IPUrbia

Another Ars Technica post about the upcoming version of EVDO that promises 9Mb/s downstream speed, more than 10x faster than current 800Kb/s.

FTTH, 9Mb/s EVDO, DOCSIS 3.0 with 100Mb/s–the next generation is looking good. Still, we sometimes overlook transport to the “node,” which is a big obstacles in and of itself. Many cell towers (mainly rural) still run off of T1s , and, in the wired world, 100Mb/s+ per subscriber starts to put strain on even fiber backhauls, which usually range from 1-10Gb/s but usually accommodates residential best effort and business class services simultaneously.

Still, a lot of fast, competing technologies is always a good thing. Let’s just get some of it my direction…

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Techdirt recently ran a short piece about a new Cablevision ad campaign claiming to have “the most advanced fiber-optic network”, despite the fact that they are running fiber to the node, and the last mile is coax. Verizon, wanting to differentiate its fiber-to-the-home FIOS, is labelling the commercials “hogwash” and potentially false advertising.

Techdirt was a little critical of such advertising, arguing that, instead of “wasting all that time arguing over who could claim who had the best network, they could have been investing all that money in… I don’t know… improving the quality of those networks”.

I’m a little confused as to why Techdirt is critical of such advertising, because it, in the end, encourages networks to compete on actual tangibles. However, it does have a measure of ridiculousness to it–Comcast has recently been running advertisements touting “up to 12x faster than DSL“, despite the fact that BellSouth/AT&T (the incumbent in the area) offers DSL service that is comparable to Comcast’s best offering. As I noted before, similar advertisements will become much more common as AT&T’s next generation speeds of 6-8 Mb/s becomes very dated against the competition’s next-generation network rollouts.

There are some interesting problems here, though, from a customer education standpoint. There is a wireless provider in Texas that advertises “Wireless DSL” which, although completely impossible from a technical standpoint, is brilliant from a customer communication standpoint. Cablevision’s ad for the “most advanced fiber-optic” network is also interesting, since, although fiber has all of the glamour these days, it won’t deliver faster last-mile access for the next few years, at least.* Is it wrong to mislabel the technology if the communication about actual performance is the same? In technical circles, perhaps, but in dealing with a generally technically unsavvy mass market, I’m not so sure.

* Quick explanatory note on fiber versus coax. Fiber does have a much greater potential capacity than coax. Nevertheless, DOCSIS 3 delivers 100Mb/s, and, according to my friends in the know on cable engineering, much greater speeds over coax are possible. Most of the details, however, do favor fiber–coax is a shared medium, which can be a problem. Also, coax will always struggle to deliver meaningful upstream bandwidth, due to technical limitations. Nevertheless, while a built-from-scratch network would be smart to use fiber, cable companies with a heavy investment in coax networks are set for the foreseeable future.

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Normally, I’d consider articles concerning DVD-sniffing dogs (aside from the ridiculousness off it all) out of context for the blog. However, last Friday while I was travelling, I got a call from an old friend who told me a story about such dogs (although not the DVD-sniffing variety).

A few years back, my friend was coming back from an international flight and going through customs and some sort of law enforcement agency came around with the canine squad. Usually the dogs are intimidating, but these were beagles (from the Department of Agriculture?) which are generally more approachable dogs than the usual German shepherds. They came near a lady, who, being a nice friendly person, decided to pet the beagle. All hell broke loose as the the officers pulled to dog back, and one yelled “Do not pet the officer!”. She was promptly escorted away, only to reappear 45 minutes later looking rather frizzled and disheveled. Nice.

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For those of you who haven’t heard of Apollo and want an in-depth overview, check here and here for a detailed explanation.

Apollo is Adobe’s vision for the next evolution in the marriage of web and desktop and is basically an out-of-browser engine for running HTML/Flash applications. Basically, this is targeted as a Java replacement; cross-platform applications that can be delivered over the Internet. The main advertised advantage over Web 2.0 applications is that there can be closer integration with the PC itself–it will be easier to access files, play audio and video, etc… than the current AJAX methods.

I hate it already, and I haven’t even used it.

6 reasons not to like Apollo

1. Cross-platform? Not really: Flash, a basic part of Apollo, is advertised as cross-platform, but Adobe has never managed to really keep the Linux release anywhere close to up to date. Apollo is not going to be any better. Adobe has already stated that Linux will be a later release-something we’ve been hearing the “Linux release will follow shortly” for years from Adobe with Flash, and no one in the Linux community really is going to believe them. If they were devoted to a cross-platform approach, then they would put more resources to the Linux version and/or delay the Windows version for a simultaneous release. Cross-platform, to Adobe, is a marketing gimmick that gets lip service and little else. I can name a dozen operating systems that support AJAX without even thinking; Apollo’s meager support for two operating systems count for much.

2. Security: This is more of a conceptual complaint than a real one. I like the idea that my operating system and files are (ideally) by and large hidden from my Internet applications. Nevertheless, since this paradigm tends to favor using software from more established, reputable vendors, most users actually might actually be safer–after all, most users are at least vaguely more cautious about their downloads than their browsing. Still, this is a bad approach to security, especially given all-to-common breaches at “reputable” companies, the potential impact of a single security breach at an “Apollo”-based software vendor could be almost impossible to contain.

3. Portability: I love AJAX apps because the device becomes irrelevant. I can work all day on my laptop; fly half-way around the world, sit down at an Internet cafe, and pull up all of my applications, settings, and documents. The fact that it ties into local files really is a hindrance, not a help. While Java and Apollo’s “Code once, run anywhere” concept helps IT departments deploy applications anywhere, easier; AJAX helps end users use applications anywhere, easier.

4. Mobility: Am I going to be able to run these apps on my phone and PDA? No. Why, if the industry is moving towards a richer mobile environment, do we throw out a framework that totally–by design–ignores this paradigm.

5. Lightweight: Apollo is targeted at developers who feel crippled by the fact that their interface is simply HTML + JavaScript. Good programmers, however, can work within this paradigm quite fine and, while a more “powerful” language can be a good thing, the lightweight, simple approach of the traditional web environment means that applications can run quite well on virtually any platform and any hardware.

6. Single Vendor: This is a single, closed, proprietary replacement to an open system. Why is this good in the long-run for anyone other than Adobe?

Does Apollo have its virtues? I’m sure it does–however, it simply heads in the wrong direction. Replacing a fast, lightweight, portable, open environment with true cross-platform support with a closed, heavy, non-portable (from a user perspective), proprietary environment is just simply a bad idea, and I hope that it crashes and burns before it does too much damage.

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