From: shamrock@netcom.com (Lucky Green)
Date: Thu, 4 Jan 1996 17:36:31 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Guerilla ISPs
Message-ID: <v02120d17ad10e6cc866e@[192.0.2.1]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 14:07 1/3/96, Peter Monta wrote:

>I'm skeptical about cable modems---few cable providers have adequate
>return paths, and everyone competes for the downlink bandwidth.
>Broadcast is not the right architecture.

Taking a closer look at it, you will find that the cable giants have
prepared themselves rather well. In the US, there are about 3300 subs per
headend. Each of which is served by about 7 trunks. Moreover, the cable
operators have been busy laying fiber to all the headends. In fact, the
vast majority of headends, certainly all the ones in the interesting
markets have fiber on site today.

The bandwidth crunch only happens if most cable subscribers want to use the
ISP services. How many of the 3300 subs have PCs and are willing to pay
$500-1000 per hookup? If you add switching to the picture, not that
switching was necessarily needed, things look even better for cable based
ISPs.


-- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com>
   PGP encrypted mail preferred.