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Networking IT Technology

Next-Gen Broadband Primer 274

Posted by Zonk from the faster-and-faster dept.
Aaron writes "Broadband Reports has a good read on the real deal behind next generation broadband deployments. In four years: half all Verizon DSL users should have fiber, half of all SBC subscribers should have 10-20Mbps DSL, and one tenth of all BellSouth customers should have 50Mbps DSL. At the same time cable companies should begin deploying DOCSIS 3.0 technology in 2006, eventually bringing 100Mbps speeds to end users."
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Next-Gen Broadband Primer More

Next-Gen Broadband Primer

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  • I'll believe when I see it... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by garcia ( 6573 ) * on Friday July 08, 2005 @12:43PM (#13014411)
    BBR: While we're only starting to see DOCSIS 2.0 deployment, and the higher speeds it can bring (Adelphia & Cox 15Mbps), DOCSIS 3.0 should only be a few years behind. Do you see the cable industry having any trouble keeping up with these bell plans?

    DB: The "15 meg" speeds Cox is offering where they compete with Verizon fiber are mostly advertising. It's really 38 meg shared among 100 or so users, the same speed as the current services advertised at as 3 and 7 meg. That's too much oversubscription to deliver 15 meg most of the time, if even 5 or 10 people are downloading on the node. To regularly get past today's 5 meg or so, you need to bond more channels, which is what DOCSIS 3.0 offers.

    DOCSIS 3.0 is real, mostly agreed, and the key vendors have the details and are making equipment for 2006. It's a shared 160/120 or higher, easily expandable to a shared gigabit. Real speeds to users will often be 20-50 megabits. It was developed to compete with higher speed DSL in Asia. Early in 2005, the U.S. cable companies realized Verizon was serious about
    fiber, and pushed CableLabs and suppliers (Cisco, Motorola, Arris, Broadcom) to get DOCSIS 3.0 ready for the U.S. ASAP, and 2006 is realistic
    with some pricey gear.

    I will believe it when I see it. Depending on your home area, overselling of bandwidth can be a real problem. I have seen both DSL and Cable
    providers routinely claiming speeds "up to". 5mpbs but real speeds are usually in the 3mbps range. Of course, the cable/DSL providers claim that "few sites allow you to take full advantage of your maximum bandwidth", which is a pile of horseshit, plain and simple. 92% of their userbase will believe that while the 8% that don't the broadband companies don't
    want on their networks anyway.

    While highspeed connections are great, I want to know where this backend bandwidth is coming from and who's paying for it? T3+ downstream speeds for only a tiny fraction of the real cost? I will be that 30+ megabits is nothing more than a pipe dream/marketing ploy. The real speeds we will be seeing are in the 10 to 15 range for "premium" members and will likely come with heavy "unadvertised". monthly caps. They want you to see webpages come up lightning fast (which happens at 1mbit) but they don't want you to actually see 10GB of torrents come in a day. They will still be catering to the 92% of their userbase that is the "mom and pop e-mail
    and CNN checkers". The people who would really be excited about paying higher fees and getting the advantages of the massive bandwidth will end up with ToS violation warnings and slower than expected speeds.
    • I want to know where this backend bandwidth is coming from and who's paying for it? T3+ downstream speeds for only a tiny fraction of the real cost?

      It's possible for a product to improve while the "real cost" remains the same. Why should broadband connections be different than anything else?

      • It's possible for a product to improve while the "real cost" remains the same. Why should broadband connections be different than anything else?

        They shouldn't but considering that broadband connections have gotten *slower* while costs have risen (i.e. AT&T@Home (up to 10mbit) -> ATTBI (1.5mbit)), people really shouldn't believe this round of hype.
        • broadband connections have gotten *slower* while costs have risen

          Perhaps in your neck of the woods, but where I live, it's a different story.

          Shaw (Edmonton) just upgraded my cable modem (at no charge), and I'm getting a consistent 6Mbps down and 1.5Mbps up.

          Before the upgrade, I was getting 1.8Mbps up and 350K down. Their rates haven't changed (I'm still paying the same $40.00 per month - including modem rental.)
          • Here in just a province away in B.C., for about that price ($48+ after tax), I get 1.5Mbps down and 512K up with telus. Or I could choose delta cable (no shaw in my town... probably the only non shaw area) and get roughly the same speeds with a 10 gig/month cap (STRICTLY enforced... you go over, you pay... and it's not cheap).

