Rich, I beleive that xDSL is no, zero, zip, zilch, nada, no threat to HFC.
xDSL is now being repositioned as an alternative in applications where T-1 lines are now used. The cost of service is just too high for consumers. There is no switching, and so competing ISPs must make costly installations into each wiring center. At least with ISDN, they can do this "virtually" without actually installing equipment in the telco plants
It is prohibitive, of course, to home-run each xDSL line to the ISPs central location, but xDSL does offer some advantages over traditional T-1 lines for point-to-point circuit, one of them being that it only requires a single twisted pair, instead of the two required by T-1.
I have experienced first-hand the failed (as in FELL FLAT ON THEIR FACE, BUFFOONS, CLOWNS, LOSERS, etc.) entry of Pac Bell into ISDN, accompanied by unreliable service, with finger-pointing between Pac Bell, my ISP, Ascend, and then back around the circle. During this time, Pac Bell and my ISP both increased prices to prohibitive levels.
And now I have experienced nearly-flawless 24-hour unmetered service from @Home, at less much less cost ($39/mo vs typically $100-$150/mo for ISDN), and at some many times the speed it makes me dizzy.
Which one do you think is going to win in the long run? (Or even in the short run?) @Home (and other HFC implementations) or another go-round by the mixed-bag of buffoons? (Who don't even have a consumer service beyond ISDN to offer at this point?)
Getting back to that 7,000 figure, I think we are going to find that it's way out of date. While I don't know any details of @Home installs, I have recently heard a figure for Southwest Cable install of Roadrunner in San Diego - they are currently running nearly 1,000 installs a week. (The math: 39 installers, 5 installs a day.)
That is one city - San Diego - which they share with other cable companies (including Cox, which has just started providing @Home service to an equal-sized area of San Diego, though, admittedly, with less attractive demographics.)
San Diego *is* the "most-wired city", but this should give you some magnitude of the pace of the demand once the cable operators start a full-press deployment.
Let's assume that Cox is only doing 1/2 the installs of Southwest (after all, they have only been installing for a little over a month now). You can bump your universe of cable modems by 1,500 every week, certainly for the next few, and that's just from this sleepy little Navy town. :)
Call me crazy, but I see 50,000 to 100,000 installs in San Diego alone within the next 12 months. With somewhat less than half of those being @Home installs.)
This is why 7,000 is completely meaningless.
Yes, I do have some questions about why Silicon Valley didn't see this level of installs when the first systems went in about a year ago, but I have to assume that is because the systems installed to date just haven't had anywhere near the home count of these two big San Diego systems. (I beleive that I've read that the service areas up till now have been quite limited.) |
