Very well put, Doc.
One item that continues to amaze me here is how so many folks continue to practice denial. I repeatedly read the phrase: "ATHM's got the broadband," as though it belonged to them, outright. This is not the case, although through some convoluted twists of shareholding I suppose that they might actually have some fraction of it, somewhere.
The MSOs, either rightfully or otherwise, "got the broadband" that goes to the residence, which is the largest point of contention these days, and ATHM is but a tenant on those last mile systems.
Upstream it might be a different story, depending on who claims to be leasing the cloud from T. And as you say, in the upstream cloud it is ATHM's domain where they own their own servers, the routers, and their caching centers in the IDCs. But again, here, as in the downstream, shareholding comes into play which again muddies things up, but not to the same extent as the downstream.
But downstream, they are the MSOs' networks, not ATHM's. In this sense I like to characterize @home as a service bureau with the smarts and the tools of an ISP. Otherwise, they own nothing in the last mile right now, 'septing the very important customer accounts which are made good through virtual means, and whose longevity (in their current state) are dependent on things which are still unknown (exclusivity terminations).
I'd like to see @home raise the capital on their own to take out a swath of these and some other MSOs, and end the confusion, once and for all. Do you think that that's possible? |
