Terman Community Center, 661 Arastradero Road, Palo Alto, CA
Brad began by describing the new competitive environment for cable and information transmission. When Cable Co-op began it was a monopoly and expected to remain one. In the past few years things have changed considerably. There is regulation of the industry, and a clear desire on the part of both Democrats and Republicans to open up cable, telephone and long distance to competition. In a few years we expect PacBell and perhaps others will be offering video service. There already is competition from direct broadcast satellites and wireless. It will only get more intense. In Hartford a phone company went into direct competition with TCI and so far has taken over 25% of the business. That might happen here, especially if nothing is done actively to prevent it. Cable Co-op has to decide what it will do and whether to stay in business, sell out, or change the business it's in. It also has some hard decisions to make about how to get financing for the rebuilding to serve changing needs of the community. The ICT consultants working for Palo Alto spent several hours talking to Cable Co-op recently and were surprised that the city is considered a potential competitor. That is one possible result of the current study, if the city builds a separate full fiber service network. A more desirable approach is for the city to invest in Cable Co-op and provide funding to improve the system. Our system is unusual in that it has both upstream and downstream capability, and both are being used. Most systems don't use the upstream capability. It is designed to provide 562 MHz bandwith but only 23 MHz can be used for upstream communications. A TV channel needs 6 HMz bandwidth. The B cable could be used for data or other services. Study on what to do with the B cable, and how best to use it, are underway and should be complete by Oct. Our plans for the new system will use Hybrid Fiber Coax Network. The fiber cable is used for trunk to a neiborhood node from which coax cables are used to connect 500 homes. This network reduces the number of amplifiers needed and the chances for failures and outages. The design allows deeper penetration of fiber as demand warrants. The most likely scenario is for Cable Co-op to remain in the video business and provide data service such as Internet with the upgraded network. Phone service, both local and long distance, probably will be offered by another organization, using Cable Co-op facilities and either paying rent or sharing the revenues. We aren't very good at regular phone service, and probably shouldn't spend the time and effort to learn it ourselves.
Data experiments were conducted for some time with Hybrid Networks. They have 10 Meg/sec. downstream capacity, but use phone lines for upstream. Com21 uses cable in both directions and can carry 10 Meg in both directions. They began experiments in February and are continuing until the end of the year.
It was asked if there isn't an advantage to getting both phone and cable from the same company. Brad agreed there is, and that's why he foresees having a phone provider working with Cable Coop.
Mike Bowles of Com21 described the history and goals of the company. They got ample venture capital in 1993, and just got another capital infusion from venture capitalists, including Kleiner-Perkins, in May. They have more than enough money to complete testing and produce a final product. The system is based on packet switching which was B invented about 30 years ago by Paul Baran, a local resident. The Com21 system allows both up and downstream data rates of 10 Meg/sec. or more. It can support 800 subcribers for two-traffic using a TV channel bandwidth, 6MHz. Or it can support 2000 homes for 40% upstream traffic. Each neiborhood node, therefore, can support 2000 homes. The system will have 12 nodes serving 24,000 homes. To serve more homes they would need to add another trunk and nodes. The trial has been very successful so far. The system is tight and there are few leaks or interferences.
It was asked why all the discussion today has been about delivering the signal and nothing about content. Brad said that at this time the issue is getting the capacity. Cable Co-op. will continue to provide the same kinds of video services, probably many more channels, but the big difference will be in the data end. There Cable Coop. expects to be mainly a pipe, not a provider of services.
Next Imsong introduced Jack Yu, Erick Tucker, Perry Arnold and Deepak Gupta, Stanford students who presented the results of their project on relationships between community groups, citizens, and the government in providing and using Internet access, training and information services. They reviewed experiences in several communities all over the US, and noted interesting features in each. They prepared an extensive report as the final product of the class. A major problem is that the class is only given in the spring quarter for 10 weeks. It takes most of the time just to research the field and find out what's happening. There is very little time to experiment or work in depth with different groups. They used PA-COMNET as a resource and were very happy with the cooperation and the information provided. B
There are several ways to interact on line. Straight e-mail is the least effective because the history gets lost easily. A BBS is better but needs someone to keep it up, weed out duplicate or inappropriate messages, and be sure everything works. There can be unintended consequences of leaving messages on a BBS or in a group file. What some may consider helpful hints, like Professor Jones class is boring, avoid it, may be taken badly by Professor Jones.
In summary, they found the class very informative and useful, but wish there was more time to explore the subject in more depth.
The meeting was adjourned at 8:43 AM.
Respectfully submitted by Bob Moss