Verizon Wireless announced Friday that it was paying $3.6 billion to three cable TV companies — Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Bright House Networks — in exchange for wireless licenses the companies bought in an FCC auction in 2005. Pundits are describing the deal, and especially its cross-marketing provisions, as revolutionary with the potential to change the way we communicate and are entertained. I doubt this. Rather, I think it reflects a failure of the cable companies to compete in other markets.
I remember this license auction and wrote about it at the time. New spectrum was being released and the MSOs were afraid Verizon and AT&T would snap it up to compete with them for video. So the cable companies bought the spectrum specifically to keep it out of commerce, which has been the case now for six years. Mission accomplished. Yet the price they are getting from Verizon when you wrestle through the apples and oranges of varying licenses bought and sold at different times isn’t significantly higher than they paid back in 2005, especially since the licenses have produced zero cash flow for going on seven years.
But the point isn’t the price, we’re told, but the co-marketing — that Comcast can sell Verizon Wireless service eventually without even calling it Verizon or that Verizon will presumably resell Time Warner Cable or Bright House to the very folks it would rather buy Verizon’s own FiOS video package.
Yeah, right.
I think the co-marketing story is just spin and that not much will come of it.
We’re heading into a bandwidth war between DOCSIS 3 cable modems and fiber-to-the-curb services like FiOS. And while I can’t predict which side will win or lose this battle I can say that wireless service won’t be a factor in the decision.
Yes, we get e-mail and play Angry Birds on our smart phones and yes, 18 months from now all mobile phones will be smart phones, but the mobile transition hasn’t had any impact on our bandwidth use in homes or offices. It has just given us a way to consume even more electrons at lunch or in the car. And for all the very real potential of Long Term Evolution (LTE) 4G networks, they can’t in practical terms serve enough bits to enough people at the same time in any city to be viable competition to almost any form of wired Internet, whether from the phone company or the cable company. The physics just doesn’t support it.
Eighteen months from now many American homes will be where Japanese and Korean homes have been for sometime, sucking 100 megabits or more from the Internet. LTE can’t do that now or then and it can’t do half of that for a tenth or even a hundredth of the customer base of wired Internet.
Verizon needs the bandwidth because voice landlines are going away and it has to compete with AT&T, not Comcast. The new voice is all wireless. But at the same time, even 4G wireless will come to share analog voice’s sense of not being enough.
FiOS was deliberately designed from the very beginning with the good glass — fiber that can go to a gigabit and beyond. DOCSIS 3’s channel bonding and network segmentation will eventually allow full access to 70+ video channels for data service where currently most cable modems use one channel and some use two or three. No matter what way the wire gets to your house that wire will soon carry 100 megabits and then a gigabit that LTE never will.
Those wireless bandwidth caps are there for a reason.
Cable companies today make most of their profit from providing Internet service. FiOS and similar services are Internet services enhanced to keep subscribers subscribing, not especially to give them Wheel of Fortune.
This deal is the cable companies getting out of wireless because they can’t figure how to make money in that business.
Whee! The first post after reading for 10 years!
I agree! The cable companies have no clue when it comes to the internet, & wireless does have limits when it comes to bandwidth.
I remember companies laying fiber-op all through downtown Austin years ago, just to mothball it. Well, it may be needed after all.
congratulations. after 10 years, one would think you’d have realized before posting how foolish you would look. were this a kiddie site like gizmodo or engadget, you’d be discovering about now that your account had been terminated.
Ouch! A bit hard on poor ol’ RogerMcK! He had a relevant statement to make and introduced it by noticing his was the first post. Surely we can wish him the joy his harmless observation.
