Interesting research for Melbourne

From: Dale Gatherum-Goss


Hi

I get lots of stuff sent to me, both information that i request and things that i do not. One that arrived yesterday struck me as good common sense and so i thought I'd attach it for anyone interested.

And no, I am not affiliated with this group in any way shape or form.

I hope that it helps

Dale
 
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Interesting research for Melbourne (long)

Reply: 1
From: Kevin Forster



The article was quite interesting.

The only issues I have with it is that examines the housing market without examining technology changes.

One of the biggest technology change that will happen very soon will be the roll out of ADSL which is expected to be completed for 90% of people by 2002. At the moment it is expensive to have but once it is rolled out and competition begins we can expect to see prices drop significantly. The speed of your current connection through a modem maximum is 56kbits per second while through ADSL the speed is 1.5Mbits/second. The speed is increased 300 times. But how does this impact on the housing market?

The first thing is the work place as we know it can be replaced by working from home. This phenomenon is occurring overseas currently and is to a limited extent happening is Australia. With ADSL you can web conference for meetings, talk on the phone and be connected to the internet at the same time from the one phone line. For housing, we no longer are governed by location or travelling time to and from work but can live according to our lifestyle. A good book on the effect of technology on a society is Unlimited Wealth by Paul Zane Pilzer

One of the other interesting aspects from the report is the importance of the Generation Xers. The current GenXers are the smallest post WWII group in history so far. Being the smallest they will have the least amount of impact on the housing market. The largest generation since WWII - the baby boomers are also undergoing significant lifestyle changes with retirement from the work force occurring within the next 10 years. The decisions on where they decide they will live will have the greatest impact on the housing market. Yet the study seemed to ignore them.

These are just some thoughts on the article.

Kevin
 
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Interesting research for Melbourne (long)

Reply: 1.1
From: Andrew Firmage


ADSL will just move the bottleneck from the home modem to the service providers. If you take a small suburb as an example, say 5000 houses, then that's 1.5M * 5000 = 7500Mbit/s of carrier load for that suburb alone!! And how many houses are there in our capital cities? The backbone networks won't be able to support all this traffic. I'd be surprised if you get >200M out of an ADSL line when it's all installed and everyone's finally using it.

You can't get more water through your hose by moving the kink.

af
 
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Interesting research for Melbourne (long)

Reply: 1.1.1
From: Sim' Hampel


On 12/5/01 12:15:00 PM, Andrew Firmage wrote:
>ADSL will just move the
>bottleneck from the home modem
>to the service providers.

I think you're missing the point slightly... until now there was a real maximum connection speed from homes of 56Kbps due to analogue modems (ignoring other connection types such as ISDN which are way too expensive for widespread domestic use).

With ADSL we remove that last-mile speed limitation (or at least raise the bar significantly for a while).

True, there will be new bottlenecks at the exchanges, but it is relatively easy (I didn't say cheap) to upgrade the capacity at this single point to handle the new capacity requirements.

You can have all the capacity in the world from your exchanges, but if you can't deliver some of that at a decent rate over the last mile (like you can with ADSL) then what's the point ?

The other thing is that you are never expected to get a sustained 1.5Mbps data stream over your ADSL connection. Consider current pricing models with Telstra BigPond for residential use...

Their new 1.5Mbps residential plan has a 5GB download limit per month, and then they charge you 17.5c per additional MB above that.

Let's do some sums...

[Notes:
1. K = Kilo = 1024 (or 1000, if you are Telstra).
2. M = Mega = 1024x1024 (or 1000x1000 if you are Telstra)
3. b = bits
4. B = bytes = 8 bits
3. bps = bits per second
4. Bps = Bytes per second

1.5 Mbps = 1500 Kbps = 187.5 KBps

Now there are 3600 seconds in one hour... so that means we can theoretically transfer 675000 KB per hour, or around 660 MB per hour (wow download a CD each hour !!).

Now by Telstra's definition, 5 GB = 5000 MB, so it would take us only 7.5 hours to use up our 5 GB allocation. So for the rest of the 700 odd hours in the month, we are paying about $115 per hour (at 17.5c per MB) for our downloads. That's a helluva lot of money. Of course this assumes you are sustaining your 1.5M downloads continuously.

The point is that you don't actually sustain those transfers. So your "1.5M * 5000 = 7500Mbit/s of carrier load" is a bit meaningless.

Sure, there will be busy periods and there is indeed a bottleneck at the exchange. And another at the ISP. And another at the international backbone. And so on. But these individual bottlenecks are much easier to upgrade than the old 56K bottleneck at all of those 5000 houses.

sim.gif
 
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Interesting research for Melbourne (long)

Reply: 1.1.1.1
From: Robert Forward


But wait there is more....

ASDL is just an end user connection. Once the data is in the exchange then it uses a high and faster quality data transfer process could ATM.

ATM at the moment can stand up to approx 10GB per second. So that is filling a 10GB hard drive in one second....

But that isn't the end of ATM, it's currently under reconstruction to head for Terrabytes per second. I know this cause I've just finished my ATM training today for the DataComms company I work at.

So as life goes on technology will advance further and bottlenecks will always be just down the track so they'll create a new data transfer process.

Cheers
Robert

The Sydney "Freestylers" Group Leader.

PS: "Be Not Afraid Of Growing Slowly, Be Afraid Of Only Standing Still."
 
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