Hi Mike, certainly there's a lot of fluff. Agreed. But I suggest that we don't confuse the preservation of product life-cycle investments with the relative ease of installating competing technologies.
"The leasing part is relatively painless, but the 'construct' part is painful and the reason DSL and CM access technologies are rolling out today."
I tend to think that momentum and a forty-year head start accounts for CM's advantage, and a similar 100-year jump by the ILECs with DSL being a late comer to an older platform, explains their lead at this point. Ether-concepts for the last mile are only about two years old, with no foothold yet, except for some pockets in Canada and several spotted areas throughout northern Europe (Sweden and Holland).
Those who represent the power centers (ILECs and MSOs) are still threatened by it, probably more now than ever, because it "is" such a no-brainer to deploy, if they should ever decide to put the same level of effort into the last 1000 feet with Ethernet as they do with their present cm and dsl platforms. One ILEC has actually already taken a minor plunge. BLS, in the Atlanta region, made 10 and 100 Mb/s Ethernet available in their IFITL platform about a year and a half ago, but I've not heard much on this lately.
That is, it's a no brainer in deploying compared to the complexities and uncertainties of CMTS-based CM with mounting concerns over open access, in the face of growing expectations on the parts of users, and the kludge-based DSL platforms whose thruput ceiling is even lower than that of CM. An old-timer once advised, "there's no money in simplicity." This is a perfect example of what he meant. But this is not a new phenomenon. Carriers have maintained artificial levels in their pricing of other services for quite some time. Only now, others can get into the act on a resale basis, so the in incumbs prefer to keep the gates closed on new and efficient technologies, entirely, while continuing to ride the artificially priced older technologies into the ground.
FAC |
