On Mon, 15 Nov 2004 19:51:34 GMT, Badger
wrote:



Frank Erskine wrote:
This situation is changing with local loop unbundling.


The "local loop" of course being the result of many decades of public
expenditure by the GPO/PO, which is expected to be effectively given
away to the private sector who don't want to get their hands dirty
with tasks such as planting poles in the ground, laying dirty cables
in holes in the road...

And until someone comes up with a 'value add' that gets a big buy in to
finance it it will continue to be by slow copper with the accountants
wringing the last pennies of profit from it. The cost of fibre to the
home is x2 too expensive at the moment, and has been so for some time.
The buy in needs to be something BIG, but in this tin pot country I
can't see it happening....Any ideas a what might trigger it?

Niel.

The marketeers at all of the service providers in the retail market
screwed themselves a couple of years ago by using the term 'broadband'
to describe any connectivity having a speed of greater than ISDN
speed. They also believed their own bull**** about the services it
could provide, such as entertainment quality video on demand.

The original definition of broadband related to cable TV technology
with RF spectrum split into multiple channels each able to deliver
entertainment quality video for the TV and in some cases to use spare
channels for data. Predominantly, the video was delivered in
analogue format and the technology was the basis of analogue CATV.

Other technologies such as DVB-C (digital transmission of more
channels of video in the analogue channels) and quality streaming of
video over IP have come along, so the original definition of it being
a pure RF medium have fallen by the wayside.

In effect, the correct definition of broadband, in terms of what the
service should be able to deliver have remained as the ability to
deliver entertainment quality video on TV to consumers as well as high
speed network connectivity.

During the dotcom boom, the vendors such as Real Networks and
Microsoft heavily promoted their originally crappy internet streaming
video running at 56k. This is an interesting toy, but not anywhere
near the league required for entertainment purposes. 2Mbits and
preferably 5 are needed for that on a large screen.

The 200k-odd streams are a world better than 56k, but still nowhere
near entertainment quality.

In the meantime, the marketeers, believing that 500k had the potential
to do this and likely the catchy 'broadband' name, sold the hell out
of it.

The result is that 500k is an interesting speed for internet access
for consumers but doesn't address the content applications to any
useful degree. In effect, the marketeers have screwed themselves.

In the meantime, Sky have come along and offer a scheduled movies "on
demand" with their Box Office product. They are doing pretty well
with subscriptions.

There certainly is a market for video on demand services in the home,
but the quality will have to be high and the bandwidth there to match.

Most of the other applications that have been discussed fall into this
category as well. THe technology has been overhyped and people's
expectations have been set that they can get a lot for a little.










--

..andy

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