Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Broadband Is Dead (Or At Least Very Ill)

Posted by timothy on from the cringing-with-cringely dept.

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.

1 of 371 comments (clear)

  1. Cringely by Wyatt+Earp · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.