4finger,
The MSPs, as you have referred to them, are establishing regional and national footprints, at this time. Some of them will even venture closer to the customer with their own fiber. But in these early stages they will depend to a great extent on the metro dark fiber carriers, utility companies and cablecos, and even the ILECs before too long, to provide their last mile fiber connections to their customers.
This will eventually be a function of wavelength distribution, especially where a limited number of fibers feeds a densely populated business location (e.g., multitenant hi-rise buildings, office parks, and college campuses, to name a few). I suspect, however, that before wdm is used to any great extent, optical component price points will have to come down a ways. For the last mile, in other words, dedicated fibers may still be the least expensive way to go for the time being. It would be decided on the basis of a classical h/w cost v. distance tradeoff analysis. Very long loops could find themselves terminating in wdm's, and very short ones could remain dedicated.
The incumbents aren't going 2stand by idly and stomp the ground with their feet, as 1would think they would do based on some of their past behaviors. SBC and Verizon, in fact, already have their own flavors of last mile GbE on the stove, and they will be releasing those when they deem the situation 2b ripe. In actuality, they've already used wdm in the past to implement such services on a limited-service-offering basis.
If they don't shoot themselves in the foot entirely by not releasing these services to the public at all, then they stand a good chance of inflicting a form of transitional self-cannibalization upon themselves if they do. Not a fun place 2be in for them, but if they are to compete, then this is what they must eventually do.
The longer they hold out, the less relevant they become, as modalities proceed to shift without them. For this reason, they must also shift, as we are seeing now with VoIP.
My hunch is that the incumbents will eventually create Gb, and then 10Gb pipes into large business locations (high rises, campuses, etc.) and aggregate scores of lower-speed lines such as 10- and 100- Mb/s feeds (as many as they can statistically support on a switch), as well as discreet Gb feeds to the larger volume users, just like Cogent, Telseon, Yipes, and a handful of others are proposing to do.
But their pricing will no doubt be higher than the startups; their business terms will be less capricious; and, their reliability will very likely be higher... due to their ubiquity and the control they have over rights of way and such. And for these reasons they will continue to reap revenues from larger business accounts who often rate reliability above any other attribute.
But if we are looking at time frames, I'd say that the startups will have a healthy head start allowing them to get established, before the ILECs mobilize their own Gb Ethernet platforms and pose too serious of a threat to them.
So, now that everyone is settled and even the ILECs are sucking gigabit bandwidth flows out of the cloud, how long do you suppose it will be b4 the cloud structure implodes? Such a bottleneck shift is bound 2happen. The reason?
Because, it's a lot easier to provision dumb, gigantic pipes (you forgot to mention the new carrier whose name is Giant Loop, by the way) to buildings and residences quickly than it is to create multiple, competing, networkable fabrics in the core, in the same time frame. Those who have already run the digits know what I mean.
Of course, we must consider residential broadband in this calculus, too, and factor in the pending multimedia boom that is sure to occur, where access platforms are able to hold up and allow.
FAC |