Yikes a little harsh, don’t you think? Totally innocent and post was relevant, I don’t see a problem, even though I do think 1st post bragging is lame on any site.
the cablecos are using fiber backbone for video to the curb, and for internet service. kids with sticks and rocks hitting overhead cable drop out a slug of channels, and that’s hell to troubleshoot. plus, they’ve overmaxed long run coax. plus, digital transmission strains over coax. that’s what the fiber is for.
it would cost the cablecos just about as much to implement 3G or 4G wireless as they’ve invested in their whole cable plant. this amounts to buying the cow (spectrum) and still paying $99.95 for the milk twice a week. even Soviet economics couldn’t make that work. Hollywood accounting can’t pretty up that pig.
cablecos have been buldle-marketing wireless for maybe 3 years now nationwide, and this is nothing new for them.
it’s basically getting their cash back for wheeling and dealing, is what this headline-screaming disclosure is all about. releasing frozen assets.
no biggie. unless you are Verizon, and you need to double your network for iPhanatics.
win.
What about LTE-Advanced?
That’s the “Long” in long term evolution. Methinks that expecting wireless to remain a major bottleneck for data is probably short-sighted. There is room for innovation in this space. Why is less predictable is the publics demand highest bandwidth content. We’ll have 4K televisions in a few years, but current HD will be good enough for many – much like 3D is seen as a fad more than a must-have feature. The sales pitches are going to have to be far more compelling…
Spectrum is a limited natural resource, so it will be a bottleneck until the government decides to favor the internet-access special interests over the special interests currently licensed to use the spectrum. Unlicensed wi-fi is not a solution either since its power level makes it a hardwired service like a cordless phone.
There really isn’t a lot of room for innovation in this space. Shannon’s Law
sets an upper limit on the number of bits per second you can fit into a
given bandwidth in the presence of noise, and thus, as Ronc says, it really
is something of a limited natural resource.
Rupe
My cable company has fiber optic at the curb and converts to copper for the drop into each address. They can easily up the bandwidth 10X, but in this flat economy there has been no economic incentive for them to offer the faster service, and more importantly, no easy way to force customers to pay for it.
Recent rumblings about a “Netflix tax” and other pay-per-bit schemes will eventually find a voice in Congress and at that point the dark fibers will come to life and we will all magically receive a “modern” standard of bandwidth and connectivity. Just be ready to shell out $150-$200 a month for it, with 10% going to Uncle Sugar.
I have claimed to my contemporaries that we are living in the age of bad telephones. Now that we have smart phone with 4G we are also living in the age of bad television. We have given a lot of “content” over to the “service” industry so that we can hold a computer in our hand and yet there are some who want to use that device to watch a movie.
Is there anything more absurd than a “home theater experience” in your hand?
Awhile back, we used to talk about the phone company being a “service” industry (point to point voice communication) and Movie and TV studios being a “content” industry. Way back when people signed up for cable it was for content so the cable companies were really in the content market.
In recent years we have blurred the distinction and assume content doesn’t matter anymore and it is all about services. I suspect this is a bad assumption. If content wasn’t valued, there would be no restrictions on distribution and no licensing on movies, TV shows and music.
It probably isn’t so much that the cable companies can’t figure out how to make money in wireless, it may be that it isn’t where the big bucks are. Delivering “Wheel of Fortune” is still expensive over wireless and is likely to stay that way in the foreseeable future. Can you imagine the poor economics of delivering next summer’s big blockbuster movie to ONLY your hand held device? Never gonna happen.
The desk top PC is going the way of the dinosaur, but as I was my 37″ digital TV’s image breakup due to an interrupted data stream I can swear that “home theater” isn’t hear yet either.
Glad to see BBC iPlayer has finally gone global and can be wirelessly sent from an iOS device and displayed on an AppleTV connected flat screen for $8.99 a month. Sounds like a lot of $$ (similar to Netflix pricing) but over time we’ll probably see a lot more of this.
Bob, you’re missing several points. 1) VZW has a national footprint. Comcast et al do not. The cable companies tried several times over the years to form alliances and ALL of them have performed badly. Anyone remember @Home? Primestar? The cable companies sure do.
Trying to launch a new brand in a market that has a customer locked in for at least 2 years is an exercise in futility (and despite what tech writers in San Francisco think, most people are satisfied with their cell providers and hardly ever switch).
