Advertising Subscribe Reprint Requests Contact Us Fibering America Major broadband service providers are plowing ahead with fiber optic upgrades to handle the data traffic needs of tomorrow's businesses and residential home consumers. Despite the collapse in the dot-com space, the tightening venture capital market and the talk of a potential recession, broadband service providers remain surprising upbeat of capital expenditures for 2001. And at the core of that capex plan is spending on fiber transport, optical switching and intelligence software to develop new revenue streams.
Service providers point to a number of reasons.
First, the underlying proposition to build fiber components in today's network is to handle vastly increasing amounts of data traffic. And broadband service providers say they see continued demand for bandwidth consumers and businesses, despite talk of recession. I see no slowdown. For instance, BellSouth ended 2000 with 315,000 DSL subscribers, while Qwest logged in at 410,000. Both companies expect to double DSL penetration in 2001.