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Date: Sat, 6 Jul 1996 23:49:35 -0400 (EDT)
From: Henry Spencer <henry@zoo.toronto.edu>
Subject: Re: cable vs. ISDN
To: Joel Yancey <python@cia-g.com>
cc: "Jacob M. Parnas" <jparnas@jparnas.cybercom.net>, hardware@freebsd.org,
        bsdi-users@bsdi.com
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> well, First Off,if cable modems were around, ISP's wouldnt be, because 
> the Cable company has taken over the business...

Most of the small ISPs are not long for this world anyway, because they're
about to get competition from the local phone companies.  The people who
own the existing wires have a powerful natural advantage, and there's just
no getting around that. 

> plus, they CLAIM everyone 
> will have 10mbps per house hold, well, considering that theres not thaty 
> much bandwidth to waste for a bunch of web browsing crowd, and they say 
> that there will only be 128k recieve, but 10mbps send. now thats strange.

Not really.  For one thing, the 128k/10M split is just an oddity of *your*
local cable system -- the better-equipped ones are talking about symmetrical
bandwidth.  For another, the cable company has *lots* of bandwidth available
in their wiring; it's just a matter of the electronics on each end.  Of
course, in the end, it will boil down to you paying higher fees if you want
higher bandwidth.

> *I* myself, dont like that opinion, because the cable company doesnt 
> really know what a computer system is all about, and i dont like the fact 
> that then they would have a monopoly. 

What do you think of phone companies?  It may come down to a choice of two
evils.  As I said above:  they own the wires, so there's not a lot of 
room to maneuver.  If you don't like monopolies, start lobbying now for
competitive cable and phone services.

                                                           Henry Spencer
                                                       henry@zoo.toronto.edu