Technology

Between 1998 and early 2000, analog dialup started to slowly slip as ADSL and cable services were deployed. There was no doubt that faster, full-time connections were needed for both homes and businesses. After all, these were the heady days of the dotcom bubble. Telecom companies and cable providers were just not deploying services quickly enough. It's no conspiracy theory that telecom companies didn't want to provide the service because it threatened to undermine an existing business, and that cable companies had quite a bit of network upgrading to perform before wide deployment could even occur. Furthermore, both ADSL and cable were -- for the most part -- the purview of the incumbent telecom and cable companies. Internet Service Providers, try as they may [1][2], didn't have a chance in these markets.

The dotcom crash, 9/11/01, and the telecom scandals didn't help things. What did occur following those disruptions was the popularization of Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11). Also, the value of the Internet barely skipped a beat. E-commerce, digital music, voice-over-IP and video were almost entirely grass-roots movements, driving the necessity for bandwidth ever higher. Podcasting, video blogging, and television distribution through Apple's iTunes are happening today -- not at some distant future time. The ADSL and cable bottlenecks are the dilemma that continue to constrict progress.

Without touching on the distinction between theoretical and real bandwidth, let's continue the relative network speeds graph from Part I of this post.

Although both ADSL and cable services have begun to deliver faster speeds, they're both dwarfed by the network performances most of us experience every day in our home and office environments. Furthermore, they are not technically different from the ADSL and cable services provided in 1998 -- they're just much closer to their maximum potential. To put my point into greater relief, the following graph presents a comparison between the connection speeds of my actual networks as I write the post.

The server where my blog exists is in a data center next to Seattle's Space Needle. It connects to the physical Internet via a full-duplex, 100 megabit per second Ethernet port. My office has both an 802.11g Wi-Fi access point (half-duplex, 54 megabits per second) and a full-duplex, 100 megabit per second Ethernet network. The fastest Internet connection I could have installed at my office -- without paying several thousand dollars per month -- was 7 megabit per second (down) by 1 megabit per second (up) ADSL. Most people don't even have that fast of a connection.

With the growing popularity of gigabit per second Ethernet and the new 802.11n Wi-Fi specification, the disparity will only grow.

In summary, new Internet applications such as podcasting, music and video distribution are continuing to necessitate higher network speeds. Whereas local area networks based on Ethernet, fiber and Wi-Fi regularly operate at speeds between 100 and 1,000 megabits per second, telecom and cable companies have reached the end of their bandwidth potential using the existing copper and coax infrastructure. A move to ADSL2+ or Hybrid-Fiber-Coax will not be enough to address this ever-increasing disparity. Part III of this post will explore possible futures.

In the early days of commercial Internet access -- when I ran a regional Internet Service Provider in Washington State -- the primary service was analog public switched telephone network (PSTN) connections at 14,400 bits per second, 28,800 bits per second, and 33,600 bits per second. The 57,600 bit per second analog modems, introduced in 1996, exhausted the bandwidth capability of the traditional voice network. In fact, it was the first time in which a large proportion of the connections could not reach the maximum performance rating.

During this "analog age", there was also a great battle waged between providers that sold a metered service and providers that sold a flat (a.k.a., "unlimited") service. The main limitation for both types of providers was that they didn't achieve a 1:1 ratio of PSTN ports to customers -- doing so would have been both cost prohibitive and, essentially, impossible. Contrary to what you might imagine, however, the challenge in deciding which camp a provider should belong was not related to determining an appropriate port-to-customer ratio through a distribution analysis of past call frequency and duration. This would have been totally inadequate in light of the dramatic change in usage patterns occurring month after month. Instead, the providers selling an "unlimited" service were making a losing bet.

It didn't take a Nostradamus to predict the future, as the Internet shifted from a primarily text environment (E-mail, Telnet, Gopher, FTP, et al.) to one that included graphics and multimedia (HTTP, RTSP, etc.). Call frequency and duration skyrocketed. The new features not only demanded more bandwidth, but also increased the number of reasons people might want to connect. There was a rapidly growing desire for high-speed, full-time connections to the Internet, and the public switch telephone network was not a good fit.

The analog voice network, however, was so pervasively installed that "technologies" even started to appear for bonding multiple PSTN lines. These connections were almost always assumed to be full-time as well. Although bonding analog connections never really took hold as a viable practice, it's important to realize how much momentum is generally behind squeezing capability from a ubiquitous network. This brings us to ISDN.

We began selling ISDN connections in 1995. The same copper wire pairs used for delivering PSTN circuits can, in most cases, deliver an ISDN circuit. An ISDN Basic Rate Interface (BRI) delivers up to two 64,000 bit per second digital channels. Most ISDN equipment can bond the two channels, for a maximum of 128,000 bits per second. ISDN, however, operates on the same "switched network" paradigm as PSTN. As a technology for delivering high-speed, full-time Internet service, it was nothing more than a flash in the pan. Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) and cable Internet service overtook ISDN by the end of 1998. Both ADSL and cable service provided faster, full-time connections to the Internet.

During this same period, it was popular for businesses to purchase dedicated Internet connections at rates between 56,000 (DS0) and 1,544,000 (DS1) bits per second. Although these full-time, digital circuits used the same sort of copper wire pairs (or pairs of pairs, as is the case with DS1) that analog voice circuits used, they were separate from the public switched telephone network. The very maximum Internet connection speed that most businesses could financially justify between 1995 and 1998 would have been the DS1, costing between $1,000 and $2,000 per month. Only the largest organizations and Internet Service Providers purchased circuits larger than a DS1, and I only mention them here for comparative purposes.

In summary, the early growth of the Internet saw a rapid shift from part-time connections based on the analog PSTN to full-time connections based on the much faster DSL and cable services. The demand for faster, full-time Internet connections resulted from the growing benefit derived from its use. Part II of this post looks at the period from 1998 to the present.