C. Zachary Gilstein, VP and general manager of OSS business operations, Telcordia Technologies

There are a lot of areas where broadband could impact our lives. My vision is that it will be an always-on appliance — you'll just hit a few keys and find out where the nearest shop is to buy CDs.

There won't be one premier delivery method for broadband. In the loop, you will see DSL continue to grow. Cable modems also offer good high-speed access into the network. There will be more fiber to the home and fiber to the curb.

In the transport arena, there will be a strong move to Ethernet, either Ethernet-over-IP or Ethernet-over-Sonet initially and then Ethernet running directly over fiber. In the backbone network, we'll see a move toward an IP core network. And in Layer 1, you will see an all-optical network with the kinds of advanced control planes and add-drop multiplexing and cross-connect capability that's going to become the standard.

But one of the key obstacles is the price point. The operational issues of getting broadband installed make it difficult to have a profitable business case for deploying it widespread, and that makes service providers somewhat skittish about how aggressively they should market it. Ultimately, the more services available, and the greater value that consumers see in them, the greater take rate you'll have.

Widespread deployment of broadband won't happen in the next two years — where suddenly we'll go from 7% penetration to 90% penetration. But we will have a standard kind of technology penetration curve that will stretch out to the next decade.—As told to Amalia D. Parthenios