Because it's all they *can* do. Just ask yourself this -- for how long has web traffic been mostly what people want? Then ask yourself how long it's reasonable to assume it will stay that way.
Of course it's easier, because the hosting solutions involving your own machines all suck.
No, you don't. Not everyone's web pages are mission critical.
It's kind of strange that you are arguing that cable's limitations are features. It's like if I invented a road and a car that could safely travel at a thousand miles per hour, you'd argue that it's not going to help since the average American rarely exceeds 60.
Baloney. People have been able to do scads of other things since high-speed connections of any stripe became common. Yet, they still do a relatively small number of things. The only thing that has came along en masse besides Web browsing is file sharing (legalized or not).
And you conveniently snipped the other person's post where he was referring to things like VPNs, game hosting, etc. My point was very few people have any interest in that.
Depends on what kind of equipment and skill you have. Plenty of people have rigged an older PC with Linux as a Web hosting system. Again, though, it's not what most people are going to do.
Obviously not, but then neither is most people's Internet access, which makes this whole issue of whether or not there are slowdowns on a particular system ridiculous. Point is, cable is giving everybody faster speeds to begin with, so even a slowdown is a hell of a lot faster than an entry-level DSL connection with 768K downstream and 384 up.
That's not a feature of a cable system, it's a marketing decision that has been made. Just as Verizon still stupidly charges for installs, as does most every other RBOC. Yet it absolutely can't be denied that RBOCs are losing ground fast in terms of number of lines deployed in homes, thanks to wireless and VOIP. Yet, as always, they choose to bury their heads in the sand rather than compete.
The things that the average consumer wants are what cable excels at. Otherwise, they wouldn't have the leading technology in the marketplace. To argue otherwise is just patently crazy.
I can understand some confusion because "troll" is often used imprecisely. See the wiki . Specifically, posting that "cable has clearly won" is disruptive in a DSL forum.
I haven't seen any in this thread or recently in c.d.x . You _have_ made some informative posts, which is why I'm bothering to reply at all.
I disagree the debate is either relevant or timely. The BB market will drift wtowards DSL or cable entirely uninfluenced by what is said here. This isn't pump'n'dump.
What I believe relevant here is helping people make their DSL work better, at the limit helping them decide if DSL or cable is a better choice. Who wins marketwise is irrelevant in these matters. Going with the global winner early brings scant rewards.
Yes, cablecos are marketting the triple play. I'm not buying it, because VoIP is no better a compromise for voice than satellite is for TV. I see both cable & phone being used in most households in the future. Sure, you can do without one or the other. But only at a quality price.
I believe this is a mistake, but I'm not sure they have a choice. They are signing the wrong (unprofitable) end of the market, those who want speed because they will use it. The downloaders. Data still costs the cablecos & telcos money to transmit/exchange. Somewhere around $1/GB. It is quite possible that some customers are unprofitable and need to be "discouraged" by things like throttles.
We're at a time when consumers are being offered more choices than ever before. They're not all the same, obviously. For example, I have both access to a "high-speed" wireless solution with Verizon Wireless as well as a cable connection. I don't really compare those 2 because they're not really aiming to be the same thing. I love wireless when I need mobility and gladly give up a lot of speed, although what I do get would have passed for positively zippy less than 10 years ago.
The same is happening with cable and DSL. I absolutely, positively believe telcos are some of the worst marketers around simply because they historically haven't had to do much of it. They came at you with this "take it or leave it" proposition, and because most people had little choice, they signed up and the Baby Bells rode the wave.
I agree with helping people do a better job using whatever they have. What I was responding to was this ongoing debate as to which is better and which has had a more enthusiastic reception in the marketplace. The former is a subjective question, the latter is much more definitive, in my opinion. If "triple play" options weren't so powerful, you wouldn't see so many people trying to use them. Bundles work in large part because they help reduce churn and increase profitability. Silly enough, telcos never really made a big effort to cross sell, even though many of them hold wireless offerings. That's starting to change now, but given how they're handicapped by an inability to offer video, voice and data in the same way that cable companies do, it may be too late to make for a real battle.
