Remember when AT&T broadband customers across the USA had DSL modems from a mysterious company named 2wire?

And besides Ethernet and DSL jacks, they had an unused coaxial connection on the back, the kind that connects to TV cables, but it was not involved with their Uverse TV offering?

"You can tell a lot about a culture by its instruments."

Plus right around then, almost 20 years ago now, a consortium of internet communication companies formed the Home Gateway Initiative[0] whose original manifesto[1] is a technical document that could form the basis for achieving uniformity among the hardware suppliers and their firmware, especially when DSL was the top offering from AT&T and very few cable providers were any faster.

2wire modems bumped that up a notch for a while by pushing the physical limit for AT&T's aging network of symmetrical copper wire pairs, but Comcast's aging network of coaxial TV cable is still 30 to 50 years newer, plus with its cable having the outer grounded shield surrounding the sensitive data conductor within, it's physically capable of reliably carrying more data faster. Even though the entire cable infrastructure was far from symmetrical, more like a water faucet where content just pours out more so than could be pushed back up. At least the old POTS was a two-way communication network by design.

It was only a matter of time before useful cable speeds outran telco infrastructure, and back then I would expect 2wire to have focused on that coming date more so than anyone else.

2wire modems bumped performance up a notch for a while by pushing the physical limit for AT&T, but Comcast wasn't going to quit even though cable was a latecomer and missed the AOL boat that was made possible only by the old telco wiring.

All you have to do is read the non-technical first 13 pages of the HGI manifesto[0] to see the way that user flexibility was to be curtailed and completely replaced by "business requirements".

The final bullet point of the 13th page is what got me:

>o The Home Gateway must support QoS both in the operator network and on the home network side when different simultaneous broadband services are used. In addition, the Home Gateway must support QoS on in-home flows.

Different simultaneous broadband services.

You mean like telco and cable at the same time?

What would that be like, and who would want that anyway?

I don't think customers would want to be paying two different ISP's so the initiative must have been initiated by somebody else for some other reason, not disclosed.

One thing's for sure, AT&T was poised with their exceptional 2wire modems already in place, a single firmware change away from a merger with cable, not necessarily by starting out with some exchange of shares on Wall Street, but instead by connecting the networks from the bottom up, physically in your home(s). In a way that could have as significant an effect on shareholder value regardless.

Now what would that be like?

I can only imagine that to make the very best use of all infrastructure resources for all concerned, that sophisticated hardware/firmware could combine elements from all resources by all providers, at a price of course.

If you were an AT&T customer, IOW you responded positively to their sales "person", then you would expect to be provided your on-line service over AT&T infrastructure and pay only one bill to that single vendor. But the "perks" of the future could include a special arrangement between AT&T with local cable where their cable service would be connected to the AT&T modem at no additional effort or cost to the consumer, so that on those occasions where you (or others sharing your bandwith in aggregate) might want to effectively download data way faster than the 2 wires of AT&T could provide, well the dual modem would be able to temporarily switch over to the cable source seamlessly.

And likewise if you had responded favorably to the cable sales effort instead of telco, and the cable company wanted to provide you with more two-way or upload bandwidth than their infrastructure had at the time, then using the same type of modems AT&T could reciprocate by allowing cable companies to access AT&T's underutilized bandwidth, automatically on demand also.

For the most rewarding customer experience?

It would have to be by special arrangement like never before.

How could you get more convenient than a system that could automatically, with the help of QOS and stuff, provide the best that can be delivered to your exact premises regardless of whether a "competitive" service might have better performance for some types of data compared to others? Whichever provider you have they'll just generously lease any helpful infrastructure from the competitor as needed. Automatically, involving a sophisticated modem. As you go along. And resell it to you at a profit, even if you never see any sign of this on your bill if it did take place.

It's got to be rewarding to somebody.

Some would say that would be like having somebody's cash register in your house that you are paying for and were not ever aware of to begin with.

And it would kind of reduce to a battle of the salespeople who could duke it out after that.

Well, that didn't happen.

Then again the same 2wire hardware would have physically facilitated a more recognizable top-down merger if one would have materialized, and that didn't happen either.

I think 2wire spent more money than the company was worth, just trying to figure out what could be accomplished using the plain old unshielded wire pairs that their network to the premisies consisted of. And was probably no slouch at more accurately determining what Comcast's infrastructure was capable of in the long run also, much more aware much earlier than Comcast itself.

Not exactly "their" network, rather AT&T's network.

After that Comcast started buying up everyone else.

2wire rode off into the sunset.

And here we are now.

Customer service worth the money has been smoothly bedamned by all providers, with consumers ending up as predicted in a certain type of hell.

.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Gateway_Initiative

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20070124064123/http://www.homega...

This might be what a fly on the wall would be hearing at the hotel bar when a couple executives run into each other after an early HGI meeting almost 20 years ago;

Comcast: "We have a network and streaming content to go with it, not you guys at AT&T WTF?"

AT&T: "Ha, we started as a monopoly and have always had seamless operation along with our divested subsidiaries ever since. We're everywhere."

Comcast: "Well, we'll get a monopoly and whacha doin' with a monopoly and not jacking up prices to the moon?"

AT&T: "OK, we'll deliver some content but can't we just call this whole thing off?"

2wire, a small player hidden in AT&T's pocket silently casting a voodoo spell: "Merge, merge, merge, ca-ching, ca-ching, ca-ching . ."