Project LightSpeed Or Project Same Old Story?

from the don't-hold-your-breath dept

There's been lots of excitement over fiber deployments lately, and the latest is over SBC's announcement of Project LightSpeed, which SBC announced milliseconds after the FCC gave in to their demands. Karl Bode, over at Broadband Reports, notes that this announcement doesn't seem very different from almost every other fiber announcement in the past decade from the Bells -- all of which eventually went away for one reason or another (sometimes without giving back the incentives that were given to them). However, that "hasn't stopped the media from applauding like children watching a clown make balloon animals each time a bell issues another press release." He also challenges the assumption that (as the Bells claimed) they had no incentive to build out fiber without this FCC ruling, noting that cable is still cleaning DSL's clock in the US (though, almost nowhere else) and the cable guys have a credible triple play offering while the telcos are still fumbling around with useless temporary partnerships with satellite providers, rather than coming up with a real triple play solution that comes over a single pipe. Meanwhile, it's also worth noting that the SBC offering is only fiber to the node and then some updated form of DSL to the premise -- meaning it still won't have anywhere near the bandwidth that they could offer. What still should be interesting, though, is to see how wireless technologies play into all of this. For all the talk of triple play offerings, the focus is always on the home, and never on the mobility of people who live in the home.

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