"But at the rate DSL, HFC, and Fixed Wireless is being rolled out, maybe the opportunity has been lost forever. At least in the United States."
Mike, don't bet on it. In fact, quite to the contrary, with very few exceptions. There's a great amount of upward potential in demand, which is probably an understatement, because like the upward-spiraling acceleration engine, demand never ends... it just keeps increasing.
And the way things look now, the ability of these first generation broadband candidates (I still grimace at the use of that term, broadband, in these contexts) will not scale to where user demands would like to take it.
Most of "today's" DSLs and HFCs are slated to be tomorrows 9.6kb/s lines, in some regions sooner than others. Usually this means that the regions that have had either service the longest will be the ones to experience exhaust first.
The reasons I view it this way may have nothing to do with the stated line rates of either type of service, initially, but rather, because of the inability of most of these access platforms at some point -being contention oriented and dependent on shared resources at head ends and COs, and into and around the edge- to withstand high utilization levels across their serving areas.
It also remains to be seen how robustly the carriers will be in sizing and provisioning their upstream pipes which point to peers and into the network core, in order to support the increasing loads from these distribution networks, as well. In the latter sense, it really doens't matter if you have HFC or FTTH or LMDS. If the choke points are between the service provider and the core, then you're going to waint on line, anyway.
FAC |
