Priority Interrupt by Steve Ciarcia Broadband—A Report Card

If you ask people these days about broadband connection to the Internet, most will say that they are going to sign up the instant it becomes available. But if you look at the statistics showing how many actually do sign up when it is offered in their area, you'll notice that the number is much smaller. So what's going on?

There are a variety of broadband alternatives and they use an assortment of transmission mediums-from copper wire installed a hundred years ago to the latest space-based satellites. Each form of technology is an attempt to satisfy a specific objective. Some offer mobile computing while others offer isolated area coverage, low cost, or higher bandwidth.

There are currently two wireless technologies, satellite and fixed-point wireless. Satellite wireless is pretty straightforward. As long as you can point a dish at the southern sky you can have broadband Internet (older systems use a dial-up modem for uploading while newer systems transmit directly back to the satellite). That's also provided you don't mind a shared connection like cable modems, a very high installation cost, and that reading my editorial about broadband may be as close as you are going to get to the Internet during bad weather. Of course, if you live 45 min. from the nearest human, it may be your only choice.

Fixed-point wireless is basically our cell phone system with some new equipment and another plan for billing us. Europeans are way ahead of us here because we seem to think that unrestricted capitalism is a better idea than organized communication standards. That's one reason why their cell phones work everywhere and ours work nowhere. My bitterness aside, high-speed wireless broadband has a rosy potential but we may be waiting a long time for the right infrastructure.

Presently, the cable modem is the most widely used form of broadband technology. It is available in both urban and suburban areas, and it is growing quickly. The technique is simple. Digital data travels over the same cable television lines and a modem separates data and television at the home. Service tends to be reliable because the cable providers own the entire infrastructure and they are responsible for installation, making provisions, and answering service questions. If there is a downside, it's the lack of package choices (from a cable monopoly) and that technically it's a shared bandwidth. The more people connected to your local cable line, the lower the throughput available to you.

Based on the number of installations, direct subscriber line (DSL) is the second most popular broadband connection. DSL data travels over plain-old telephone service (POTS) lines and a filter separates data and voice at the house. One reason for its popularity is that DSL can technically go anywhere there is a phone line (all of us who installed second phone lines for dial-up modems can put the money toward DSL service) and there are many service providers and speed versus price packages. That's the good news.

The bad news is putting some truth into DSL's biggest marketing claim-that because cable modems are a shared bandwidth and everyone in the neighborhood is dividing down one data rate, connections can slow to a crawl. By contrast, DSL is a dedicated 1.5-MBps connection and it's all yours.

In theory, this may be true. In reality, however, the speed you get varies by how good your provider is and how much they've oversubscribed the service. As in my own case, the DSL provider can put his scope on the side of my house and show me 1.5 MBps between me and the CO down the road, but damned if I've ever seen anything faster than 800 Kbps when I'm on the Internet. In other words, the bottlenecks are simply further down the pipe. However potentially fast your connection speed, the ISP network ultimately governs your throughput.

The dot-bomb era taught us that when necessity isn't the mother of invention, it has a big downside. Business grew too fast and too much of the venture capital went to providing superfluous content. The same might be said for broadband. In my opinion, the initial surge in sales for high-bandwidth connections came from businesses and computer-savvy individuals (like us) who tend to get antsy waiting for web pages. Broadband is like cell phone history. It became ubiquitous only when people felt they couldn't live without it.

For broadband to become truly universal, it must be offered at a price that is more appealing and the content that people demand has to be readily available for them to download. It isn't enough to just have a bunch of high-quality video clips on every web site. Broadband Internet connectivity has to evolve into an integrated experience for users. Online video gaming has to evolve from simply calling up video frames from a resident CD-ROM to transmitting moves, messages, and all of the audio grunts and screams with no latency. And watching a movie has to be real time, not an 8-hour download.

I have no doubt that broadband on the Internet will eventually be all that it claims. Success will arrive when people see what they can't get elsewhere more conveniently. Hopefully, it won't take forever. Until then, we'll have to live with the irony that 99% of today's broadband connections come through the same old pre-Internet pipes.

steve.ciarcia@circuitcellar.com

Published: June-2002