Mike - I haven't given the respect due, to the staying power of paid-for legacy infrastructure. Your points are well taken.
My thinking in our discussions of the communications future has been predicated on two bases:
1 - it is the nature of technological evolution that "leaps" are based on a series of incremental gains, synthesized into a new, major step forward. There is a co-dependance here between money and technology: the money must see new money in the technology, and the technology must have the money to refine itself and propagate.
2 - technological evolution is becoming non-linear. What I mean by that is that a knowledge base will no longer spawn one technological leap, but perhaps three or four, more or less simultaneously. Example: the impact of Moore's Law on DSP - it has given birth to new modulation standards (WOFDM, VOFDM, COFDM,), new reception techniques, new compression techniques - and we have several technological initiatives deriving from relatively old OFDM research, each headed in a different direction, all from roughly the same point in time. And each is spawning its own subset of technological discoveries that may or may not be related to its "parents".
The point I'm struggling to reach, not too successfully, is that communications technologies will begin to leapfrog each other. An example would be satellite communication - a tremendous, though so far, not commercially viable leap past other mobile RF technologies.
To illustrate, I'm thinking of getting a CDROM burner. But DVD burners are on the horizon - and recently, I read an article about a new technology that will increase DVD capacity tenfold, and still retain backward compatibility with CD!
The parallel with the potential broadband user is that he/she will go for "bang for the buck", always with a wary eye to the future. And most of us can see the beginnings of FTTH now. There was a discussion a few months ago, where Frank (I think) mentioned the potential for home security firms to become enablers of last-mile fiber installation. The point here is that when the push starts on FTTH, it will become "gotta have it" technology, enabled by massive capital, big alliances, and a "plan" to generate money, probably with loss-leader home installation. It will run, very soon, in parallel with other infrastructure growth, and will leapfrog everything else, leaving it profitless.
Once it's in the home, it will gather all under its wing -telephone, television, fax, music, radio - all of our conventional entertainment/communications needs. What does it need? A few more technological advances, a "plan", a big pile of money - and consumer demand. Once it starts, everyone will scramble to get on.
But (and here's the hook, and your point) the regulatory environment will still be a massive brake on this, ensuring that Uncle Harry can still use his pulse-tone phone to call for pizza. But at some point, the Uncle Harrys will become a profitless market, no matter how much you jack up the rates, and they will become as improbable as a stagecoach on a superhighway. |
