Funny that this topic came up on the piffer thread. I was just talking with someone here at work yesterday about FTTH and how soon we thought it would be a real possibility. My answer was that it will be available when it is affordable. I think that DSL has shown that the demand for more bandwidth is indeed there, but it has to be reasonably priced. My co-worker was telling me that he didn't think anyone would pay for fiber, when they could get DSL for as cheap as it was... his reasoning was that 384Kbits was as much bandwidth as anyone really needs for web-surfing...
I laughed at that. Out loud. C'mon, who wouldn't pay for more bandwidth. Anyone who has surfed the web even at T1 speeds has to think that 384K is dog slow. So, the question becomes, how much would someone pay to get > 10MBps to their home? I'd pay as much as $100 per month, and if I could get 100 MBps, I'd probably pay $200. If there are more people like me out there (and I know in SV, there are), then that would make a pretty good case for laying the last mile fiber, don't you think?
Anyway, I didn't mean to write a novel here, but I find this subject fascinating, because there are all kinds of "killer apps" that we can get in people's homes, if we just could get enough bandwidth there. Videoconferencing is probably the biggest one, but I could see a point where all your previous copper traffic can be switched over to fiber.
What do you guys think about this? And who do you think would be the first people to provide solutions for this?
Jay |
