Hi MikeM,
"Since 98% of today's residential Internet users would be thrilled to get 1 megabit speeds"
Absolutely. They'd be even more thrilled if they could get a gig, wouldn't you agree. At some point they may even be thrilled if they could "hold on to" the meg they have, when utilization picks up, and they find themselves being held hostage to scarce supplies of upstream capacity. There is a period now which both dsls and cablemodems are going through known as the pink cloud period. Everyone is extremely pleased with their new toys right now, in other words.
The true test of these platforms will not be the platforms themselves, so much, as it will be the carriers' and cablecos' resolve to support adequate bandwidth supplies to the upstream when contention picks up after users and publishers get deeper into MPEG streaming and file transfers (work at homes, etc).
Then we will have an opportunity to see how well the providers scale their pipes to meet the growing bandwidth requirements, from the edge to the core backbone providers' nets. A simple rule of thumb is 100 users using 1 Meg each can consume 100 Mb/s aggregate, although statistically this doesn't happen (unless there is an event that causes mass logins).
A thousand users of a meg each? A gigabit.
10,000 users? And so on.
In contrast, today's dslams may only attach to an atm ring in the edge which collectively connects to the upstream via a couple of T3s, or an OC3 or an OC12 per region. What incentive does an incumbent provider have to improve that pipe size in the future?
What they will do, instead, is play chicken with each other. By this I mean they will each look at the other's performance and do a kind of arbitrage on how bad they can remain without suffering any consequences (such as susbscriber churn). This, come to think of it, is what they've done all along with deployments in general. Is it a coincidence that in my neighborhood I suddenly have both dsl and cablemodem to choose from, when four or five months ago I had neither (from an incumbent)?
This is easy to do. If you are an ILEC, say, you install sufficient extra bandwidth, temporarily, to ensure that the platform kicks off properly. Then as the competition's performance begins to degrade because they've been around for a while and they're beginning to increase their contention, then you begin to throttle back to the point where you are just a tad better than them, but not by much. Or, you simply don't add additional bandwidth when you would have if the competition's performance were better.
Anywhat, $40/mo isn't in my opinion being fair. For $40 per month you get three oranges, or revenue units: cableTV, Voice, and Inet Access. LD and Cellular, if you also choose and the provider has it.
FTTH would allow you to evaluate bushels of apples, many of which would not be possible, or apportionable amongst the masses, when using HFC or dsl.
There is no comparison between the two models, when it comes to opening up pathways to new services. So I reject the $40/mo argument, but cannot at this time afford you another for comparison purposes. smile
FAC |
