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Originally Posted by erol
This vision of 'unlimited bandwidth' to all is not a pipe dream imo. It is in the realms of the possible and increasingly so by the day. By the day the costs of such a system are reducing. The main problems to achieveing this goal are not actualy techincal atm. They are more to do with the historic control of entities (telephone companies) that have for the last 100 years or so had a business built around the concept of managing scarity.
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Ahh the old "Evil phone companies" argument. I won't go out of my way to defend them, as to a large extent, what you are saying is true (after all, BT held comms back in this country for years, and, imo, still isn't rolling out ADSL as fast as it could, other companies are in a similar position, ntl included). But I would like to point out that despite advances in Technology, it is still not cheap to maintain/upgrade a network. It still costs billions a year for the likes of BT and ntl to maintain theirs. Even the huge comms companies don't have infinite resources. The problem with ntl is they sometimes seem to mismanage what they have.
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We will at some point live in a world of 'near infinate bandwidth' - simply because it is techincally possible and offers to much value not to do so. My concern is in how quickly we move from a world of managed scarcity to one of abundance.
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I think we will get to a point where we have near infinite bandwidth, but I don't think it is technically feasible yet (the fibres used may have infinite bandwidth, but the equipment used either side of each fibre may not).
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For me the NTL cap keeps us in a world of managed scarcity at the same time as simply not solving the problem of congestion.
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If the problem is congestion on the network, as NTL have stated, then, no, a 1 gig cap probably won't help. It might if NTL are charged for data transferred across their link to the Internet and they are trying to cut costs though.
A more sensible option (I will stress that I am not in favour of this option though) would be to have variable speeds. The max speed would lower in peak time, and increase in off peak time (much like Bulldog DSL does).
So finally some questions for you Ian.