High Speed Networking for the Millenium

Where I live in Palo Alto California the most popular forms of high speed Internet access are cable and ADSL. Palo Alto is considered to be more or less in the heart of silicon valley so one would expect more exotic forms of internet access that aren't available in other areas of the world and there are but they aren't widely available yet.

Cable Internet access is available everywhere in Silicon Valley at three different speeds. The first is 500kps downstream and 100kbs upstream, the second 500kps downstream 200kps upstream, and the last 1Mbs downstream 200kbs upstream. All these speeds are in bits per second and these connections are obviously aimed at home consumers because asymmetric connections are not for servers. This is because servers need high-speed upstream connections to serve data to clients. Cable access is the most popular because it has been around the longest and is the most widely available.

ADSL stands for asymmetric digital subscriber line. There are a wide variety of DSL lines out there and xDSL is the acronym that refers to them all. The availability of ADSL is based on the distance the end user is from the central telephone office because the high frequency ADSL uses for the high speed data rates becomes disrupted over distance. This is why ADSL is not available for everyone yet. The advantage of ADSL is that it can be used on an existing phone line at the same time as voice is being transmitted on the same phone line. The high frequency nature of ADSL allows this use analog and digital at the same time.

The newest form of high speed Internet access in development is called Fiber To The Home (FTTH for short.) This is a project that is city sponsored and is slowly making its way through city consul. Its goal is to provide a 10Mbs or 100Mbs Ethernet connection that is connected to a switch, which is connected to the city fiber loop. Then for a relatively low cost per month users could purchase Internet access from local ISP's. The main problems with this project are the politics and the people who are pushing for the project do not understand how basic ISP rate structures currently work. They seem to think that for under $50 a month they can get 10Mbs. If this were true ISP's would be out of business. The FTTH trial is supposed to start soon and is certainly a step in the right direction but much work will still have to be done so I don't think we will be seeing access like this for a few years yet.

Go To Page: 1 2

Articles in this Topic    Discussions in this Topic