Broadband Is Dead (Or At Least Very Ill)

Thornkin writes: "Broadband is dead. That is the proclamation of tech pundit Robert Cringely. With Excite@Home turning away new customers and going bankrupt along with most of the DSL companies, things are bleak and will get worse. The icing on the cake could be this bill which would remand the requirement for local phone providers to open their networks before competing in the long distance market." And at a different scale, apparently the DSL circuits in Blacksburg, VA (a place which liked to claim it was "the most wired town in America" not long ago) are now full, and turning away residential customers.

Comments

Cringely

[Wyatt Earp]

Just because Cringely calls something dead, that doesn't mean it is. Or if something is alive, it doesn't mean he is. Take a look at the list of articles from his Old Hat page. It's like a tour of Wired covers.

Here is Cringely on Excite@Home
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit1999012 1. html

"Excite, like it's bigger, badder competitor Yahoo, is entirely about branding and brand awareness, so the name won't go away. Excite is better known than @Home. Current management at Excite won't change, either. Only the pockets get deeper. So in exactly the same spirit in which a little Mississippi long distance company became MCI-Worldcom, look for more content deals from Excite and more customer-acquiring deals from @Home, sucking-up smaller ISPs.
The one thing that has changed in all this is the identity of the competition. Unable to beat Yahoo at its own game, Excite is using @Home to change the game. The new target is America OnLine. "

While he has been right sometimes, he is just as often wrong, sometimes wildly wrong.

Back in 1998 he proclaimed, loudly that the iMac's intro was going to be flawed by the fact that something like 18% of them didn't work. Well the failure rate was under the industry average when they actually came out of the box. I would provide a link, but his Old Hat list starts the week after this column was out. But I remeber it dangit.

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit1999010 6. html

Then in Jan of '99 he said that Apple was screwed because it came out with different colors of iMacs and that was stupid.

Or there was the decleration that broadband was going to make Blockbuster go out of business.

"How long will it be before the time difference between driving to get video on demand or downloading from the Net is a wash? Three years, according to my figures. Add another three years for broad availability and to cover the impact of HDTV, which will make our video files five times larger again. In six years, then, the Blockbuster and Hollywood Videos of this country will probably be have sold their storefronts, too, leaving the strip malls of America to Starbucks and Bennetton. These intellectual property businesses will simply go away, along with what's left of the retail software business. All that will be left is books -- the oldest intellectual property vessels of all. "

It's been three years and video on demand over broadband is only for the peer to peer file sharing crowd.

Broadband isn't dead...

[Masem]

It's just that Ma-Bell is doing it's best impersonation of T1000 from Terminator 2 and recollecting the bits of itself before it regains it's monopoly on phone lines.

It's the fact that that last mile at all parts is *physically* controlled by some facet of the baby bells, none which are struggling in terms of cash flow, which is making DSL seem like a loser. Because they control both the physical access at the CO and at the user's home, every CLEC has to sit and wait for the ILEC to go out and do something; only recently have the ILECs (at least for Ameritech here in the midwest) have been hand-slapped for being 'intentionally' slow in responding to voice-line installs and problems for residental customers, but all that was was a hand-slap in terms of fines in the millions; DSL is hidden behind this issue. If the CLECs didn't have to deal with the ILEC in any way, I would fully expect most CLEC to be able to offer installes within 5 business days, as opposed to the 4-6 week standard now.

However, fortunately, we have Verizon and PacBell at the end of lawsuits from DSL ISPs for being intentally slow, as well as the FCC watching out for the decline of CLECs (the extention on Rhythms' shutdown, for example). However, I still believe that the ownership of the last mile , from CO to the network interface, should not be in the hands of anyone that is providing the service along those lines; either the phone company can sell it off to a different group (possibly owned by the city/town as with mayn other utility services), or it can split off from that. As long as both the ILECs, CLECs, and standard phone ccompanies have to play the same pricing game, there would be much more competition in the DSL market.

I doubt it will be dead, but it probably will end up as being two major CLECs (Covad and Worldcom) along with several ISPs that use ILECs for the last mile. The only probably now is that artificial bandwidth limits are coming into play particularly with those that use ADSL. Certainly speeds are much better than dialup, but given the projected rate of growth of multimedia on the web, more speed is going to be needed for the 'average Joe' and these artificial caps appear to be fixed at the current time.