And it eventually comes back to infrastructure. Who’s going to put towers in places that the alliance doesn’t have a cable footprint? Well, no one, that’s who. So now you have to have handsets that will have frequency bands that are compatible with other wireless carriers, and that adds to cost. And your handsets are incompatible with the rest of the world, so you become another TMobile, at the mercy of the handset makers to cover your frequency band and increasing costs.
But don’t worry about the cable companies. Where they have infrastructure they’ll be providing cell backhaul over fiber (Comcast has been quietly building out a fiber backhaul service for a few years now), so where it makes sense, they will carry traffic for VZW. That’s how cable companies make money on wireless, not by retailing someone else’s service.
Also (kind of off-topic), the current fiber equipment in most cable headends is nearing end of life. You see, over time, lasers and detectors begin to break down. Most of the stuff I use is well past the manufacturers’ recommended lifespan, and in the densely populated areas is being replaced with the latest and greatest (I live/work out in the sticks). This includes highly segmentable nodes, optical transmitters that take up one 10th the space of the old stuff, and provisions for fiber to the curb/passive coax designs. Passive coax will lead to dense modulation formats like 512 and 1024QAM (currently 256 is the best we can do), since there won’t be amplifier noise products introduced. And since we’re already pulling glass for cell backhaul (you didn’t think we’re just putting in a TX/RX pair did you?), we’ll be that much closer to a curb near you.
“…most people are satisfied with their cell providers and hardly ever switch”
Let’s put this into the “Close But No Cigar” Dept. Many of us are DEEPLY dissatisfied with their cell providers but are unwilling to go thru the time/hassle of a conversion just to deal with Tweedledum instead of Tweedledee, on the tiny chance that we’ll have fewer gotchas on statements, more transparent/flexible pricing plans, customer service that doesn’t spend 45 minutes with the most trivial issues, etc.
Sorry, but I’m having a hard time seeing in your argument exactly where I am wrong. Yes, consortia (cable OR telephone) have tended to fail. Tell me about it: I was the low bidder on TeleTV’s set top box contract that was never let. This is another example of them failing again. Yes, I suppose Comcast will sell backhaul services to Verizon or to ME should I ask them to do so.
Three miles down the road from me there’s an upscale housing development behind the Kenwood winery that has its own WiFi-based Internet system with service kinda-sorta provided by Comcast. It’s one guy leveraging his cable modem with a Comcast Business Class account but he’s doing it legally because what Comcast is TECHNICALLY selling him (they know about this — there IS a contract) is a VPN connection to a data center in Fremont. So that data center is the real ISP if you squint just right, not Comcast. So sure, they’ll do that for anyone.
But your distinction between local and national, that’s meaningless. How big do you have to be to have national impact? Is NBC-U big enough? And I don’t think anyone is worrying abut the cable companies. I don’t see where I suggested anyone should.
Yes, a big technical transition is coming. That’s what I wrote. But wireless won’t compete directly with wired except for a few niche markets. The cable companies will make sure of that.
12 years ago I was running classic telco on trunkage from TWC. comms companies take in each other’s wash all the time. it’s required by Federal law that if you have capacity and somebody wants to buy it, you don’t ask questions, you write the contract and treat your sworn enemies as you would your best customer. in the end, it’s billable, it’s good.
other-level service providers for just about everything abound. it all depends on whether you are required to make a business segment, or whether you think you have a business segment and want to try it. either case, some sharpie will take you up on it.
all it takes to be a comms company, really, is a tin desk and a telephone, and you don’t even need a tie any more. somebody else out there has spare bits to make you look real.
RK, you replace the optics cards until they go out of manufacture, and then you box ’em and send ’em to whichever island is above water this week to refit them until those guys run out of reject laser LEDs.
then you upgrade the optical ADMs. that modus operandi has been well established by long-hauls and telcos.
the big issue cablecos have is much of the fiber they installed is outside riser cable. that gave you a quick install, hanging from poles, but the count stays the same and the type of fiber remains constant. fibers are improving every several years, and the happy campers are the ones who have ducting and blown fiber… you can add fiber until there isn’t any more to order anywhere without disturbing anything already installed.
sucks when you get backhoed, because you don’t have colored jackets to simplify identification and splicing, but otherwise it’s endless and endlessly upgradeable. so the stuff that can carry 8 lambdas but not 16 can be supplemented with fiber that can carry 64 and 128 lambdas for a couple decades.
that’s where the cableco infrastructure faces a bit of a challenge, now that many like Comcast now want to sell PRIs and DS3s like classic telcos to business.
