Not by a long shot. DSL lines and the organizations that sell them have given me nothing but agita over the past four months. Just passing on some information.
In a discussion with a colleague last night the realization was reached - like a bolt of lightning had intervened - that it isn't what the carriers want that they get. Instead, it's what the vendors are prepared to make available to them that counts.
Of course, we have a chicken and egg thing here, but turning the vendor community around, after they've done years of product development, is like 180-ing an aircraft carrier.
Even if the carriers wanted to alter their directions, on a dime, they couldn't, because the vendors are still catering to what they (the carriers) wanted, yesterday. Development cycles and time to market, and all of that.
As increased production of yesterday's wares yields lower unit production costs (per port), who is going to jump on a first generation optical alternative when the latter's chasm-stage unit costs would be up to three or four times as high? Albeit, capable of delivering 100 or 1,000 times more bandwidth... which carrier marketing departments are not too fond of doing. But as someone else ** once said, "If we don't cannibalize ourselves, someone else will."
** In 1995, while he was still with ATT, after jumping ship from Microsoft, Tom Evslin (now CEO of ITXC) said this about the need to go to voice over Internet protocol (VoIP). That was two years prior to his leaving T and founding ITXC. |
