Home Media Center Update:

[cfarm]

Have you heard what Docsis 3.0 and switched video/all digital switchover can do because those two things will greatly increase available bandwidth to these levels.

DOCSIS3.0, which is not even finalized and will probably not roll out in the US until '08 or '09 has an upper limit of 38 or 43 Mbps, depending if your system is 64 or 256 QAM. DOCSIS 2.0 is only now rolling out. My provider Comcast only supports DOCSIS 1.0 at this time.

The switched video/all digital gets them the scenario I gave in the earlier post. Comcast stated this directly in their CC last week and since their network is one of the more advanced, it's probably a good model for all MSOs. The Philly area is currently the only metro with that technology in place, but 75% of their network will be by years end. So you can check with the folks in Philly and see what they are offered as an example.

Now again they could offer every customer 100Mbps down speeds if everything went perfect but in the real world we won't have anything more than 50Mbps down per customer. Now with that said we most likely will see cable companies offering teirs to compete with the telcos. Say if Verizon offers 15Mbps down and 2Mbps UP for 45 bucks a month. Most likely we will see cable companies offering 20Mbps down and 2Mbps UP for the same price. Again just because they can do it doesn't mean they will or that it will work as well as they hope. The whole point of what I've said is that they soon will have ways to massively expand their bandwidth without a big costly upgrade process that also takes tons of time to boot.

100 Mbps for what? Within their network? Certainly not for an Internet connection on any scale. While the concept is fine if you just want to prove it with a sample case or two, it doesn't scale. The Internet backbone won't support mass residential 100 Mbps connections and no one needs that sort of speed anyway. The only people you facilitate with that are the guys peer sharing porn.

Just like the WiMax technology that everyone thinks is THE answer. No, it's just a last mile solution. At some point you still have to hook all those WiMax subs up to the wired Internet world and there again your scaling kills you. WiMax, just like cable, is a aggreate spec. Depends on how many are sharing the pipe will determine what download speed you ultimately receive. Advertised speeds with cable are alway best case, low load scenarios.

FWIW, you can buy a 20 Mbps bidrectional connection from Surewest in the Sacramento, Calif. area today. It's FTTN, I believe. I think the cost is $100/mo and it comes with a 40 Gig/mo transfer cap. But again I ask why? No normal residential application needs that sort of speed. I transfer large files every day when I work from home. My 4 Mbps connections does that just fine. The dreams of 100 Mbps pipes are fine for Ga-ga responses, but in reality there is no practical application at this time.

But getting back to your topic at hand, the whole HMC concept is pretty dang cool. Some of this stuff has existed for a couple of years now, which means they've been fine tuning the feature sets. MPEG2/MPEG4 dual decoder chips are just about to production levels, so the boxes can start rolling out and there is enough pressure in the market place that it won't be long now before we start seeing them in people's home. Personally I don't think the first DirecTV effort will be all that great, but you have to start somewhere and build from there. Hopefully by the time an HD version hits the market, it's in a compelling package.

Keep up the good work on the research side. It's all quite interesting stuff.

EDIT: My bad. Surewest is a FTTP solution, not FTTN. You could call them the west coast version of Verizon FiOS.