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#12 A Broad & Deep Need For Speed | ||
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The first thing to remember: broadband is just another distribution method. Second thing to remember: e-Business is just business. Whether it’s DAM (digital asset management), VPNs, or entertainment, the internet is changing the first world and broadband is changing the ’net, but not in as fundamental way as some would think. The telegraph started us on this instant communication road and broadband is just a natural extension. In 1992, some renegades from The Ranch started EDnet, the grandpa of virtual tie line services. They used ISDN, the only reasonably priced digital service available from the telcos at that time. ISDN was too costly for widespread adoption and never made significant inroads here in the US. A basic business SDSL account provides 12 times the bandwidth of a similarly priced ISDN account. A single channel of raw 48/24 requires 1.152 Mbps, and two channels of 44.1/16 sucks up 1.4112 Mbps. With a symmetrical, 1.5 Mbps, always–on SDSL connection, phoning in your part doesn’t seem so lame. The investors of Rocket Network are trembling with anticipation. Let’s talk about the current technologies…Right now, symmetrical broadband access to the ’net is really valuable only to select businesses, such as multinationals with far flung satellite offices. Media moguls, like ourselves, are a small but often motivated group that could also benefit from broadband services. Trouble is, most of us don’t get paid enough to afford industrial strength versions. The Contenders… Cable: In some outlets, cable is the only way you can get broadband service. Several cable providers are starting to aggressively price their services, targeting corporate users in addition to the home accounts that we’ve all heard about. Like the dangling participle on my previous sentence, broadband via cable has one glaring problem—the dreaded shared bandwidth. With half a dozen subscribers in a neighborhood, life is good as the fixed bandwidth available is divvied up only a few ways. As more and more subscribers tap in, however, individual service degenerates as the aggregate bandwidth is sliced wafer thin. Just thing what video over IP would do! Wireless: My cell phone is a WAP–enabled device that works great as a digital phone, which isn’t saying much. It’s supposed to be “free and clear” but boy, can you hear the compression artifacts. Anyway, it has a web minibrowser, which I never use due to two factors: exorbitant cost and absurd display. Imagine getting deeply involved with the wireless internet when your staring at a screen the size of a brazil nut. That about sums up the current state of wireless broadband, costly and quirky. Currently, there is practical broadband wireless, and it comes in two distinct flavors. So called fixed wireless applications, where the transceivers are nailed down, are projected to be a high growth area of broadband services. One approach has targeted MANs or metro area networks, where fat connections between buildings in a campus setting are desired but digging up the lawn to plant some fiber isn’t. The other approach is more akin to some current digital TV services: use a satellite. These services, aimed at the over 20 million folks outside the reach of fibre, cable or copper, will be challenged by rural electric utilities that will offer AC power and broadband into your house over the same wire. G3 or third generation wireless protocols promise seemingly infinite bandwidth anywhere. In reality, migration costs will limit adoption to those who really need such services. Once better standards emerge and consumer products mature, wireless delivery will become another specialized player in the overall information dissemination fabric. DSL: DSL is the winner in the middle time frame, with reasonable cost for both provider and consumer as long as you’re physically close to your local telco switch. A significant feature of all business DSL accounts is a static IP address. This means that your company has a permanent address on the Web, which in turn means you can host an ftp or web site in–house. The content: data, it’s all data. Just as networked storage will someday all be transported over IP, I’ll hazard a guess that even a nice reuben sandwich will someday be delivered via IP packets. Just kidding, though it seems that way at times. Eventually, IP traffic will carry everything, both block and file–based data, around the world. The emerging 10Gigabit Ethernet standard is shaping up as the bridge between LANs and MAN/WANs. 10GigE explicitly incorporates QoS (Quality of Service), a feature not inherent in the PSTN network, and vital to the continued growth of broadband. Interestingly, general adoption of 10GigE should foreshadow the eventual retirement of reliable but expensive ATM, which has been the only way to provide WANs and MANs with guaranteed QoS. The catalyst for widespread adoption may not be, gasp, surround audio but good ol’ low bandwidth voice communication. Since disagreements between record companies and CE manufacturers continue to impede the development of a digital content protection standard, music downloads won’t fill up anyone’s bank account anytime soon. Instead, everybody’s frantically vying for a piece of the VoIP action, hoping to cash in on the publics perception of the ’net as a place to go for anything cheap. And money is really the gating factor for broadband. Though fibre to the home will eventually win the war, the required changes to the infrastructure, whether it’s a passel of new photonic DWDM switches at the local exchange, or licenses for wireless spectrum from the government, are horribly expensive. Who’s going to bear those costs? If you said “the end user,”me thinks you’d be right. Sidebar – Hold on, more networking jargon coming your way…
by Oliver Masciarotte
Bio – OMas is a provider of professional services to the content creation community. More nerdy reading on this and other topics are always waiting for you at http://seneschal.net. Related Links - Ancillary Info A column by TV Technology’s Peter Prunty about how voice coexists with data under DSL | ||
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