Word: broadband
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...Broadband growth figured to be limitless. Given that every business and every household is moving online, data transmission has been expanding at phenomenal rates. But as phone companies and Internet service providers sprang up everywhere, capacity raced light-years ahead of demand. So the price for using the pipes tumbled, hobbling the telcos' ability to expand and to buy more gear. "Never in the history of industry has the sheer number of competitors been so underestimated and misunderstood," says former AT&T Broadband president Leo Hindery. "And never have the implications of technology advancement been so misunderstood as well...
...logging on. Not at all. Internet traffic continues to grow at the astonishing rate of 200% annually. Every 45 minutes, AT&T transmits a quantity of data--meaning everything from e-mail to streaming video--equal to 34 times the contents of the Library of Congress. But the broadband buildout has been so furious that it could take three years for the traffic to catch...
Behind this overbuilding is the telecommunications deregulation act of 1996, which brought a flood of new local and long-distance broadband carriers--including satellite and wireless systems operators--into the telecom market. Their very presence forced incumbents like AT&T to upgrade their systems to keep up. And since deregulation coincided with the Internet bubble, Wall Street was happy to throw money at the telecom upstarts, many of which now resemble dotcoms...
...broadband revolution promised to bring every household fast Internet access along with video-on-demand, interactive TV and the ability to flash Libraries of Congress around the world at whim. Amazingly, the sellers of this dream overlooked the fact that many homes and offices connect to the 21st century fiber network with twisted-pair copper wires--late 19th century tech. These could hardly keep up with the bandwidth demands of the Napster...
...song. By contrast, a modem connected to a TV cable that feeds into a fiber-optic loop could claim that tune in under a minute. Yet even today only about 6% of U.S. households have cable modems or digital subscriber lines, which carry compressed data over copper wires at broadband speed. But that hasn't stopped carriers from blanketing the country with high-bandwidth networks...