            Telus gives me 2 ips, so I chose them (besides, they don't seem to care how much I download. A few years back however, I got 4Gbps for the same price.

        • I have not experienced this. Comcast for me was around 1mbs down when I first got it. (three years ago) Now I am up to 4mps down. The T1 at work seems slow to me these days.
    • Heh, next month I'm getting a 20/1mbit ADSL 2+ connection. It's been widely available for about half a year now.

      The two technologies involved seem to be ADSL 2+ and VDSL. They both have their merits but ADSL 2+ can be rolled out by upgrading current ADSL 1 instalations. VDSL however requires Fiber-to-the-street, thus requiring a much larger investment.

      Of course, in rural areas both technologies require a high investment, so don't hold your breath for any dsl; WiMax seems to be a more cost efficient choice
    • Lots of insight there, but I've got to point out a few things. When you are talking about home service, you are talking about fast, unreliable links. They can and do go down at anytime. As TFA article and you point out - it is never as fast as they advertise all of the time. A T1, T3 or what have you usually come with the guarantee of full bandwidth 101% of the time and a promised uptime - cable and DSL do not.

      Sure, they are going to price it where everyone must have it - at current broadband prices you'd

  • 4 Years... I wish (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Armando_Mcgillicutty ( 773718 ) on Friday July 08, 2005 @12:44PM (#13014430)
    I'll be moving up from my 768k dsl sometime around 2020 I'm afraid...

    Rural America is fun fun fun.

    • I live in San Jose, CA and I have 768k DSL and that was just as of last year, before that I had 384K DSL and for a LONG time I had 144K IDSL (DSL over ISDN!). So yeah you rock for being in rural America :)
    • Be thankful that you even have DSL. Real rural Americans have no broadband options available at all. To us, hopping in the car, going into work, downloading to CD/Flash, and driving back home is the closest we get to broadband.
    • That's nice. I only got 1.5M DSL into my neighborhood six months ago. Before that my options were a modem or satellite- the cable company didn't even bother running cable out to our development until a year ago, and they still don't have cable modem service.

  • Buy Stock! (Score:4, Funny)

    by MandoSKippy ( 708601 ) on Friday July 08, 2005 @12:44PM (#13014434)
    I guess it really is time buy stock in the adult entertainment industry... mainly web sites ;)
  • We'll continue to make do with 50K/sec. upload speeds.

    • It would be nice if more companies realized that the internet is not one-way communications, and that its real strength lies in allowing everyone to both create and share content. Of course, considering that Time Warner is a media company at its core, they have a bit of conflict of interest with providing lots of upstream bandwidth as long as they continue to fear file-sharing.

    • Pfft. I'd LOVE 50K/s upload speeds. I'm lucky I get 18. Fucking Atlantic Broadband (formerly serviced by Charter)...

  • Goodie (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Swamii ( 594522 ) on Friday July 08, 2005 @12:45PM (#13014441) Homepage
    With these speeds and wide accessibility, why is Google investing in Broadband over Powerline technology?

    Judging by the tiny speed increases for broadband over the last few years, I'll believe this when it comes to fruition, which probably won't be for another 10 years or more.

    • Re:Goodie (Score:4, Insightful)

      by MindStalker ( 22827 ) <mindstalker@[ ]il.com ['gma' in gap]> on Friday July 08, 2005 @01:20PM (#13014799) Journal
      There will for a very long time be rural areas that won't get broadband access. Their options will be wireless, satallite, or powerline.
      • But is there enough money in providing BPL to rural users to make it worth the investment? Although you're piggybacking off of the initial investments made in universal service decades ago, you still have to make significant investments at each station with relatively few users per station.

        Most of the costs will be passed on to the users, but the overhead will still be significant. And they do have a fallback plan, which is plain old modem. It's not broadband, but there comes a point where they say, "I'
      • Powerline in rural areas will get nowhere because of the EM noise. Note it is still perfectly usable as a last mile technology for areas where power is underground. Satellite is expensive, and has a huge lag. WIMAX is an option, but if there is enough $$ to be made, it should be possible to make a long-distance version of ADSL, with perhaps less speed. This could be combined with fat-client compression: All ZIP files carry their own dictionary. If you instal 30 huge dictionaries for different media typ
        • Wow, I read your sig as 10 PRINT "Hello World", then did a double take. I have no idea on what system ? was shorthand for PRINT now, but my eyes remembered.
    • You say tiny speed increases, but over the past year in my area (Cincinnati, OH) competition between Cable and DSL (where we were one of the first offerings nationwide) has caused the amount of bandwidth per dollar to triple for home users. I hear the cable company now offers 6mbps speeds, where they were just at 2mbps a year ago.

