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Friday, 14 March 2008 |
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Industry body infuses heavyweight European carrier blood into dying broadband technology body. It is bad news for donors and recipients alike.
BT, Telecom Italia and France Telecom (plus FT via its Polish arm) have seen prominent figures elected to the board of the DSL Forum. This is described as evidence of a move to “give Europe a stronger voice in broadband standards development.”
One way of looking at DSL is to see it as a short-term solution to the copper confines of broadband. A form of raging against the light. Not so, says the DSL Forum. “These strong industry players will help drive the standards work and direction of the Forum, whose activities now involve a much wider scope than its original DSL mandate – including increasing activity around IPTV, fibre deployments and management of the digital home.” Well, I've seen IPTV over DSL and as a future it simply does not work.
You can, just, see the logic. Squeezing the last ounce of profitability out of arterial copper must be a good idea, even while the carriers involved are downplaying claims to 8Mbits/s throughput and the rest. And the last time dinosaurs were assembled to ponder the likely course of evolution, they ended up in the La Brea tar pits.
Jim Chalmers
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