High Speed Internet costs (was: Email hosting)

[Travis Roy]

>   Are you telling me that they built their entire digital TV 
> distribution network to handle symmetric two-way traffic 
> before anyone suspected the Internet would hit it big?  Why 
> the hell would they do that?  Don't give me any talk about 
> grand visions of packet-switched networking; the cable 
> companies didn't see that coming any more than the telcos did.

The work needed to add internet to a properly set up cable plant is
-NOTHING- compaired to the cost of upgrading the cable plant itself. You
add one node per ~500 customers that all go to a head end. The cable
plant itself already supports it because you upgraded it anyway for 1.
Phone service, 2. Digital Cable, 3. you had to for the FCC being on your
back about leakage anyway. Manchester probably has about 400-500 nodes,
if that (it didn't even have close to that when I worked there) That's
not a huge cost for a company the size of AT&T or even M1 when it was
that. The cable has the bandwidth to already support that ammount of
traffic, they don't have to do anything extra to support it. I remember
back in the day of the old lan-city modems and I was an employee, if you
knew the right people you could get your modem uncapped to 10 -MEG- up
and down, and if you were transfering to somebody else that was uncapped
you could almost get that (I hit 8meg at one point) this was of course
before caps on the nodes themselves.

Even with phone, digital cable, and internet there's PLENTY of room on
that cable for other stuff, they're already planning stuff like video on
demail (ala TiVoish) they talked about having the ability to download
whole shows to your cable box and FF/RW.. Even without internet they had
plans for that, and they had to make room for it.