A frightening report for the future of residential broadband appeared in The Wall Street Journal late last month. The Yankee Group warns of cable TV customers who are abandoning digital cable services to return to the baseline analog TV subscription-not always for strict reasons of economic necessity, but because they feel they are not getting enough bang for their buck with 300 digital channels.

What does one-way entertainment have to do with interactive services? Everything. Cable operators and local phone companies alike pin their hopes for winning the home on the "triple play"-bundling broadband Internet service, video services and voice (preferably packet-based) in a package so compelling in price and features that they can displace another carrier in a winner-take-all scenario. Multisystem operators (MSOs) are much more likely to win this race, since their ability to add voice-over-Internet Protocol service in a residential gateway platform is more straightforward than the incumbent phone carriers' ability to add multiple channels of video service.

In fact, this is one factor that is propelling Verizon, SBC Communications and other incumbents to a faster rollout of passive optical networks over digital subscriber line, since a passive optical network has more potential for carrying multiple digital video streams than DSL.

The problem is the "stickiness" of the service. MSOs were willing to shell out the bucks to upgrade to hybrid fiber-coax networks, but forgot the cul de sac of content creation. Small studios and cable networks can't get enough traction to pay for original content, so most of the hundreds of channels end up re-purposing old content from other sources.

Consumers are not dumb. Many use very few of the 90-odd channels on analog service, and they find little reason to expand that to 300, so they go back to analog as their default. If there's no obvious reason to go to packetized digital voice, why not just rely on the old familiar circuit-switched service?

In such a scenario, triple-play offerings may become a race to the bottom, where monthly subscription rates fall below the amortization costs for network buildout. The issue for carriers is not how low they can go, but how they can create the compelling environment that makes people want to retain their broadband services.

Loring Wirbel is Communications editorial director for EE Times and its network publications.