Fiber growth is slowing- the big telcoms are eating up the production, and the new docsis standards are kicking the shit out of much of the fiber networks out there. There was an uptick when the feds were giving out infrastructure grants to underserved areas, but that will continue to slow.
The next wave of docsis is FDX- a wide open 2 way path from lowest to highest frequency, which will produce at the current compression 10 Gig per second up and down.
Fiber is theoretically unlimited... but the bottleneck is the transmitters and receivers as well as whatever each company chooses to us for light to data conversion- where the struggle for bandwidth becomes tight.
Old phone companies will continue to go the fiber route, they have no choice with the infrastructure in place.
The cable companies have the upper hand by a long shot moving forward- all innovation is gear towards that transmission medium and the stride are large and often.
The thinking is, Aluminum and copper transmission lines are a single highway tht can be repaired in minutes vs a bundle of individual fibers that take many, many, MANY hours and insane amounts of manpower to restore- which is a MASSIVE concern when moving in to residential neighborhoods... because that is where upwards of 90% of all damages occur.
Fiber is the bomb in industrial areas- low subs passed, no landscaping danger, no struggle for bandwidth.
Get to residential though, and it is a hot mess.
If you ask me to look long term at the new players, Wireless is on its way to solid respectability due to the new model.
Cell tower based wireless is a dead end- off air wireless bandwidth is costly to allocate, finite, and costly to maintain as well as subject to an insane amount of interference.
The smart cell companies (or the cable giants that busted in to the cell market) are saturating areas with wifi units to handle the load- that model handles infinitely more traffic than a tower based system.
in many areas, your T-moblie service is routed through a consumer cable wifi unit... that operation runs second fiddle to the original subscribers usage... and cell customers are simply using the routers of neighbors from a company that has a reciprocal agreement with the HFC provider.
They use the HFC network for stationary units and save bandwidth, the HFC/Cell provider uses t-mobile towers in areas where they do not have a presence.
The big players in home cell based providers are all using this model to one degree or another.
