Amara's Law: Overestimating Effects of Technology in the Short Run and Underestimating in the Long Run

Implications: FTTH growth has been sluggish at best over the past eight years, when the FTTH moniker began to show up in discussions and print.  Perhaps, now that there are some 2.91 million FTTH connections, and 17,000 100 megabit customers in North America, there is a very positive trend we can possibly link to future year predictions of growth, affecting the vendors, service providers, advertisers, and the economy in general.

Analysis:  Futurist Roy Amara, who is eponymously associated with Amara's Law, (described in the title of this analysis), may not have been talking about FTTH growth in North America.   However, we have heard about the wonderful FTTH benefits for many years, and yet there are still 90 million households that do not have FTTH access.  Perhaps, this is because we are underestimating the value of FTTH to both consumers and service providers. Perhaps, as the article states, Verizon's FIOS is responsible for 70 percent of the 2.91 million homes connected by glass to their central offices and the growth rate is really tied to Verizon's pocketbook.  Rural LEC's and smaller independent telcos are building FTTH in greenfields as are the big boys, AT&T and Verizon.  Some municipalities such as the Chattanooga Power Board are overbuilding the RBOCs with their version of FTTH. Maybe things really are looking up and the doubling of FTTH connections mentioned in the article may be the predictor of 2009-2010 growth in FTTH connections.

AT&T's Uverse broadband service does not count as FTTH, as it still involves copper to the customer, which is fed by fiber.  However, AT&T may be targeting as many as 30 million video/data customers with the service over the next few years, depending on who is making the predictions.  Putting both Uverse (30 million eventually)  and FIOS possible service volumes (18 million by 2010) together is actually pretty scary.  There are some 65 million video customers in the US today and if the major RBOCs and their RLEC/Independent Telco friends are going to speed the deployment of both FTTH and FTTN, then one could make the jump that CATV MSOs may need to give up.  Of course, they should not give up, and they are actively doing the kinds of things they need to do to shore up their service offerings, but FTTH doesn't appear to be on their list of today's todo items.  Radio Frequency Over Glass (RFOG) may help them in that direction, since some subdivision developers are requiring all service providers to build glass networks, since the RBOCs/telcos are requiring glass be installed in new greenfields.  The CATV MSOs in some cases, do the RFOG thing and build the glass, but alas, they connect it to hybrid-fiber coax networks, since they are short on all-fiber networks today.  With Amara's Law, maybe we are closer to seeing more glass come from the CATV MSOs than we think:  "We tend to overestimate the effect of technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run."