I’ve mentioned innumerable times how much I loathe Time ‘Join the broadband revolution, erm, but with no upstream’ Warner. Despite my distaste for them, they’re actually one of the better cable monopolies. The essential problems are that they are a monopoly and they own content companies so their service offerings are compromised by their steps to aggressively protect their intellectual properties. Meanwhile the telcos, who everyone hated in the 70’s, have stumbled about over the past decade or so, unable to formulate and execute a rational strategy to deliver data services to consumers. Maybe things are slowly beginning to change for the better though. Supposedly by the end of this year a portion of Verizon’s customer base will be able to subscribe to 30Mbps dsl (10x faster than cable’s 3Mbps) and Verizon is also dropping over a billion dollars on an upgrade to their wiring capacity, with the intention of delivering fiber optic to our doors.

Sign me up is all I can say. Competition rocks, someone finally looks to be challenging the cable monopolies. One caveat though – goddamnit they better deliver asyncronous upstream bandwidth or at least something close to it at the same time. This isn’t a fucking broadcast medium, what it will take to get these companies to understand that I don’t know, but a first step is weaning them off their intellectual property holdings, it’s compromising their ability to offer service.

Anyway here’s hoping.