Fox McCloud
Ron Paul Enthusiast
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| reply to Sammer
Re: Rural DSL
said by Sammer  :said by Fox McCloud :*sigh* I think it'll be years before the broadband divide is ever truly "fixed". IMHO there will always be a digital divide. Imagine what things will be like in 50 years. FTTH will be available to a majority of American homes. Because of mobility wireless also has a very strong future. By then FTTH will be used in ways most of us have never thought of including medical treatment. Some may only use FTTH as a connection point for their future version of a wireless router. Still others will probably decide that despite the bandwidth constraints a WISP meets their then current needs. However just as you can now build a house beyond the power grid, beyond the PSTN, and beyond the reach of cell towers there will be homes where the described future will not exist in 50 years. None of what I just said is meant to suggest that no one should try to reduce the digital divide as much as possible. I generally agree; I just don't like it when there are people in rural areas that aren't truly "out in the middle of nowhere" (for example, I say that I am, but, in actuality, I'm only 12-15 minutes from town...which isn't terribly far)...and yet the fail to deploy here.
The one silver lining is that once FTTH is deployed, it'll probably stay in place until the "end of time" so to speak, as every few years, someone finds a way to squeeze even more bandwidth out of a single strand of fiber. I can't see DSL lasting beyond 2015, as copper will become more expensive and fiber by then...and I can't see cable being able to compete with fiber in the long-run (that'll be an interesting time, the telco's will have the cable companies on the run when it comes to bandwidth).
And let's be honest; it seems that the bandwidth speeds being offered increase faster than that size of the actual media we download...therefore, I would tend to think it would be decades (if not a century or so) until we would even want a 1 terabit connection. |
