The telephone companies can't mass deploy DSL. We all discussed this long ago. If they attempted to do so, their existing infrastructure would be completely jammed. I don't know if this is happening to you, but as the public is beginning to discover the faciltiy of the net, I'm getting "the line is busy" messages with rising frequency of occurence. In the last month everything has grown substantially slower. It is becoming necessary to hog the line, because if you log off, you may not get back on anytime soon. The existing infrastructure is close to maxing out. Please tell me how the telcos want to encourage a mass increase of utilization without any visible means of return from not only office equipment upgrade, but also backbone, interconnect, and solving the discontinuity of service line quality.
If all the copper lines had the same integrity, this portion of the complication would have been addressed years ago. The core problem is that there has to be a minimum common denominator of line quality. It doesn't exist. At speeds above 100kbps distance starts becoming more and more of a problem. To get around these problems the telco investment for 10 million subscribers is on the order of $200 billion, but how can they retrieve their investment? Everyone else is the beneficiary, they aren't. They would have to put a surcharge on internet access, on the scale of $5/mo/100kbps.
DSL two years ago was targeted to address a business desire for a campus-like cheap alternative to T1. What it has been whipped up into, boggles the mind. The issues touched upon above were analyzed to death several years ago. The technology hasn't changed except it has gotten a little better. It's market focus had nothing to do with mass deployment on telephone lines. This concept developed early last year because the net growth was far greater than anticipated and the DSL companies needed a story to pump up waning working capital.
This article is an attempt at damage control. The DSL industry can only lose by creating great expectations in the public that can't be met. They're being used by MSFT, CPQ, INTC, in order to sell their products. These parasites don't care if the box you buy is loaded to do high speed, but can't. They can blame it on someone else. These companies and others are getting desperate because they see the handwriting on the wall. It says, "weighed and found wanting", so they invest in everything, foolishly squandering monies that will yield nothing or blow the capital. |
