Telecom myths: killer apps, content is king, QoS streaming

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[Another excellent paper by Andrew Odlyzko, who is a famous iconoclast often
credited for pricking the telcom bubble and is quoted frequently in the
Economist and other magazines and papers. Some excerpts -- BSA]


   http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/telecom.dogmas.spectrum.pdf

or

   http://www.wirelessunleashed.com/

Telecom dogma and spectrum Allocations

Today, the key discussions about broadband are [...]:. Should
service providers be given complete control over their networks in order to
get them to de-ploy broadband? Or should they be pushed towards a "dumb
pipes" model that maximizes innovation at the edges? There is increasing
realization that fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) is not feasible economically in
the near future. There is also concern whether the duopoly of cable TV
operators and ILECs can be trusted to deploy the needed infrastructure and
provide associated services, and if so, on what terms. (If FTTH were to be
the future, those concerns would be even greater, since for that technology,
natural monopoly does appear to apply. But even competition between cable
modems and DSL might not be sufficiently vigorous, since in the past the
ILECs and the cable companies have refrained from competing.) The dynamics
of financial markets (and, a key precondition, the developments in
technology that lead to a convergence in the services that different
networks can offer) may very well lead to vigorous competition between cable
and ILECs without any external intervention . But that is not certain, since
natural monopoly issues might lead to either instability that would collapse
into monopoly or an uneasy but stable duopoly. Wireless can play a major
role in stimulating such competition, both indirectly (through voice traffic
migration to wireless) and directly, by providing an alternative broadband
link, and thus leading to real facilities based competition.

Promoting diffusion of general broadband access is desirable, and can be
facilitated by promoting wireless communication. But there are two even more
important reasons for advancing wireless [...]. One is that mobility, which
is what wireless provides, is extremely valuable, and offers the promise of
major boosts to economic productivity. The other one is that the telecom
industry is shackled by a set of misleading myths.


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