Who wants a Ferrari when a Ford will do? Plenty of people.
In 2007, UK telco British Telecom called running fiber to the home "
premature," instead opting to milk copper for a little longer. In 2008, they announced a widely lauded plan to invest in "fiber" (to the node), though the specifics
weren't particularly impressive when you looked a little closer, and the "fiber to the press release" announcement was more about getting
a regulatory back rub from the British Government. According to British Telecom's CEO, DSL is like driving a Ford and really --
who isn't perfectly happy driving a Ford?
British Telecom has shown all the telltale signs of the spoiled monopoly broadband providers you're familiar with, from
whining when people actually use their product, to
throttling 8Mbps connections to 896kbps without bothering to tell anyone. Like most incumbents with investors, they'd prefer to pocket significant profits rather than invest that money back into the network -- even if the move would keep them relevant for decades. Luckily, it seems that British Telecom may
finally be getting over their fiber phobia as fiber prices drop:
BT has allocated approximately $2.47 billion for fiber-to-home deployments, but finds the lower costs will allow it to build far more than it had expected, using the same budget. Analysts at CSMG, for example, say that FTTH “pass and connect” costs are declining between six percent a year to 10 percent a year, in the U.S. market.
Apparently, that Ferrari is starting to look more reasonable. Still, the vast majority of British Telecom's customers are going to be on either vanilla DSL or VDSL for much of the decade. Just like in the States, BT doesn't want to fund deployment to more rural markets, leaving everybody wondering how exactly to fill in the gaps.
Better analogy
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