It's hard to run faster and jump higher when you're dragging an enormous telephone company or cable operator along for the ride. Many of the promising new ways to deliver high speed broadband to the home bypass the telephone and cable companies. Why aren't the incumbent broadband carriers leading the charge to 100Mbps broadband? Money.
Ask an economist who protects the status quo in a market, and they will point a finger toward those with the majority market share. The mantra of ”protect our investment" drowns out the call to keep pushing forward. If telephone and cable companies made a move to fiber to the home, they would lose billions and billions of invested dollars in copper wire strung on poles and buried in the ground. Worse, they would suddenly be on equal footing with small upstart companies determined to eliminate copper wire as a delivery mechanism.
Market transitions hurt those caught in the vise of supporting the majority market share while fighting off competitors offering new services. The company who delivers 100Mbps of broadband delight to our homes may well not be the ones delivering 1Mbps to us today. That's tough on them, but the customers, meaning you and I, will finally get broadband that completely envelops us with the speed and services it delivers.
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