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Comments on news posted 2004-10-11 12:28:40: The New York Times today is running a feature article on the "Fios" fiber service Verizon has been deploying in Texas (and eventually elsewhere). ..
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neftv
join:2000-10-01
Broomall, PA
 ·Broadvox Direct
| yea right, years...
... to break even. Somehow I don't believe that after all they took (coughs clears throat "stole") the Money from Pennsylvania. Watch one year from now or in the future Verizon will cry wolf and double or triple the monthly subscription rates for fiber. Poor Verizon how much is enough. Ya took PA's money. | |
vic102482
Premium
join:2002-04-30
Upper Marlboro, MD | Id pay 1K activation fee
In a heartbeat for fiber to my house. | |
Jammy
be'suvwl
Premium
join:2000-11-03
Chula Vista, CA
clubs:  |  Fios sounds nice
Just how long will the installation remain free though?
Jammy | |
teknikk
Wi-Co, Inc.
Premium
join:2003-01-22
Los Angeles, CA
clubs:  | reply to vic102482
Re: Id pay 1K activation fee
said by vic102482  :
In a heartbeat for fiber to my house.
Sure... | |
vic102482
Premium
join:2002-04-30
Upper Marlboro, MD
| said by teknikk :
said by vic102482 :
In a heartbeat for fiber to my house.
Sure...
I sure as hell would.
--
I tie a rope around my penis and jump from a tree, don't you wanna grow up to be just like me!!!! | |
Yep Its Fiber
@aol.com
| SO not your money dont worry about it
That is why u buy in bulk and after they steal all there competitors customers and that we might end up paying $100 for internet+cable+phone combo maybe even more but u get the point in a year they would get there money back if people us an all verizon service. | |
decadent
Premium
join:2002-04-02
Piscataway, NJ | Two year contract
In 25 monthes they will get their money back with cheapest package: $40/month. In that case 2-year contract is fair. | |
lesopp
join:2001-06-27
Land O Lakes, FL | reply to vic102482
Re: Id pay 1K activation fee
I wouldn't!
There are installation costs associated with both sides of the dmarc and my guess most of that $1,000 is paying for the Verizon side. | |
jimbo2150
join:2004-05-10
Youngstown, OH
| Trials Only
Probably only until the trials are over (lucky bas***** who get the free trial-runs for free).
When they actually finish deploying it will break us... cost us a lot of money to install.
The government and FCC has said they want to keep prices down... but I haven't heard anything since. When it is releases I bet the subscription rates will be horrendous. | |
technick
Premium
join:2000-12-16
Loganville, GA | reply to neftv
Re: yea right, years...
Can someone be a good mate and post the NY Times article, I hate registering for these annoying things, and I am running out of time for today =\ | |
PhoenixDown
-- Wants FIOS
Premium
join:2003-06-08
Fresh Meadows, NY
clubs:
| reply to vic102482
Re: Id pay 1K activation fee
Not a bad idea actually. 1k is a bit high, but I would go for a sub $500 install fee and sign a 1 year agreement for a certain level of service.
However - I think people would have been more enthusiastic about this before cable started rolling out 3+ mbps connections.
--
Final Fantasy | |
DrTCP
Yours truly
Premium,ExMod 1999-04
join:1999-11-09
Round Rock, TX | Just like Sprint trial...
Sprint's fiber trial a few years back ended up sprint loosing over 3000 per subscriber.
In particular, these trials are show-offs to FCC so that Bells can get a cut and once they achieve their regulatory missions the trial will be terminated. | |
kapp0
join:2001-12-16
Belvidere, IL | reply to technick
Re: yea right, years...
Try this »www.bugmenot.com | |
rit56
join:2000-12-01
New York, NY
| reply to technick
Phone Line Alchemy: Copper Into Fiber
By KEN BELSON
Published: October 11, 2004
KELLER, Tex. - Rick Montey and his two-worker crew want to present a new image of the local phone company: prompt, friendly and hands-on helpful.
At the home of T. J. Smith here in this Fort Worth suburb, Mr. Montey helped choose an inconspicuous spot to bore a small hole through the side of the house for the fiber optic line that would enable Mr. Smith's son to download big computer files quickly for his graphic-design work and let his granddaughter pull video clips off the Internet.
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Three hours later, only after the Smiths knew how to use the new system, Mr. Montey and his crew pulled away in their Verizon Communications truck. The family paid nothing for the installation, beyond the $34.95 monthly fee for the high-speed fiber optic service - which they can drop at any time.
The new offering is part of a multibillion-dollar bet by Verizon and the other Bell companies. They are gambling that by going door to door to replace century-old copper wire technology with high-speed fiber optic lines, they can hang onto their most valuable asset: a direct line into the home of each customer.
Verizon and the other regional Bell companies are losing customers by the millions as people drop their old phone lines in favor of cellphones, e-mail and ever cheaper phone services from cable companies.
