For Teens In Maine, Hands On Wheel, Not On Cell

I Covet My Neighbor's Broadband

from the more-more-more dept

Mon, Jun 9th 2003 2:18pm — Mike Masnick

For years people have said that no matter how much bandwidth you get into your home, there are always going to be applications that require more. Stewart Alsop is now realizing this is true. After being happy with DSL for many years, he's discovering that it's kind of slow. He's upset that the cable modem in his "vacation home" has a lot more zip in the connection than his DSL line. So, he's excited that Verizon is moving towards offering fiber-to-the-home (which, to update Alsop, is often referred to as fiber-to-the-premise these days). Of course, should that ever come to pass from the phone companies (and it is still an "if"), Alsop will quickly realize that the implementation they're aiming for also has too little bandwidth for certain applications, and is much more focused on a broadcast "downloading" model than a true high speed internet connection. While it's certainly possible to do fiber-to-the-premise these days to offer real high speed access, there are still plenty of political issues that are going to hinder adoption.

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bg, 10 Jun 2003 @ 9:23am

No Subject Given
Actually the government just approved a bill that gives the go ahead to deploy FTTH technology without having to share it with CLEC's. The technology is PON and by illustration of the recent interest at Supercomm last week, companies like Quantum Bridge were making quite a renewed splash.
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- Mike (profile), 10 Jun 2003 @ 9:52am
  
  Re: No Subject Given
  There are a number of problems with PON, actually. I don't see it as the end-all, be-all solution that its supporters are claiming. I think it's a fairly limiting way of rolling out FTTH.
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