The New York Times has an enlightening story today looking at how Verizon plans to spend $20-billion to deliver fiber-optic connectivity to residential households. Why? Well, Verizon believes it has no choice if it wants to deliver the same kind of bandwidth-hungry services (high-definition television, video-on-demand, etc.) as cable rivals such as Comcast and Time-Warner. It's a huge investment and a strategic gamble but many carriers have no choice if they want to compete on a level playing field with their cable rivals, which have been happily signing up hundreds of thousands of new home phone customers from carriers in recent years. It is interesting that while Verizon aggressively pushes forward with fiber-to-the-home, Canadian carriers Bell Canada and Telus Corp. are betting on fiber-to-the-node This means they are pushing fiber close to households, and then hoping compression technology can give the big, fat pipe over the "last mile". Will this strategy pay off? Well, only time will tell but the strong growth of Canadian cablecos such as Rogers, Videotron and Shaw recently is a troubling development for Bell and Telus. One thing I do find fascinating about the carrier-cable battle is how the cable industry has used CableLabs to support its efforts. For those unfamiliar with CableLabs, it's a non-profit R&D consortium that develops innovative products and standards for its members. You would think the carriers would have - or should have - something similar to effectively fight back. Instead, the carriers rely on cash-strapped telecom equipment suppliers for new products and services, while arguably not spending nearly enough on their own R&D. For more on FTTH, check out Information Week, which writes about the technology's strong growth, albeit from a small base.

With three weeks of vacation in front of me, one of my "projects" (aside from a lengthy list of home improvement "assignments") is tackling a handful of books. I started with Chris Anderson's "The Long Tail", which has been met with mixed reviews from the critics. (The New Yorker's review is here; The New York Times' is here.)  The Long Tail is a tightly-written, quick read that does a nice job highlighting some interesting companies, arguments and developments, and how the Internet's ability to lower of the cost of delivering services/products is becoming a major economic force. For anyone working in the Internet industry or a simply an enthusiastic follower/user, there is little earthshattering in The Long Tail, which started its life as a magazine article in Wired. That said, I found myself bookmarking a bunch of interesting companies and points raised by Anderson. Among them is why people create products and services that will likely be little-read or little-used - and reside in the far reaches of the Long Tail. His believes money is not the motivation but other reasons "expression, fun, experimentation, and so on."

 "The reason one might call it an economy at all is that there is a coin of the realm that can be every bit as motivating as money: reputation. Measured by the amount of attention a product attracts, reputation can be converted into other things of value: jobs, tenure, audiences, and lucrative offers of all sorts."

While this paragraph could easily be applied to bloggers, my immediate thought was how it could be used to explain the flurry of Web 2.0 start-ups being created even though the vast majority of them have no chance of being successful from a user or business perspective. As Anderson emphasizes through The Long Tail, low production and distribution costs ("the democratizating power of digital technologies") mean products and services can be easily developed for all kinds of reasons other than to create a business. Many Web 2.0 start-ups are really nothing more than hobbies or cool experiments by people with lots of energy, ideas and, now, a low-cost way to create and distribute them. So rather than scratch our heads at why they exist at all or why people waste their time building the 100th photo-sharing site, maybe these start-ups are being created for other reasons such as fun, reputation, etc. Now, that's an interesting concept! For those curious about The Long Tail, Anderson's blog can be found here.