  • Someone should tell Google (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ... as they throw their shareholders money at broadband-over-power-line providers who are busy trying to force the 60-Hz powerline distribution network to carry broadband signals on the order of 1 MBPS.

    For the money they are spending, the power companies could run fiber, scale their speeds up in the future to compete with these higher-speed providers, and not pollute the entire HF spectrum. Instead, they are going to trash a very real natural resource and end up with a hopelessly-uncompetitive system even
    • The rural market is pretty much untapped, as far as broadband goes. There are many people who can't get DSL or cable, let alone have fiber run to them. The infrastructure for BPL is already in place.

      I don't think BPL would work in places with other options, but for rural America, it is the best option at this point. Google knows what they're doing.

  • I think I'll be ok (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Hachey ( 809077 ) on Friday July 08, 2005 @12:47PM (#13014464)
    Google loads fast enough for me as it is. Make my internet cheaper in 4 years, then i'll be happy! ;)


    --
    Check out the Uncyclopedia.org [uncyclopedia.org]:
    The only wiki source for politically incorrect non-information about things like Kitten Huffing [uncyclopedia.org] and Pong! the Movie [uncyclopedia.org]!
    • Google loads fast enough for me as it is. Make my internet cheaper in 4 years, then i'll be happy! ;)

      You have your own internet? No way!

    • I hear ya. I switched to CavTel from speakeasy for my DSL earlier this year. Static IP, can host whatever I want - it's slower speed but I'm saving $50 a month on phone/internet access, and really it's the always-on aspect I'm after, rather than the fastest download.

  • 100Mbps (Score:5, Insightful)

    by drgonzo59 ( 747139 ) on Friday July 08, 2005 @12:50PM (#13014489)
    What are ordinary people going to do with 100Mpbs next year that they have such a difficulty doing now?

    I am not talking about Slashdotters who will put spinners on their Cable Modems and will overclock the cpu to the limit, but about ordinary people who still only use their computer to look at web pages and write email. Will 100Mbps provide 50x better experience than 2Mbps? I would rather them lower the cost by at least by 50% that would be much better.

    Older computers that run Windows 98 that a lot of people still use, probably can't even handle a consistent 100Mbps stream.

    • Re:100Mbps (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Alex P Keaton in da ( 882660 ) on Friday July 08, 2005 @12:56PM (#13014553) Homepage
      I believe that ordinary people will be downloading a lot more content- How long before we can get all of out tv shows etc "on demand" from our computer?
      There is a chicken and egg thing going on- With more out there, people want higher speeds, but with higher speeds, more will be created out there---
      Real world example- I used to work for a newspaper website, a big one, and in late 90's early 00s our big problem was that with slow load times and dialing in (5-10% of people had broadband) it didnt make sense for people to read the paper online from home as it took too long. With broadband, it does. Once everyone has the capacity, it will make sense to oofer more video on demand etc. The real money is in the 99% of users that don't know much tech, just from a #s standpoint.

    • Re:100Mbps (Score:3, Informative)

      by FidelCatsro ( 861135 )
      ITs a future development , The web will expand as the bandwidth becomes available
      on the good side we shall see richer content , on the bad side we shall see um richer content.

      • Re:100Mbps (Score:5, Insightful)

        by jellomizer ( 103300 ) * on Friday July 08, 2005 @01:21PM (#13014805)
        Well this has always happened. For example when Modem speeds went at 1200bps we dared to use 8 bit ascii with special charactors such as lines and block charactors. Then at 2400bps we pushed it further with color ANSI so we could have colored text, at 9600bps we would use a lot of those advanced charactors and colors that filled the screen, then at 14.4k we started to use vecor based graphics (Like RIP Script and whatever Prodigy used at the time) then at 28.8k we started to have bitmapped graphics, 56.6k we pushed to digital audio content. And then broadband we have more realtime audio and vecor based animations (flash) and as Broadband speeds increased we have more realtime movies increasing audio quality. and as speed increase you will see more things happining in realtime. Which will make HDTV's and Telephones Obsolete. Perhaps if we can get Broadband at 1gbs or faster we will have enough technology for 3d stuff.

