The Land of Milk and Honey
June 2, 2009
I hate to beat a dead horse. However, those living in the Doris Day Land of milk and honey where everything is nice– while recommending to the Federal Government (NTIA/RUS) that 1.5 megabits of broadband service in America is perfectly acceptable and only those below 1.5 megabits should be considered “under-served”–need a reality check.
This little ditty from dslprime.com:
Verizon: FiOS Service To Everyone
All of D.C. suburb Gaithersburg will get fiber “within four (4) years,” after a new franchise deal for Verizon. Eric Rabe writes “We’ll meet our commitment to offer service to everyone in the time period specified. How many homes we actually serve will depend, of course, on how many subscribers we are able to sign up.” This follows Verizon’s historic commitment to for universal fiber to 3M homes in New York City, and I believe similar in the works for D.C., Philly, and Boston. The Verizon crews were working around the corner from Jennie. We’ll probably soon be able to choose between Verizon and Time Warner Cable for 50 megabit downloads.
Verizon’s GPON is designed for 200 meg in both directions. TWC is so far holding back on upstream DOCSIS, so VZ will have a natural edge to exploit.
Five years ago, Ivan decided “We have to get fiber out of the house,” and upstream is emerging as a crucial weapon. So is the quality of the FiOS network, designed to take almost any bandwidth demand thrown at it and not requiring caps. Time Warner has pressed hard for the opposite, looking at caps and brutal bandwidth charges to protect their video revenue. That’s not because a cable network needs caps; Cablevision serves half of New York and doesn’t need them, nor traffic management.
So, non-ILEC carriers and non-Cable Companies supporting bandwidth rates at low rates as acceptable–you are headed for disaster. Sitting still because you locked into copper is a fools bet.
Think about the Federal stimulus package for Telecom at $7.2 billion – it is a paltry sum when we encourage the government to measure under-served as anything less than 100 megabits. At 100 megabits, the vast super majority of all consumers and businesses are radically under-served.
I will spare you today – I won’t revisit what the rest of the world is doing at a minimum threshold of 100 megabits. On a global basis, I am less concerned about Fiber-To-The-Barn, and more concerned about our global ability to compete using bandwidth.
Wake up America!
Written by Dave Rusin - Telecom Executive
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