Can you imagine Verizon and Comcast merging? Can you imagine Comcast purchasing Disney, with its ESPN, Disney and ABC programming? Can you imagine a time when you will no longer use the words "cable drop" or "inside wire" any more?
The time is soon upon us, perhaps in as little as five years, when the bandwidth required to stream live TV at 4K and 8K resolutions will easily occupy a 5-20MHz wide carrier in the 700-800MHz range in free space.
Now imagine that the HFC infrastructure we so carefully maintain is now used to place thousands of LTE neighborhood cells, talking to small base stations in the home and office. Using the new 802.11ac, Super WiFi technology, the home LAN now supports 1.5Gbps. No more inside wire.
All this is great news to the cable industry where the majority of all service calls are related to installation and problems with inside wire, connectors, splitters, and amplifiers at subscriber's homes and businesses.
But is this good news for consumers? That's a lot of technology and programming in the hands of just a few enormous corporations. Where is the competition? There doesn't seem like any are around except for a few municipal fiber nets touting ubiquitous WiFi.
And what does this mean for rural America? In every one of the over 18,000 communities in the USA, there ought to be a fiber, multi-gigabit per second interface to the Internet. How access gets to the citizens ought to be up to the local powers, as in franchise or self-build.
