maintaining quality of life in their community. It's not the same field. It's not even the same game. If the community wants to spend their money, assuming the taxpayers have their say, they should be able to do that.

PL: What is the state of the network five years out?

JS: Let's say there are 150,000,000 households in the US. We currently pass between 8-9 million households. By 2012 we will probably pass 30-35 million. Verizon is passing 3 million a year and everybody else is passing 1 million. When I say pass, I mean there is fiber going down your back yard whether you are connected to it or not. Some providers are doubling their number of subscribers every year and estimate that they will continue to double every year for at least the next few years. Of those millions of homes that are passed, we estimate that 50-60% will become FTTH subscribers. That's around 15 million by 2012. That's around 10% of the homes in America. The limiting factor is how fast you can string the cable, hook up the house, and market to subscribers.

PL: What's a reasonable timeline before FTTH becomes truly pervasive?

JS: There's the more rapid deployment to the easy 50% of the households and then the harder 50%. The harder half are more widely dispersed and tend to have geographical barriers in place. It's tougher to put in fiber when you have to chew through rock. The easy 50% will be sometime between 2010 and 2015. We have a call to the nation for a broadband national policy that sets a goal of 100mb to every US household by 2015. That was put forward by Senator Rockefeller as a resolution to the Senate. If we can get everyone moving in the same direction there will be no reason to keep in place the barriers that have been limiting growth.

PL: Can you tell us about the 2007 FTTH Conference, coming up at the end of September?