David,

What you missed is that when people live in apartments with Ethernet/T1 networks, they often become *producers* of information, not just consumers. We've had more than three years experience managing apartment houses with T1/Ethernet in them here, and probably 25% of the residents are running Web servers. Sure, some of it is vanity pages, but some are not, and just a few Web servers change the bandwidth requirements dramatically. The T1s in our apartment complexes feed as few as 36 users and as many as 100; nearly every night between 6 and 10, you will see periodic spikes in traffic that max out the lines. A 56kb line feeding these places just would not hack it.

You alluded to cost, but did not really hit hard on that, either. It is cheaper by at least one and often two orders of magnitude to hook up people with Ethernet/dedicated lines than to put everyone on individual ISDN, xDSL, or cable modem connections.

Here at Virginia Tech, we are going to a 12:1 fanout on hubs (that is, each hub serves only 12 people, and the hub is plugged directly into an ATM node), and are moving toward Fast Ethernet, because our traffic studies show that we HAVE to. Blacksburg is still at least a couple years ahead of everyone else. New York City now is where Blacksburg was in 1994; back then, Ethernet/T1 was still a novelty, and no, we did not need all that bandwidth AT THAT TIME. Now we need more. We are figuring that everyone will need a minimum 100 meg feed into residences, classrooms, and individual offices, and that's the network we are building now.

Best regards,

Andrew Michael Cohill, Ph.D.

Director, Blacksburg Electronic Village

cohill@bev.net