deploy voice services through VoIP. Although cable systems had only about 3 million telephone (voice) subscribers at the end of 2003, this number will surely increase in the next year or two, prodded by the entry of inde- pendent VoIP suppliers, such as Vonage and Skype. However, no U.S. A Look Back and a Look Forward cable operator can currently offer the most flexible and growing form of voice service: cellular telephone service. In short, there are still practical limits to convergence. Traditional telephone companies might be able to induce convergence over their networks by deploying fiber to or near the home, which would then make them major competitors of the cable and satellite carriers for dis- tributive video services. They would also be able to deliver services now downloaded from the Internet at much higher speeds. Indeed, with high- speed fiber connections, traditional video services might gravitate to the Internet or some similar interconnected network. If this trend develops, the cable companies are also likely to extend fiber directly to their subscribers. Of course, satellite companies such as DirecTV or DISH Network may develop their own high-speed Internet services through the use of spot beams, but they could not penetrate the voice market or even a variety of high-speed two-way services from their geostationary satellites. Given the commercial failure of several low-orbiting satellite systems such as Global- star and Iridium, voice services are unlikely to shift to satellite delivery, but even if they did, there would be no convergence with the video platform that resides in geostationary orbit. The three major platform operators may have little to fear in the way of competition from terrestrial fixed wireless systems. Although much has been said about the possible deployment of "mesh networks" using unli- censed spectrum for delivering signals over short distances, there is still no widespread commercial development of such systems. One must conclude that for the foreseeable future, cable op