Dave Schaeffer, CEO Cogent Communications

To be able to offer to businesses high-capacity service, it's an absolute requirement that the customer have direct fiber connectivity. The state of broadband is highly dependent on the state of facilities built out in the network, and things are not as well developed as we would like them to be or as customers would like them to be.

There are less than 20,000 commercial buildings — or 3% of commercial buildings — in the U.S. that have a competitive fiber solution that can offer them broadband services. In the current capital market climate, it's unlikely you're going to see service providers building a lot of new facilities, and for those reasons we've seen broadband deployment stall.

The problem is the plant doesn't exist now. Fining the RBOCs for not selling what they don't have doesn't make any sense. The fact is the current plant has been fully depreciated. It's a stranded asset. It's got almost no value, and it should be sold based on that value. Not on its replacement cost basis, but on its book value.

If you went into the RBOCs and said, “You've got to sell copper, not for $14 or $15 a pair, but 20¢ a pair,” then they're all in a situation in which their competitors can make money on that copper. For the RBOCs to grow, then, they'd have to deliver a better product to their customers. That will incite them to build fiber.

Until you create a situation where there is no incentive to keep charging high prices on a fully depreciated asset, there will be no new plant construction.

As broadband becomes more prevalent, you'll see applications moving off the file server and onto the Internet. The host of business benefits that can be derived from that type of architecture is impressive: remote storage, videoconferencing, remote software storage and applications. You'll see a proliferation of peer-to-peer computing on desktops — the Napster model expanded. For residential, you'll probably see peer-to-peer video exchanges.

When the first PCs were introduced, people believed the best application for a home PC was to store recipes. When Thomas Watson of IBM predicted in the 1940s that maybe in the whole country there'd be a demand for five or 10 computers, what he wasn't contemplating was the types of applications there could be. The applications are probably as infinite as people's imaginations. Once the connectivity occurs, the applications will follow.—As told to Toby Weber