IP: Fwd: the absence of the fantasy---er, Internet [Re: TOKYO ... 3MBPS ADSL ...]

[Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>]

 From an "old" interneter and IPer djf

>From: Brendan Kehoe <brendan@zen.org>
>Date: Sun, 28 Jan 2001 22:59:29 +0000
>To: farber@cis.upenn.edu
>Subject: the absence of the fantasy---er, Internet [Re: IP: TOKYO ... 
>3MBPS ADSL ...]
>X-Mailer: VM 6.90 under 21.2 (patch 38) "Peisino,Ak(B" XEmacs Lucid
>Reply-To: brendan@zen.org (Brendan Kehoe)
>
> > And I am paying $276 per month for slow ISDN service  in rural Pennsylvania
>
>Your comment started a whole spiral of thought for me, landing somewhere
>between the vast lands of pure irony and strong disappointment.
>
>In Ireland, a place that the world is supposed to see as a ``technical mecca''
>for Europe, ISDN service is being hailed by the [still a monopoly in practice]
>major phone company here as their ``hi-speed Internet'' connectivity.
>Hi-speed == 128Kb dual-channel capability, but at the expense of making two
>outgoing calls instead of one.  Oh by the way, you get charged by the minute
>on each of the two calls.  Needless to say, this can run the bill up quite
>high (including past the $276 you see in PA, for which I'm actually jealous).
>
>My wife and I moved here in 1999 and were hearing seductive claims of cable
>modems and ADSL launches---why, cable modems by the end of the year for sure!
>
>The outcome?  Cable modems are still supposedly in beta-test in two or three
>small places; the cable company has halted their deployment of the wiring and
>switches and such to actually make that possible, and the company may get in
>trouble with the government over not fulfilling their exclusive license.  (By
>April, they're supposed to have it available to a few hundred thousand people.
>We're not getting the impression that this is going to come to fruition on
>time.)
>
>Anyway, living in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, visiting friends
>in Los Angeles, or dropping by a New York City coffee house, you'd think
>everyone everywhere enjoys the incredible speed potential of the Internet
>backbones.  (Nay, we can even fantasize at the IPv6/1Gb backbone testing of
>the last few years.)
>
>But the reality for what constitutes the significant majority of the world
>population is one of continued delays and ongoing frustration.  People still
>actively tell their browsers to stop downloading images because sites are
>being glossed up more and more, usually with banner ads or massive Flash4
>animation that aren't---the truth be told---really critical to offering the
>information that's housed there.
>
>A fun survey to run: of say 10 million web pages, how many actually offer the
>`alt=foo' part of the HTML code to images?  Far too few, I can predict.
>
>For Ireland and other European countries, the main hurdle is working to help
>craft new business plans for the major telecommunications houses that thus far
>don't see ways to offer new technology without significant investment.  The
>counter-argument may be that such an investment isn't necessary.  Ah, but it
>is absolutely required in order to do long-term growth in markets undergoing
>startling change.
>
>In our town in Ireland, there's one Internet cafe up the road.  It's busy most
>times of the day, and in a few days will be converting to a 24-hour mode of
>operations.  I stopped by there to ask if one can go in with a laptop and just
>plug in---nope, they've got things running via Socks proxies and only allow
>use of the systems that are hooked up to their billing system.  In the course
>of the conversation, I asked if their main clientele consisted of tourists (I
>saw a lot of screens used to access Hotmail---finally).
>
>The answer was a shocked, ``No!  You'd think so, but most are people on lunch
>break or coming in from home because six pounds an hour here on a
>single-channel ISDN line WAY beats what they pay if they dial up on a modem at
>home.''
>
>Funny, the same goes for a friend of mine outside of Philadelphia.  And people
>I regularly exchange mail with from areas of Colorado, Maine, London, Florida,
>Virginia, Hawaii, and New York.  The list goes on.
>
>Anyway, right now I'm working on a book about Europe's (soon to be more)
>popular WAP technology, and the projects that are underway in the US for
>similar offerings.  Thus all of the babble and why it was sparked.  I'd be
>very interested in hearing from other sources regarding what ways the US
>industries and the world's technology crafters (aka IETF and others) are
>trying to defeat the still stunted growth in application of the technology for
>most of its potential users.
>
>All the best,
>B



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