Monthly Archives: October 2007

Verizon for TV?

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Bernadine Joselyn sent me nice article on Verizon the other day (OK maybe last week). It was a nice glimpse of the economy of the triple play (Verizon’s Big TV Bet Pays Off).

Verizon started getting into position to offer cable/pay TV two years ago. They invested some serious money. People laughed – but Verizon are the ones who are starting to chuckle now. Apparently even Comcast is publicly calling Verison worrisome competition in the cable/video industry.

But by the end of 2010, Verizon expects to have fiber in at least 18 million households in its traditional East Coast territory, more than four times the potential customers it has today. They expect to start turning a profit in 2009.

The article goes on to talk about the investors’ perspective and a little bit about AT&T – who say they have enough broadband thank you. They haven’t and apparently have no plan to invest as Verizon has.

I spend so much time looking for – and therefore finding – info on community-based fiber projects. It’s really interesting to read about a fiber project based on ROI and not need-driven.

Global Trends in Broadband Presentation

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Thanks to everyone who attended the Blandin Foundation Webinar: Global Trends in Broadband. I think we had almost 30 people participate – including community leaders, consultants, and tech experts.

Bill Coleman, the presenter, did a great job. He inspired me to learn a little bit more about GPON versus EPON, which I’ll report once I get time to do the research. (Please note that we have 2 more webinars planned this month!)

Here is the presentation for those who weren’t able to attend and for those who asked to see if again:

(Want to donwload it – you can do it here.)

Effort to Improve Broadband Measurements Thwarted

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Last week the folks at Speed Matters published an interesting article about the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia denying Center for Public Integrity access to zip-code-by-zip-code data from the FCC on high speed connections.

Service providers submit this info to the FCC. In the Senate Session I watched last week (and in other instances – such as a bill submitted by Senator Daniel Inouye) the FCC has pretty much said that the numbers they have aren’t great. But apparently the court denied access to this data because it would be “likely to cause substantial competitive harm” to the telecom companies.

Ironically this happened exactly one week before the International Right to Know Day (Sept 28). I’m kind of an advocate for making information public – especially information like this that can be useful in the aggregate – that is to say info that doesn’t necessarily help anyone profile us as individuals but that does help paint a clearer picture for legislators so that they can make better informed decisions.