Will DSL Survive?

DSL may be dying, but it certainly isn't dead. DSL's decline stands as an unavoidable truth to the nation's telephone companies, which are racing to build fiber lines to compete with cable. The simple logic of DSL's downfall is speed. Compared to DSL's top speed of 7.1 Mbps and a low of 256 Kilobits per second, cable-modem service varies from a low of about 5 Mbps to 30 Mbps for "Power Boost" service. And several MSOs are in the middle of rolling out DOCSIS 3.0 high-speed networks that will offer speeds of about 50 Mbps — Comcast expects 20% of its footprint to be DOCSIS 3.0-capable by the end of this year. Those speeds are matched by Verizon's FiOS product — between 30 Megabits per second and 50 Mbps — and AT&T's U-Verse, which comes in around the middle with a maximum speed of 18 Mbps. But for the vast majority of the telco footprint, DSL will be the only telco option for high-speed Internet service. The belief that every Internet user will be hungry for more bandwidth speed is a misplaced one, said Leichtman Research principal Bruce Leichtman, who doesn't believe that an explosion in video downloads has created a huge demand for speed. He cited research which states that the average U.S. consumer spends less than eight minutes per day downloading video.