        Sure a lot of traditional technologist call this stuff bells and whistles and fluff. But in reality computers are here for our own benefit. So if we want to use our spare bandwith and cpu cycles for our enjoyment we should be able to. (On the same note as a technologist I would like the ability to turn it off so I can use the speed as I choose)

    • Re:100Mbps (Score:3, Insightful)

      by PeeAitchPee ( 712652 )

      What are ordinary people going to do with 100Mpbs next year that they have such a difficulty doing now?

      Simple -- download and play HDTV shows and movies on demand and buy music and other pay-per-use bandwidth-intensive high-quality content. This is *really* what the broadband providers have always been counting on as a business model and is where the real money is.

      Besides, I could have asked the same question 10 years ago when you had a 14.4 modem and were waiting to a full minute to download a graphic

    • Re:100Mbps (Score:5, Insightful)

      by John Miles ( 108215 ) on Friday July 08, 2005 @01:06PM (#13014657) Homepage Journal
      What are ordinary people going to do with 100Mpbs next year that they have such a difficulty doing now?

      Actually, ubiquitous speeds on the order of 100 Mbps will change everything.

      Right now, with a one-megabit DSL connection, it's possible for me to use a Terminal Services client at home to run basic apps like Outlook and Perforce on my machine at the office. It's slow, clunky, and not especially pleasant, but it works, and it beats the hell out of juggling multiple email clients (and .PST files). Even things like streaming video almost work.

      At 10 megabits/second, this process will still be slow, but not all that clunky, and a lot less unpleasant. More apps will live on my machine at work, without having to be duplicated at home.

      At 100 megabits/second and up, the distinction between remote computing and local computing will disappear entirely for most users. Software and services subscription models for commercial applications will actually make sense for PC users for the first time. The client operating system -- be it Windows, Linux, MacOS, what-have-you -- will shrink to almost zero-importance.

      And Microsoft will either be bankrupt or they'll own the inner planets, depending on whether the entire company goes down with the sinking Windows/Office ship.

      Since the entire Internet will be one huge client-server network at that point, worms, viruses, and malware won't be a concern for most users. Monopolization will be. Whose machine is going to run and maintain 99% of your applications? If you think you're married to your software vendor now, you haven't even met her daddy yet.

      • Re:100Mbps (Score:3, Insightful)

        by shish ( 588640 )
        At 100 megabits/second and up, the distinction between remote computing and local computing will disappear

        High mandwidth != low latency.

        VNC and X are fine locally, but laggy remotely; and the lag is pretty constant from 56k dialup to 100mbit lan...

        • Re:100Mbps (Score:5, Insightful)

          by John Miles ( 108215 ) on Friday July 08, 2005 @01:46PM (#13015040) Homepage Journal
          VNC and X are fine locally, but laggy remotely; and the lag is pretty constant from 56k dialup to 100mbit lan...

          Sure, in their current incarnations. This a pie-in-the-sky kind of prediction to begin with... we are multiple decades away from widespread, economical 100-megabit access. Almost nothing will look or work like it does now. My point was, the change is going to be a bigger one than just the usual "more games/movies/pr0n" commenters were suggesting.

          I never bought into any of that "the network is the computer" bull-hockey myself until the first time I failed to notice I was typing on my machine at the office. At that point it was obvious that we're only a couple of orders of bandwidth-magnitude away from not caring where our apps live.
          • we are multiple decades away from widespread, economical 100-megabit access.

            Today, 1 Megabit broadband is slow. 5 Mbit is the norm. 2.5 mbit is about what I normally expect when downloading a popular torrent. 10 Years ago (lets see, this is '05 so that would be '95) I had under 56k speeds/ That is a 50x increase in under 10 years. That means that 100 Mbit access is probably at most 10 years away, not multiple decades.
          • The problem isn't just bandwidth. It's latency. If I click on something, and it takes 150 ms for the packet to reach my "real computer" and then 150 ms for it to come back, then that's almost 1/3 second percieved lag whenever trying to do anything. Imagine trying to play Quake on a remote system. No matter how much bandwidth you've got, the game just won't run right with 1/3 second lag. Then, also assume that your "real computer" has to talk to another server. It'll be like playing in mud.

            • Re:100Mbps (Score:3, Interesting)

              by John Miles ( 108215 )
              Imagine trying to play Quake on a remote system.

