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Verizon To Pump $18B Into FiOS
larytet writes, "LightReading reports that Verizon will invest $18B into FTTH. The company says its fiber-based service will become profitable after four years, and expects by then to have 7 million customers using FiOS for Internet access." For perspective, have a look at Bruce Kushnick's book $200 Billion Broadband Scandal. His site has a page detailing phone company promises of fiber since 1993. We have been paying for these undelivered promises for years. By now we should have 86 million homes wired with FTTH at 100 Mbits/sec.
We have been paying for these undelivered promises for years. By now we should have 86 million homes wired with FTTH at 100 Mbits/sec.
This goes so against my usual feelings on how big companies treat the general populace, but...
With all the companies that make huge promises but never actually delivering, I willing to let it slide when a company delivers something pretty close to the original promise, even if it is just a little late.
- Tony
Fine, there have been plenty of broken promises from phone companies (and, I believe, cable providers, satellite providers, and others) over the years. 7 million homes also might be a little optimistic. But FiOS is really, exists in plenty of homes already, and is much more real than many of those other technologies were at the times the promises were made.
I'm in New York and have FiOS. It's a very nice service. Happily, in New York, the slowest speed tier is 10 down / 2 up, and it's quite affordable compared to cable modem service. I'm looking forward to the FiOS TV service, and the day I'll be completely rid of Time Warner (not that Verizon itself is such a wonderful company).
Well is this unexpected? They were begging for money and consideration at the time, but they were also lobbying. In effect, they say "Oh it'll be fine, you'll see, watch what we'll give you!" Of course, since the promises weren't written into the law as a mandate, with real consequences if they went unfulfilled, what they gave us, predictably, was as little as they could get away with for as much as they could charge.
Now, in addition to tax revenue and right-of-ways, they want us to give up net neutrality. "Oh, but look what we'll give you!" I imagine they'll do just as well as last time.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
Subsidies are frequently abused and allocated for all of the wrong reasons. They skew the market, create a new base of lobbyists and generally increase the scope of government intrusion. We wouldn't have people like Ted Stevens be the norm in Congress if the American people could bring themselves to follow what's in the Constitution, and subsidizing business isn't one of the enumerated powers of Congress. If it were a dry, boring job that made them more like "law book janitors" than power brokers, most problems would go away within an election cycle.
But no, we just need to change where and how the government gives away money, not whether or not the government should be involved at all.
According to this article in my local paper, Verizon is planning on spending nearly $23b on FiOS and that's for about 1/2 their network. The $18b figure mentioned in the summary comes from discounting the $5b in projected savings from not having to maintain the aging copper physical plant. The linked to article sort of mentions this, but it's not real clear.
I'll believe it when I see it. I have Verizon phone service, and I live in a well-populated area, but I cannot get DSL yet. It turns out that some of my local loop is running over copper, and the rest is running over fiber. I cannot get DSL because of the fiber but I also cannot get FIOS because of the copper. So I''ve been waiting, but I might just have to bite the bullet and get Comcast...
Never ask for directions from a two-headed tourist! -Big Bird
I've been hitting the submit button on the "Can I get FiOS?" site in Northern Virginia since I heard about it in 2004. So far, all I've gotten is a web redirect to their DSL offerings.
Speaking of DSL, I talked to Speakeasy (my dsl provider) and asked them if they'd ever be able to offer their open hosting policies over FiOS. Speakeasy said no because FiOS is regulated differently than your POTS lines. So this really put a damper on things because I won't get port 80 etc over blazing optics. Unless they strike a deal (unlikely?) or an act of congress happens (lobbying?). I'd love to know exactly why fiber is treated differently.
As far asw having 86 million people wired by now, have you not heard of the last mile problem. Laying the cable costs money. And takes time. After the dot bomb the telcos had to retrench for a few years until the market improved a bit.
The dot-com collapse was a big reason why there was a big delay in getting broadband to metropolitan areas across the USA. It's only within the last three years that landline broadband has been widely available in most larger cities across the USA. Most AT&T customers now have at least access to DSL broadband, and the cable companies have made broadband available to almost everyone nowadays.
I'm surprised by Verizon because you don't need a Verizon PC to use FIOS. Imagine that! Those clever engineers figured out a way to make a service profitable without proprietary lock in. Gee they are great!
Okay I do have a chip on my shoulder when it comes to Verizon.
Now imagine if Verizon FIOS was operated like Verizon Wireless.
You would be required to sign a 2 year contract and pay $1000 for a PC that can barely take advantage of the basic features of the service. If you wanted something that could give you the full experience that would be a 2 year contract plus $2000 for equipment.
