Josh Bailey <josh@vandervecken.com> wrote:
>On Mon, 11 Dec 2000, Don Stokes wrote:
>> The folks at Murray Hill wouldn't have had trouble making that leap.
>> But they're not the telco.
>
>Actually, until 1996, most of them were, before Lucent was spun off - they
>were part of AT&T.

<sarcasm>No! I never realised that!</sarcasm>

A telco having a highly respected research division who have a good
handle on technology and possible applications is a long way from the
telco as a whole having similar views. (This isn't unique to telcos;
another example is Xerox PARC, which developed a significant fraction of
the technology now used in IT, while the Xerox company as a whole
couldn't get past selling photocopiers.)

>This is a trusim. I've found telcos internationally represent the general
>population in packet-headedness. Hate to say it, but the North American
>ones are the smartest.

Yes, they've learned a lot. I was talking about telcos circa 1993. The
world has changed just a teensy bit since then.

>Some APAC telcos certainly have the n * 64K syndrome. But your statement
>doesn't hold true out of Australasia.

n x 64k thinking is certainly still a problem here, Telstra Saturn seem
to suffer it a lot less than the others, but that's because most of the
people in it don't come from the Saturn side (or the ISPs they
engulfed).

>> I really heard telco types talking like this; they really thought that
>> folks would be using ADSL like a telephone, just with more bandwidth.
>
>Why not? This is actually how it's sold in many places; you can put a
>"regular" TV signal down without having to packetized/encode it; cheap and
>simple (much like a cable modem, in fact).

I'm talking about the major expected market. Sure, you can always find
counter-examples, but it's a hell of a lot easier to find folks shifting
IP over DSL than it is to find people pumping unpacketised video over
it. This is a complete reversal over the way ADSL was pitched at the
outset.

DSL after all just buys you a bit stream; it works just as well for
unpacketised video as for IP. But in the early 90s telephone companies
thought in terms of, well, telephones.

-- don

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Received on Tue Dec 12 12:23:44 2000