Hi Gary,
Given the number of options and the breadth of the wireless field, I wouldn't want to leave you with a one thought answer. It would be useless. At the same time, I am not the wireless expert here, as others surely are.
Some general perceptions I have, however, lead me to consider that wireless may start to enjoy a much better future penetration rate than it has seen thus far. Indeed, most markets don't even have a wireless last mile contender yet.
As far as I'm concerned, up to this point it has simply been an incubator tech in those niches that are going to make the difference for 'net access, say, and it is only now beginning to form some wings.
With the next steps up in throughput handling capabilities, IMO, we'll begin to see wireless make an appreciable dent in the last mile stats going forward, for a number of reasons. Chiefly, when deployment commences in earnest, it will be a lot less expensive getting it out there without having to pass homes on the basis of maybe they will, maybe they wont, cost exposure like cable upgrades do.
Large areas (radii measured in the tens of miles, sometimes approaching the century mark) could be covered, for example, without operators having to lay down cash on street construction costs, pulling, field electronics, etc. It also enjoys speed-to-market advantages which could be used to catch competitors entirely off guard, relatively, in terms that could possibly make a difference, not allowing them adequate time to respond when they come under wireless threats.
If they can present their services at comparable costs, i.e., using the 30 to 40 price points we're seeing for cable as a reference, supporting minimum realized throughputs of 256 to 512 kb/s, say, I think that they will acquire support in the way of a viable following. Such realized speeds in the future could actually be better than competing alternatives whose stated potential speeds are much, much higher.
Having said that, I don't for a second believe that many, if not most, forms of wireless delivery will enjoy a freedom from the kinds of dynamics that will stifle their competitors in this sense. It will depend on the amounts of spectrum that have at their disposals, the methods they use to allocate resources, reuse frequencies, etc., and how they design their overall platforms and their entire approach to network architecture.
If one bets on the idea that HFC will not againupgrade anytime soon, we may start to see some reduced levels - even dismal - performance over cable modem lines at some point, which would provide additional impetus to start looking at the lower stated speeds of DSL and wireless, which may not, after all, look that bad in real-world comparative terms, at that point.
Then again, the cable cos could take the unlikely step of accellerating their secondary (triage for the first) upgrades, or resegmentations. But these are highly unlikely to take place anytime soon (indeed there are still large serving areas that haven't even seen their first upgrades, yet) to the extent that they would yield sufficient improvements, unless the black cable portion were replaced altogether, IMHO. And we are not about to see that take place for a number of technical reasons, not the least of which is because the DOCSIS line port looks for coax.
Stated another way, DOCSIS, one of the most truly beneficial ideas the cable folks have had in order to streamline procurement and standards compliance issues, has a top end that was designed to operate over coax, defeating any possibility that it could be easily leveraged in a future optical domain.
Actually, the shortcomings would go far beyond the front end where the coax meets the box, but we'll leave it at that for now. This obstacle notwithstanding, there are plenty of other reasons which center on financial justifications and risk which would be more influential at this point, in standing in the way of going purely optical to the appliance. Someone else will have to come out with that model, the cable cos wont. Not any time soon.
I think that Bernard and wireless wonk, along with several others here, may want to add to this. Surely, others will want to disagree.
Regards, Frank Coluccio
ps - I have not explored WLGS to any meaningful extent |
