re: This statement apparently ignores the last mile problem
Exactly. The last mile is still an effective monopoly, controlled by the RBOCs. No competition = no incentive to do anything but milk existing customers using existing infrastructure. And when they watch what's happening to Global Crossing, they get even less willing to spend big bucks on big new infrastructure projects. About 80% of the population lives in communities big enough that there is already a optic cable running to their town or city. But it doesn't matter, because the last-mile bottleneck stubbornly goes on, year after year.
I've become convinced that we just have to wait until cable or wireless brings competition to the last mile telephone lines. And it will never be done by the RBOCs. Until then, all the applications and services and chip-using devices that thousands of companies want to sell, just won't happen, if they require high bandwidth.
It's so hard to predict the pace at which a technology gets adopted. Example: We put men on the moon in 1969. Predictions from that time confidently said that, by the early 21st Century, we'd be colonizing the Moon and Mars, and thinking about going to nearby stars. Instead, space exploration came to a sudden complete stop, for 30 years and counting so far. Today, we can't go as far as we could in 1969. And the reasons for that had nothing to do with technology. They had to do with politics and the Cold War.
I'm not saying that's what's going to happen with last-mile bandwidth availability, but it is a cautionary tale. Progress, in many fields, happens in intermittent brief bursts, with long periods of stagnation in between. The steady progress (Moore's Law) of semiconductor capacity, is the exception, not the rule.
And it took about a million years, from the time Australopithecus invented the shaped stone, to the invention of the axe (a stick tied on the shaped stone). Even the RBOCs won't be that slow. |
