At 03:43 PM 4/1/02 -0800, Morlock Elloi wrote: >> multimedia and the like). Clearly, ISPs want to keep their customers >> happy, as they know that they will otherwise switch to another provider. > >Nonsense. Following this logic, broadcast/cable TV should be of high quality >since they also want to keep their customers happy, and customers want quality, >don't they ? Bullshit.
If by "quality" you mean signal quality, they do a reasonable job. (Customers gripe about perceivable losses, you know.) If you mean semantic quality, well, they sell what people buy. You could gripe about how most CDs sold, which are technically excellent, contain pop trash, but you're wasting your breath. >> secure telephony. Most ADSL is 384/1024 these days, and cable modem >> (6*10^3 customers in the U.S. alone) is roughly 500/500. In selected 6,000? Methinks you dropped a kilo.. (maybe it'll wash up in the keys...) or swapped exponent and mantissa Cable is typically 1Mbit download, 1-200 Kbit upload, slightly better than *DSL on telco copper. Often downloads are slower because of congestion elsewhere (server, upstream nets). >Nonsense. Try actual tests on actual consumer grade lines. These are real numbers from our cable modem. 110 Kbyte/sec downloads, 27 Kbyte/sec uploads. [BTW, We do see TCP/80 incoming blocked, but there are so many other portnumbers to chose from...] >Access pattern of *DSL lines reverts to modem usage 30-45 days after consumer >switches from analog modem to DSL. There is no bandwidth within ISPs to provide >anything more to consumers but modem speeds, on average. Not true. Folks get quite used to adsorbing multimedia that they wouldn't have the patience for at 56Kbit/sec. (They also enjoy the reduced latency). They may use live services like streaming audio, or attempt to download movies. All these things are *motivation* for people to migrate to "broadband" ISPs, which the ISPs therefore like. If all people did was send text email, there would be no "broadband" ISP market. (And I'm not even considering gaming or realtime chat motivators, as I know little about them.) And you should know that, although oversubscribed, "on average" ISPs have plenty of b/width. Review your queueing theory. The very things that Jack Valenti hates, broadband ISPs love. And the creative folks still have their hands on the printing presses, so if there is a slowdown in the rate of content generation, it might only be in comparison to the last ~5 years, when a lot of 'pent-up' creative energy was expended upon first exposure to the net. However, the supply of whackos, artists, editors, authors, and agitators has not waned. But yes, these currently largely benign (if monopolistic) ISPs -whatever their speeds- are the weakest link, where state and corporate fascism can exert control. ----- And Morloch: your replacing DNS (as a vulnerable point of failure/control) is a good idea. Of course, AOL does this, with their own name space. But without their tightly herded masses, or access to the Root Servers you'll have to write a browser plug-in, or background daemon that modifies the resolver's behavior, or extendable resolver. You could append to Windows (et al) "hosts" file, and the normal resolver would pick that up. I'm surprised there are no attempts to do that, but then, there's the Network (aka FAX) Effect operating here. Does that baptista.god fellow write code?