To battle back, the phone companies are trying to outdo their archrivals, the cable companies, by installing a network of fiber optic lines to reach tens of millions of American homes - lines able to carry not only phone calls but television programming and Internet connections at six times the speed of cable company lines.
In the process, the Bells hope to become a counterweight to cable companies that often operate as monopolies in their specific regions.
"Without fiber, their customer base will evaporate," said Michael Render, president of Render, Vanderslice & Associates, a market research firm in Tulsa, Okla., that tracks fiber optic networks. "The world is changing too rapidly. Building fiber networks is a must-do."
Though the service is available now only in this small town and a few other cities nationally, Verizon expects to make its fiber connections available to a million homes in parts of nine states by the end of the year.
For all the billions of dollars Verizon and the other Bells plan to spend, success is far from assured and failure could be catastrophically expensive. Cable providers, with lines into 73 million homes, are a formidable opponent, particularly with their new Internet phone services. And it is not certain either that the Bells will be able to offer fiber-based services compelling enough to get customers to sign up, or whether future technologies will render all that expensive fiber obsolete.
Still, if the Bells need any reminder of why they need to act now, they have only to look at AT&T. The old Ma Bell spun off the regional Bell companies more than 20 years ago to pursue a seemingly unfettered communications future, but it has fallen on such hard times that this summer AT&T decided to retreat almost entirely from the residential phone market.
Despite the urgency, it will take years, if not decades, to wire every home with fiber. The Bells are starting first in suburbs and new communities, where access is easier. In cities like New York, the Bells are likely to bring fiber only to the basements of multi-story buildings, not all the way to each individual apartment, and then use existing copper lines to bridge the gap.
As the telephone companies embark on this most ambitious rewiring of America since the old Bell System strung copper lines from telephone poles early last century, they know that today's competitive market will not let them approach their job as the regulated monopolists of yore.
They have to keep appointments, rather than expecting consumers to wait home all day for the phone truck to drive up. They no longer mail customers Internet-access gear and expect them to figure out how to install it, as the Bells have often done in recent years with their high-speed D.S.L. service. And in this hotly competitive era, they are not charging an installation fee - even though the job, in equipment and labor, can easily cost $1,000 or more a home.
"I've never thought of myself as a salesman," said Mr. Montey, a 25-year Verizon veteran, "It's the biggest challenge in my career."
Within weeks of AT&T's decision to back away from the household market, Verizon, the biggest Bell company, began offering its first residential fiber service to customers here in Keller, a town of 30,000 people 15 miles north of Fort Worth. From April to August, Verizon contractors dug up Keller's neatly laid streets and buried fiber optic cables that connect to the Verizon central switching station in town.
Customers like Jim and Margaret Archer are the types of Keller residents that give Verizon hope. The Archers struggled for years to send e-mail and search the Web with their pokey Internet connection through a dial-up modem and a regular phone line. Their house was too far from Verizon's central switching office to get a faster digital subscriber line.
So when Verizon began burying fiber cable in their neighborhood, the Archers jumped to order the service. "Now we've got the good stuff," said Mrs. Archer, 61, a part-time paralegal. Next year, they hope to dump their satellite dish when Verizon begins selling TV programming via the fiber network to compete with the local cable TV provider.
Fiber, which carries digital information as pulses of light rather than electric current, is not new. For years, phone carriers have been laying fiber between their municipal switching stations, on long-distance routes and across oceans. But only now are the regional Bell companies, having lost 16.3 percent of their local-line customers in just the last four years, laying fiber to residences.
Nationwide, only 146,500 homes have been connected to fiber, said Mr. Render, the market researcher. That number is up from 64,700 homes in September 2003, Mr. Render said.
The numbers should continue growing. Verizon plans to spend $3 billion to offer fiber service to three million homes nationally by the end of 2005. SBC, dominant in the Southwest and the Midwest, and BellSouth, big in the Southeast, have also been installing fiber to homes in newly built neighborhoods in their regions. In older areas, they are taking fiber to switching stations or to the curb, and relying on old copper lines to reach the house, a strategy that may reduce connection speeds.
To build a nationwide fiber network comparable to the cable industry's, the Bells would have to spend at least $100 billion, or $1,000 a home, experts say. But so far, the companies have committed themselves to spending only about $10 billion, before determining whether further outlays make sense. And even that amount has raised alarm bells on Wall Street, where investors remain wary of costly projects.
Still, the experience of running fiber cable past every home in Keller and selling services to consumers has given Verizon a taste of what may follow. Early indications are that customers like the price: as little as $34.95 for one of the fastest Internet lines, a price comparable to what cable companies charge for considerably slower connections.
Getting the service to consumers is another matter. In Texas and other states with flat expanses, workers typically bury the fiber using boring machines that often lay the lines near the older copper cables. In places where the terrain is hilly or rocky, lines are strung from poles, a faster, cheaper process, although one that leaves the fiber line susceptible to storms.
After a customer puts in an order, Verizon sends a crew to connect the main fiber line to the side of the customer's home. Then another installation crew, like the one led by Mr. Montey, connects the fiber to equipment inside and outside the house.
