Re: DSL and the Nethead vs. Bellhead brawl
Steve, Frank, John and Threaders,
I'm certainly in over my head with you fine gentlemen. Your views and information make it so hard to come up with easy answers to the convergence issue. I find myself firmly in the Gilder/Isenberg/Dumb Bandwidth/Nethead camp for its essential clarity and simplicity. Have been for many months. However, of late there have been some developments that have me rethinking this 'brave new world' scenario.
For instance, one of the great advocates of IP over glass, Jim Crowe, of Level 3 seems to be admitting that the time until we have a pure IP network is farther down the road than he had hoped. The flexibility to adopt a solution such as Lucent's Softswitch is admirable from the point of view of pragmatic leadership, but the hidden message here is that VoIP is a lot farther down the technology road than many of us would prefer.
AT&T is having to rethink just how it wants to go about provisioning local telephony via the MSO HFC infrastructure. Little problems, like providing life line service, raise their thorny little heads and get knocked back down, not with an IP solution, but with a circuit-switch club. Talk about retro.
Looks like the ol' PSTN may just be with us for quite a while longer.
Having not raised too many hackles with my bashing of the investment potential DSL, I will suggest that there is at least one company that is defying my analysis. That would be RBAK. I wonder, to phrase this in the genteel way of this thread: Are these guys in play? Are they onto something? Or what?
Ciao, Ry |