              That's pretty much how it works now. When you play a network game, you might as well be running on an OpenGL-tweaked X terminal.

              Client-side prediction is helpful for a good experience in the general case, but it's far from necessary on most broadband connections today, and it won't be necessary at all in the future.

              No matter how much bandwidth you've got, the game just won't run right with 1/3 second lag. Then, also assume that your "real computer" has t
      • Are you crazy? RDP/ICA works wonderfully at 33.6/56Kbps, and is acceptable at 28.8 speeds. The only thing I can't do is play video, which is more a function of how the technologies work then a shortcoming of the bandwidth. The real answer to where the need is is video. DVD quality standard definition video is 9.8Mbps when encoded with MPEG2, about 2/3rd's that for MPEG4. HDTV quality video is 19Mbps for ATSC broadcast spec.
    • Resell bandwidth of course! Actually many DSL providers allow this, I guess as they are used to allowing their T1 customers to resell. Cable does NOT allow this, obviously as they are used to cable sharing being theft.
    • As with every other technology; porn will push it forward (or war, but we're talking civilians).

      Also, Nullsoft/AOL's DIY TV station kit is pretty cool; with enough bandwidth we'll be seeing 640x480 live streaming videos replacing blogs, maybe.

    • Did you forget about online entertainment. How large is typical movie file? Just as you have internet radio pretty soon you will have internet TV. Lets not even talk games as all the next gen console will support online play not to mention the large pc sector. All going on in one household, the averae is going to need the bandwidth.

    • 25 Mbps = TV, Internet & Phone (Score:4, Informative)

      by Ironsides ( 739422 ) on Friday July 08, 2005 @02:41PM (#13015483) Homepage Journal
      What are ordinary people going to do with 100Mpbs next year that they have such a difficulty doing now?
      ...
      Older computers that run Windows 98 that a lot of people still use, probably can't even handle a consistent 100Mbps stream.

      You're missing the point (as is probably most everyone else here) on why the TelCos are doing this buildout. Once they hit 25 Mbps, they can start offering full quality HDTV service over the lines and compete with cable like never before. They will be able to supply Phone, Internet and Video on one service. That is their main reason. 20 Mbps for TV, 5 mbps for internet and ~11Kb for phone. If they really want to have fun, they can start doing Video Phones on their networks for about 1Mbit total.

      Chanel Changing times for the TV will be a little bit longer than with DTV, but that is because it is using the multicast on the network and has to tell the router/central server to send it the bits. However, this will mean a third competitor in the Cable/Satelite market. It will also mean a second proper competitor in the broadband market.

      Once they get above 25Mbps, then they can start increasing the quality of the TV they offer. 15-20 Mbps is really the minimum you need for HDTV. ~45 Mbps will pretty much garuntee you great quality no matter what is on the screen.

      One final comment on the prices of OC-3s. The TelCos are generally some of the companies that own various backbones that the internet here in the US is made of. They can charge themselves whatever they want for access.

  • Yeah, bandwidth is great. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bersl2 ( 689221 ) on Friday July 08, 2005 @12:51PM (#13014496) Journal
    Now, what about latency and QoS?

    And there was way too much mention of IPTV and you-know-who, with their "the future may run through us alone" attitude, in that article for it to be palatable.

  • BPL (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Skynet ( 37427 ) on Friday July 08, 2005 @12:55PM (#13014544) Homepage
    One little mention of broadband over the power lines (BPL)?

    Interesting since Google just made a huge investment [zdnet.co.uk] in it.

  • Qwest customers? (Score:5, Funny)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) * on Friday July 08, 2005 @12:57PM (#13014566)
    ...half all Verizon DSL users should have fiber, half of all SBC subscribers should have 10-20Mbps DSL, and one tenth of all BellSouth customers should have 50Mbps DSL.

    And what will Qwest customers get?

    Why, they get the shaft!

    Qwests idea of fiber to the curb is to leave a bran muffin on your sidewalk every day for just $50 a month.

    • Re:Qwest customers? (Score:2, Informative)

      by elister ( 898073 )
      While its not being offered on their web site, depending on where you live, you can get 7M down / 1M up (technically 876k) speeds for 50$ a month. For me, it was only 10$ more than my 1.5M service. Mind you, its a basic service. No email, no newsgroups, no web hosting.

      While 7M speeds arnt as good as the fiber service, its much better than what Comcast is offering in Seattle, which I believe is 4 meg down and 40k up for 45$ a month.

