Click Here
       |
©1999
ExciteNet.com
All Rights Reserved
http://www.broadbandtimes.com
E-MAIL:
admin@broadbandtimes.com
BroadbandTimes's purpose is to provide perspective on the latest news in this burgeoning field. Despite the apparent excitement generated by the word, an obvious question crops up: What, exactly, IS broadband? Webster's defines it as "having, or operating with uniform efficiency over a wide band of frequencies."
However unhelpful that answer is, the picture gets even murkier as more and more communications companies claim they are in the broadband arena, including not only cable operators, long distance suppliers, TV broadcasters, local exchange carriers and satellite companies but also PC manufacturers, software designers, content producers and Internet service providers.
Without question, cable is broadband. Setting aside special connections such as T1 lines, the fattest and fastest pipe belongs to the cable industry. Broadband and cable are so tied together that in Washington lingo, broadband access to the Internet is virtually synonymous with cable modem access. In the wake of the recent cable mergers, one cable
lawyer suggested that cable adopt the acronym RBOC (which really doesn't apply to the super-regional local telephone companies anymore), short for Regional Broadband Operating Company.
Yet the whole cable industry doesn't fall into the broadband category, at least not in the BroadbandTimes sense, at least not yet. Virtually all of cable's revenues come from selling one-way video news and entertainment and however interesting plain old cable service still is, you won't see much in-depth analysis of it here.
What we will cover is high-speed access to the Internet via cable modems and cable set-tops, interactive TV, packet-switched telephony and all other developments that constitute new cable service.
Traditional TV broadcasting, in engineering terms, is broadband --- most video broadcast signals occupy a six megahertz slice of the spectrum, broad by anyone's definition, and HDTV signals take up even more space. And yet, most of broadcasting's revenues come from point to multipoint mass market transmission of programming. That's not broadband.
But when broadcaster's ship their video content to PCs via the Internet or offer high-speed multicasting services with their digital spectrum or otherwise push past the technological limitations of their medium to offer something new, we'll take a look.
Conversely, traditional telephony is the very essence of narrowband, the status quo everyone is trying to surpass, even the telcos themselves through digital subscriber line technology. With speeds of less than one megabit per second, DSL - or its mass market version, ADSL - fails to make the broadband grade in the eyes of most cable operators. Certainly ADSL is broader band, and any student of telecom history knows never to underestimate the telcos. DSL could be the most promising broadband technology around.
Without the Internet, no one would care about bandwidth. Most Internet users, however, and virtually all Internet sites don't need broadband capability. Ebay addicts, email users and Amazon.com browsers get along fine with 28.8 or 56 kbps connections. Broadband will no doubt bring bells and whistles to those sites, but their fundamentally successful premises were forged in a narrowband world.
Still, most Internet companies are betting on cable modems or telco DSL or wireless broadband access to change everything. Movies over the web
and net-delivered CD's are conjuring up all kinds of visions of broadband
riches over the Internet and the grandest dream is to bring the Internet to
the TV. As the Internet breaks out of the narrowband box, we will be there
to comment.
Wireless cable and satellite company forays into Internet access and
other new services certainly constitute broadband. But neither medium
can quite yet effectively deliver reliable interactivity, which is almost as important in defining broadband as bandwidth is. Nevertheless, cable and satellite are making strides in overcoming that obstacle and we will keep our eye on them.
That's our first take on defining broadband, a topic that we will revisit. Broadband is new cable service, broadcasting that has a technology twist, telephony of tomorrow but not today, Internet content that expands upon text, graphics, audio and still-frame video content, and interactive services delivered by wireless cable and satellite systems.