There are those who will always see a battle happening even after one has long died. I covered technology for years and would always get scads of e-mail after a story on Apple that was anything but glowing. All that aside, it doesn't change the fact that Apple has never been more than a niche player in the PC market even though they've morphed into a wider company and are now undisputably successful.
VoIP works, plain and simple. If it didn't, you wouldn't have companies like Time Warner signing up customers at a rapid clip. Satellite is a bit of a different animal because it will never be able to offer things like video-on-demand, which I think is probably one of the most useful services that has come along in years. If we could just get the commercial networks to restructure their business model to give people true choice of watching what they wanted when they want, then we'd REALLY have something.
VoIP is used in practically every major enterprise in America. Sure, it's more robust and complicated than consumer grade, but VoIP unquestionably works.
Yet cable companies are doing quite well financially and telcos are locked in a battle for survival. Why do you think Verizon bought MCI? Because they KNEW that business customers were their only hope for survival. Residential access lines are decreasing.
Another thing that's patently stupid about RBOCs is their refusal to sell DSL circuits alone (e.g. "naked" DSL). A lot of people would buy that who otherwise have chosen another solution for their voice needs. Yet, in their desire to keep the proverbial cow's milk flowing, only one or two smaller companies in the country will give it to you. That's not only amazing stupid, but shows a total disregard for what's going on in the market.
So? I'm an engineer, and marketing is mostly a dirty word to me. I suspect to many people too for any ongoing service. Marketing only sells the install.
No. Your first post in this thread was responding to an informative "it depends" post including the half-wrong:
USENET is not the same as journalism. There, you might gain a reputation of calling trends early. Here there is little payoff. No one remembers, and you lack the authority of a publisher.
For as long as they can negotiate favorably with the RIAA.
It isn't the signing that matters, but the retention. Nothing I've heard on VoIP makes it very much better than cellphone. Lower quality is an acceptible trade-off for the mobility. But on a landline, I want to be able to hear the other end breathe!
So why isn't TiVo a huge success?
No. Their survival is assured by the state PUCs and guaranteed rates-of-return. They are trying to get sexier with other offerings.
I suspect PUC regulation hurts the RBOCs here. The problem is who pays for the local loop maintenance on a naked line? The PUCs won't let voice subscribers pay. And the RBOCs don't want to roll the price into DSL since very few actually go naked.
Cablecos have much the same problem. Many will not sell BB without at least basic TV which covers their loops.
What I prefer to do is measure the bytes transfered at the network interface. For example, on Linux, /sbin/ifconfig will report the RX bytes for each interface.
If I take the rate I'm getting there, in bytes/second, multiply by 8 to get bits/second, then divide by (1024*1024) to get mbits/second, I get 5.01. My line is 5 mbit/second down.
That kind of surprised me. I had expected DSL providers to use 1000000 bits/second for mbit/second, to be able to advertise a higher speed.
reply_in snipped-for-privacy@mouse-potato.com (Tim Smith) wrote in news:r3KUf.9708$ snipped-for-privacy@newsread3.news.atl.earthlink.net:
If I recall, the OP wanted to know what kind of tranfer speeds he should expect to see based simply on the advertised speed of the circuit he bought from his phone company. Also, most people aren't too interested in the speed at the interface but the rate at which data is actually presented to applications.
That might work on a short-hop connection to an otherwise idle system. Otherwise, you have to worry about the performance of every component of every segment of the route between you and your server.
At the moment, I have a 6Mb/s line from Qwest. Going to systems on my own ISP's network, I'll often see transfers at speeds exceeding
500KB/s, but going to the outside world, it's extremely rare that I'll get that, with 400KB/s being much more common.
An advantage of measuring at the interface, though, is that it is more consistent. Different speed tests seem to have different overhead, making it harder to compare results.
I have much better luck with Sprint. For example, using the nice speed test at speakeasy.net/speedtest, which lets you test with servers all over the country, I get a range from 4.96 mbit/second to 5.01 mbit/second, on my line that Sprint says is 5 mbit/second.
Whenever I've seen less than this, for the most part, the problem has been that the site that I'm trying to download from has been slow, not anything in between. The only exception I recall was a couple weeks where Sprint had serious latency problems (800 msec ping to the gateway), and so nothing TCP-based could go fast. (It didn't occur to me then to test UDP speeds--that would have been interesting).
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