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| Tuesday, December 6, 2005 |
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The costs of asymmetry 
| | In the shower this morning I was thinking about the unstarted businesses that can only thrive in online markets made possible by symmetrical broadband — markets we have never seen, because broadband to the home (and even to many businesses) has been provided in asymmetrical form from the beginning. |
| | How many small and home office (SOHO) businesses would be made possible by services that let people produce as well as consume? |
| | How many small service businesses can't grow because people can't (or don't bother to) run servers in their homes? How many business-building activities are strangled before they are born by prohibitively narrow upstream bandwidths? |
| | And why do we conceive bandwidth only in up and down terms? Why not in and out (as in inbound and outbound services, or inventories, or traffic)? |
| | The answer is simple: In spite of the Net's peer-to-peer, end-to-end, symmetrical, smart edge-stupid middle native architecture, bandwidth provision has carried the assumption that consumers don't produce anything other than cash for producers and intermediaries. And we've bought into those assumptions, too — because most of us have never known anything else. |
| | Asymmetry doesn't just hurt broadband customers, either. It hurts carriers. How many services could carriers provide if they made bandwidth symmetrical for everybody? How many more things could they charge for? How much QA and backup and offsite storage and hosting and brokering and naming and who knows how many other services could they provide? |
| | How fast would economies grow if every consumer had unlimited powers to produce? |
| | That was the promise of the Net in the first place, folks. It's still not fulfilled. |
| | I remember when the Bell Atlantic-TCI merger was announced -- it was clear then that the only agenda was to strip mine out the public interest component of the telecom infrastructure and put toll booths wherever was thought to be ncessary. In 1993 it was visionary but not too much so to envision a distributed peer-global network that demanded symmetry of access as a design point. Today it's just ghastly that if I want a symmetrical data service I still need to provision a T-1. |
The Because Effect, cont'd
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