Tech Issues

["Ben Levy" <belevy@syr.edu>]

Thought I'd chime in to clear up a couple of the tech topics this list has
strayed into in the past few posts...

Excite@Home is in bankruptcy, and Friday its creditors won approval to void
all pre-existing contracts with cable companies.
Excite@Home provides the cable modem service on several major cable
companies' wires, including AT&T, Cox and Comcast. (Note: This is by a
system-by-system basis, so there will be some systems owned by these
companies unaffected.) What this means is that although the company owns the
wire, it's actually Excite@Home running the Internet service, and providing
the outbound bandwidth to the rest of the world. By canceling the contracts
and suspending service, the goal is for Excite@Home to force the cable
companies into signing new contracts with higher rates, because operating as
it has now Excite@Home is reportedly losing around $6 mil a week. This has
nothing directly to do with the sale or non-sale of AT&T Broadband, but is
forcing AT&T and the other affected companies to decide if they want to pay
more to Excite@Home, or go it alone out to the Internet. We should know by
the end of the week who decides to blink here. Combine this with the same
problems in the land of DSL, and you start to wonder if this home broadband
stuff is ready for primetime.

As for the whole bps/baud debate triggered by WBPS's calls... Older modems
used to have the baud and the bps as equal stats, because they could only
transmit one bit per cycle. However, if you devise a system where you can
transmit more than one bit per cycle (IE. instead of 2 signal states, use 2
to the third, or 8 states) your bit rate will multiply but your baud rate
will stay the same (in this case, the bitrate will be triple the baud,
because with your selection of one of the 8 states you can signal 3 bits.)
This is why generations of modems tend to come out in multiples of prior
speeds, 1200 to 2400 to 4800 to 9600...

But WBPS's calls don't make much sense, because the bps speed rates were
only seen with modems. And afterall, with the big move to broadband, modems
are being replaced by DSL links and cable modems, which are much faster and
more reliable, and with the way they seem to be catching on... (rereads top
half of this message) uh, nevermind.

Ben