[Tig] Comcast "wideband" (WAS: Re: OT TiVo)

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Tue, 8 Jan 2008, Rob Lingelbach wrote:
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/technology/08cable.html
>
> what´s the secret behind Comcast´s "wideband" downloading
> speed advantage I wonder?  And will the images suffer...

Smoke and mirrors, I imagine.  The backbone of modern cable networks 
seems to be at something close to 600Mbits/second.  Cable networks are 
shared for many uses so Internet users have their bandwidth capped to 
some arbitrary limit.  Very high transfer rates are possible if the 
cable provider removes the "cap" for the purposes of a demo and 
installs a much higher bandwidth connection to the consuming device.

As I have mentioned here before, IP based delivery of video can 
actually work if the video is offered very close in the network to the 
consumer.  This means that cable and telephone companies (or 
co-located equipment in their equipment centers) are in the best 
position to offer the service.

Internet access performance will not improve unless someone pays for 
it.  $30 for flat-rate Internet offers no incentive to improve access 
performance for video delivery.  If people pay NetFlix to download 
videos, then performance will continue to suck unless NetFlix offers 
the program on conjunction with teleco and cable providers so that the 
companies providing the bandwidth get paid.

Comcast already stands accused of intentionally breaking protocols 
used to transfer large amounts of data.  Testing shows that their 
network produces bogus packets which cause transmissions to fail for 
protocols/transfers they do not approve of.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/