Michael.Silverton.Palo-Alto.CA.US
UMSB: Ubiquitous Massive Symmetric Bandwidth
A rambling retrospective cobbled together some time in 2006Still wondering why I ranted about SYMMETRIC bandwidth and OPEN ACCESS all through the 1990's and at the turn of the millennium? Well, I just happen to have one of each, a bandwidth example and closed-network example for you; pretty much precisely as we explained in our technology and business plans, back in the day. The less democratic the upstream, the less content PRODUCTION and more content CONSUMPTION for the average netizen. The less OPEN the network, the more RESTRICTIVE the policies. Yes, the ephemeral, yet palpable influences of coercive architecture and captology in our everyday lives are still alive and well, thank you very much; and it's still up to you and me as to whether they are used as forces of g00d or 3vi1. This isn't rocket science, friends, and the internet did not have to be configured this way. As we proved long ago, a better model can and should be built, and in fact, the multi-decade struggle for the inalienable right to democratic technologies of all kinds, including bandwidth, continues so long as I continue.
Alas, the ongoing quest for Massive Symmetric Bandwidth has ever been my muse, my nemesis, my joy, my sorrow, my eternal hope. Since 1992, one of the most overvalent ambitions that has ever captured my imagination, heart, sweat, and energy. From the beginning, we said that this would be the bedrock foundation of a robust information economy. An economy wherein all value was created, exchanged, and ascribed from the network's edge, rather than hoarded and rationed from the center. Then came John Perry Barlow's 1995 "Death From Above," which included such plain observations as:
"It already seems obvious to me, and to anybody who's launched Mosaic lately, that the market for upstream bandwidth is about to explode. Bandwidth is one of those things like money, sex, and power. The more you've got, the shorter it feels. And there are now a critical number of Americans who know what bandwidth is and why is feels good."We felt increasingly confident that policy makers and venture capitalists would fully understand what we were talking about. Remember, that was 1995 and "the market for upstream bandwidth is about to explode." Well it was, and it did -- and Sand Hill Road missed it, despite that fact that many of us were calling for construction of residential community LANs, aka Ethernet To The Home, aka Ethernet in the First Mile, years before that terminology ever matured. A real shame. But bitterness gives way to sadness, sadness to acceptance, acceptance to new beginnings; and the old things, become history.
Since 1992, I'd advanced the proposition that without Massive Symmetric Bandwidth, there can be no authentic internet-mediated individual net liberty. Liberty in the sense of empowering any network user to be either an information Consumer or PRODUCER. Back in the 1990's, the most common reaction to such ideas was dismissal. "You're far overstating the significance of the bandwidth thing. By the way, what is bandwidth?" Even the so-called experts at Telestructure III couldn't seem to fully comprehend the need for Massive Symmetric Bandwidth, while we explained that it was the very essence of The Emergent Economy, Itself. Of course, we never proposed that the bandwidth per se (puh-lease) is the economy, but the way that people use the network would be so fundamentally different as to create an Alternete Asymmetric Pseudo-Internet, if the Residential Information Infrastructure System were not engineered as a Symmetric, Ethernet To The Home (ETTH) network.
Animation: 9/26/2001
As we approach 2007, both cable MSO's and anachronistic telcos are finally scrambling to deliver ETTH; in fact, Ethernet Everywhere. But their service offerings are still far too asymmetric because the fundamental thinking of incumbents is a century behind the market's needs. While many see it as a mere academic argurment, the fact is that as early as 1995, the issue of symmetric bandwidth was a central issue to internet development. "One critical issue is the amount of bandwidth provided from the home. The Internet model sees bandwidth as being more-or-less symmetric; the cable TV model sees a much more limited outbound bandwidth: essentially enough for home shopping" (Economic FAQs About the Internet. Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason and Hal R. Varian).
Today, people are beginning to understand. With the advent of YouTube and User Originated Content, the old battle to maintain old-school, Ma Bell, telco central office control is rekindled. This battle goes back as far as the Arab-Israeli conflict and way back in 1999, we called it Open Access. Today, it's called Net Neutrality, and It Matters Now More Than Ever that people make thier voices heard to Save The Internet from becoming even more restricted in terms of service capabilities.
