Opinion: The Decline of Landline America
- Details
- Category: Hardware News
- Published: Thursday, 19 August 2010 00:00
Thankfully, most of us live in large cities, where fiber-optic or other landline based high-speed internet options are available. Okay, maybe I'm just one of the few that is lucky enough to have that as the scenario. The news reports on future rollouts of wide-scale blazing internet service are disheartening, to say the least, leading me to believe that such landline high-speed rollouts will be no more.
Look no further than Verizon
If you're interested in Verizon's Fios product, and who wouldn't be, because it's freaking awesome, you can probably see the writing that's on the wall.
In late Spring of this year, Verizon announced it was halting the expansion of Fios, and not rolling it out to any new cities, metro areas, or other locations. The reason why is simple dollars and sense. For each new customer hooked up to Fios, the project was estimated to cost as much as $1,350. Perhaps exaggerated, but there is no argument that a fiber rollout is quite costly.
Even more recently, in 14 (mostly midwestern) states, Verizon's land-based network services were sold off to Frontier Communications, which is still in the transitional stage of taking full control of the services. This includes Verizon's DSL, Fiber, Coax, and POTS systems. The reason is most likely a three letter acronym, which always seems to be the case in the tech industry.
LTE
With the rollout this fall of Verizon's LTE (4g) network, it is very likely that Verizon envisions offering broadband services in a wireless-only fashion. There is a notion that the 'wireless' term carries a premium price to end users. And with speeds topping out in the 40-50 mbps range, all may not be lost on the broadband speed front, either. However, once their network is saturated with users, and given what will likely be limited range of the rollout, many will miss out on the experience for quite some time.
Verizon's current internet data offering is $60/month for 5gb of data transfer on their 3g network. We can only hope LTE is much more reasonable in terms of cost and data allowance.
The LTE rollout wouldn't be able to match the potential speeds of landline fiber, but with a much lower cost, and the possibility of charging more money, as a business does it make much sense to proceed in any other fashion? Unfortunately for America, that means slower speeds, data caps, areas where service is unobtainable, and likely a higher cost going forward. Surprise, surprise, right?
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