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Monday, December 5, 2005
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 Monday, December 5, 2005
started 12/6/2005; 7:12:21 AM - last post 12/6/2005; 11:17:08 PM
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Doc Searls - Monday, December 5, 2005 
12/6/2005; 11:12:21 AM (reads: 6901, responses: 8)
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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
New Jersey Wallpaper
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Lisa Williams - Re: Monday, December 5, 2005
12/6/2005; 7:05:54 PM (reads: 655, responses: 1)
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Hey, Doc,
When you said it was New Jersey wallpaper, I looked more closely at the auditorium. It looks eerily like one in the AT&T megalopolis in Basking Ridge, NJ.
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Jim Roberts - Re: Monday, December 5, 2005
12/6/2005; 9:22:33 PM (reads: 1050, responses: 2)
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There is a reason for the asymmetry. You have to remember that broadband was not designed for high speed web surfing. It was designed as a delivery platform for on-demand video. So while there was great need to make a fat pipeline to download movies, television, and all the other mind numbing stuff that three networks and a few movie companies dish out, it really doesn't take a lot of bandwidth to upload your credit card number.
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Doc Searls - Re: Monday, December 5, 2005
12/6/2005; 9:29:53 PM (reads: 660, responses: 0)
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Heh.
It's actually a large classroom at the Harvard Business School.
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Doc Searls - Reasons for asymmetry
12/6/2005; 10:02:44 PM (reads: 1346, responses: 0)
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The Net was meant in the first place to be symmetrical. The "design" you're talking about was what the carriers deployed because they could not imagine consumers becoming producers. They could not comprehend markets like the one for photography today, where the only consumption is of means for production.
Today, if I want to put 200 photos in my Flickr collection, or worse, if I want to send a multi-gigabyte video file to Google Video, I can't even do it easily over my "business" broadband connection, which costs me $109/month and provides only 300kb of upstream bandwidth. So I go down to a Starbucks, where there's typically a T-1 in every store.
This is not a good thing. Worse, it's a clueless thing, six years into the new millenium, for carriers who could be making a lot more money if they realized the gold mines sitting in the households they hold captive for Hollywood fare that still hasn't come through like everybody in that business imagined, back in '95 or whenever.
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Wes Felter - Re: Monday, December 5, 2005
12/6/2005; 10:40:54 PM (reads: 612, responses: 2)
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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?
Doc, I think the carriers would just screw up those services and people would end up buying them from "pure-play" providers instead. For example, you mentioned Flickr. If your ISP provided photo hosting, would you use it? You'd probably still use Flickr, because it's better, because it has to be better since photo hosting is all they do.
BTW, I see you've got some nice "single digit growth" going on in that photo there.
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Wes Felter - Re: Monday, December 5, 2005
12/6/2005; 10:46:16 PM (reads: 667, responses: 0)
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The ADSL and DOCSIS specs have been revised several times in the last five years. They could have made them symmetrical. They didn't. I think it's too late for the "we had no idea this would be used for Internet access" excuse.
But I put a little blame on the Ethernet people, who bitched about bellhead cell-taxed ADSL for years without providing an alternative. Now they have Ethernet in the First Mile, but it may be too late to get any traction.
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Doc Searls - Re: Monday, December 5, 2005
12/6/2005; 10:47:41 PM (reads: 660, responses: 1)
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Sure they'll screw it up. But if they give us symmetrical service while attempting to do business on it, what's the problem?
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Wes Felter - Re: Monday, December 5, 2005
12/7/2005; 3:17:08 AM (reads: 725, responses: 0)
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Oh, I regard it as totally obvious that symmetric service is better. I didn't bother to mention it. 
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