elmat, I find your recurring theme about the death of dsl, and your asking me to corroborate it, intriguing. I'm about to receive a 2 Mb/s sdsl line this week from a data clec with a national footprint (they purport) at my home office; my eldest son has VZ adsl which he is thrilled about at his residence in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn; we use RedConnect's dsl at my office in Manhattan; my neighbor uses a symmetrical form of DSL from a national DSL provider (I believe he is using SDSL), which he is backending to his home LAN with a residential wireless Ethernet scheme at 11 Mb/s (which I also plan to do in a couple of weeks if the sdsl performs as advertised); and on and on. DSL is not dead, nor is it dying.
It was only a year ago that I was lamenting that DSL and CM were totally missing in my area. The NY City Area, that is. When TWX released their intentions to support CM, VZ responded. Or, was it the other way around? The game is called Chicken.
DSL is alive and well from an uptake and marketing perspective, although it sputters in certain regions to the point where users are now at their wits' end. In other areas, it works flawlessly. For example, Verizon's ADSL sucks in the SOHO district of Manhattan, by several accounts that I have heard, but it works like a clock up on Central Park West.
DSL is not dying, it was just born tired with some congenital birth defects, because it does not possess the extensibility in speed that users will demand, nor does it possess the geographic reach in its basic makeup (unless you want to include fiber extended versions) to make it anything more than an expedient, until the real thing comes along. But among the existing so called "broadband" technologies, these problems are not unique to DSL. The reach issue has been with ISDN since its original release in the Eighties, and it is a fundamental trait with most forms of wireless last mile, as well.
Someone else (David A. Kincade on the LMT thread) asked if Dr. AHhaha's claim that wireless was likewise not a viable solution for last mile use, as well. In the same vein as dsl, wireless will serve some users with fixed station capabilities (xMDS grades) in the last mile with some improvements over V.90 (probably appreciable improvements until account penetration turns it into another tragedy of the commons), in most of those situations where it makes sense for the provider to deploy. Where wireless stands the best chance to succeed from an end-user perspective, ironically, is where it shows the least potential for generating revenue, from a service provider's perspective. Which is not a dilemma that is unique to wireless, either, I might add.
That is, it will work most favorably for end users in sparsely populated areas where congestion is unlikely to occur as quickly. But, in very sparsely populated areas it doesn't make sense for providers to make the investment.
And of course, there is no substitute for wireless when it comes to true mobility. Although, with the expedients now being deployed to overcome spectrum supply constraints (WAP, for example), I don't view mobile wireless as a substitute for what can be achieved over the more capacious landline solutions. Unless, of course, wireless is deployed as I suggest below. And then it becomes a longer-term contender, although probably still only in the lightweight class, but considerably better than LMDS/MMDS:
I still hold out some degree of promise for neighborhood hybrid fiber/wireless, or, what we've (I've?) coined HFW in the LMT thread. This scheme would be similar to Fiber to the Curb where "real" broadband is driven to a cluster of homes (like T's "Lightwire") using fiber technology, and where, instead of coaxial or twisted pair (VDSL) to the home, the provider extends connectivity via broadband wireless through the use of a microcell.
HFW could capitalize on the fact that it doesn't have to carry video. Everyone already has that, and it is very expensive to begin providing at this point in the old format at this time. What people want now is broadband access, which will very likely someday supplant traditional NTSC video programming, anyway.
This scenario would free the provider from the more costly prospect of supporting an ancient analog NTSC infrastructure, and if done correctly, would result in HFW providers becoming candidates for MSOs and ILECs alike.
This is not my view of an ideal world. It merely addresses some questions about the death of some of the above mentioned technologies and what I think some possibilities are. And, what I think some folks will do. Hanging wireless off of a high speed trunk that's brought closer to the residence is nothing new. This is precisely what I'll be doing with my 2 Mb/s sdsl. If it works. Only, in my case the backbone speed will be 2 Mb/s instead of an HFW's potential of n Gb/s in the fiber backbone to the curb, with vastly reusable frequencies on the tail sections that extend to the user.
The higher the frequencies used, the shorter the range and the more reusable they are. And the more expensive they are, until unit pricing levels for >60GHz wireless technologies come down a ways. Perhaps UWB pulse RF will begin showing more promising signs by then.
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