I guess you did not read what I wrote, but that's understandable as you have a brain-lock on cable superiority.
What I said was that DISH's best hope is to partner with either RBOC's or Sprint, because they can use DISH to provide the multimedia content to the house and then let their copper pairs do the telephony and the high speed data. I don't disagree that the HFC plant has a higher aggregate throughput, but cable also has some weaknesses. For instance, do you think of reliability and customer service when you think of your local cable company? Probably not. Another weakness is that it's going to be years, many years, before the cable systems are all upgraded to 2 way HFC. Right now, DISH is pumping out signal and the RBOC's are installing XDSL modems. A telco/DISH partnership will have the market all to themselves in many many cities where the cable TV plant is not upgraded to 2-way yet.
DISH's is in a position to offer something to the telco's that the telco's can't do with their current systems, and that is broadband access to the home. I'm not saying DBS is better than HFC, this is not an arguement about HFC vs. satellite. I'm saying if the telco's want to compete with their new adversary ATT/TCI for the whole information service monthly bill, they've got to have a video strategy. LMDS ain't it -- that would take years to build out. XDSL aint it -- the pipe is not big enough. They aren't going to build out their own HFC plant either, they can't afford to wait that long and it would be expensive.
DISH is it, and I bet my money that by the end of the year I'll be proven right, in a big way.
FB
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