      Call them up.
      • While its not being offered on their web site, depending on where you live , you can get[...]


        That's the catch, I live in this [google.com] 50-year-old neighborhood in Denver (i.e. not out in the 'burbs by any stretch of imagination) and Qwest still hasn't deployed DSL of any sort.
    • Have you priced bran muffins at your local coffee shop lately? $50/month for curbside delivery might be a better deal than you think it is...
    • "Qwests idea of fiber to the curb is to leave a bran muffin on your sidewalk every day for just $50 a month."

      Cheaper than Starbucks. And delivered!

  • Railroads Arguement (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mpapet ( 761907 ) on Friday July 08, 2005 @12:57PM (#13014570) Homepage
    A long time ago in America, railroads used fluff pieces like this to justify to their investors that they needed more money to stay competitive.

    Because everyone needs faster trains right? Well as history has shown, yes to a point in time when a disruptive technology comes along to do the job cheaper/better in one way or another.

    Off-Topic:
    I'd be interested to find some non-marketing stats on how many homes have computers in America and the breakdown of dialup/broadband.
  • Shaw recently increased their speeds and for only $15 more per month I could be getting much faster speeds. Of course they only increased the cap by about 10 gig/month so I'd be going from fast and able to blow my monthly transfer cap in 4 days to really fast and able to blow my cap in 3 days.

    I don't care if I'm only getting 2 mbit instead of 30 mbit, let me max it out and leave it there forever without penalties and threats of kicking me off the network. Hell I'd pay the higher fees for a slower but tru

  • This just in... (Score:5, Funny)

    by nrlightfoot ( 607666 ) on Friday July 08, 2005 @01:00PM (#13014596) Homepage
    And the cable companies will still only give you 32kb of upstream.

    • Re:This just in... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by NardofDoom ( 821951 )
      This and the lack of official support for servers is a huge problem for me.

      I'd love to be able to set up WebDAV or have streaming video from home to wherever I am. I can't do it because most providers (and all the providers in my area) don't have fast enough upstream speeds and don't allow servers

      The justification of lack of server support is twofold. First it's that you shouldn't make money off of their service unless you overpay for a "business" connection. (Which is BS. Bandwidth is bandwidth.) The se

      • If they can provide 100Mbps downstream, I'll take 50Mbps BOTH WAYS for the same price. Fair's fair, right?

        Sort of. I don't know of any asymmetric pipes, so broadband providers must have tons of unused upstream bandwidth. As you say, they're only limiting your upload speed so they can make you pay more.

        I'd love to have my own leased line and not have to deal with an ISP, but even T1s are very expensive.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • In Austin, TWC offers 384kbps upstream and 512kpbs for premium customers.

        In NH Adelphia gets you 512 for the standard $59/mo package. Not sure how that compares on price around the country.
  • Would I love saying I get 30+Mbit to my house? Sure...am I even happier that SBC dropped DSL to $14.99/month (1.5Mbit) and $24.99/month (3.0Mbit)? Crap yeah. More is better...but cost is a big factor, and SBC has the winner for that right now.

  • DDoS Possibilities (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mpeg4codec ( 581587 ) on Friday July 08, 2005 @01:06PM (#13014648) Homepage
    Has anyone considered the implications of a DDoS involving a zombie army of machines with 100 mbit uplinks? This could spell disaster for just about everybody except those with the absolute fattest pipes. It takes an awful lot of hosts to swamp an OC3 now, but that's with hosts that rarely have a half megabit uplink, if that. It would be frighteningly easy to swamp the heavy links with a few 100 mbit links.

    That is, of course, unless the bigger pipes grow at a rate proportional to the smaller ones. That also assumes symmetrical links for the home connections. Oh the irony of a 100 mbit / 128 kbit connection.
    • It takes an awful lot of hosts to swamp an OC3 now, but that's with hosts that rarely have a half megabit uplink, if that. It would be frighteningly easy to swamp the heavy links with a few 100 mbit links.

      One major reason DDoS work is the D for distributed. If you coalesced your zombie network down to 100 or less machines, for example, it would be relatively easy to get those specific zombie machines taken out of service. With a 10,000 system zombie network, it is not feasible to hunt down the individua
      • A 100 node zombie net can be blocked pretty easily, but your 10k node network will require a many more nodes to be blocked if they are all/mostly running at 10 or 100Mbit links.

        A 10k node network @ 256Kbit requires a much lower percentage of hosts blocked to mitigate the attack.

