Survey: Fiber Can Net Telcos 20% Annual Saving Over Copper > Surprised it's not more...

Well there you go, you got a business idea there. Trump AT&T and start a business wiring houses with fiber. I think your only real competitor will be Google. But don't do like they did and start in the sticks, go for the big market like LA. Let us all know how your first quarterly grab your ankles financial results meeting goes. Don't mind the torches and pitchforks complaining about ROI...it's a great investment right?

AT&T hasn't rolled it out because they are shortsighted, partially driven by investors who are looking at the next quarter and nothing beyond. If they were looking at the long term viability of their business, they would be building GPON as fast as they could physically install it for the next decade.

The challenge with other market entrants is the entrenchment of the current companies, the capital needed, and the right of ways needed. AT&T already has everything they need to start rolling out GPON, yet they refuse to. They even have an IPTV platform that could easily run over fiber (and runs over a highly crippled fiber connection in a few places) with some tweaks, they just need to get to actually putting some in!

If they care about their own long-term viability, it should be blatantly obvious to anyone that FTTH is the only way to go. U-Verse has already run out of bandwidth, and is a very short-term plan. The problem is, the investors, like is so often the case in the US, act like they are 5 and can't think beyond the immediate future, and no 10, 20, 30 years down the road. It's a general problem in American government and infrastructure, not just AT&T. Verizon thought ahead for a while, and then their investors had a hissy fit. If the investors had the ability to think more than one quarter in the future, they would have pushed Verizon to 100% FTTH and then to start overbuilding other providers like AT&T that weren't delivering such a far superior service like FIOS.

Well, it depends if you're looking for returns next quarter or the long term viability of the business model competing against HFC. My plan would lose billions for probably a decade, but any given area would see returns within a few years, not a few months like U-Verse.