That's the big headache about replacing the telco/cable circuits. The are all too happy to drop the mains in and set up 1,000 channel duplexors at the corner pedestal on every other block, but then getting them to run a drop to your house you're looking at 5 figures, assuming you don't have to cross the road. With the advent of bandspace opening up due to the conversion of tv from analog to digital, as well as a number of other little coincidental opportunities coming soon, I think the next big push is going to have to be wireless. CDMA and such on the cellphone side is going to have to expand it's functionality, and when it does, I see a real meld with wi-fi, with wi-max portals working like microwave relays to provide a big bandwidth improvement, but resulting in a much noisier spectrum. We deployed a gigabit circuit over much of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, but still it was the local 100 Mb/sec lans and the 54 Mb/sec wireless feeds that governed most of the systems speeds. A few circuits that were able to make use of the backbone directly really beneftitted a lot, but all those office buildings never saw any improvement over the old telco backbones (a kluge of microwave, T1 wire circuits, and a hodge podge of dedicated wire and telemetry junk from the 50s, 60s and 70s when every dept was doing their own thing).