Eeeyow. There are rented "bucket trucks" all over the suburb of Arlington, MA where I live. It appears the RCN, the new phone, cable & Internet company is serious. They plan to make Arlington the first town in Mass to have two cable companies. The rumor is that $19.95/month will get you phone and cable.
They are pulling what looks like shielded fiber cable all over town. I would love to know what kind of equipment they are going to use. Will they multiplex the phone and cable over one line or use separate lines? Will the phone be over a shared media or all point-to-point back to a CO? They have torn up the street for some serious wiring in front of their new office.
I Can't wait to see what 1998 brings. Both in terms of new services and new/merged companies. Seems like staying at home just gets better and better from a networking point of view (56k modems, cable modems, ISDN, ADSL). The stock market is going through the roof and this seems to be the fuel for acquisition after acquisition. The "VC event horizon" must be about 18 months no days. What a shame. Let's here it for taking the long view... (and really delivering a solution to the customer).
Are you seeing adds for RCN in the paper? It all started when I read about a weird thing in the local paper. It seems that Boston Edison and some other little firm had placed the city council's underwear in a knot because they had petitioned to pull fiber all over town and the dead-line for the council to respond was only two weeks. They needed more time. But legally Edison and the other little company were entitled to their permit.
Turns out the other little company was RCN.
So, six months later I'm seeing adds about how bad NYNEX is (did we need to be reminded?) and how they are going pull fiber into our houses and give us phone, cable and Internet.
I want to believe. I want the fiber. I want a gigabit network connection. But can they really do it? I'm not sure I want to give up my copper phone and copper cable connection just yet.
But if they did pull fiber to my house. Wow. That would be cool. And, if they did they could give me phone, cable and Internet and it would probably be cheaper and only one bill. Humm...
Wow boy. I'm not sure. I have a cable modem. I love it. But it has failed. And when it did they said I would have to wait a week to have it fixed. My heart sank. I get so much email that this would cause a serious problem. My mail server can not be off-line for a week.
So, I installed an ISDN backup system. Luckily this is easy for me. For many people this would be hard/impossible/expensive. The good new is that my cable modem came back to life the next day. It turns out that for a while it was flakey when it rained (I now understand this is not an uncommon phenomena for cable modems).
I just have to say it. Is Java the COBOL of the 90's? I used to hear people say they would only program in Visual C++ and nothing else. They wanted to windows programming and nothing else. They wanted to be Microsoft junkies. I had this vision of thousands of out of work Visual C++ programmers standing on a street corner hawking windows apps for pennies.
Now I am seeing the same thing with Java. Java this, Java that. So many coffee metaphors. Too many coffee metaphors. Not enough computer science or just plain engineering.
I fear that people will be only able to make cute little animations jump across the screen and no one will be left who can actually tell me how the machine actually works.
In something akin the "Bride of Frankenstein" I read about someone porting SS7 software to Windows NT. SS7 is the protocol which giant phone switches (like the AT&T 5ESS) use to talk to other phone switches. So, why would you want to connect your NT server to a giant phone switch with SS7? You wouldn't. But, you might want to *replace* some of the functionality of the giant multi-million-dollar phone switch from New Jersey with a much, much cheaper Windows NT box if you were not so concerned about reliability or employing thousands of engineers. Ever wonder why AOL is always in the news for their outages? Just kidding.
Seems like a trend that people will be trying to do flanking maneuvers around these giant phone switches for all sorts of reasons, including toll reduction, call diversion, remote access, etc... Interesting stuff. I always wondered how giant phone switches talk to each other and now I can run it on my pentium at home.