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IEEE Spectrum article....
A municipally owned network in Utah is poised to offer 100 megabits per second—and that's just to start
Utopia, as described by Sir Thomas More, the man who originated the term in the early 16th century, is an imaginary place of few laws, great natural abundance, and an absence of poverty and want. We still don't know how to cure poverty and want. But in a western U.S. desert, a utopia of sorts is taking shape for broadband users who would like to get their phone, television, and Internet services from the providers of their choice.
As it turns out, this Utopia, known formally as the Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency, promises to be just that, a broadband utopia. And it is very much a real place, encompassing 14 cities in northeastern Utah. It delivers to each of its 3000 subscribers high-speed Internet access, telephony, and television programming through a fiber-optic cable at data rates that now reach 30 megabits per second. Soon, service providers there will be offering speeds of 50 and even 100 Mb/s. That's enough to download a 2-hour movie in about 6 minutes, 10 to 20 times as fast as the typical U.S. cable or digital subscriber line connection, 6 times as fast as Verizon Communications Inc.'s much-publicized fiber-to-the-home service (called FiOS) and twice as fast as the new DSL now being introduced in Europe by France Telecom and others.
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Utopia's promise is as vast as the nearby Great Salt Lake. In fact, if Utopia's data bits were liters of mountain water, the flow into one household connection would be enough to slake the thirst and bathe the bodies of half the people in the United States, whereas DSL could barely serve just Utah, and an old-fashioned dial-up connection would be enough for just a small town like Orem, population 84 000, the first of the 14 cities to be connected to Utopia.
What do you do with all this bandwidth? First off, you do just what you were doing before—only faster, better, and cheaper. Cheaper, of course, gets everyone's attention, especially people like Orem housewife Wendy Seamons de Hoyos. She and her husband, Ben, switched to one of Utopia's economy packages because it cost just US $44 a month, compared with the $69 per month they had been paying for DSL from Qwest Communications International Inc., the Denver-based incumbent regional phone provider. The cheaper package caps the bandwidth at 15 Mb/s, but that's still 10 times as fast as what Qwest had provided. At the new speed, de Hoyos says, Web pages "jump on-screen instantly."
The need for even more bandwidth will be apparent when new, data-hungry applications come onstream in the next few years. Most television today is a low-resolution digital version of the analog service of yore, but it's poised to soon bulk up its bandwidth requirements sevenfold for high-definition technology. Telephone calls will soon be as high-fidelity as FM radio, in stereo; that service, too, will require a fatter data pipe. Videoconferencing, still often a herky-jerky pantomime, will finally be easy and beautiful, experts say, and this will consume many megabits per second. In fact, high-bandwidth media will be pervasive—in online shopping, distance learning, telemedicine—you name it.
And in practice, it won't be so very hard to use 100 Mb/s. Utopia customers will be able to order the full-bore service, getting it all in a single, supersonic data feed, but most of them will prefer to divide this into separate streams. To split out one high-definition TV channel for the parents, another for the older children, and yet another for the youngsters, for example, at about 20 Mb/s each, would take more than half the feed. Reserve another 10 or so for high-definition video telephony, and there's only 30 Mb/s left for regular Internet use. This provision of television, Internet, and telephony services is called the triple play of consumer telecommunications.
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Utopia, as described by Sir Thomas More, the man who originated the term in the early 16th century, is an imaginary place of few laws, great natural abundance, and an absence of poverty and want. We still don't know how to cure poverty and want. But in a western U.S. desert, a utopia of sorts is taking shape for broadband users who would like to get their phone, television, and Internet services from the providers of their choice.
As it turns out, this Utopia, known formally as the Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency, promises to be just that, a broadband utopia. And it is very much a real place, encompassing 14 cities in northeastern Utah. It delivers to each of its 3000 subscribers high-speed Internet access, telephony, and television programming through a fiber-optic cable at data rates that now reach 30 megabits per second. Soon, service providers there will be offering speeds of 50 and even 100 Mb/s. That's enough to download a 2-hour movie in about 6 minutes, 10 to 20 times as fast as the typical U.S. cable or digital subscriber line connection, 6 times as fast as Verizon Communications Inc.'s much-publicized fiber-to-the-home service (called FiOS) and twice as fast as the new DSL now being introduced in Europe by France Telecom and others.
>
Utopia's promise is as vast as the nearby Great Salt Lake. In fact, if Utopia's data bits were liters of mountain water, the flow into one household connection would be enough to slake the thirst and bathe the bodies of half the people in the United States, whereas DSL could barely serve just Utah, and an old-fashioned dial-up connection would be enough for just a small town like Orem, population 84 000, the first of the 14 cities to be connected to Utopia.
What do you do with all this bandwidth? First off, you do just what you were doing before—only faster, better, and cheaper. Cheaper, of course, gets everyone's attention, especially people like Orem housewife Wendy Seamons de Hoyos. She and her husband, Ben, switched to one of Utopia's economy packages because it cost just US $44 a month, compared with the $69 per month they had been paying for DSL from Qwest Communications International Inc., the Denver-based incumbent regional phone provider. The cheaper package caps the bandwidth at 15 Mb/s, but that's still 10 times as fast as what Qwest had provided. At the new speed, de Hoyos says, Web pages "jump on-screen instantly."
The need for even more bandwidth will be apparent when new, data-hungry applications come onstream in the next few years. Most television today is a low-resolution digital version of the analog service of yore, but it's poised to soon bulk up its bandwidth requirements sevenfold for high-definition technology. Telephone calls will soon be as high-fidelity as FM radio, in stereo; that service, too, will require a fatter data pipe. Videoconferencing, still often a herky-jerky pantomime, will finally be easy and beautiful, experts say, and this will consume many megabits per second. In fact, high-bandwidth media will be pervasive—in online shopping, distance learning, telemedicine—you name it.
And in practice, it won't be so very hard to use 100 Mb/s. Utopia customers will be able to order the full-bore service, getting it all in a single, supersonic data feed, but most of them will prefer to divide this into separate streams. To split out one high-definition TV channel for the parents, another for the older children, and yet another for the youngsters, for example, at about 20 Mb/s each, would take more than half the feed. Reserve another 10 or so for high-definition video telephony, and there's only 30 Mb/s left for regular Internet use. This provision of television, Internet, and telephony services is called the triple play of consumer telecommunications.
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However, surely it's still limited by the server at t'other end and all the intermediate nodes. As you can see from the chart, all the delays in my connection to MURC are not with my puny 1 Mbit/s connection but with Beyond the Network America Inc nodes.
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