The Cat's Alley
NBMA's Big Event, February 11, 1998
Bandwidth Heaven
by Catwoman, roving cat-reporter
(a.k.a. Suzanne Saunders)
Table of Contents
Welcome by Steve Gilman of NBMA
Introductions by Pam Pfinner of ZDTV
Exodus by BV Jagadeesh
DIVA by Tim Rea
Diamond Lane by George Hawley
@Home by John Garner
Chambers by Jack Lawrence
Welcome by exiting President Steve Gilman of the
NBMA
Steve Gilman thanked our co-sponsor the MDG and welcomed the enthusiastic, well-fed crowd [aka the Peanut Gallery] to this
special, trade-show-like Big Event tonight at Fort Mason. He thanked all the presenters [some of whom came with give-aways
including toy aeroplanes thanks Exodus from my cats].
He opened by asking the audience Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? [This short story won the
first Nebula Award in 1966,
better known today by the film version as Blade Runner].
To which I replied, Yes.
But at what speed? he added.
Why, a T1 perhaps? I offered. More like a T-Bone! he declared [chuckles from the Peanut Gallery].
Steve bid us farewell as exiting President of NBMA and after a few brief announcements, got the show off by turning the
floor over to the Panel moderator, Pam Pfinner.
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Introductions by Pam Pfinner of
ZDTV
Pam explained ZDTV [Ziff Davis TV] is a 24-hour cable TV company, dedicated to the Web/Intranet.
She turned to floor over to the first presenter for tonight's theme [to see if the technology presented tonight can really
help us reach Bandwidth Heaven].
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Exodus
Presentation by BV Jagadeesh
Exodus, he explained, provides User Connectivity to the Internet using high-speed technology including:
- ADSL
- Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Line
- Cable Modems
- a box with two connectors, one for cable TV and the other for a modem line from your PC
- ISDN
- a high-speed type of cable installed by the phone company to allow digital data to be split into channels
- T1
- another type of high-speed cable line, used mainly by large corporations
Exodus houses servers for companies who exist on the Internet, keeping them running on a high-performance,
Clear Channel DS-3-Sonet ring backbone [another type of high-speed line beautifully illustrated on their website].
They are an IXP which is an Internet Exchange Point that allows routing of Internet connections as fast as
traditional phone company technology that routes signals through similar exchange points across the country.
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DIVA
by Tim Rea
Tim introduced himself as former manager of Viacom for 15 years, using limited bandwidth at 300Mhz and only a 15-channel
capacity. Cable is rebuilding, he explained, at 750Mhz with Fiber Digital and Diva provides video-on-demand through cable
companies.
Diva is an End-to-End Provider, he continued, installed at the cable company's Head End, they developed
what he referred to as Sarnoff, which is digitized in MPEG2 format, for VCR functionality, he explained.
Some technical details included an 8-to-1 ratio in Traffic Engineering using a Fat Server but a
Thin Client.
Diva provides Adult Programming at a higher cost, [the air began to thicken as the
Peanut Gallery grew restless] providing privacy for a huge marketshare that was, [he declared enthusiastically]
Virtually Impenetrable! [the Peanut
Gallery began to look for a rope, Tim motioned for the next presentation slide and
continued undaunted].
Although they have the ability to, they decided not to stream Internet content.
Available 24-hours to rent movies or other content online with the ability to pause and restart anytime within the 24-hr
period.
Charges
| Item | Price |
| Club charge | 5.95/mo |
| Each content [ie movie] | 3.95/24-hr |
Tim concluded by announcing that Diva is looking to hire, having grown from a staff of 15 to 150 in a year, and also
looking for Content Providers.
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George took the Peanut Gallery on a whirlwind tour of technical explanations [thanks George!] holding everyone's
fascination giving the following rundown [with great style and flare] flashing presentation slides as he explained:
- ADSL
- Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Line, transfers greater than 6 Megabytes/sec downstream
- ATM
- Asynchronous Transfer Mode
- CAP
- Corner Amplitude Phase modulation
- DSL
- Digital Subscriber Line, also referred to as xDSL
- ISDN
- Transfers data at a rate of 144Kb/sec
Human hearing equals about 22KHz, which is a 1000-to-1 noise ratio, he explained.
[For what Dr. Ron Pellegrino described as about 50 hours of University Physics of Music course condensed, you can follow
this link to review Excellence in Multimedia Audio].
Diamond Lane provides high-speed equipment to use DSL and ATM technology to provide the speed of access over the Internet,
at the higher rates than previous phone line-technology, paving the way toward home PC and Corporations to Bandwidth Heaven
[to cheers from the Peanut Gallery].
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@Home
by John Garner
John gave a delightful performance starting with an introduction screen:
@ Home
Climbing the Stairway to Bandwidth Heaven
Owned by six cable companies including  John explained that
the @Home Network provides a full-service solution to access the Internet through their existing cable network. The Peanut
Gallery was most impressed as he surfed the Web demonstrating some of the content including CNN, tuning into Broadband
Audio. With low-latency, he explained, the benefits to Online, Multiplayer games are tremendous!
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Live from beautiful, scenic Colorado, Jack provided a video demonstration that just rocked the house. He had the dubious
honor of being the last presenter in a three-hour show and by now it would have been pretty hard to keep the Peanut Gallery
from nodding off soon, but Jack got a rousing response when he showed us all the one, really good reason to pay all that
money for a cable modem.... because the video presented a showdown between a PC on the left using a regular modem, while the
PC on the right had a Chambers Communication connection via cable modem, both surfing the Internet.
As the presenter in the video switched channels on the regular PC, we were treated to the familiar chug-chug of
a painfully normal refresh screen trying to load an ordinary picture on the Web.
The PC on the right, using fresh-scented Chambers Cable on the other hand, simply switched channels to another URL on the
Internet, and poof the Web site appeared [to cheers from the Peanut Gallery!].
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Two paws up for cable modems and a big thanks to all our panel!
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