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Virtual circuits, point-to-point links and distributed phone
switches.
Looking at the phone poles around my house I'm begining to wonder
if running copper pairs back to a central office makes sense anymore.
I'm dreaming of a distributed phone system.
If bandwidth is essentially free, or very cheap, why not dedicate
bandwidth to each house?
Listing to the debates in the IETF on multicast address assignment
has me wondering if they have missed the point. I'm having a vision of
a large multinational
ISP decideing to 'sell' a fixed IP address to a content provider (say, CNN),
and the content provider just streamed content out. For the right amount
of money, the ISP could guarantee a fixed amount of bandwidth for the
multicast traffic.