A good P/E means they have access to loans. Sitting on a bunch of cash means they can self-finance. Cable companies traditionally were financed through junk bonds (Michael Milken was one of the top fund raisers for TCI and Ted Turner), and were usually one step ahead of the creditors). Google has a lot of money on hand to roll out slowly, watch it grow slowly and as long as the shareholders put up with it, run it like a utility.

No one on Wall St will back a pure FTTH network rollout today, the cost of aquisition per customer is too high, and the 30 years it will take to payback (based on past history of telephone and cable network buildout) is far too long for today's hot-shot fund managers.

at 256 QAM (38.8Mbps), 1 Gbps is about 30 6 MHz "channels." Most cable systems are capable of transporting 120-135 channels. Throughput on a cable system with 100% QAM carriers is about 4.5 Gbps (raw speed). There are a large number of systems in the US using all digital service today (Most of Comcast's systems have been or are in the process of being upgraded). Most of that bandwidth is being used for broadcast HDTV.

DOCSIS 3.0 uses channel bonding to add downstream bandwith today. It also specifies a 1024 QAM standard that will increase the channel throughput to about 50 Mbps (raw speed). In addition, new error correction methods will actually make 1024 QAM more robust than today's 256 QAM.

"The merger of state and government is called fascism." -Gerald Celente

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFlKJmE4gVE

The term you're looking for isn't socialism, it's Fascism.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFlKJmE4gVE

Who are these people and why aren't they protesting/rioting in the streets?

How bad are their managers if they couldn't at least maintain their department's payroll from one year to the next?

So they have to furlough to make up for the overall budget increase?

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2013/02/media-hype-over-sequester-cuts.html

Figures the week I make an offer on a house this has to come out. They could have let me live in blissful ignorance for a few days, but NOOOOOO!

Damn Realtors and their lies about owning my own little part of the universe, forever if I want she said. LIES! FALSE WITNESS!

And screw the HOA if they think I'm going to waste the short time I'm here on lawn maintenance.

Tower costs are still FAR cheaper than stringing fiber to every customer. Try $7-12 PER FOOT for underground construction. $7 is nice and easy, just trenching in the right of way, while the $12 range is for road bores and other "tricky" jobs. That's just for getting the fiber in the ground, not for the glass or lighting it up. Hope you pass a lot of customers along the way. If not, that guy at the end is going to take a long time to pay back.

And you have to pay pole rental if you want to run aerial, along with paying for an engineering certification (which will end up with you paying for replacement of at least some of the poles you want to attach to), and in some cases you'll pay your competition, who went ahead and rented all the communications space from the power company years ago.

So why couldn't an ISP set up a tower with a GigE connection and tell customers they have to set up a directional antenna pointed to my tower, but my prices are a fraction of what a wired or totally managed (cellular provider) ISP would have to charge. After all, we keep hearing that the reason we don't have a massive buildout of fiber to the home is because the last mile is extremely expensive. If the customer is paying for the equipment to connect, along with open white space spectrum (or whatever is being proposed), someone could actually break the duopoly. It actually follows the retail model instead of the utility model, where a business has you come to their retail outlet, instead of delivering to your driveway.

If they see success the ISP would have to build more towers, but it's much easier to expand and grow incrementally than it is to have to build out all the infrastructure at once, which is what happens with low power/low range wifi. Ideally, spectrum users would have to be licensed (and possibly tested, similar to a drivers test to legally use pubic roads), to monitor congestion and allow for more transmitter power.

I don't know why anyone expected this to be so wonderful. It's an even number release:

http://www.rationalskepticssociety.com/blog/2012/02/28/windows-8-cursed/

At work our front-line employees are being moved out of laptops and to tablets and smartphones. Most of my "cloud" applications are running Java and could easily be used on a convertible tablet (with keyboard dock). Other than Excel there's not much left that couldn't be ported. There's only the matter of hardware interfacing that still is an issue.

But Microsoft held on to the desktop/start menu layout for touch (and resistive touchscreens) for far too long. It is a design that clearly doesn't work for a touch interface. And if you're left handed, forget using the old Tablet Edition UI.

What about "That vision thing"? Ballmer never really struck me as a creative type (but I've never met the man, so I can't say), and successful companies need someone at the top who can telegraph their vision to the rest of the company. Not just talking about Steve Jobs here, but anyone who builds great companies. Howard Hughes, Alfred Sloan (who created the design group of GM, and was smart enough to put Harley Earl in charge of it), William Levitt (everyone should own a home), Akio Morita... you get the idea. Like it or not, Gates was able to get his vision of the future out to the employees (or at least see a good idea when it crossed his desk).

Oh, I've seen some butts that look better than Metro...

So many variables though. I have one of those cheap Android HDMI computers on my TV. When connected via 802.11G streams were somewhat intermittent, even with line of site to the AP. When I switched over to a wired connection all the stuttering stopped, and even web content like Ustream improved.

I suspect a poorly designed antenna in the Android device, but it could just as easily been bad drivers, interference from neighbors, or another device using bandwidth on the wireless channel. Some other big differences: wireless networks are 1/2 duplex, while wired Ethernet is full duplex, Ethernet (through switches) is basically a dedicated channel between devices, and overall more bandwidth available.