At 02:07 PM 1/3/96 -0800, you wrote:
Thomas Edwards writes:
[ microcellular nets ]
But how can these things compete with @Home, which is promising 10 Mbps in and 128 kbps out of homes with cable modems?
I'm skeptical about cable modems---few cable providers have adequate return paths, and everyone competes for the downlink bandwidth. Broadcast is not the right architecture.
Even admittedly with no evidence, I tend to disagree. I think the world needs cable-driven "mostly-one-way" Internet access for the same reason we need both: 1. Magazines/books (few to many) vs. snail-mail (1-to-1 communication). 2. Television/radio (few to many) vs. telephones (1-to-1 communication). If, as I've heard, you could broadcast 28 mbits per second down a 6-megahertz cable line, that's a lot of "news, weather, and sports" to be broadcast to EVERYONE, similar to newspapers. Imagine the entire contents of USENET, plus a goodly supply of (encrypted) individual mail, etc. The contents of every newspaper in the country, transmitted a few times every day, etc.
Any systems in actual operation? How many users do they support?
No idea. Wish I knew.