Once upon a time, Leo Bicknell <bicknell@ufp.org> said:
When the original rural telephone network was pushed ROI's of 50 years were talked about. There's plenty of infrastructure built every day with ROI's of 20 years.
How much of that was built in the last 15 years though (where now it needs to be replaced before it has been paid for)? In the 1990s, BellSouth pushed hard here, rolled out fiber to the neighborhoods, and deployed ISDN-capable equipment everywhere. ISDN was available at every single address in town by around 1995 (allegedly we were one of if not the first moderate-sized city with ISDN everywhere). Then it turned out ISDN was a flop, and DSL came along, which wouldn't run over that nice big fiber plant. They had to start rolling out remote DSLAMs all over town. Shortly after they had most of the city covered, ADSL2 came along, and they had to start upgrading again. Granted, the cable plant (whether copper, fiber, coax, or avian datagram) is not quite the same, but the bean-counters look at it as "we were supposed to have <bignum>-year ROI on project 1, 2, and 3, and we didn't get it; why should I believe we'll get it on project 4?". -- Chris Adams <cmadams@hiwaay.net> Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.