I wouldn't link those two points quite the same way.
"Frank Coluccio always thought VDSL had a shot..."
Well, not "always," but before the industry showed definite signs that they would not commit and take the step to deploy in any meaningful numbers - which had the resulting effect of NOT driving costs down due to the lack of mass production - yes.. I thought that they had a shot at one time.
In particular, Next Level's wares, before they were taken out by GI. And VDSL may have another shot soon, with the removal of the ATM layer and replacing it with Ethernet as a means of all-round simplification and streamlining, hence driving its overall cost of ownership to the carriers down substantially, as in Ethernet over VDSL, or EoVDSL.
Reportedly, they would retain the Layer 1 silicon functions of native vdsl and make the Layer 2 substitution from ATM to Ethernet. This is just one of the outside plant twisted pair proposals being considered in the Ethernet in the First Mile Forum at this time. Whether it goes anywhere or not remains to be seen.
But in the following I have to correct you:
"...and that [vdsl?] was part of the reason why he had his doubts about ATHM."
"Doubts" is the wrong word, but I made numerous observations concerning a broad range of other issues, not the least of which was architectural in nature... but there were other over-riding aspects of what home was going through at the time. Briefly, these had to do with:
- the Cartel who owned them;
- what T would eventually do with them;
- conflicts of interest wrt cable ops offering competing services with them, especially set top box-based multimedia versus a pipe-constrained attempt for home to do it themselves over DOCSIS;
- their preparedness or lack thereof to deal with open access, which could have turned out to be a money maker, I'm still convinced, if they had embraced it proactively, despite the engineering challenges that they would have had to overcome;
- the fact that their hands are, and always were, tied, preventing them from acting on their own behalf in attempting to deal with issues such as the one just covered (open access);
- the mergers and acquisitions they made with and of foo-foo content providers that cost at least a thousand times more than they were worth, if they were worth anything, at all;
- I can go on.
You do recall those issues, don't you? Those are the ones that we took a heap of flack over at the time. Oddly enough, though, they are the very same issues that are now being discussed in retrospectives, as though no one ever brought them up before. Those issues.
But my thoughts concerning Home were not influenced by any notions that VDSL was superior to HFC, per se, although, if properly implemented it could be, depending on the shape of the HFC. I'm pretty sure, however, that by the time frame you are referring to I had already gravitated to a preference for FTTH, whose cost structure was first beginning to come down. Yeah, yeah.. it's still expensive, but not hardly as much as it was.
In fairness, if HFC receives the proper level of attention and eventual upgrade and triage - I include 'triage' because triage is endemic in many extant HFC systmes due to the level of ingress experienced by coaxial connectors and other outside fixtures that support transmission at Radio Frequencies - then HFC itself wouldn't be much of a concern, either.
But going back into the plant, for a third time, to do yet another upgrade is going to be very expensive, especially if the approach is to use T's Lightwire or an equivalent, although that would be the best long term approach for them to take, if they can afford it. At some point these upgrades have to start paying for themselves. T spent over $5,000 per sub when they bought their cable properties. And many of those subs were hanging precariously by a string, resulting from years of neglect by TCI.
Fiber to the home, in contrast, is down in the $2,000 to $2,5000 per sub range now. It's something to think about the next time someone has a hundred billion dollars they want to get rid of.
FAC |
