All carriers will be changing their backbones, first to WDM, and then to more exotic technologies being hatched as we speak. Electronic transmission won't last; it will all be optical and not very far away in time. DSl will be around just as telegraph persisted and had a very important function deep into the perfection of telephone. It will take quite a long time for cable to penetrate remote or sparsely populated areas. This is the arena of DSL because telephone is already there and of satellite.
AOL will partner with some RBOC or TWX in order to compete with its broadband offering, AOL Broadband Services, with T-TCI-ATHM, and there will be one other major competitor perhaps associated with Sprint-WCOM-ELNK. This triumvirate will deploy the world's broadband services.
Glitches like the Fremont thing are minor growing pains. The merger has put TCI in to a let things slide attitude, because it isn't our problem anymore. The problem about that is it assumes merger. even if the merger goes through, TCI has a lot to do regardless of T's involvement which initially won't be much. We can also look at the equipment mfgers and conclude that TCI is procrastinating hoping for a quality, consumer do-it-yourself installation kit. I don't believe that is the way. Maybe that will work at little, but you have to have some guys come out and do something and the premises must have HFC available. That, in most cases, is not yet true.
The problem is not in the network per se, it's in the last mile, the house or apartment complex hookup.
Hope that answers your questions. |