I’m someone who has stubbornly refused to upgrade to a smartphone because of the cost of the data plans. At home I can pay a single reasonable rate and it covers every device in my home (PC, multiple laptops, Xbox, iPods, iPad, you name it). I talk to Verizon and they want essentially the same amount for EACH device. Give me a break. Go away and come back when I can pay $30 a month for several wireless devices.
It’s YOU who are going away: your desired plan is extremely unlikely to be available in your lifetime. The carriers are NOT pushing this on you; instead, your fellow consumers are demanding the constant connections — but apparently, not you.
My brother, a car freak, long ago noted the inequity of paying extra liability insurance on 4 cars, when it was obvious that he could only drive one at a time, same as everybody else. The multi-car discounts don’t begin to touch this. In the case of multiple mobile devices, it is actually more likely that your kids will be playing Angry Birds in the back seat while your wife is getting driving directions or texting a friend from the passenger seat. So multiple devices is pretty much a guarantee of heavier usage.
Not everybody needs constant connection away from a home or office situation. If that’s you, nobody is going to laugh at you for being a Luddite. Unless you go out of your way to make “Get off my lawn!” noises.
You have a point but so does twh. Family plans for wireless voice have been around for a long time. All he wants is a family plan for data. Associate the charge and the data cap with the plan rather than with which device in the plan is using it.
A “family plan” for data (i.e. shared MBytes) is coming – some carriers will probably also allow you to divvy it up, so much for Johnny, so much for Sally, this much for your spouse and the rest for you. Whoops, Johnny used too much but still needs more for his science homework, well a few clicks can adjust things quickly…
When this will be available, and whether it will be a good deal for the parents, well that remains to be seen.
*Eighteen months from now many American homes will be where Japanese and Korean homes have been for sometime, sucking 100 megabits or more from the Internet.*
I *hope* that indeed that is the case. I doubt it though.
I’m also very concerned about this whole “pay by the bit” bullshit that’s been getting press recently. Between Netflix, DropBox, Crashplan, and family with 4 kids who are always online, I easily hit 200-400GB month (yes, that’s right – oh, we have FiOS & husband is a digital photographer).
My point is that these greedy & incompetent cable companies should tread lightly. You’ve written before about the billions they were given and squandered. The trend is “more for less”. If they try to jack up the price & handcuff us with monthly limits, just as the “average” Joe is becoming a high-usage customer (who *doesn’t* have Netflix these days???) there will be hell to pay. Pitchforks & torches kind of stuff.
I, too, hope that we see 100 megabit speeds common in a year or two. I also doubt it will happen, but it would be nice.
I think I also hope that the pricing will be similar to what the Japanese and Koreans experience, since I believe all the articles I have seen that mention the high speed internet service common in Japan and Korea say, or at least imply, that the Japanese and Korean customers pay less for their super-fast internet service than we pay for our pokey old couple of megabit service. I have never heard of metered usage or caps on the Japanese or Korean internet services. Maybe they are common there and just not mentioned (or maybe I haven’t been paying attention).
As much as I’d love for 100m service in 18 months, I’m resisting the urge to hold my breath. It’s been a year and a half since Verizon quietly stopped asking me to upgrade to their 10M DSL service (which I would do in a heartbeat, were it actually available), and still no sign of FiOS in my neck of Philadelphia…
At least 3 times a month, either Comcast or ATT contact me trying to “upgrade” my service. I always tell them the same thing. This is what I want : Land-line phone service for $10 a month; cell phone service for $10 a month; TV service for $10 a month and internet service for $10 a month. When you can give me all that for $40 a month, give me a call.
