ZO, yes, good points. But remember, only about 2% of Europe's present long-haul fiber was installed prior to 1998. Earlier (prior to the large-count fiber cables now available through Pirelli, and ever-increasing stand counts by Corning and Lucent) the PTTs were installing counts as low as 12 or 18 strands per route, with some carriers as recently as five or six years ago, including BT and DTK, actually limiting their use to 2 or 4 strands per route on their continental rings (like Williams did on their original Vyvvx network for their broadcast industry customers).
They were caught by surprise, later on, by both technological and regulatory improvements and changes, respectively. Also, because they thought that SONET/SDH over wdm would eventually carry them into the future. And then came the Internet.
Today these same carriers (but more importantly, the brood of new fiber barons who are now running absolutely wild throughout Europe) are installing multiple sheaths per pipe containing in excess of 576- , often 864- strands per inner-duct, within multiple outer-ducts (4" pipes each) per route, resulting in millions of additional strand-kilometers being laid along railroad track, highways, and riverways, as we type.
Not all of this will be for e-business. In fact, a large amount of this capacity will be turned into generic, unclaimed, fungible capacity that will be bartered and traded, and that will eventually be used to service "all" needs, not only commercial, but residential applications, as well.
Witness how Enron, without even a hint that they would be doing so (that I am aware of, in any event), just turned their once-perceived commercial service "reserves" (to coin a term) into a part of a residential service platform that will support video to homes via the Blockbuster/Telus/ILECs deal, using dsl. But there's a catch here. The latter deal concerning ENE and dsl is really a good case in point that I'd like to pursue for a moment.
While Blockbuster is downloading its MPEG file to the home via ENE and the ILEC's dsl platform, do you think that that the dsl line will be able to support anyone else's needs throughout the home, say, by other members of the family for other purposes?
Or, will Mary who was doing research for her graphics design class at school, and Dad who was struggling to synchronize his Lotus Notes data base at home with the one in London, just prior to Johnny deciding that he needed to see that last Metallica Concert on film just one more time... will these other members of the family be forced to wait until the multi-gigabyte file download for Johnny is completed?
Or, will Mary and Dad flip a coin, with the "winner" being forced to revert to a dialup connection using the old V.90 modem that no one knows how to invoke anymore, the one that no one wants to use anymore, the one that no one "will" use anymore, because it's way too slow? Especially, for graphics design work and remote data base synchronization purposes.
Let's get back to the abundance of new fiber that the Europeans are now putting into the ground. All of which is creating a network edge and core capacity that is almost imperceptibly large (the numbers that we would need to be use to describe the overall capacity would be surreal), resulting in a supply side for bandwidth which will not be satisfied by today's flavors of dsl and cm capacities, alone, as new types of applications roll out, moving forward.
You are probably right, however, in that it will take a bit longer in some instances, maybe in Europe, for the reasons you mentioned, than in others. Here we might speak in terms of maybe seven to ten years, instead of three to six years for validation of decent levels of penetration of FTTH. And perhaps in many locales they may look to go with fiber to the neighborhood, and 100 Mb/s or greater wireless over the last several hundred meters (HF/W).
But as we can see right here and now in the states, the ever-growing appetite for bandwidth renders users nothing less pathetic, when it comes to bandwidth, than insatiable. And at some point, some end users will even tolerate having their tulip gardens mussed up a little, if that's what it takes to obtain a sense of tele-presence and a more ubiquitous, multimedia reach.
ZO, I took this as an opportunity to spout off a bit. Only voicing some what-I-consider-to-be obvious general trends, with more than just a touch of fiber bias behind my thinking ;-)
FAC |
