Demand for bandwidth has led to several technological approaches developed to provide broadband access to business and residential customers. There are a variety of access technologies that can be used to provide broadband services. Although DSL has numerous advantages, other means of obtaining high-speed access might be preferable. What providers of each of the three technologies have in common is their desire to provide broadband access to as many people as possible.

Cable companies offer broadband service, most notably high-speed Internet access services using cable-modem technologies. Cable modems, because they are already being deployed rapidly, are the most direct competitor to mass-market residential DSL service. Cable modems can offer speeds as high as 10 Mbps, much faster than all but VDSL technology. Cable operators had already begun upgrading their networks to handle more channels and offer more services before the Internet and the Web became household items. Cable operators were primed to take advantage of this opportunity to provide high-speed access, because once their network was upgraded, adding high-speed access would not be a large expense. Additionally, these operators saw that if they sped up their planned upgrades of the cable plant, they could take a large chunk of the market for broadband consumer access.

Once the cable plant has been upgraded to two-way broadband, adding high-speed access is extremely cheap. Most of cable operators' expenses lie in upgrading the plant to carry two-way traffic. Once this has been accomplished, the cost of adding subscribers is incremental. Adding new subscribers on a traditional wireline network is expensive, as it is on a wireless network.

Fixed wireless technologies—such as local multipoint distribution system (LMDS), multichannel multipoint distribution system (MMDS), 39 Ghz, and digital electronic messaging service (DEMSs—are beginning to challenge traditional wireline and cable for the data marketplace. Satellites are beginning to emerge as another technology to compete against fixed wireless, DSL, and cable. Broadband access through satellites is mainly for the thousands of consumers who cannot gain broadband access through any of the wireline access solutions. The chief advantage of wireless technology is the speed of deployment. Another big advantage of wireless is that a large portion of deployment costs is incurred only when a customer signs up for service. Because microwave can be rolled out on a segmented basis, it is often less costly than other technologies, especially for carriers penetrating a new market or in regions with widely dispersed customers.

Broadband wireless systems consist of a radio transmitter that sends a signal on a combination of channels to numerous receivers, including homes and businesses. Digital versions of wireless cable promise to provide digital television, interactive services, high-speed Internet access, and data networking services. Breakthroughs in digital technology and digital compression now permit operators to dramatically increase the amount of data that can be sent in a finite amount of spectrum. Each of the three wireless technologies operates on a different part of the radio spectrum. Spectrum allocation varies widely from country to country and is controlled by regulators.

Satellites have always been able to transmit data at very high speeds, but it was not until recently that consumer-friendly applications became popular. Data over satellite is not new; very small aperture terminal (VSAT) providers—such as Gilat, PanAmSat, Comsat, and GE—have been providing data connections to businesses for many years. In many large-business satellite-based offerings, the end user's terminal or satellite dish is capable of both sending and receiving data, thereby allowing for downstream and upstream speeds that exceed 200 Kbps. What is new is the adaptation of this technology to consumers.