All the while the PC they sold you would be locked to FIOS and have many features disabled. Some features I can imagine being disabled would be File Transfers via FTP or any standard protocol. You would be required to use their application at a fee for every transfer.
You would be locked out of using other media services like Apple, Yahoo or audiable.
Your information services would be limited to their partners, probably fox news...
Finally they would happily hand over your personal information to those willing to pay or a government with no probable cause or a warrant.
This all sounds very familiar now that I write this all... Net Neutrality anyone? or a lack there of...
What could possibly go wrong?
Congress is actively dealing with this right now! You won't get fiber to your house, but you will get a larger series of tubes. And your representative will mail you your very own Internet.
[Insert pithy quote here]
That book about the scandal sheds a lot of light of just how screwed over customers have been the past decade+. If anything Verizon has a moral obligation to start something like this from the fact that their customers have been paying extra for it for years and the fact that America is getting its ass kicked in regards to infrastructure compared to some countries in Europe and Japan. China is also planning on sinking billions into its infrastructure as well, so it's about time one of these money whoring telecoms stop the douchebaggery and start fucking doing something instead of syphoning capital out of its customers for service in which the cost doesn't justify the performance. Maybe this will trigger Comcast, ATT, Qwest and others to stop their stupid fucking complacency and start doing something to improve this companies infrastructure instead of holding their monopolies and using the legal system to force out municipally owned service.
Then again, I've never associated telecoms with ever doing anything moral, intelligent or in the best interest of the consumer.
Am I the only one that's wondering if this much bandwidth for the average home user is a good idea? Perhaps it's time to tie things like egress filters and packet shapers to the new bandwidth to prevent threats from spreading that much faster?
Yes, lots of other phone companies have made promises about bringing FTTH utopia, however the difference is that Verizon is already doing it. They've been rolling it out in several places around the northeast for a while now.
Here's a blog with lots of details on how the installation is done: http://www.bricklin.com/fiosinstall.htm.
10 minutes working on a sig. What a waste.
It's about time! Now I have a reason to buy Intel's 80 core CPU!
Yep, they're slowly rolling it out, replacing the old copper cable. Plus, they're offering such a sweet deal with Internet and TV over the fiber: $35 for 5mbit up/2mbit down (I sometimes hit 6mbit down, strangely enough). $52 for basic 180 channel digital TV (only 18 channels analog, so you need a set top box or DVR), a STB in one room, a two-tuner DVR in another.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
Here in France most of broadband is DSL oriented. For 29.99 you get on a DSL : 25Mb/s, digital TV (more than 100 chans), unlimited call to european land line (and most majour countries), on-demand video, PVR-like features, ... nothing surprising anymore.
i on/presentation1.htm) or even FTTB (on Paris area, see Erenis http://www.erenis.fr/ )...
;-) Right, ...
...
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But since year 2000, some small ISP have lanched FTTH in Paris 15th district (Citéfibre http://www.citefibre.com/ 59/month for 30Mb/s symetrical, unlimited call to any france landline , digital TV) or other cities (like Pau see http://eco.agglo-pau.fr/Initiatives/PBC/presentat
Obviously some would says that Japan, Korea or Taiwan are still leading on FTTH
But this september, Free (Iliad Group registered on Euronext as ILD) the #2 on broadband market (#1 is FranceTelecom/Orange) has announed they will migrate their DSL customer to FTTH offer. Same price (29.99) for 100Mb/s symetrical bandwidth on a point to point full fiber infrastructure, services anticipated are : multi-tv-set full HD service (full HD sports show Rolland Garros or Tour de France will be hits next year !) and WiFi based mobile VoIP (your modem will become a public hotspot for any other subscriber roaming)
This means a 1G$ (1 billion euro) of investment on 6 years (mostly using cashmoney they got). The migration of DSL customer will start begin of next year by Paris and some other big surrounding cities and will then follow on any other disctrict where Free got more thant 15% of the DSL market.
For more details, please see :
http://www.journaldunet.com/0609/060911-free.shtm
(In French, so babelfish can be your friend)
Dear lazyweb,
What say you to publically owned, but privately serviced network infrastructure? For example, a city, town, or borough pays to have its own network system (cable, dsl, ftth, whatever) installed, and then has an outside company (Adelphia, Comcast, Verizon, etc.) provide the bandwidth and support. The city retains control of the lines, so in the event the denizens of the city are unhappy with the provider company, they could vote to terminate (or simply not renew) the contract with the company and seek other bids for service.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Although I may have been successful in my deciphering, I believe FTTH is not a common acronym that most people (even on /.) have heard about. And no, I shouldn't have to chase a wikipedia link to figure it out. At least the submitter didn't use the much worse acronym FTTP, fiber to the premises (which I would have thought a misspelling of FTP).
