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Bandwidth Shortage And The Telephone Company
FasterThanLight writes: "This article from USA Today regarding (non)usage of existing fiber and its impact on bandwidth in the semi-near future ... more doom and gloom. Why? Greed, of and by the (surprise, surprise) large telcos." Remember, this story is about a predicted shortage, not a current shortage.
I have lived in three neighborhoods in Texas during the past 4 years, and during all but the past years, everytime I went on a drive, I could see construction trucks with spools of thick fiber lines being buried underground.
However, this all stopped about 4 months before I got layed off from Alcatel, one of the largest suppliers of fiber-optic cable in the world. There's just not as much business as there used to be, and people aren't willing to speculate on putting fiber down when they won't immediately see profits from it in this kind of market.
I don't, however, think we are going to see a shortage of bandwidth anytime soon...at least in big cities and suburban America (judging from the state of things in Texas). There's more cable underground than I care to think about, and I know for a fact you can get more bandwidth up and running in less than 9 months--the timespan that this article suggests. If there's a big enough market for it, telcos will have it in tomorrow! We threw up huge testbeds at Alcatel in under a month that could easily have served a small city a good amount more bandwidth.
Basically, this article is a bunch of speculative horseshit supported by quotes from people that either don't know what they are talking about, or have alterior motives for giving the quotes.