Good thought from Holman Jenkins at WSJ.
Pay only. Heres the money graphs.
"You'll hear a lot about a cozy, fat duopoly of cable and Bell. Don't bet your kid's inheritance on it. Cable has already spent $100 billion to upgrade its systems for broadband and digital TV. The Bells are spending billions of their own to match and raise them. That's a lot of capital that has to be earned back somehow. Price wars are looming as the mad scramble for households becomes madder.
Worse, throw in the likelihood of a new entrant of uncertain but possibly large disruptive potential. That's WiMax, a wireless broadband protocol that will do for a whole county what your WiFi router does for your home network.
Here resides the biggest snake in the woodpile for the new AT&T and its trenchbound competitors. Hanging over companies that just spent billions to dig up the streets and unspool thousands of miles of broadband fiber is the awful prospect of wireless competitors offering identical services without any of the expensive ditch digging. InStat, a market research firm, estimates that 90% of U.S. homes could be reached by such a network for a paltry investment of $2.8 billion.
And wireless, when you come down to it, is better suited to where the digital age is taking us: towards a world in which communications chips are embedded in dozens or even hundreds of devices in the home and office.
Though it's seldom spelled out, the consumer nirvana that technologists see coming is quietly premised on householders' willingness to set up and manage their own wireless networks to keep all their devices -- computers, PlayStations, TVs, stereos -- talking to each other digitally. WiMax could potentially take much of the hassle out of the consumer's hands. He'd just bring the stuff home and it would find its own wireless network.
Phillips Electronics, for one, says it sees a day this decade when more TV chips will be going into phones than into TV sets. If so, consumers will quickly be using up the dinky amounts of Internet wireless capacity that today's cellular operators are rolling out. WiMax, or some other form of wireless broadband, is the answer here too.
And just as people cut the phone cord when they got their wireless phone, once people have a wireless broadband on their phones, why not use it for everything else in the house too?
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