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
1. Give me TRUE, dedicated bandwidth at a low level. I'm talking like 768k down, 384k up that is MINE. It can't be squashed, and I don't get nasty letters for using 768k down 24/7/365. You really are not giving everyone 30mb down / 8 mb up, at least not all the time. Own up to it and let us know what is allowed JUST FOR US.
2. Show me my burst level. I might have 768k that is MINE, but I might be able to get 30MB down when everyone else isn't as busy.
3. Offer unlimited access within the switch (neighborhood). If I have a 100MB pipe to my house, and my next door neighboor is on FTTP, then allow me to talk at 100MB. I understand lowering it once you hit a trunked connection, but allowing full speed COSTS THE ISP NOTHING, and has a HUGE gain. My buddy might have 30MB from Comcast, but if I tell him that if he switches to ISP A he we can talk at 100MB, I'm sure he would switch.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
Fine, there have been plenty of broken promises from phone companies (and, I believe, cable providers, satellite providers, and others) over the years. 7 million homes also might be a little optimistic. But FiOS is really, exists in plenty of homes already, and is much more real than many of those other technologies were at the times the promises were made.
Maybe you should read the above book. The number of homes with decent high speed internet in the US is pathetic. Compare, for example, the internet service in Sweden. It is faster, more reliable, lower cost, and each citizen paid much less than each American citizen has in government subsidies. They also have about the same population density. Sorry, but the US is falling behind the world, except in a small number of very urban locations. I'm happy you have good service, but don't mistake the situation in new York for most of the US. I've lived in three of the ten largest cities in the US and in each place I had a choice of a crappy cable service bundled with Cable TV I don't want or an incredibly expensive DSL line bundled with a phone service I don't want.
The dot-com collapse was a big reason why there was a big delay in getting broadband to metropolitan areas across the USA. It's only within the last three years that landline broadband has been widely available in most larger cities across the USA. Most AT&T customers now have at least access to DSL broadband, and the cable companies have made broadband available to almost everyone nowadays.
Are you kidding me? Are you freaking kidding me? Those are communications companies and not dot-bomb companies. If anything we should have had a faster rollout of telecommunications equipment because the labor and supplies would have been a bit cheaper without the dot-com folks around. I hated the dot-com era and allowing the telecomms to use the dot-com collapse as an excuse for something that they should have had rolled out before the dot-com era really started is a huge cop out. In some respects you can blame the dot-com collapse on the telecoms for not having the nation wired up with fiber at 100 Mbits/sec up and down in the mid 90s! The dot-com era was from the mid to late 90s. The telecoms should have been finishing up wiring the country with fiber before the dot-com era really picked up!
Good idea. I'm gonna get off my lazy, liberal ass and start laying some damn fiber! I'll start by renting a backhoe so I can dig up my front lawn. Maybe I can save some money on that if my neighbors chip in. Hell, maybe I can get the whole city to pitch in a little bit to buy the fiber in bulk. We'll need some organized way to collect the money. Maybe the city can collect it once per year from every citizen -- that's a good idea. But if I'm gonna do the whole city, I'll need more than 1 backhoe. That means I'll need some qualified backhoe operators. I'll probably need to get some permits to dig up the roads and such too.
Man, this is a lot of work. Maybe instead of giving me the money the city can give it to some large conglomeration of people whose job it is to do this sort of thing. I know there are a few companies out there. Anyway, the government can give them a bunch of money -- probably in the billions -- to build up the infrastructure, and we'll be all set.
I'm so happy you spurred me into action. Things are gonna change! I can feel it!
Seriously though, you must be a conservative. You don't like books and big companies are never wrong.
"...and expects by then to have 7 million customers using FiOS for Internet access."
"Fios" is portuguese for "wires"... That name wouldn't inspire many people here in Brazil!
So say we all
By the time Verizon gets FTTH to my rural home I'll either be too old to care or dead. It's been what, more than six (6) years now; what happened to the $200 billion? Out in my area there is NO xDSL, NO Cable Internet, NO Clearwire only dial up and over priced satellite Internet service. The only way I'm connecting now is with my Verizon wireless account, a whopping 16k/bit sync.
Since my move, I haven't had any broadband service for over two (2) years. I've more or less lost all interest in computers, my Sun boxes sit idle with no Internet connection. All the time I have been mucking around with Linux have been confined to my IBM A31p laptop, and what ever connection I can get at Starbucks, work or open access point.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick