The remaining people are stunned and in terrible pain. The story above is not true and that is probably obvious to you because of one major logical flaw. They have managed to do that very nicely for themselves thank you. There were around 30,000 active users in the world at the end of 1997 and projections for the end of 1998 range from a modest 300,000 to an even more modest 100,000. The pent-up demand is high as evidenced by the uptick in residential ISDN installs over the past two years.
Stable products exist.
The potential size of the market invites lots of investment dollars. There are several reasons why xDSL has not taken off yet, starting with the fact that this is hard stuff. Running high speed digital signals over a wiring plant installed over several generations, susceptible to lightning and gophers, and generally uncharacterized in terms of what services are running over what wires in a bundle, is not easy. You can' t just tell everyone to install Cat 5 or Cat 6 cable and call you in the morning. Then, the xDSL community made it even harder by overshooting with the initial goals.