Markets
Since the broadband revolution began in 1999, high-speed services have attracted more than 300 million subscribers worldwide. While a few carriers are connecting fiber to households, this process is generally expensive and time consuming. Most carriers worldwide are deploying advanced broadband services over existing copper infrastructure, of which there were approximately 1.2 billion lines in service at the end of 2007.
Moreover, the speed with which data can travel over such copper infrastructure is increasing, from 8 Mbps in the early days of ADSL to current VDSL2 offerings, which deliver symmetric speeds of up to 100 Mbps. With fiber-like speeds over copper, carriers around the world are able to maximize investment in their copper infrastructure by quickly and cost-effectively delivering a host of broadband applications. The Holy Grail for most carriers now is “interactive broadband” which includes a bundled offering triple play applications, as well as the opportunity for the user to interact with the application.