Morgan Stanley has released a very interesting report on internet business with some tips to net operators:
http://www.morganstanley.com/institutional/techresearch/mobile_internet_report122009.html
It's actually available for free on the World-Wide Internet at http://www.morganstanley.com/institutional/techresearch/pdfs/Mobile_Internet_Report_Key_Themes_Final.pdf , but you can purchase a paper copy if you'd rather. It's pretty slow going as it's mostly power points, some with lots and lots of words, but some of the graphs and insights are intriguing, esp. as they related to the non-USA parts of the world.
The authors are pretty well convinced that the demand for more wireless spectrum will be handled by spectral efficiency improvements and deployment of more towers, they stress the importance of replacing copper with fiber and microwave in the middle mile, and don't think the telcos are doing the right things. There's a lot of discussion about how the wireless networks will handle voice and best-efforts at the same time which many will find troublesome, I suppose, but overall I'd give it 4 out of 5 stars.
RB
I know, watching my local incumbent they are not replacing damaged copper with fiber. I think they must have warehouses of it someplace. I can't imagine that it is good to replace buried copper w/copper during the wintertime. If you're out doing it, might as well *actually* install fiber in the conduit.
(Unless it's about unions/job protection for the copper guys).
- Jared (not saying unions are bad, but when you operate two assets and have a different union for each, it can limit your potential significantly).
Only if you want the dead-tree edition. The others are linked below the
text you've quoted.
Scott.
Maybe we need to pass some laws that ban copper wire outdoors.
One of the very hard things about running a large, geographically distributed layer 0/1 organization is managing the various and sundry physical cables from point to point. Replacing one bad span with a good span which is qualitatively different introduces a level of version control and management headache, and if done in a haphazard fashion can reduce the overall availability of the network. I don't know who your incumbent is, but it's reasonable to assume that they have some strategy for cable plant management which includes overall technology refresh at some point, with like-for-like replacement until then.
Also, last I checked, the specs on "how to build a good layer 0/1 fiber infrastructure" were different than those for copper - because the capabilities are different, the network architecture has different optimizations available.
This doesn't mean that the provider shouldn't be moving toward a large-scale fiber rollout - far from it! I just wanted to provide a reason why they might not want to do said rollout in a piecemeal fashion.
David Barak
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