Slashdot Mirror
Verizon: FiOS Access For Other ISPs in the Works
Ant writes "According to Broadband Reports' story, 'Verizon has confirmed the claim made by a DSLExtreme representative here last week that the company has plans to offer other ISPs access to its new fiber-to-the-premises network.' A Verizon spokeswoman is quoted as saying, 'A couple of deals have already been signed and more are in the works.'"
this will help other ISPs, and it will keep costs down thanks to competition. thank god
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
Not so...I work for a local ISP here in Tampa and we're already advertising and selling the service to customers in the areas that qualify.
Also, is it possible to retain my email address with my former ISP (cox) for a small fee? I can't seem to find any info on cox's webpages about such a thing (which is to be expected; they don't want us to switch!)
But the promise of 15mbps, which is nearly 4x what I get now; and the major thing, 2mbps up, is really, really enticing. AND it would end up costing _less_ than what I pay for cable right now!
This, like DSL shared access, is not competition. For example, we sale DSL in Hell$outh and Verizon territories, and they charge us more for just the raw line than they charge customers for the line plus Internet access. We have to charge our customers twice as much as Verizon does just to break even. If it wasn't for our much better customer support, we would have been out of business a long time ago.
To explain this a different way. For DSL, BellSouth charges end-users $25 for a slow connection. BellSouth charges us $30 for the same speed connection plus we pay about $20,000 per month in overhead for our ATM connection to those customers plus we pay about $15k per month for Internet bandwidth to Sprint. As you can see, BellSouth is abusing their monopoly position. They aren't selling to us just to be nice, and there is no competition.
Parent poster is absolutely correct. I worked at another national ISP that no longer offers broadband services because we got burned in the same way. The carriers charged us more per customer than they did their own broadband division, so there was no practical way to compete. It's just a sham.
I am forced to use Verizon DSL because the apartment management provides their own cable TV via satellite. Even though cable services (from Cox) are available all around within a 100 feet or so. My dsl modem shows the bandwidth at 860kbps down, 140 kbps up. I am looking forward to FIOS.
Unfortunately the residential service my current Cable Modem provider offers doesn't allow any servers being exposed to the public.
:)
The can't block every port. Run your web server on a port other than 80, then get a free no-ip address to redirect. Thats what I do
Wireless connections;
CO/WAN connections;
T1 was fine for many corporations 10 years ago. Many still use T1 lines...while wireless hubs are sprouting up either formally or informally. Driving around right now, it's trivial to get a wireless connection in many areas.
Say you are a co-operative group like Seattle Wireless, and you get some WiMax (or other equipment), why not just disconnect mostly or entirely from POTS and go peer to peer? Maybe you'll be able to offer the service for $10/month...after all, they are doing it now at lower speeds.
If you were a bell executive, what would you do? What would you do to keep your stock from tanking when WiMax (or any other tech) eats your customer base?
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Guy from verizon came to my house and we had some chitchat, I was bringing up how I cant seem to get broadband, and he brought up fios, and mostly the reason verizon is doing this is because of cost.
Fibre is cheaper to run and maintain in the long run compared to copper. Mostly due to copper's physical limits, it's limited on speed and distance, and eventually has interference.
fibre has insane speeds, you need less repeaters on the grid, and you can run more cable longer without signal loss, and zero interference. That's mostly the reason for the move, that and microsoft's new IPTV "technology" they want to unveil, I think that's part of it as well.
I hope earthlink is jumping on this. Same with speakeasy.
In my area, verizon's TRYING to get it started, but they made a huge mistake and started with Chino Hills, who are charging THEM for putting in the lines, charging them for using the streets, and charging them for licenses to install to every house.. like $100 per house, then other fees.
If they had only started on this side of the Inland Valley, then it might be going somewhere. Cucamonga is growing faster than CH, and is more populated (thus has more potential customers)
oh well, I hope they learn.
..They do not mean you get fiber strands running into your house and you have to figure out what to do with all the blinking lights at the end of them.
You have some hardware in-between you and the blinking lights, and I'll wager THAT hardware does not understand quantum cryptography. In fact it's whatever was provided by the lowest bidder, so it probably will not understand much of anything.
Still, the fiber is all that much closer to you so in the distant future when all large backbone switches are optical perhaps you can get that as an option.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Others have commented to the point that their pricing makes it hard to compete, but I know nothing of Verizon pricing.
I do however know that the four big telcoms testified in front of Congress recently and their testimony might be of interest in this discussion. I watched it on C-SPAN and liked what I heard for the most part.
Their testimony basically told us that their mergers aren't going to harm competition. I'm sure a lot is bull, but please listen to the testimony first. It's interesting if you have a fetish for networks, redundancy and interconnectedness like I do. Plus loving gov't in action helps.
There were a lot of good questions and some pressure for honest answers. Listening is better than reading because you can get tone and inflection. Good thing too because the transcript isn't up yet, all you have is Real Audio.
Get your Unix fortune now!