Josh Bailey <josh@vandervecken.com> wrote:
>On Mon, 11 Dec 2000, Don Stokes wrote:
>
>> a lab floors) was that ADSL borrowed the idea of QAM modulation from
>> the modem world..
>
>Some varieties, yes.
>
>> (ADSL was being pushed to carry video via a 6Mbps downlink; nobody
>> much was talking about other kinds of DSL.
>
>At that time Murray Hill way (Bell Labs) it was being investigated as a
>T1/E1 replacement. Greater range over fewer pairs.

The folks at Murray Hill wouldn't have had trouble making that leap.
But they're not the telco. Telcos for the most part are dinosaurs --
they've got better over the last half a dozen years, but at the time it
was a *huge* leap for them to consider services in other than
multiple-of-64k terms; getting them to think in terms of something other
than circuit switching. Telco types were scared stiff of packets.

>> expected that the ADSL kit would then be attached through ATM, and
>> circuit switched to whatever broadband service provider you wanted --
>> one service at a time. Very typical of telco thinking at the time.
>
>Actually, this is how it's still being sold, and it's a good thing. I use
>a frame relay over DSL interworked to an ATM connection back to my office
>at home. Much more simple, much more reliable, than IP + MPLS (or
>whatever) can be for awhile yet; no authentication, or routing problems
>for me!

Yeah, but for "broadband", read "video". The clear expectation was that
6 Mbps was primarily for video -- you would watch a movie or TV channel
by basically dialing up your video provider's channel and watching it.
If you wanted data, well, they left space in the bottom of the band for
ISDN. I really heard telco types talking like this; they really
thought that folks would be using ADSL like a telephone, just with more
bandwidth. Mind you, at the time, telcos hadn't figured out that folks
would spend many hours a month on Internet calls to one phone number
either.

-- don

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Received on Mon Dec 11 22:59:36 2000