I hear the figure 30PH/s tossed around for this coming January. Then to stay current we need to buy 10x the hashing power we have now. Ouch.
to stay current, you need to double the amount of your miners with every difficulty rise
Alas, we're competing against technical investors with big bucks who likely held off, and perhaps a LOT of them.
I think one possibility is that in time we will all see that buying ASICs won't be anything more than a money pit, much worse than now.
The prices will drop, to a point...then there may come a day when ASIC manufacturers may see that returns mining those rigs beat selling them ...since they aren't paying RRP but cost price. They won't need to earn 7k to balance a Jupiter for example...just more than it cost to produce which will be a lot less.
Who can compete with that?
They need us now to fund the dev period, but maybe once they have the funds or speed stalls for a while that won't be important.