Today's Quote

"In a series of recent research reports that I entitled ”The Dumb pipe Paradox” – which I believe provided the original impetus for the Committee’s invitation to testify today – I tried to address the expectation that the telcos are rapidly rushing in to meet this need and to provide competition for cable incumbents. In fact, by their own best estimates, they’ll be able to reach no more than 40% or so of American households with fiber over the next seven years.

And most of that will be in the form of hybrid fiber/legacy copper networks, such as that being constructed by AT&T under the banner of ”Project Lightspeed.” These hybrid networks are expected to deliver 20Mbs average downstream bandwidth. After accounting for significant standard deviation around that average, that will mean many enabled subscribers will actually recieve far less. I and many others on Wall Street harbor real doubts as whether these hybrid networks will provide technologically sufficient to meet future demands

More importantly, in 60% of the country, there are simply no new networks on the horizon, and the existing infrastructure from the telcos – DSL running at speeds of just 1.5Mbs or so – simply won’t be adequate to be considered “broadband” in five years or so. That includes wireless networks, by the way. Current and planned wireless networks – including the over-hyped Wi-Max technology – offer the promise of satisfying today’s definition of broadband, but simply can’t feasibly support the kind of bandwidth required for the kind of dedicated point-to-point video connections that will be required to be considered broadband tomorrow."