Special Report: Telephony's Best and Worst of 2007

Top 3 Lessons Learned From Overseas

1. Bandwidth consumption is unpredictable. Though fiber-to-the-home is everywhere in Japan, per-capita Internet traffic there is no higher than in the U.S., and nobody knows why. In Hong Kong, where fiber deployment is comparable to Japan's, traffic is six times higher. Go figure.
2. Without Indian software developers, Asian manufacturing and Eastern European engineering, the U.S. would be a third-world communications market.
3. Government regulation can promote competition and/or bandwidth deployment. In the U.K., separating services from network facilities has created a wildly competitive broadband network. The same approach has enabled multiple IPTV operators in France, while in Asia, government directives have delivered bandwidth to Japanese and South Korean homes in amounts that only a small percentage of Americans receive today.

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