Digital is nice, it's fungible, switchable, packageable and more. But it ulitmately delivers analog content, the language that people speak, hear, project and see. Digital also introduces a certain level of quantizing error when it's used to conserve bandwidth, which is a type of error that doesn't occur in analog transmission when facilities are properly equalized. In other words, the price-performance of digital eventually reaches a tipping point, wherein it becomes perfunctory, if not also overly complex, thus reaches 'dis-economies' of scale when pressed to compress at higher rates. Where do you suppose this is all leading us? To wit, the architecture will change before then, as you've already noted. Perhaps it will remain digital in the control plane at speeds that are already attainable, with analog content being ported in its native form conveying super high-definition, or maybe some new method or traffic mediation and exchange will evolve that no one has even thought of yet.
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