If you don’t tell them what you want, they’ll think of something else and stick you with that instead.
yes, exactly. Though I’m willing to move a little bit on the price-per-each.
Have you tried that with your local grocer? Let us know if it worked.
Your local grocer does not tell you what you can buy or pester you to change what you have already chosen at the till. Your local grocer also has more than 3 products and has lots and lots of competition, keeping prices low or at least more reflective of what the products cost.
Both the cell companies and the local grocer have forces acting on them resulting in the prices and service we see and have to accept in the end. The grocer rents shelf space to the highest bidder and tells customers (politely) to pound sand if they ask for the return of their favorite products. Prices keep going up everywhere to please the union. Oligopolies can be worse than monopolies since the “competition” is often an illusion.
That’s funny! The $10 x4 is what I come close to having!
I pay $8.25 month for prepaid voice phone (T-Mobile $100 first year; $10 thereafter)
I pay $8.25 month for prepaid data plan (AT&T $25 / 90 days; used to buy / renew 30 days data.) DishNetwork $15.00 – just locals.
And I bounce back and forth every 6 months between Comcast and Qwest … err I mean CenturyLink, for their 6 – month specials at $15.00 to 20 per month.
Being retired I have the time to deal with all the hassles. 🙂
I sure hope you’re right about 100 Mbit service. As a TWC customer I’m delighted when I get 20+ Mbits. It’s taken years to get even that “fast.”
I use Clear Wimax at the house. 10M down / 1M up. No bandwidth caps. $35/month plus $6/month taxes. I download movies all the time with my VOD service on my DirecTV DVR.
Don’t get too attached to that. I had them for a while & then the service starting being sporadic. Then it went down for a whole week. Repeated calls during that week and I could get no ETA for it working. Finally I went abck to AT&T DSL adn Clear wanted to charge me $100 for an early termination fee on a service they couldn’t deliver.
Clear was a major letdown for us. It was mostly OK for the first month we had it and then just grew to be totally unworkable. Bizarrely, the tower closest to our house would lose its internet connection whenever it rained and the only thing that would get us reconnected was a call to tech support. Verizon was offering DSL for the same speed and price, so we switched and have never looked back.
I had Clear WiMax for over a year now at home. I just added it to my office as a backup for our Comcast cable internet service which has been going out lately for about an hour or three a week. The current price for Clear WiMax is now $50/month plus a bunch of taxes.
Internet access will always be slower and more expensive in America than in Japan and Korea simply because America is more thinly populated, with many people choosing to live in sprawling suburbs. Even in Europe a lot of people live in apartment blocks in compact cities and towns with good public transport. America is different, partly because it has far more spare land and also because Americans’ love of the personal freedom they get from their cars means that they often live in remote places. That means more cable and more wireless base stations transmitting more power a greater distance.
What you say is not a complete picture. My understanding is that the biggest reason for slower bandwith speeds is the regulatory environment in the U.S which has granted an effective monopoly status to a few providers who milk the current levels of service for all they are worth and refuse to advance because they do not have to due to lack of competitive alternatives.
Here are some articles on the subject:
http://corp.sonic.net/ceo/2011/03/05/why-us-broadband-is-so-slow
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=competition-and-the-internet
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/business/06digi.html
http://gigaom.com/broadband/state-of-the-internet-what-are-the-fastest-cities-in-the-world
The last article discusses cities. This is where your point regarding population densities seems less relevant. Even if most of rural Texas or the San Fernando Valley is stuck with slower broadband, why must Manhattan or the Silcon Valley be so stuck? Why does Riverside California at 3,267 people/sq mi have the fastest broadband in the usa faster than most of the cities in the Silicon Valley which have around 5,000 per square mile or New York City (5,435.7/ sq. m)?
People only need a large bandwidth for HD video or for serious gaming which are things that they only do at home where they don’t need a wireless provider. It’s therefore economics and not the laws of physics or any technical reason that is stopping 100 Mbps wireless access. WiFi is already capable of delivering that indoors, at least theoretically, and it could do it in practice if only the demand was there.