The great thing about the objective of delivering Ethernet To The Home (ETTH) is that it can be delivered over fiber optic cable OR wireless. With the opening of fallow television spectrum, and other advances in WiMAX, etc., it could well be that ETTH finally reaches the last 100' by radio. That would be great, too. Despite arguably myopic naming of the company (Fiberhood Networks), we always emphasized that a combination of fiber optic backhaul and a diversity of last-hop deliver methods would get the job done; the objective was and and is the end-to-end Ethernet Subscriber Access Network (ESAN), whatever form that takes, given the real life conditions of any given installation. Where fiber is abundant, where trenches are open, sure, use FTTH, but by all means, practicality, cost-efficiency, real-life field conditions dictate the optimal ETTH architecture.
A Trip Through The WayBack Machine
February, 1992 -- Small Business Development Center, Phoenix, AZ: "You mean you want to raise money to set up a BBS?" "Um, no, that would be pointless; we need to finish building the internet, using native Ethernet, all the way to individual homes." "Sir, we just can't help you if you won't speak sensibly. That might happen in 30 or 40 years, but it's just not practical in this decade. Besides, you don't even have any education; what makes you think that YOU could ever do such a thing?" The finance officer actually suggested to my wife that I seek psychological counseling because of this delusion of an inevitable explosive demand for Massive Symmetric Bandwidth.
September 1993 -- Begin classes, San Diego Mesa College. Pursue AA Business Administration with intent to follow-up with technical BS degree.
June 1995 -- Valedictorian, San Diego Mesa College, 4.0 GPA. Acceptance letters from Harvard, UC Berkeley, and Stanford University.
June 1997 -- Graduated from Stanford, 3.65 cumulative GPA.
April 30, 1997 -- Dialup's doom is obvious (especially AOL). "Isn't it about time to move beyond the interim ISP model altogether? Time to deploy residential community LANs and do away with all this silly local switched-circuit congestion altogether."
October 1, 1997 -- Building community alliances and crunching the numbers.
January 25, 1999 -- The First Ethernet To The Home (ETTH) Company.
Oct.
27, 1999 PDT, by Chris Oakes
SAN JOSE, California -- Now, coalitions of Internet service providers
and consumer advocates are trying to warn the nation's ISP industry
that a similar monopolistic monster threatens their ability to compete.
"Open Access is historically an enabling policy that's fostered
competition and allowed Internet service choice so far," said Michael
Silverton, director of the new Open Access Alliance of the Bay Area.
July 6, 2000 -- Marketing Residential Information Infrastructure Systems (RIIS). "Just Give Me Bandwidth and a Browser."
October 4, 2001 -- Redefining ETTH to the more generalizable Ethernet Subscriber Access Network (ESAN).
February 5, 2003 -- Still working to protect the net from ILEC Unbundling, an early precurser and requisite for Incumbent Carriers to eventually undermine Net Neutrality.
June, 2004 -- IEEE Std 802.3ah-2004 (Ethernet in the First Mile) is available from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
October, 2009 -- Motorola Ships One Millionth Fiber-to-the-Home Optical Network Terminal, inspiring a brief retrospective.
Well before the official standard, in 1998, Fiberhood Networks, was the original Ethernet To The Home (ETTH) company, and boldly acted upon the vision of leapfrogging the extraordinarily costly, inefficient, piecemeal retrofitting of aging cable and telephone networks and instead building a completely new network model, similar to those that many other nations now enjoy. However, in the United States, the entrenched encumbents proved far too powerful. Morever, short-sighted models like the now dilapidated AOL and long defunct @Home were seen as preferable to fundamentally changing, and OWNING a completely new network architecture. It's still my firm belief that had Sand Hill Road possessed the foresight, Fiberhood Networks (or some derivation thereof) would only now be kicking into high gear, having seen far enough ahead to be prepared to deliver the Massive Symmetric Bandwidth demanded, today, in 2006. In fact, the current market for Universal Ethernet services is pretty much exactly where we forecasted it would be in the 2006-2008 time frame.
The way I see it, if you're going to tilt at windmills, you might as well pick the biggest dang windmill you can find. If that windmill proves too daunting, find the next smaller windmill and charge onward! In the end, the world's first 10Mbps, 100Mbps, and 1Gbps fiber optic Ethernet To The Home node will always be in the little Palo Alto garage that we wired with more bandwidth than the entire region's residents had, at the time. Our only regret is that we didn't have the opportunity to Share the Bandwidth as intended; even today, the average broadband customer is fortunate to see a tiny fraction of what we demonstrated as feasible, last millenium, and despite Barlow's warnings, Death From Above may have done enough damage to keep it that way into the foreseeable future.
Last updated: 23 Oct 2009
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