Jxcxjx: A neat little context article follows from ZDNet that reminds us of the competition status of the Telcos for delivery of high speed service ( ADSL ) to the home. Relavent to AIME, I think. Worth a read.
Tom D.
The ADSL Tease: Why Super-Fast, Cheap Access Is Taking So Darned Long
Jesse Berst, Editorial Director
ZDNet AnchorDesk
When you're dating, it's easy to tell when someone is teasing. When you're flirting with new technology, it's not always as obvious that you're being led on.
Chances are you're smitten with the promise of super-fast Internet access from home. Especially since phone companies are rolling out super-fast ADSL services in select cities. Click for full story. But I'm here with some bad news. Many Americans will have to wait years for cheap fast access from phone companies.
Widespread deployment of ADSL -- with its lure of data transmission at speeds five to 25 times faster than today's dial-up connections -- is still a long way off. Yankee Group analyst Bruce Leichtman estimates there will be only 25,000 paying ADSL customers by the end of the year. Cable modem subscribers, by contrast, could hit 500,000 by then. Click for full story.
There are several factors preventing phone companies from making ADSL happen at the speeds and with the prices we all want:
Phone bureaucracies. Most telcos still adhere to a business structure optimized for a regulated monopoly. They are not prepared to respond quickly to market conditions. (Not yet, anyway, though things are improving.)
Fear of cannibalizing T1 sales. Telcos are making a fortune selling fast access to businesses at high prices. Why jeopardize that revenue for ADSL, which should cost a fraction of what T1 does for comparable speeds? I say should because most phone companies aren't rolling out ADSL at competitive prices. U.S. West, for instance, is offering a $40 per month service. Sounds pretty good until you find out it doesn't include setup, modem or ISP charges. And that it connects at a relatively paltry 256 Kbps. At the high end, its MegaBusiness service starts at $80 per month for 768 K speed and runs up to hundreds and hundreds per month for more serious speeds. Click for the U.S. West service/pricing details.
Inadequate infrastructure. As slow as the cable systems have been to bulk up their network underpinnings, phone companies, with a few exceptions, have been slower still.
Merger mania. The huge consolidation wave that's hit the telecommunications industry -- GTE and Bell Atlantic, WorldCom and MCI, AT&T and British Telcom -- will prove a serious impediment to ADSL progress. Any merger is an enormous drain of time, money and resources. And these deals are among the largest and most complex in history. It will be years before the dust has settled. Click for full story.
To be fair, the media have contributed to the fast-access flirtation. We're eager to see high bandwidth advances such as ADSL. So we get excited about each technology breakthrough -- forgetting the business bottlenecks that can stall the actual delivery of technology |