The way to provide 100mbps wirelessly to almost everyone, wherever they are, is simple but not yet economically feasible – just put a base station on every street lamp post. Because there would be so many of them and because they would be so close to the user they would, on average, not transmit much power or use much bandwidth. That kind of network could become realistic within years as soon as the hardware becomes cheap enough.
“… just put a base station on every street lamp post.”
Just put? Just? Yeah, because it’s going to be economical to “just” wire every streetlight in the US for fibre. The cost of the box is meaningless next to the cost of of wiring every pole for something other than power.
The only reason that WiFi can deliver fast speeds is that every house in a neighborhood is reusing the same set of channels over and over and over again.
Streetlights are also fairly far apart in our neck of the woods, and so what you’d basically be doing is installing a smaller version of a cell tower, which gets you back towards the same set of limitations.
It would not be necessary to wire every single lamp post with fibre. Data could be relayed wirelessly from one to another if they are in line of sight of each other. Even that does not have to be done for every streetlight in the country – the system could be rolled out incrementally, starting in a few areas and would probably take a decade to cover a large part of the country.
Don’t you mean: “Verizon Wireless announced Friday that it IS paying $3.6 billion to three cable TV companies..”?
Also, prove to me that electrons exist – you cant!
prove they don’t.
so everything exists unless you can prove it doesn’t? prove to me that miniature lizards wearing hula skirts smoking ganja don’t exist inside your ears. you can’t – they must exist! like electrons!
Electrons exist as a
concept to help us predict what is true about the universe.
Here’s my question: precisely how will this result in me paying more for things I don’t even want?
graft and highway robbery. it’s worked well for them in the past.
What do you mean by “this”?
> because voice landlines are going away
Bob, from what are you basing this prediction? Businesses and other institutions have no plans to give up land lines as far as I know. I certainly don’t plan on giving up my land line. I’ve heard it’s a lot more reliable, especially in emergencies, then cell phones.
I think Bob is saying that dedicated voice landlines will be replaced by something like wired voip or wireless cell service. Voice by itself requires little bandwidth compared to TV. That’s the main reason the old Bell System had phone service in the ’30s but never could get anyone to pay for PicturePhone.
voice has been little slices of Shannon theorem since the late 50s once it gets past the local loop. digitized, time-multiplexed as digital data, office to office. in the 70s, it moved to neighborhood service through the digital loop carrier. in all that time, it was dedicated timeslice.
starting about 10 years ago, routed voice packets started being used in some areas as basic trunkage.
for several years, there have been corners in telco technology in which the question for all service becoming VoIP was “when” not “if.” perhaps you missed ATT asking the FCC to start the process to determine how they would regulate a fully VoIP routed network replacing the class-5 switching and voice on single pair to the subscriber. it did happen something like a year and a half ago.
change is coming. the outfit that isn’t ready to move with the standards is the outfit you will refer to as “whatever happened to…”
Here on Cape Cod & the Islands in Massachusetts we are in the midst of getting a fiber optic backbone installed and available to every town government and library in addition to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Air Force base.
Its called OpenCape – https://www.opencape.com/ – a $32 million grant funded project. It includes a data center being built on the Cape. Anyone want to move their business here?
Bye – bye Comcast.
Sounds great for a few government agencies and Woods Hole, but what about the citizens who are paying for it?
Right on!
The basic physics are very simple. A coax cable has a thousand times the bandwidth of a twisted pair. A fiber-optic strand has a thousand times the bandwidth of coax, giving fiber-optics a million times more bandwidth than any pair of wires. There is no possible comparison with any radio/wireless system.
Once the current fad of walking down the middle of the street talking on the cellphone fades away (either because people get more sense or they get run over!), wired connections will rule, possibly with some optical or radio extensions (descended from WiFi) to connect to portable devices. The babbling about a wireless future was always a function of technical ignorance.
A few (very few) phone companies are replacing their copper scraps with fiber to the customer to cut the cable companies off at the knees. They will win; the others will become a historical artifact like Kodak, and very soon too.
