ice protected environment. Following this, in the 1980s, industry commentators predicted that in many countries infrastructure investment in the local loop would bring broadband services over fibre into the home (FTTH) or office (FTTO) in an all fibre network (AFN), which was expected to be complete in OECD countries by 2005. In the mid-1980s, the cable TV operators with switched star fibre optics networks for full interactivity then took the lead. 42 However, the AFN has not developed in the way that many expected. While FTTH or fibre close to the customer is envisioned by some as the preferred access technology of the future, it is certainly not assured. Hybrid fibre/copper-coax (HFC) networks in the local loop have taken off in the OECD area, especially as broadband demand soars with signaling via DSL. At the current rate it would be decades before FTTH was widely available across the OECD countries. This slow take-off is for reasons of cost, outlined in Table 2.13 for remote equipment (hardened) and protected environments (non-hardened). Note that these costs of FTTP, or even HFC DSL are well beyond the infrastructure costs of developing countries, which also may not have a favourable topology for passing homes and offices. Capital cost per home or office is sensitive to loop lengths (and hence to housing/building densities) and thus it is necessary to consider three deployment scenarios: urban, suburban and rural. Using the table above, the costs of a local loop infrastructure as an average for the United States, for approximately 200 million homes and offices, for FTTP would hence be of the order of USD 3.4 trillion. For HFC using a shared cabinet (for 300 connections) it might come down to about USD 200 billion, at today's prices, not an inordinate sum for infrastructure for the United States. But could this be done more cheaply with some other technology? Moreover, to minimise distances to each subscriber (a critical factor in the amount of bandwidth delivered) service providers have to place the electron