IP: Economist Article on Broadband

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 08:40:57 -0800 (PST)
From: "Prof. Daniel O'Shea" <arbitrate () yahoo com>


The Economist has published a brief article on broadband:

http://www.economist.com/editorial/freeforall/7-11-98/index_wb9683.html

An excerpt:

Last month, at Agenda 99, a computing-industry conference, the FCC’s
chairman, Bill Kennard, was left in no doubt that the next phase of
the computing revolution is impatiently waiting for broadband. 

Knowing this, the cable operators are threatening to stall the
upgrading of their networks. If the FCC insists on open access for the
ISPs, they say the value of their investment would be in doubt. They
also seem to want to control how web-based video competes with their
own broadcast channels and pay-per-view programming. @Home actually
restricts its customers to ten minutes of streamed video from the
Internet at a time. 

Nor is time on the side of the FCC and the independent ISPs. It so
happens that the big cable operators have designed the technology of
their broadband services so that interconnection with unaffiliated
ISPs is all but impossible. New equipment could solve this, but it
would make the current generation of cable modems useless. Expensively
upgrading a few hundred thousand modems is one thing; but several
million modems will soon be installed, and that would be a different
matter. The closed-system theology of the cable industry and the
open-standards religion of the Internet are heading for a smash. 
 

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_____________________________________________________________________
David Farber         
The Alfred Fitler Moore Professor of Telecommunication Systems
University of Pennsylvania 
Home Page: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~farber