[ Ray Smith, CEO ] Jim, That's a really good article.
He spells out this entire arena in clear terms.
Thanks,
This gives me a much more clear view on the Big Picture.
I didn't think of ADSL as an interim technology.
Part I liked the best
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Today's price for that?
Ray Smith, CEO of Bell Atlantic
Maybe a couple hundred less than for fiber to the curb, but we're Wired's readers know that these estimates are based on certain caveats and assumptions about early roll-out volumes, rather than full-blown nationwide deployment.
The third approach is ADSL. When you see what we're doing with it, you'll see that it's not an interim technology - at least not in the sense that it's second-best or doesn't work well. It has excellent quality. You can do the virtual VCR over it. You can fast forward and back, and you can have a whole batch of channels. It's server-based. It's digital.
But it is interim in the sense of being a transition technology, right?
Yeah, transition. That's a much better way to say it. It's a market entry kind of thing. It doesn't require conditioning the whole plant. It doesn't require big switchers or anything like that. It's modular. You go in house by house, and if people want it, you just stick in a circuit pack. When you get enough people in the neighborhood who want interactive services, then you bring fiber to them. Pull out the ADSL circuit packs and bring them out to a more remote area. They're reusable hundreds of times, so it's an interim technology that will be with us for 40 years.
Then what's limiting about it compared to fiber?
The cost is higher per house.
The cost of ADSL?
It's higher, yes, for each house. But remember when you cover a whole batch of houses, not every one of them takes cable television. When you do ADSL, each house costs more, but you do it only after the sale is made.
But isn't the level of interactivity different?
There's a big difference between that and full fiber to the home. A big, big difference. It doesn't give you infinite channels and infinite interactivity, but it does give you video-on-demand and home shopping. And it gives you excellent picture quality and good production values and our Stargazer user interface.
What about live broadcasts, live sports?
Well, as currently deployed, no. It's 1.5 Mbits per second. But future versions of ADSL will carry 6 Mbits a second. That gives you live broadcasts. It'll give you everything except the gee-whiz levels of interactivity.
Then the fourth approach is wireless cable. Twenty-eight GHz is working, and it's great. And remember you're talking about antennas that are small enough to be pasted on a window. You paste it on and put in your telephone jack, and you now have video. Of course, it's not applicable to every location and every terrain.
Direct broadcast satellite is the fifth approach. And these will all be integrated, so if you're the customer, you can say, "Yes, I'd like your telephone service and your wireless cable TV service." Or you can say, "Give me ADSL service," or whatever. It'll depend on your location, how far the engineering and construction of the network in your area has developed.
Do you think eventually there'll be one common architecture?
There will be. But I can't predict whether it'll be fiber-to-the-curb or fiber-to-the-node plus coax. But probably those two will be the most common.
But who knows? Remember, the capacity of wireless cable is 28 GHz. That's huge. It's gigantic. If you can get that to work well - and be interactive, too, which we have high hopes for - then it has the capacity for as many channels as you want. If that develops, we won't have to build out all the other things.
But by whatever combination of means, we will deliver broadband services to all of our customers within the next 10 years. We'll deploy it in each location and each market differently, depending on the economics. But we will deliver it to all of our customers. |
