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Future of Last Mile Broadband Service © Internet TV, Film, and wide scale Video conferencing, wide area interactive games
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| With the advent of inexpensive and fairly high speed
broadband service to residential and small business users new avenues of commerce,
communications, and entertainment are emerging that will shape the technology
frontier of the next decade.
Cable and DSL modems that are rapidly being adopted by more and more users is only the beginning. Current offerings are typically 1-3Mbps downstream and 512k-1Mbps upstream even though sales and marketing literature may claim higher speeds. Much higher speeds - 100Mbps+ symmetrical -- will be required and will be provided by the Last Mile Service Providers (LMSPs) as demand and competition grows in the market place. The main drivers pushing the last mile service technology will be entertainment, commerce, and communications, specifically Internet TV and Film. In addition, wide scale video conferencing where groups of individuals can communicate inexpensively over wide areas using high fidelity video will become a reality if the Internet service industry and Internet infrastructure manufacturers have vision and foresight. The commercial opportunities in wide area interactive games will further push the technology towards higher access speeds to the end-user. These technology drivers will require progress and coordination of a number of technologies in addition to high speed last mile service: Very high speed backbones, accellerated content delivery by a variety of techniques, faster network infrastructures, intelligent networks, improved and wide scale IP multicasting, and the provision for high assurance confidentiality, information integrity, and other security issues. Technology typically outpaces the marketplace however, in recent years the marketplace has been running quite hard and fast behind technology. It took much more than 10 years after the introduction of narrow band ISDN before high speed broadband access became fairly common place but it may take half as much time to get an order of magnitude higher speeds at the same costs unless short sightedness and short term goals of the technology and service providers hamper progress. The future looks bright for new avenues of commerce and communications such as high speed multicast streaming to the end user, high fidelity video conferencing for the masses, and very responsive wide area large participation interactive games, however, the market leaders providing these services and technologies have to make large investments that they should not expect to recover in less than five to seven years. A commitment is required by the service providers at all levels along with the manufacturers who have to lower the costs to expand the market and thereby get the economies of scale necessary to make these possibilities a reality. Lets hope that someone is listening and prepared to act. |