more on Cell Carriers to Web Customers: Use Us, but Not Too Much -- Modem "Crisis" Redux

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Stan Hanks <stan () colventures com>
Date: May 11, 2006 7:03:20 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Subject: RE: [IP] more on Cell Carriers to Web Customers: Use Us, but  
Not Too Much -- Modem "Crisis" Redux

> This reminds me of the days when the carriers ranted and
> raged at length at the damage modems were doing to "their"
> network. Or when @home complained that they were just joking
> when they told people they could use the Internet.
>
> The answer for the "modem crisis" was simple and obvious -
> the only reason modems were a problem was that the carriers
> were denying people access to the native data packet layer
> which not only had far more capacity but was far easier to
> expand and share. We still treat the copper phone pair as a
> low capacity analog medium rather than a multi-megabit shareable path!

Actually, the problem was a little more insidious -- modem usage
patterns breaks a hundred years of statistics on "traffic intensity" as
applied to the Erlang law analysis of switch capacity. The bottom line
is that the fact that people "sat" on modems for hours at a time caused
switch capacity exhaustion, which meant that "regular people" making
"regular phone calls" got switch busy signals. Which made regulators
really unhappy, which required capital investment to increase switch
capacity, which made telco CFOs really unhappy...

The punch line in this is that huge dial-up modem usage forced massive
increases in switch capacity -- which is now completely stranded as both
dial-up usage has moved to broadband and as people have moved their
regular phone service from RBOC wire-line to wireless and VoIP
services...

Stan


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