This is a new kind of work for Mr. Montey. For decades, phone companies have operated as stodgy utilities, with little need to improve customer service. With fiber, they have to turn themselves into retailers. Phone workers, accustomed to splicing lines and hanging from phone poles, are now spending hours teaching customers about their broadband connections, even becoming PC advisers because so many home computers are riddled with viruses.
The company said it was too early to say how many homes in Keller had subscribed to the service, although it said it had received up to 80 orders a day.
Verizon is now laying fiber in Dallas County, Tex.; Huntington Beach, Calif.; Tampa, Fla.; and in parts of six other states. The company has not announced the additional six states, but said most are in the Northeast. Analysts have said the list includes New York and New Jersey.
Because it has been swallowing the installation costs, Verizon is eager to use the fiber to start selling television programming, which analysts say will be comparable in price to many basic cable packages. To do so, Verizon and the other phone companies are having to negotiate contracts with networks, buy the equivalent of cable TV franchises from municipalities and sell advertising to fill their air time.
Despite its high installation costs, fiber could be a money-saver in the long run. Unlike copper cables, glass fibers do not rust, and require less electricity and maintenance. By 2008, Verizon's fiber network could save the company about $1 billion annually in operating costs, according to analysts.
SBC, which is running fiber cable only to newly built homes and neighborhood switching stops in older areas, will get only 70 percent of the savings that Verizon's network is expected to achieve, but it will spend only half as much time and money on the project, according to Ernie Carey, the chief of SBC's $6 billion fiber installation project.
The continued reliance on copper for the final link to the homes of consumers makes sense to some experts, who say improvements in software compression and Internet connection technology make to-the-home fiber unnecessary. They point to companies in Japan and South Korea that are already selling high-speed Internet connections and video over copper networks.
No matter how much fiber they bury, the Bells cannot be complacent because the cable companies will continue to market their own services.
"The cable guys are not going to wait three or four years" for the Bell companies to catch up, said Jeffrey Halpern, an industry analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. "The Bells need a revolutionary change, not an evolutionary change." | |
marigolds
Gainfully employed, finally
Premium,MVM
join:2002-05-13
Saint Louis, MO
| Not a Trial
According to Verizon, this is not a trial:
»www.multichannel.com/article/CA4···ral=SUPP
The cost is running about $800/home for their first million homes passed. Which means they are spending a lot more than $1000/subscriber. Of course, this is a drop in the bucket compared to the $5 billion SBC is spending on fiber to the node.
Pricing sounds like it is:
5/2 for $39.95/month, $34.95 with POTS
15/2 for $44.95/month, $39.95 with POTS
30/? (not listed) for $199.95/month
Verizon is already working on delivering video over the system, but does not have the capabilities yet.
--
ISCABBS - the oldest and largest BBS on the Internet
telnet://whip.isca.uiowa.edu
Member: American Association of Geographers, American Geophysical Union, American Water Resources Association | |
rit56
join:2000-12-01
New York, NY
| city dwellers woes
the part of interest for myself and other city folk is the paragraph stating they will eventually run the fiber to apartment buildings and then connect it to the existing copper lines of which they have no intention replacing. that alone will keep me from using it. cable it is.... | |
retrogame
join:2003-04-14
Auburn, MA
 ·Charter Pipeline
| reply to decadent
Re: Two year contract
quote:
In 25 monthes they will get their money back with cheapest package: $40/month. In that case 2-year contract is fair.
You're erroroneously assuming that 100% of that $40 is going towards the install cost. The cost for bandwidth, maintenance, system upgrades and customer and technical service reps comes out of that $40 as well. It will take them alot longer than two years to earn the install cost back. | |
rpsmith
join:2004-04-19
Huntington Beach, CA | reply to DrTCP
Re: Just like Sprint trial...
The "regulatory mission" applies only to fiber. If they've won a victory, it will only take effect if they *don't* terminate their fiber plans. | |
bogey780
join:2004-03-19
Here | 1000$?
That's below industry estimates of diber service. OSP had it estimated at a 1800$ cost per house. If that's the case then it's competitive with copper. | |
rpsmith
join:2004-04-19
Huntington Beach, CA
| $1,000? What's the big deal?
This is investment, folks. All companies do it. An ROI of a few years doesn't strike me as a bad deal at all, for them. They aren't going to raise prices because of this. Cable companies invested too, wiring fiber and coax for HFC networks (that they have a monopoly on, lest anyone forget). Probably that job was pretty expensive too, yet the price/bandwidth ratio keeps going down.
We need both cable and ilec's. Despite the fact that telecom plants are inherently monopolistic in nature (the "why wire twice" problem), the initial focus of ilecs on voice and cable on video has (almost accidentally) given us two viable competitors, and now we are realizing the fruits of that as customers. I don't think we will see bandwidth prices going up--much more likely they will fall with time, in adjusted dollars. | |
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