Eulogy for a good friend: RIP, twisted pair telephone line

[Commentary] As cable and fiber-to-the-home connections gain subscribers and speed, the traditional twisted-pair phone line is already becoming less relevant. And if telcos don't act, their link to the home threatens to disappear altogether. In the long-run, it's "fiber or die" for the traditional telcos. Verizon knows it, and the company has spent $20 billion on its FiOS system. AT&T knows it—sort of—and has dumped billions into its fiber-to-the-node U-verse product. But FiOS deployments remain quite limited, and fully operational U-verse deployments are even scarcer. As for other major telcos, many appear to lack any sort of wide-ranging fiber plans at all. Cable has tremendous bandwidth, most devoted to TV, but it can essentially pick what speeds it wants to offer. The telcos wedded to DSL at the moment will eventually act—they have to. Unless content only to serve rural and hard-to-wire customers, telcos will eventually adopt fiber rollouts to stave off the threat from cable, but when they choose to do so matters. While it's no doubt tempting to squeeze every last ounce of juice from an investment in twisted pair copper wire, telcos will be in a stronger position with customers if they make their moves while a household still has a billing relationship with the company. Inertia is a powerful force, and only the offer of dramatic cost savings or significant feature differences will entice customers back to a new fiber solution once they have already switched to cable.