"Stefek Zaba" wrote in message
...
Mike wrote:


......., a wireless solution will dominate broadband provision in due
course.

Really?, What makes you think that then....

I'm a consultant for many of those companies.

Ah, an independent voice, then ;-)

Never claimed to be :-) But having helped design the current ADSL system I
think I have a reasonable grasp of what works and what doesn't.


Dinosaur-like, I just don't see it. RF spectrum is limited - Messrs
Nyquist, Fourier, and Shannon are tediously difficult to bamboozle,
whatever the IPO spreadsheet says :-)

Totally agree. But the average number of bits downloaded by most people is
really small - they just want the same data with less latency.


For the large urban areas, wired
wins in cost terms, readily so if you can re-use existing wire (hence
xDSL and cable-TV-piggyback schemes), pretty readily if you can re-use
existing ducting and wayleaves.

I worked on the VDSL standards and have designed suitable equipment to
install, but unless the service providers want to use that service, no
operator is going to install it. As for cable TV systems - forget it. When
they were given their licences they were required to install fibre which
would have created the fibre to the house (FTTH) system we really need now,
but once the licences were awarded they asked for and got optouts from this
requirement because "fibre is too expensive".


If you have to dig new trenches, there's a one-off capital cost,

Which will bankrupt you, as it did with most cable companies in the 80s/90s.


but final equipment cost is cheaper for both operator and subscriber.

Not really. Once you are in high volume the cost of most pure electronic
items becomes remarkable similar. It's things like mechanicals or displays
that vary the price.

That's where your business model affects the
investment decision - if you want to go after the better-off early
adopters and have the infrastructure cost scale quite closely with the
numbe of users, the Wireless Way is attractive; if you expect to build
to a mass market quickly, the pain of the initial investment is
outweighed by future revenues. Admittedly, that argument's easier to
make when the finance houses are falling over themselves to pump money
into anything with "interweb" in the name than now ;-)

Oh if only they were. Raising finance at the moment is grim.