        But it's like the phone/cable cos are ever gonna give us 100Mbit uplink anyway.

    • Re:DDoS Possibilities (Score:5, Insightful)

      by debest ( 471937 ) on Friday July 08, 2005 @02:21PM (#13015315)
      That also assumes symmetrical links for the home connections. Oh the irony of a 100 mbit / 128 kbit connection.

      Bingo. That's exactly the kind of scenario you will see. Broadband providers don't want you providing content to the internet, they want you consuming content. The upstream is only to provide requests for content.

      If you want a symmetrical 100mbit connection, try banding together a couple of T3 lines. Good luck paying for it!

      • Mod parent up (Score:3, Insightful)

        by cortana ( 588495 )
        The Digital Imprimatur [fourmilab.ch] is a must-read for anyone whose eyebrows were raised at the parent's statement.

        Remember that often, the company that produces movies/tv content, is the same company that delivers it to your home via cable tv/interet. This company has no interest in allowing you to compete with them in the content production business.

        "It is in the interest of broadband providers to prevent home users from setting up servers which might consume substantial upstream bandwidth. By enforcing an 'outbound

  • we will be forced to use voogle.com
  • I'd like an option to keep my current service, but drop prices by 50% (which is direct line with the dial-up user base still running). Alternatively, for the same cost, bump my access speed up. There's a bunch of the 'mom and pop CNN and email checkers' who also help their kids with homework, play Yahoo! Games, and download music from iTunes. I wouldn't even be using the full bandwidth available to me, and I consider myself a fairly heavy power user. I don't download music over P2P (other than stuff that's
  • And I'm sure that P2P users can't barely wait.

  • Come on, nobody's ever going to need more than 64 K/second of bandwidth.

  • I'm seeing some improvement, but not much because most servers out there are bandwidth throttled for a single connection anyway - they aren't serving at 3Mbps per connection, so you won't get anything faster from a single download point.

    And I think most people aren't downloading from multiple sources most of the time. I was downloading a half dozen Corrs videos from Yousendit and another file download site the other day and still saw a maximum of only 162KBps being used according to Firefox download box. A

  • Upload speeds? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by b1t r0t ( 216468 ) on Friday July 08, 2005 @01:30PM (#13014886)
    The heck with download speeds, I want more upstream speed. I'm in an SBC area very close to a Remote Terminal, but in an older neighborhood with no alleys and lots of wooden fences which is unlikely to get fiber. Right now I get 512K up out of a possible (with regular ADSL technology) 640K. If they use VDSL, that can go as high as 2.3M up. I think I'll be happy if I can get 1.5M (esentially a full T1) up.

  • bandwidth before the border routers (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Danathar ( 267989 ) on Friday July 08, 2005 @01:41PM (#13014995) Journal
    What I'd like to see is better utilization of bandwidth within the cable/DSL network infrastructure. It costs cable/DSL providers MUCH less to provide high speed connections between customers in the same local topology.

    If you had 100Mb/s to everybody within your local area it would make things like high speed videoconferencing or sharing of high bandwidth content between friends and family VERY fast.

    Problem is that current caps on cable/DSL lines dont' descriminate between transfers between two people on the same cable/fiber segment and going out beyond the border router and down that T3/OC-3 or whatever out to the commercial internet up provider. As a result you are capped at communicating with the person accross the street when you really could communicate with them at blazing speeds.
  • Customers won't demand a huge increase in the growth rate, they'll assume growth will be similar to past growth rates.

    Here's some dates for "home"-grade telecommunications common in the USA. If anyone has exact approval dates for modem standards, that would be useful.

    1960s - 300 bps
    Early/mid '80s - 1200
    Mid'80s - 2400
    Mid/late '80s - 9600
    Around 1990 - 14,400 symmetric
    Early/mid-1990s - 19.2, 22.8, 33.6
    late-'90s - 53Kbps/down 33.6/up
    2003 - 3MB/sec over Cable
    2005 - 6MB/sec over Cable

    From the days of 1200 bei
  • ...and it works great. I've had it for just over two months now, and I haven't had a single problem with it. $49/mo is pretty nice, too.

    The actual installation took about four hours, so I had quite a bit of time to talk to the installer. He said that they do two installs a day, and that they're booked pretty solid for the next few months doing installs. This is in Huntington Beach, CA, one of the first areas that they're rolling out their FTTP services.

