely different now. If you go skim a history of DOCSIS provisioning they used to split the downstream fiber runs to feed multiple nodes. At the time of initial deployment a single downstream channel of the CMTS would have a span of 4000+ homes passed; today that number is down closer to 400 or less homes passed. That's been part of the reason for reasonable cost expansion up to date -- they could just take areas that were sharing a downstream fiber port, split them to each have their own fiber port and essentially double the bandwidth provided. Now they're starting to get down to the point where many upgrades involve trenching new fiber and inserting nodes in existing coax spans.
said by axiomatic:Yet now with a much speedier DOCSIS 2.0 network and not that many more customers in a given area that they had before they need more money to upgrade their network. And let me be more specific, they need to speed up their network yet imply caps at the same time (counterproductive reasons?) to make ends meet? Yes yes, streaming media, downloading movies, bittorrent blah blah blah. With traditional network applications, increasing access speeds has the paradoxical effect of actually reducing network congestion. Networks are statistically oversubscribed in 2 dimensions: bandwidth (capacity) and time.
Say I want to download a Linux ISO to burn and install on a machine at my house. If my access speed to get that ISO is doubled I am about get it in less time. I don't download it a second time just because I can get it faster -- I get on and off the network faster (and then go and burn it to a CD / DVD and work on the install after I have it). Since I reduce my total time of high impact to the network, the statistical likelihood that my heavy usage will overlap with that of my neighbor's is reduced.
Clearly streaming and constant network use applications like P2P change that model, which is why this is becoming such a big deal with ISPs over the last few years.
said by axiomatic:I bet traffic could be seriously reduced if cable and telcos embraced bittorrent and "localized" more content and let the content be more dynamic it hosting itself locally to neighborhoods instead of downloading the media (again) from the originating host server. The point of contention is from your house to the ISP's core network. Anything beyond that point is built out using commodity Ethernet access with extremely favorable price points. It's the more restrictive and expensive DOCSIS / xDSL technologies that become a problem for expansion.
said by axiomatic:The public has spoken, VOD comes with too many "shackles" for most people. The cable companies need to wake up to this fact and embrace the change. And this is only one example of change, there are many more. It may indeed be the case that IP network-based VoD will be the winning technology for delivery of that content. If so, it's going to drastically change the network provisioning model that most ISPs are using and will significantly drop the oversubscription ratios. Keep in mind that it's oversubscription that keeps your prices what they are today: on a 100:1 ratio they can use the revenue from 100 users for every 1 unit of increase in capacity. If that gets down to something like 20:1, and the price of each unit of expansion doesn't reduce by 80% at the same time, then prices are going to need to go up to continue to support that growth. |
