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« AT&T R&DWho Cares II? »
This is a sub-selection from Who cares?

trparky
Premium Member
join:2000-05-24
Cleveland, OH
·AT&T U-Verse

2 edits

trparky to BiggA

Premium Member

to BiggA

Re: Who cares?

True, but what the numbers don't say that. The numbers say that sticking with wireline is an economically bad decision.

Cable on the other hand, can still stuff a ton of data down that COAX and it seems that with each iteration of DOCSIS they can shove ever more amounts of data down that COAX line and it looks like there's no end in sight for COAX.

COAX was after all, built from the beginning to handle high frequencies, twisted-pair (telephone cable) however wasn't. DSL always did seem like trying to stuff an elephant through a garden hose.

Fiber is great and all, even I praised the idea of FTTH in the past but the numbers don't lie. It's just too expensive to do FTTH. Even Google's little fiber project is turning out to be very expensive to deploy. Face it, FTTH is just too expensive to deploy.

With cable, you can send fiber to a node (similar to how xDSL-based FTTN works) but unlike xDSL, cable isn't limited by the distance from the node and was practically built from the beginning to have support for repeaters to get the signal farther and farther down the line. It doesn't matter if you're 500 feet or 9000 feet from the node, cable works. You can't say that about xDSL.

So from an economic point of view, cable is in a much better position to be able to deliver tomorrow's high speeds with a quarter of the capex that would be needed in telco land.

With that being said, AT&T's idea to divorce themselves from the wireline business makes perfect sense. Drop what costs too much and instead put that money into something that's going to actually make money, and that's wireless.

LightSpan
Premium Member
join:2004-02-18
Lexington, KY

LightSpan

Premium Member

Look at their wire line profit from last year. Lte is the rual replacement for dsl. Wire line is very profitable on the big business end of wire line.company's can't get there hands on metro E solutions and cloud service's for their data fast enough. I have a backlog of jobs waiting to be spliced.Yes iam talking fiber to the prem and copper metro e solutions.

trparky
Premium Member
join:2000-05-24
Cleveland, OH
·AT&T U-Verse

trparky

Premium Member

I'm not denying that there is profit in wireline but that's the business side of wireline, not the residential side of wireline. The residential side of wireline is hemorrhaging cash and that's what AT&T wants to get rid of.

AT&T wants the cashcows, wireless and business-side wireline. The faster AT&T can get rid of the residential side of wireline the happier they'll be.

When I talk about wireline, I'm generally referring to the residential side of the business.
« AT&T R&DWho Cares II? »
This is a sub-selection from Who cares?