 by the end of 2003. 52 The competitive carriers now co-located in ILEC switching centers have designed their equipment to use the copper loops of the incumbents. If fiber optics replaces the copper loops, will the incumbents eventually have to provide the entire fiber path, including central-office (ATM) switching facilities to entrants at forward-looking costs? If so, the benefits of risking $1,100 to ,400 per home are surely attenuated. Conclusion With its extensive cable television penetration and household Internet use, the United States is poised to enjoy substantial benefits from aggressive platform competition between cable operators and telephone companies for broadband customers. This competition is augmented by smaller niche players offering broadband services via satellite and fixed wireless plat- forms. There are now about 30 million residential broadband subscribers, and the largely unregulated cable modem services have nearly 60 percent of them. Given the substantial price elasticity of demand for such services, technical progress and the resulting decline in the price of broadband ser- vices will likely provide further impetus for household subscriptions. Unfortunately, most of the past nine years have been spent debating how to "open up" the telephone companies' networks to competitors incapable The Broadband Revolution of building or unwilling to build their own facilities and how to provide ISPs with access to cable platforms. This exercise has been costly and largely unsuccessful. Most of the new local entrants are either mired in bankruptcy or nearly so, and the smaller ISPs are disappearing anyway. Equally impor- tant, the incumbent Bell companies slashed capital expenditures between 2000 and 2002, despite the fact that about 30 percent of households and small businesses were still unable to receive DSL service. In 2003 the FCC decided to sharply reduce the degree of line sharing and unbundling required of incumbent telephone companies. This deci- sion appears to have reversed the decline in