Jim, many of your points from both of your messages have been assimilated into subsequent discussions. So, I’ll selectively choose some areas and respond to those only. Starting with this statement from your uplinked message:
"Re-allocating broadcast video to wired (optical) was a hypothetical decision made by imaginary policy."
Try as I may I’m not seeing your point beyond its face. Kindly explain in some greater detail what you mean, after taking the following several paragraphs into consideration:
The conversion from one media construction and format to another has taken place in all transmission venues for reasons that are both arbitrary, as you noted, on the one hand, and for reasons having to do with terrain, on the other. Whatever the apparent drivers are on the surface, the ultimate reason is almost always seeded in economics.
It's only recently that some providers have sought solutions that provide services that are not primarily video-related, and here I'm referring to high-speed Internet access and voice services, which constitute yet another set of drivers. Usually, providers will seek to seize the efficiencies afforded by newer technologies as they apply to their specific needs when the time comes for an upgrade, and sometimes earlier, depending on competitive pressures.
Viewing broadcast video exclusively from an historical perspective for a moment, since that is the area you stipulated, there have always been purpose-built networks to serve the unique requirements of residential, backhaul, interstate and international distribution. We know these as last mile, metro-edge, long haul and international, respectively. There also exist specialized transmission systems for niche content markets, such as Vyvx’s, and now Broadwing’s, offerings for the motion picture industry and large TV networks. Each of the foregoing areas of transmission have used, and continue to use, both wired and wireless approaches, and I don't see this changing anytime soon, although the emphasis, wherever feasible, seems to have been shifting heavily in favor of wired (optical) systems..
The various transport formats that were considered "wired” and "wireless" since the beginnings of TV distribution, however, have yielded constantly to newer formats of wired and wireless, with time.
Residential "wired" has seen coaxial; Hybrid Coaxial/Fiber; twisted pair xDSL; FTT/B/C/H/N etc; and so on. Residential "wireless" has supported Over-the-Air; Satellite, xMDS, Line-of-sight Microwave Radio; and, more recently, various scaled-down formats are now also using Cellular technologies.
For brevity, in the backhual, interstate and specialized segments, all of the following at one time or another has been used: Microwave Radio, Coax; Low-Capacitance Twisted Pair; Satellite; Fiber.
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