Bill Rodey, chairman, DSL Forum

Today, more than 50,000 new DSL customers are installed daily worldwide. People were predicting on average about 16.5 million consumers by the end of last year. We wound up at 18.7 million.

That story isn't being told. I wouldn't say the media is doing a disservice because it is pointing at problem areas. The overall impression it leaves sometimes is that DSL is losing, and the facts don't bear that out.

It is widely reported in the U.S. that cable modems are up to about 7 million to 8 million, and DSL is at 4 million to 5 million. But globally, cable is at around 11 million, and DSL is up around 20 million. We get heartburn when we see negative stories come out and we see data coming in that shows us it is not as bad as the stories are saying. Demand is strong and rollouts are ongoing.

A lot of the problems of getting DSL deployed are getting solved. We take some of the credit for that. Our job is to identify obstacles to mass-market DSL and remove them. We know the job's not done. To reach a true mass market, we need to get from 20 million subscribers to 200 million.

For that to happen, we must provide a stimulus for the industry in four key areas. The government and regulators must create a framework that stimulates installation of broadband and a level playing field for DSL. Second, there has to be more rich broadband content. Next, we need to improve the utility and user-friendliness of customer premises equipment. Lastly, although we have nothing to do with pricing, there is a direct relationship between cost and demand, and we need to see the cost come down.

A lot of people lump the dot-com implosion with e-commerce, and they shouldn't. I can tell you that broadband connections make it easy to load a shopping cart, making e-commerce work. My family is one of the reasons Amazon had a profitable quarter. I would not assume every family is like ours — not everyone has a wife who will go out and buy a router and run wire throughout the house to hook up the kids' computer and get it online — but we are typical of what people want. I would say every family with children is facing a similar issue where they will be competing for access to the Internet.—As told to Tim McElligott