Wouldn’t it be great if your local cable modem company opened the throttle inside its own network? I know traffic bound for the Internet costs the cable company money, but internally it does not. Why can’t I send files to my neighbors and friends at 10Mb/s? I think its wrong to download from one cable modem to another and be stuck at 40kB/s. Once it might have wowed me (“ten times faster than smoke signals!”), but now 40 kB/s is just plain slow.
I would think it would be technically possible. Each cable modem has an internal, nonroutable 10.x IP address. The modems could be made to “uncap” traffic going to these 10.x addresses. Or maybe I’m wrong in thinking the modems have routing ability. At the present, the routing is handled by the head-end for most modems.
Anyway, wouldn’t be great to have a 10 Mb/s metro LAN for the price of two cable modem subscriptions?
Actually, I think that a cable modem functions more like a bridge/media converter. It has two purposes: convert the coax cable to twisted pair (or USB), and link one computer to the ISP’s network. A bridge is designed to connect two segments of the same network, whereas a router is designed to connect two different networks. The cable modem is essentially a pass-through to your ISP’s network. This is why you have to get a broadband router instead of a hub to connect two or more computers to one cable modem.
Why don’t cable ISPs lift the speed cap for internal traffic? It’s a matter of cost. If they gave you a 10Mb/s connection, you would have that speed throughout their entire network, all the way to the Internet gateway. This would result in a lot of network congestion at the gateway, but that’s nothing new; it’s like that at work (lots of bandwidth in the building, relatively little to/from the Internet). Lifting the speed cap would likely require your cable ISP to replace marginal lines, upgrade network equipment, and buy more Internet bandwidth to handle the additional traffic. If a cable ISP raised rates across the board to, say, $90 a month, I think they would lose customers to DSL providers. DSL speeds are fast enough for most people, and DSL service costs at little as $33 a month for a 1.5Mb/s circuit (assuming that you can get service at all, and that it reaches your house at full speed).
Personally, I’d like to see FTTH (fiber to the home), but I’m not holding my breath waiting for it to happen….
Verizon’s doing it. I wonder if our neighbors in Durham will be so lucky.