Re:Is the backbone ready for this? (Score 1)

The backbone doesn't need to handle the bandwidth, if people like Akamai and InfoLibria have their way. They put servers at the ISP headend, and charge content providers for cacheing their material at the "edge of the web".

Consider that much news footage is shot in DV25 these days. This is a 25 Mbps format. I think VDSL + edge servers looks really interesting for full-quality video delivery.

I'm not forgetting the quality-of-implementation and distance-from-CO issues; I just figure they'll get worked out eventually.