From: Tom Williams <Tom@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: January 3, 2006 10:20:33 AM PST
To: dewayne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Telco's Arrogant Stand on Content
Dewayne Hendricks wrote:
[Note: This comment comes from reader Andrew Odlyzko. DLH]
P.S. There are lots of other comments one could make about this
piece by Budde. For example, his rosy prediction for tele-presence
flies in the face of numerous failures in video telephony. But
that is another subject.
Using CU-SeeMe on a Macintosh in the late (or maybe it was
the mid) 1990s, I had expected those problems to go away
by 2002.
It appears to me that two major contributing factors to the
current inability of video telephony to get off the ground
are, at least for us "consumers,"
(1) Asymmetric bandwidth (remember when it was
called "ADSL?") and
(2) Lack of "real" public addresses.
As a result, instead of being able to use a $50 camera and
a $20 headset to call a buddy over the Internet, he or I
must fiddle with our NAT routers and hope there's enough
upstream bandwidth at each end to make it worth the time.
And if that's the case for us Seasoned Professionals, guess
how likely it is for Joe Sixpack to use this medium to
call Grandma?
If I were into conspiracy theories, I would start babbling
at this point about how the Big Businesses have kept address
space and outgoing bandwidth from us in order to keep us
as "consumers" instead of members of a network. For now, I
guess I'll just think it.