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Hype aside, a smattering of broadband users, investors and analysts offer varying perspectives on technology’s future:
- Bill Payne, a local early stage venture capitalist active in the Tech Coast Angels:
“I am perfectly content with cable modem service. I’m an e-mail addict — I don’t use any wireless services right now.
“To John Q. Public, broadband access has been very successful. Those that are on dial-up drool over the ones that have high speed. You really need to look at what the consumer’s doing. What investors are pursuing is still a gray area. Investors made a lot of mistakes during the recent boom cycle. They were trying to project an Internet economy that never could be. What I can do with my cable modems at home — major downloads, sending packages over the Internet — is not a whole lot different than what you could do with a T1 line. I’m a pretty happy customer in that respect.
“What do consumers want? Is there a killer application out there that they can’t resolve with e-mail and a phone? Do you really go to the movies from a restaurant without knowing what time the movie starts? Do you really need (broadband) to look up movies from your car?”
- Rajeev Chand is a broadband wireless analyst for Bay Area-based Rutberg Research. Rutberg helps tech companies raise venture capital.
Whatever happened to Bluetooth, the technology that was supposed to link wirelessly households and businesses? “That is an area where I’m proud to say the hype has been deflated,” Chand says. In the near term we’re urging investors to look at it as a cable replacement technology. We think that the cable replacement market is a substantive one, including laptops, handsets, phones. Bluetooth’s not dead.”
In future broadband deployments, “capacity could be a big problem. I see network traffic growing, prices per minute declining, subscribers not growing as fast. So you have not as many customers paying less per minute, increasing traffic without increasing revenue.”
- Kathie Hackler is a broadband analyst for Bay Area-based Gartner Communications, which advises businesses on trends in the telecommunications sector:
“DSL business plans were not based on real good cost and revenue assumptions. Some of those companies that went into the broadband business were going into targeted markets. But they were encouraged by their investors to quickly build a national footprint and a lot of capital expense went to do that. The measuring stick was not revenue but offices or homes passed. The metric had nothing to do with making money, but everything to do with spending money. It was like a gold rush.”
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