  • It would be nice (!) (Score:4, Informative)

    by krray ( 605395 ) * on Friday July 08, 2005 @02:06PM (#13015199)
    It would be nice if they put 100Mbit to the end user -- but my personal experience with SBC and Verizon warns me to not believe all the hype. They regularly throttle connections -- and hosting any kind of service is typically a NO-NO. Thus they lost me as a customer (both residential and business grade).

    The sad thing is that they're just _now_ getting to this. I've had 10Mbit (symmetrical) for many, many years now ($50/mo) through a wireless connection. Yes, that is a solid 10Mbit and I regularly see 800-900K/sec (up or down) if the remote site can handle it. A good test has always been downloading something from Apple. :)

    Yeah, I said upload. My ISP has no issue with me hosting my own website, email server, heck camera video feeds too ... at home no less. They're towers used to be at 45Mbit and were since upgraded to 100Mbit (or better I believe) with the option to upgrade my antenna coming next month (to 45Mbit -- at my expense for the equipment, but I *own* it then :).

    Why are the bells lagging to badly? Sure, the wireless connection (being shared) doesn't *always* give 100% throughput as many others may be tapping it hard at the same time; 8pm isn't a good download time, but gaming isn't a issue... (~10-12 ping on Quake or better -- yeah, that's me you love to hate :).

    I will say that it is rock solid enough to have taken the POTS then ISDN line away from the Bells too -- all VoIP over here (through the ISP no less :). I can think of the last time my Internet went down -- it was about a week ago with golf ball sized hail falling from the sky. I was out for I believe 3 minutes, probably while a bunch of routers had to re-sync for whatever reason. Previous to that I can't remember.

    Yes, 911 works as expected [tested, thank you :]. Of course there is the cell phone -- and honestly it is in my head to go for the cell in an emergency. If both VoIP and cell fail then there may be bigger issues at hand -- and running down the street naked yelling "FIRE!, FIRE!" will certainly bring help. :)

  • Interesting trend (Score:4, Funny)

    by one9nine ( 526521 ) on Friday July 08, 2005 @02:20PM (#13015308) Journal
    In four years: half all Verizon DSL users should have fiber

    It seems high speed internet is causing a sharp increase in incontinence.

  • And if history is any indication, Verizon will *still* limit you to 96kbps upstream.

    I'm tellin' ya, these carriers won't be happy until we have gigabit capacity downstream, and just enough upsream to handle mouse clicks, completing the Internet's conversion into interactive television.

  • I'm all for this AS LONG AS...

    the ISPs adequately keep their eyes peeled for infestations in their network. It wouldn't take but a handful of infected machines on 100mb networks to DoS even the healthiest of networks.

    Given the HORRRRRRIBLE track record of even some VERY large, notable ISPs in cutting off members who have spam-bot / zombie / worm-infested machines, this increase in bandwith makes me both excited at the good possibilites and shudder at the possible bad, too.

  • SBC, lying again about high speed DSL (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Friday July 08, 2005 @02:39PM (#13015463) Homepage
    SBC trots this out whenever they want something from regulatory authorities. But they don't actually install it.

    Read this 1999 article about SBC's 'Project Pronto' [ebay.com]. " According to SBC, when the expanded deployment program is completed [in three years] customers will be able to receive minimum downstream connection speedsof 1.5 megabits per second, with more than 60 percent eligible to receive guaranteed speeds of 6 megabits a second." Right.

    SBC's new "Project Lightspeed" isn't about the Internet at all. It's just cable TV, implemented using Windows Media 9 over DSL using Scientific-Atlanta set-top boxes. The system doesn't use the Internet at all. It has its own infrastructure, which is a Microsoft-implemented multicast implementation.

    It's not about Internet access at all. All you can get is what they want to send you. Lightspeed will block access to Internet video. [64.233.179.104]

  • There was a Next-Gen [slashdot.org] story yesterday, too. I guess we're all getting outdated and the new kids are moving in... *sigh*
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  • meanwhile in Japan.... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Doppler00 ( 534739 ) on Friday July 08, 2005 @03:21PM (#13015826) Homepage Journal
    They already have this!
    http://bbpromo.yahoo.co.jp/promotion/adsl/regular/ index.html [yahoo.co.jp]

    I think it equates to around $40/month for the 50mbps connection. Doubt we'll ever get that good of a deal here.
  • Or just move to Korea or Japan and get it right now.

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