IP: Fwd: the absence of the fantasy---er, Internet [Re: TOKYO ... 3MBPS ADSL ...]

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

 From an "old" interneter and IPer djf

> From: Brendan Kehoe <brendan () zen org>
> Date: Sun, 28 Jan 2001 22:59:29 +0000
> To: farber () cis upenn edu
> Subject: the absence of the fantasy---er, Internet [Re: IP: TOKYO ... 
> 3MBPS ADSL ...]
> X-Mailer: VM 6.90 under 21.2 (patch 38) "Peisino,Ak(B" XEmacs Lucid
> Reply-To: brendan () zen org (Brendan Kehoe)
>
> > And I am paying $276 per month for slow ISDN service  in rural Pennsylvania
>
> Your comment started a whole spiral of thought for me, landing somewhere
> between the vast lands of pure irony and strong disappointment.
>
> In Ireland, a place that the world is supposed to see as a ``technical mecca''
> for Europe, ISDN service is being hailed by the [still a monopoly in practice]
> major phone company here as their ``hi-speed Internet'' connectivity.
> Hi-speed == 128Kb dual-channel capability, but at the expense of making two
> outgoing calls instead of one.  Oh by the way, you get charged by the minute
> on each of the two calls.  Needless to say, this can run the bill up quite
> high (including past the $276 you see in PA, for which I'm actually jealous).
>
> My wife and I moved here in 1999 and were hearing seductive claims of cable
> modems and ADSL launches---why, cable modems by the end of the year for sure!
>
> The outcome?  Cable modems are still supposedly in beta-test in two or three
> small places; the cable company has halted their deployment of the wiring and
> switches and such to actually make that possible, and the company may get in
> trouble with the government over not fulfilling their exclusive license.  (By
> April, they're supposed to have it available to a few hundred thousand people.
> We're not getting the impression that this is going to come to fruition on
> time.)
>
> Anyway, living in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, visiting friends
> in Los Angeles, or dropping by a New York City coffee house, you'd think
> everyone everywhere enjoys the incredible speed potential of the Internet
> backbones.  (Nay, we can even fantasize at the IPv6/1Gb backbone testing of
> the last few years.)
>
> But the reality for what constitutes the significant majority of the world
> population is one of continued delays and ongoing frustration.  People still
> actively tell their browsers to stop downloading images because sites are
> being glossed up more and more, usually with banner ads or massive Flash4
> animation that aren't---the truth be told---really critical to offering the
> information that's housed there.
>
> A fun survey to run: of say 10 million web pages, how many actually offer the
> `alt=foo' part of the HTML code to images?  Far too few, I can predict.
>
> For Ireland and other European countries, the main hurdle is working to help
> craft new business plans for the major telecommunications houses that thus far
> don't see ways to offer new technology without significant investment.  The
> counter-argument may be that such an investment isn't necessary.  Ah, but it
> is absolutely required in order to do long-term growth in markets undergoing
> startling change.
>
> In our town in Ireland, there's one Internet cafe up the road.  It's busy most
> times of the day, and in a few days will be converting to a 24-hour mode of
> operations.  I stopped by there to ask if one can go in with a laptop and just
> plug in---nope, they've got things running via Socks proxies and only allow
> use of the systems that are hooked up to their billing system.  In the course
> of the conversation, I asked if their main clientele consisted of tourists (I
> saw a lot of screens used to access Hotmail---finally).
>
> The answer was a shocked, ``No!  You'd think so, but most are people on lunch
> break or coming in from home because six pounds an hour here on a
> single-channel ISDN line WAY beats what they pay if they dial up on a modem at
> home.''
>
> Funny, the same goes for a friend of mine outside of Philadelphia.  And people
> I regularly exchange mail with from areas of Colorado, Maine, London, Florida,
> Virginia, Hawaii, and New York.  The list goes on.
>
> Anyway, right now I'm working on a book about Europe's (soon to be more)
> popular WAP technology, and the projects that are underway in the US for
> similar offerings.  Thus all of the babble and why it was sparked.  I'd be
> very interested in hearing from other sources regarding what ways the US
> industries and the world's technology crafters (aka IETF and others) are
> trying to defeat the still stunted growth in application of the technology for
> most of its potential users.
>
> All the best,
> B



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