BROADBAND'S NEW LIFE

Self-styled “sex symbol, airplane enthusiast and adventurer” Robert X. Cringely is the author of “Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date.” He is also the host and writer of the PBS programs “Triumph of the Nerds” and “Electric Money.” His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Forbes, Success and Worth. A recent column on his “I, Cringely” Web site (www.pbs.org/cringely) proclaimed “Broadband Is Dead.” We talked with him about its passing and about the survival of the industry at large.

On broadband: “The future has to come not from the current players. There will be new players, and they will be driven by new technologies and new concepts of content.”

On competition: “I don't think the competitive model is dead. There are some CLECs that are very successful doing what they do best, which is leeching off the ILEC infrastructure and making a little money. Eventually there will be a new bunch of CLECs, and they'll be doing new things. Within the Telecom Act, there's all sorts of CLEC flexibility that hasn't been stretched yet.”

On the upstart culture: “Venture capitalists still have hundreds of billions of dollars under management. They'll come back in. We can use the time to rationalize our approach. It was so easy for a short time for any idiot with half an idea to get funded that we needed a fallout. We needed those people to go away, and we needed a lot of companies to die, so we can then come back in with a new wave of better ideas from more sensible people who are actually planning to make a profit.”

On privacy: “The only way that those who are opposed to privacy can have their way is by shutting down the Net, and they're not going to do that. If I get out on the highway and drive 100 miles an hour, I get a ticket. But if we all go out on the highway and drive 100 miles an hour, they change the speed limits.”

On what's next: “The next big thing has typically been, ‘Do what we've already done, but faster,’ or ‘Do what we already do one way, but do it in another way.’ I think the next big thing is what's behind door No. 3: a new application that serves customers in a new way, and I can't anticipate what that is. But I pray for it every day because without some new goal, we just sit around, leveraging 100-year-old infrastructure, scratching our heads and getting fat and really boring.”