Its not the end. This will be a great offering for semi larger cities that have real fiber infrastructure in place. However if you have been reading the news you would already know that in many parts of rural america, high speed fiber capacity is not readily available. Many of the smaller cable television providers are in these smaller cities and do not have access or more importantly can not afford to have a fiber feed run to there head ends. These providers are the target market for using HITS. It is unlikely that W5 will be going any ware any time soon because of this information.
The most likely thing to kill W5 will be the switch to a more efficient modulation standard that our 4DTV receivers can not get.
The sky is NOT falling.