Oh, you zany phone companies... While I did my radio show back in the day, I was also the technology director at the station. We used to get a free publication on the telecommunications industry. I would read it sometimes when I was bored. What I learned was all the companies in the industry laid tonnes of cable as the net companies got big in anticipation of demand for broadband in the home. Then, the companies died, and no one wanted broadband. The companies had put down huge amounts of money for cable that no one was interested in. They took it hard in the pocket book.
As a funny note, each company was looking for the "Killer App" that people would all buy broadband for. Eventually, South Korea showed the way. Gamers wanted that bandwidth so bad. See, Korea loves internet games and all those gamers get broadband. they had a 60% rate of broadband use when the U.S. was still in single digits. Shows you how much those big companies know. I could have told them that years before I read it in the magazine.
Anyway, those companies aren't interested in getting burned again. They don't want to lay a ton of cable only to eat the cost. As time goes on, laying the cable gets cheaper and cheaper (fiber optics and routing equipment gets better and cheaper with time, copper not so much), so why lay the cable until it will make some money? Of course, if you can charge extra for faster delivery, you'll make back the investment much faster.
The other big concern for the telecoms is the concept of the national franchise. Your cable company has a right to give you cable. They paid your city, county, state, someone for that right. It gives them a monopoly, but you can't have every damn cable company putting lines in the ground, what a mess that would be. Anyway, the phone companies want to offer TV over the internet they give you over phone lines, but they don't want to have to license every stupid location on its own. A national license would be much easier. The problem is, cable companies have to often have to provide service to poor and rich areas by the terms of their licenses. What kind of requirements phone companies would have is not clear.
In general, I support national licensing because it would make the phone companies do a major upgrade of their infrastructure. If cable can offer phone over the internet why not let phone offer cable over internet? Plus if DSL gets faster, cable will have to get faster to be competitive (or cheaper...).
Speaking of cable, the Cable Barons.