Where does this leave white space? What about mesh networks?
And what do the Koreans and Japanese do with their 100 Mbit/s?
Inquiring minds would like to know.
I won’t pretend to have a Nobel in physics, but even 9th grade physics will tell you that cellular data is not and can not be the way to go. The bandwith simply is not there. The central issue is that EM-radiation (signals) interfere with each other. This is why you should have your wifi base station use different channel from your neighbors’. As long as you constrain the signal to a medium, the only limitation is how many cables you can use simultaneously.
In all honesty, I perfectly understand why the telcos are so enamored with wireless, they save the last mile entirely. Likewise users want wireless. But the current problem is that interference is increasingly an issue.
If you take a long-distance train over here, you’ll probably see a dozen people in every wagon working on their 3G/4G equipped laptops, meaning a hundred people per train, wheezing thru the landscape at 100 mph, constantly negotiating and renegotiating cellular links to various base stations. Pure madness.
As I see it, the main problem is that we use cellular technology as if it was a silver bullet. Instead we should use the different wireless technologies smartly, focusing heavily on utilizing those technologies with the shortest reach (and thus the lowest collateral interference) for the “last miles”.
Perhaps it is about co-marketing…
For instance, the cable companies don’t have any wireless infrastructure to utilize – so they have not ability to do the same deals as Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint do with the get Internet, TV, Phone, and Cellular services from a single source – whether AT&T’s U-Verse or another Baby Bell’s equivalent.
So what the deal does is it gives them access to an existing wireless infrastructure so they can now make those kinds of deals, and at the same time expands Verizon’s wireless spectrum to host those additional wireless accounts.
What strikes me odd is why only Verizon? Why didn’t one of them go to AT&T, T-mobile, or Sprint?
I’d think it would make better sense for them to make the various Baby Bells compete with each other in this market too – as it could garner them a bigger price for the spectrum licenses they are bringing to the table, and perhaps better deals for their own up-and-coming wireless customers.
“…why only Verizon?” Perhaps it’s because Verizon is the only one with extra money in the bank from charging higher prices since day one.
What a laugh. I think Bob has been predicting this 100 megabits to the home for at least 10 years now. And now it’s only 18 months away. No, Bob. Based on past history it’ll be around 2020. Go back to more realistic things like space flights.
I agree with the commenter who said walking around with a smart phone is a fad that will die off. Once everyone has it, it won’t be hip any more. We’ll wonder why we ever wanted to read web pages on a tiny screen. Others will wonder how they got tricked into working 24 hours a day. Real smart.
It’s great. So I’d like to share it.
And here I am, one of the millions of underemployed Americans who can only afford a slow DSL connection. I am waiting, and waiting, and waiting for this page to load!
We all have to wait. DSL should be fast enough.
Would someone ‘splain me please, why has Verizon *not* rolled out FIOS in Brooklyn’s wealthiest neighborhoods? Verizon has copper wire delivering landline and xDSL to compete with Time Warner everywhere in Brooklyn. Verizon has cel sites everywhere in Brooklyn. But why is Verizon holding off on FIOS?
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[…] our homes faster than any next-generation 4G service can ride the airwaves. Don’t believe me? Ask him, Cringely–He’ll set you […]
I live in Korea and am Korean.
Internet in Korea is sometimes fast. In theory it is fast, but it is often incredibly slow (think 30KBps). As someone said, our small country allows for easier infrastructure ugprades. That and 90% of Koreans use IE6 or 7 on Windows XP, and 95% of our sites use super annoying ActiveX plugins.
I have also lived in the US and used FIOS which seems to be a lot more responsive relative to my internet usage in Korea (US sites on FIOS 30mbps and Korean sites on KT fiber optic service 100mps).
Also 3G and 4G are way slower and more heavily congested than my experience with 3g and 4g in the US. I would gladly sacrifice a theoretical 70mbps for higher quality internet services and innovation like the US has..
[…] than any next-generation 4G service can ride the airwaves. Don’t believe me? Ask him, Cringely–He’ll set you […]
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