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Cable Wants to Cut the Cord
skatephat420 writes "Wired News has featured an article on how "the cable industry wants you to chuck your cable -- at least when you're outside the house. The addition of a fourth wireless component to the cable package is now affectionately known as the 'quadruple play.'" With this addition to the standard package of voice, video and data, how long is it going to take DSL to compete?"
The "quadruple play" is already a well understood investment play on Wall Street over the last few months. The big battle ahead is cable and what used to be the regional telcos. They're both arming themselves with everything they can think of, including faster and faster, two-way broadband, internet telephony, cellular and broadband wireless services, along with hundreds of content channels...and each side is committing to spend billions to do it. What investors are trying to understand is who remains standing with a semblance of a profitable business at the end of it. Each side is desperately trying not to end up being a "dumb pipe", but have a valuable "walled garden" of services to keep customers paying $50, 100 or more per month per household. Someone is going to end up losing these multi-billion dollar bets. More here: http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/07/on_wilting_wire.htm l
letting them access video content on their mobile device as seamlessly as they access "video on demand" programming at home.
So how long will they wait for the cellular & PCS companies to get somewhere near up to speed to be capable of live video? And no, Sprint's bullshit 15fps mobile "tv" doesn't count.
SBC already offers a bundles package of:
Home phone service
Long distance
DSL internet service
Dish Network satellite TV
Cingular Wireless phone service
It seems that the cable companies are trying to catch up to DSL, not the other way around.
If cable can integrate their content onto the phones as the article suggests, maybe they will pull ahead.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
It's obvious that all these large companies with massive infrastructure want to extend the use of said infrastructure as much as possible.
But what I'm really waiting to see is whether or not any new/fringe players will make a move to implement a WiMAX grid that has decent redundancy and large-scale coverage and move away from the "ground-based" bandwidth carriers.
IMHO, that's where the really interesting dynamics come into play. FTTH, increased cable speed/features, expanded DSL offerings, that's all great. But show me a completely tetherless solution for my voice/data/entertainment needs with mass coverage and you've got me hooked for your hundreds a month, with probably less cost to you than to (insert cable co./telco here).
Hopefully, if you're lucky, from Verizon or T-Mobile. All you need is a bluetooth phone and a USB bluetooth module- and once 3G networks roll into your neighborhood cell towers, you can unplug completely.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Dog is my co-pilot.
and I pay SBC a lot less than the cable company wants or will want.
Better, SBC is going head to head with cable, trying to get cable channels unbundled.
Let's see:
1. charging more
2. trying to sell what's already available
3. pulling a poor sales job to make it look like it's their idea
4. doing their damnedest to make sure I have to buy tons of crap with the few things I want.
There's your cable quadruple play.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Here's what I want. If anyone out there works for a cable company, please feel free to pass this along. Currently when I subscribe to cable, not only do I get access to all the shows they air, but I also get limited access, through Comcast's Digital Cable, to something vaguely PVRish... I can watch a select number of shows at any time for free. I can pause them and rewind them as I see fit. If this service is already available, I don't see any reason why I can't have the following feature:
I would like to be able to go online, log into my cable company's webpage, and download any show that's aired since I began my subscription. These are all shows I theoretically have access to already (I could have taped them), so why not allow me to watch them when I want. Give me a username and a password; go ahead and keep track of when I joined and only give me access to content I'm entitled to. Bittorrent distribution is fine, I don't mind contributing a little bit of bandwidth to this scheme.
In addition, I want to be able to schedule downloads of new shows in a PVR like system. So, anytime I decide I like a show, I can download the whole back catalogue since I started my cable subscription, and download every new episode that airs automatically.
Also, I should be able to access this content anywhere, at any time. This would actually be a big selling point if I were presenting this idea to a cable company because it means you could sell something of a discounted product to people outside of your traditional market. Why do I need to deal with Comcast when I can subscribe over the internet to Time Warner, even though they're not in my area? Suddenly, all the cable companies will be competing against each other to provide the best selection of programming at the best price with the most ease of service... something that isn't really happening today.
I'm sure there's legal issues with this from the point of the content producers. All I know is that I'd be happy to download shows via bittorrent with commercials directly from my cable company if they allowed me to do so. I'd be happy to switch away from my local cable company if someone else on the internet could provide me with a better deal. The cable companies already have the rights to distribute the content to end users... this scheme would require a renogotiation, but it's within their power (unlike some crazy startup).
Anyone else interested in this sort of service?
--
RumorsDaily
A few years ago, I thought Verizon was cooked. Long distance was dead, and they were not one of the leaders in wireless, and DSL has always been a bit of a joke outside of heavily populated areas.
But in the Washington DC area, we've seen in the past few years:
1) Verizon Wireless has become one of the leaders for voice.
2) Verizon Wireless offers their 1X service which gives 90-110K web service in most areas of the country
3) in metro areas their EVDO service is now offering mid-speed internet access
4) They still offer DSL
5) In the Washington DC area, they're rolling FIOS out to everybody, far beyond their DSL offering, and they're spending money faster than I've seen anybody short of the military spend money on this rollout. Its amazing.
6) In the process of this rollout, they're getting rid of 40 year old copper infrastructure.
7) Using this fiber they'll be offering increasing video services that strike right at the heart of the cable companies.
Seriously, Comcast should be scared. They looked to be in the driver's seat 3 years ago, but Verizon has come on strong and now Comcast has to come up with an answer. Maybe they'll even start offering decent help desk and helpful employees.
Nah. I think they'd rather go out of businss.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
VOIP is reliable enough for me.
That's what Time Warner Roadrunner was trying to tell me when I was on hold for the THIRD TIME THIS WEEK because my cable had gone down from 2PM to 5PM.
"Hello," I said to the customer service representative, after I finally got through their new and exciting phone system that told me two times how to spend 15 minutes resetting the DVR I don't own, "Could you tell your management that having ads for your phone service when people are on hold trying to get their cable service back... on a phone they couldn't use because their cable service was out... is probably NOT going to win many new customers?"
I was in Houston when Alicia hit. A tornado took out the U-Haul storage place across the street. I had no power for 6 hours. But my phone worked, I could even get online (on a BBS, the Internet wasn't around yet) and leave a message for the folks I knew back at college. When the floods hit we lost power for half a day, of course there was no cable. But my phone worked, I could let my family know I was OK. This June a storm (and possibly another tornado) dropped someone else's fence on my roof and took mine in exchange. I had no power and no cable for several hours. But I could call up the power company and report the outage, and the insurance company to make a claim! I'm getting a partial rebate for July, because a bad splitter had packet-loss going to 85% every time the weather got hot, but I could still call the cable company to report it even if it took them two weeks to get someone out at a time I could be home.
Hell with dialling 911. I want a landline phone because I need Time Warner's repair service on speed-dial.
Heh. Regional issues do exist, for sure. The thing is, I just don't happen to have any.
I'm a happy customer.
In france, I subscribe to Free (www.free.fr)
I have Video, Data (20Mbit), TV, and wireless.. and it's been available for months now.
It all comes over the adsl connection.. (which does not necessarily imply a France Telecom subscription)
If I decide I don't like free.fr, there are at least 2 other competitors on the market with the same package..
So what's the big deal? Once you have the bandwidth to the user, its just software that provides the services.. (and a little hardware - the freebox)
Why is a cable company so special when they do it? Oh yeah.. its the USA...
Like hell it is.
300MB per month?
I've got more than 300MB in my download history just for this morning.