Dhruv Khanna, co-founder and general counsel, Covad Communications

To Dhruv Khanna, the co-founder and general counsel for Covad Communications, the deployment and uptake of broadband is an industry success story.

“It's pretty clear that broadband took off right after the Telecom Act got passed,” he said. “Today, over 80% of the U.S., including homes, has access to broadband, and 10% of households have migrated from dial-up to broadband. By any measurement of uptake standards, this uptake has been fast.”

What kicked it all off, Khanna said, is competition. Service providers and cable operators invested billions of dollars toward the deployment of broadband services, and Khanna said the threat of being left behind spurred the RBOCs into putting their own money into broadband networks.

So much investment, though, actually worked against many of the companies that were building. “In some ways, there's been overcapacity,” Khanna said. “Some of the competitors have fallen off because there was more DSLAM capacity that they could fill up.”

But not surprisingly, Khanna views further competition as the best hope for increased broadband penetration. “There's been a slight increase in the pricing for DSL, driven by the phone companies. To see further penetration in the marketplace, prices will need to go down, and we think the competitive process is the only way that will happen.”

While broadband-specifics applications would also help increase uptake, Khanna said the technology must make enough of a difference for more traditional uses of the Web to justify itself to end-users.

“In reality, broadband is a tremendous boost for existing apps. It's painful to have to dial up to get e-mail. It's painful to search the Web on dial-up. From music to video, to other forms of entertainment and e-commerce — even e-mail — all of those are affected by broadband.” —Toby Weber