>No, it's a burgeoning problem ... there isn't enough bandwidth to >support lots of people downloading movies. It only works when while >there have been few....That's why Comcast started playing tricks with >the bit torrent down-loaders... Comcast didn't expect such a problem when >they designed their service contracts and got caught out by it.
Actually there is plenty of capacity and technology is keeping well ahead of the growth of traffic. Changing the equipment on the ends of existing fiber achieves huge increases in capacity without any changes to the existing fiber. The cable company problem, is just a cable company problem caused by their network topology. The cable vs DSL/fiber contest is much like the contest between Ethernet and Token-Ring networks of 20 years ago. Token-Ring networks connected everybody in a common loop (as did early Ethernet and as cable does now). With the advent of 10Base-T, Ethernet was able to move to a home-run topology. Then the price of switches came down so low that nobody uses a regular hub anymore. So a 100 Mbps private connection now costs about $25 to implement. Not much more for Gigabit and 100 Gigabit is in the works. Token-Ring networks could not do that and were discarded. Same will happen to cable. ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
