Mike:
My present opinion on VDSL is that the biggest obstacle is the additional cost to bring the fiber closer to the subscriber than efforts as manifested by SBC. IMHO, 12K ft of copper aint' gonna cut it in delivering the bandwidth that (1) VDSL is capable of and (2) is necessary to deliver a truly competitive service to cable or DBS in terms of video broadcast delivery. You will recall that we discussed the latter issue a few days ago. I discussed the former a small bit with Ray, though tangentially, as he & I differ on the timing of VDSL deployment.
As I see it, through the pairs of SBC/PacBell, their first effort is to get DSL and other advanced services out into the neighborhoods, reaching the lion's share of SBC customers by 2003. As the first stage of Pronto winds to a close, I am of the belief that SBC will begin to deploy VDSL in select areas, and essentially in those areas where the copper loop is less than 5,000 ft. I speculate that if these trials are successful, not only in terms of technology and the deliver of true broadcast capability, but more importantly, as you point out, market penetration, than SBC would put additional investment behind VDSL to shorten copper loops in those markets/neighborhoods that indicate successful penetration rates. In short, I think economics WILL play a larger role than ever in the deployment of VDSL than with DSL, which IMHO is the result more of competitive forces ("do or die") from alternative platforms of high-speed Internet access (ie. cable). |
