The big build is ahead of us. As our friend Tom Nolle of CIMI Corporation recently noted, while there is no consensus on what the future revenue engine of the market will be, there is general agreement that whatever it is, it will require broadband customer connections. Thus, the highest priority in networking is to modernize the access network to support broadband. It does not help that, in running in the direction of network modernization, we have gone about the task in the wrong order. Simply put, we have modernized our highways but not our local roads, making it difficult to get on, go fast and go to the places we might want to go.
Access is the platform on which broadband services have to ride and today it is the bottleneck.
Without change here, we will not get much change anywhere. When we had the Bell System, that would have been a natural conclusion to make for we would have regulated modernization in. Under the current framework, this has not occurred and now the core has a problem. Because access markets are governed by a regulatory scheme that has served to dis-incentivize those who own and control it. The reason for this is simple.