isen.blog

Steve Stroh has been following the press generated by this week's Supercomm. He observes:

It's getting close to the endgame for the telcos, and so they're appearing to make changes.

There are fiber to the premise annoucements (really...we're GONNA do it!).

There are cable bundling announcements; phone, video, broadband for $90/month.

There are free VOIP phone (pc software) with callable PSTN numbers announced...

Cingular says thay're going to do 14.4 M (yes, capital M) bps in the Cingular/ATTWS spectral footprint for, among other things, video.

TiVo says you'll soon be able to download video content as pre-digitized bits from a broadband connection instead of having to digitize video locally.

AT&T is virtualizing itself; its voice calls travel over whatever broadband connection is available and they're going to "do over" ATTWS as an overlay on Sprint.

These are PURE examples of everything you, Roxane, etc. have been saying all along; we're finally seeing The Stupid Network trumping all others; voice - just an app; video - another app. In my opinion, though, if the Best Network delivers competitive broadband via wireless, that'll be good enough. That is, you don't need fiber bandwidth if TiVo dribbles in your video content and parks it on a hard disk waiting for you to watch it. So I would bet that those fiber investments won't hold up unless they price it at predatory levels akin to dialup.

If I could get FTTH for the "predatory" dial-up prices around $40 a month -- which is about what 1.3 million FTTH customers gladly pay for FTTH in Japan -- I'd sign up in a nanosecond. But given the current laissez-faire, telco-dominant U.S. policy direction, I expect that Steve's right. The best near-term network will be wireless.