InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
By Jason Levitt
Digital Subscriber Line and cable modem service are poised to be the big pipes that drive the
telecommuter/home-office market to new heights and new applications; and it looks as though,
in my neighborhood at least, cable modem service will arrive first.
Cable modem service will be available throughout my home turf of Austin, Texas, by the "end of
November of this year." So says the shiny Time Warner Inc. press kit promoting the company's
Road Runner cable modem service (yes, that Road Runner -- it's all very cute: Beep! Beep!). Time
Warner has been slowly upgrading its cable TV systems to fiber and then rolling out Road Runner.
The company offers cable modem service in 20 cities and boasts 90,000 customers.
At first glance, cable modem service seemed like a dream come true: massive bandwidth right to
my home office via a cable TV connection. But after a bit of analysis and discussion with Time
Warner, I'm not so sure it's the right service for real power users.
The Business Case For Cable
What is clear today is that certain kinds of network traffic aren't well-suited to the cable
modem architecture. Unlike ISDN, POTS modems, and DSL, which are usually dedicated,
single-circuit, point-to-point connections back to your Internet service provider, cable modem
connections are shared among pools of users. It's like being on a corporate LAN with 150 users --
if your next-door neighbor decides to upload a 20-gigabyte file to some FTP server, there will be
that much less bandwidth for you to use, and you will likely experience a dramatic decrease in
network response.
According to Time Warner, as many as 500 homes will share the same pipe back to the Road
Runner regional office that has the Internet connection. This wouldn't be so bad if the pipe were
symmetric (that is, if bandwidth upstream and downstream were the same), but it isn't. The
bandwidth downstream (from the Internet to the users) is huge, perhaps 10 Mbps or more, but the
upstream (from the users to the Internet) is somewhere between 768 Kbps and 1.5 Mbps. The
result is that Time Warner won't be letting customers, whether business or consumer, use cable
modems for servers or services that require any kind of serious upstream bandwidth. Web
servers or FTP servers are the obvious applications that come to mind. Time Warner will allow
businesses to run Web and FTP servers but only if Time Warner hosts the servers in the regional
office's machine room instead of at the actual end points for the cable modem service.
So, I can't run a Web server in my home office. For my purposes, that's bad news. Furthermore,
the pricing information on static IP addressing that I'm getting from Time Warner suggests
(remember, cable modem service isn't available in Austin yet) that, in order to get static IP
addressing, I'll have to sign-up for "business class" service on the order of $500 or more a
month. Suddenly, cable modem service doesn't seem so attractive.
A Geek Disclaimer
Call me a power user, or even a business user, but my home office has a domain name, DNS
server, MX mail forwarding, Web server, reverse domain lookups, static IP addressing, and a
nailed-up, 24-by-7, dual ISDN connection to the Internet. That's pretty standard stuff for a
business LAN, and is well-suited to my lab duties and for the types of network traffic that I
produce, but it's not so typical for today's average home office and telecommuter market. I think
times are changing, though. Remember, the kids who are 15 years old today don't remember the
AT bus, 386 CPUs, machines with 4 Mbytes of RAM, 14.4-Kbps modems, interlaced computer
monitors, keyboards but no mice, 5.25-inch floppy drives, Windows 3.1, or other artifacts of
yesteryear. In 10 years, they'll be expecting to run their own Web servers in their living rooms
and do video-teleconferencing from the phone on the wall. They'll want just what I want.
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he home-office and telecommuter market is taking off. Any pundit will cite some staggering
statistics. According to some estimates, there will be more than 123 million telecommuters in
the United States and Europe by 2003.
Cable modem service, like DSL technology, is still in an embryonic state. The hardware is rapidly
being improved, and applications to take advantage of all that bandwidth have yet to arrive. Even
Time Warner doesn't seem clear on exactly what kind of business services the company will
provide, although it already offers several tiers of service and dedicated circuits from your
home office back to your corporate LAN (your home office and corporate LAN must reside within
the same cable modem service area).
I guess I need a quick disclaimer here. Some people get along fine just browsing the Web from
their home office. They don't mind using America Online or having a dynamically assigned IP
address from their Internet service provider. I'm not one of those people. For those people, the
$45 cable modem service may seem quite attractive.
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