Tele-Orgasm
September 24, 2009
I have a new word and sensation for Telecom – it’s the Tele-orgasm.
A Tele-orgasm is the tingling sensation that Chris Matthews gets when he encounters a fiber bigot, such as myself, discussing copper loop removal from a building or residence. Yes, the Tele-orgasm is the equivalent of Chris Matthews in awe of anything President Obama utters – that same identical tingling.
At the Goldman Sachs investor conference this week, Ivan “The Terrible FIOS” Seidenberg, CEO of Verizon pretty much stated that copper is just about dead as far as Verizon is concerned. These comments were aimed at the shrinking loss of lines that analysts like to measure. Joined by Randall “FTTP” Stephenson, CEO of AT&T and Ed “Wireless-less” Mueller, CEO of Qwest, all concurred that someday the landline loss would stop shrinking.
As aptly reported by conference attendee Saul Hansell of the New York Times, “In other words, that snipping sound you hear around copper phone lines is just going to get louder.”
Oh, that tingling sensation I get just thinking about it!
In the same article, Seidenberg declared, “Video is going to be the core product in the fixed-line business and the focus will move from selling bundles of video and landline to video and cell phones.” He added: “Once I shed myself of the burden of chasing the inflection point in access lines and say ‘I don’t care about that anymore,’ I am actually liberated.” Let’s here it for liberty and freedom – I am having a vision, perhaps Ivan can be caste in a remake of “Braveheart” as William Wallace – the Telecom version!
Since I have written about this before, let me translate this for Wall Street: Measuring legacy copper lines is of declining value, possibly of no value at all. It is not an indicator of anything anymore. Ivan, Randy and Ed won’t say it, but I have before and will again — you need to measure ports installed and bandwidth deployed. Mr. Wall Street – any idea how many simultaneous VOIP calls you can run over one port of Gigabit Ethernet? You count that “port” today as a line… Think about it. You really don’t know how much net line loss is going on with VOIP as a substitute for copper TDM lines, do you?
And I do know for a fact that many of you on Wall Street do read this blog but never comment. That’s called voyeurism.
The other secret I’ll let out of the bag, though my buddy Ivan insinuated it, is this: They are not the telephone company anymore. Wall Street-–you need to accept this and figure out what to measure accordingly. The big “service push” that is evolving is data. And I don’t mean data in the sense of point A to point B.
What I am talking about is the effort by my three new friends trying to figure out how to sell one data plan to customers that covers all their needs — fixed and mobile. People don’t want to pay for separate, multiple data plans – a single “portable” data plan is of significant value to the customer. Data – anytime, anyplace, on-demand regardless of access device is powerful. The single point IP addressable data plan is the new Holy Grail in telecom. A personal data plan or a shared corporate data plan —- but one data plan period – wire line (fiber) or wireless (LTE/4G/Wimax) is coming our way. So stop it with the copper line loss shenanigans.
However, before we get to data utopia, that copper needs to get snipped … and there goes that tingling sensation – another Tele-orgasm.
Written by Dave Rusin - Telecom Executive
Posted by wbrache | Filed Under American telecom, Telecom Blogs, Telecom USA, Telecom bloggers, Telecom broadband, Telecom news, Telecommunications bloggers, Telecommunications blogs, Telecommunications companies, Telecommunications industry, Telecommunications news
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