Recent Headlines
October 2, 2009
Tweet Be Sure to Read Part One: Astroturf Overload — Broadband for America = One Giant Industry Front Group for an important introduction to what this super-sized industry front group is all about. Members of Broadband for America Red: A company or group actively engaging in anti-consumer lobbying, opposes Net Neutrality, supports Internet Overcharging, belongs […]
October 2, 2009
Tweet Astroturf: One of the underhanded tactics increasingly being used by telecom companies is “Astroturf lobbying” – creating front groups that try to mimic true grassroots, but that are all about corporate money, not citizen power. Astroturf lobbying is hardly a new approach. Senator Lloyd Bentsen is credited with coining the term in the 1980s […]
September 27, 2009
Tweet Hong Kong remains bullish on broadband. Despite the economic downturn, City Telecom continues to invest millions in constructing one of Hong Kong’s largest fiber optic broadband networks, providing fiber to the home connections to residents. City Telecom’s HK Broadband service relies on an all-fiber optic network, and has been dubbed “the Verizon FiOS of […]
September 23, 2009
Tweet BendBroadband, a small provider serving central Oregon, breathlessly announced the imminent launch of new higher speed broadband service for its customers after completing an upgrade to DOCSIS 3. Along with the launch announcement came a new logo of a sprinting dog the company attaches its new tagline to: “We’re the local dog. We better […]
September 23, 2009
Tweet Stop the Cap! reader Rick has been educating me about some of the new-found aggression by Shaw Communications, one of western Canada’s largest telecommunications companies, in expanding its business reach across Canada. Woe to those who get in the way. Novus Entertainment is already familiar with this story. As Stop the Cap! reported previously, […]
September 22, 2009
Tweet The Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission, the Canadian equivalent of the Federal Communications Commission in Washington, may be forced to consider American broadband policy before defining Net Neutrality and its role in Canadian broadband, according to an article published today in The Globe & Mail. [FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski's] proposal – to codify and enforce […]
September 21, 2009
Tweet In March 2000, two cable magnates sat down for the cable industry equivalent of My Dinner With Andre. Fine wine, beautiful table linens, an exquisite meal, and a Monopoly board with pieces swapped back and forth representing hundreds of thousands of Canadian consumers. Ted Rogers and Jim Shaw drew a line on the western […]
September 11, 2009
Tweet Just like FairPoint Communications, the Towering Inferno of phone companies haunting New England, Frontier Communications is making a whole lot of promises to state regulators and consumers, if they’ll only support the deal to transfer ownership of phone service from Verizon to them. This time, Frontier is issuing a self-serving press release touting their […]
September 7, 2009
Tweet I see it took all of five minutes for George Ou and his friends at Digital Society to be swayed by the tunnel vision myopia of last week’s latest effort to justify Internet Overcharging schemes. Until recently, I’ve always rationalized my distain for smaller usage caps by ignoring the fact that I’m being subsidized […]
September 1, 2009
Tweet In 2007, we took our first major trip away from western New York in 20 years and spent two weeks an hour away from Calgary, Alberta. After two weeks in Kananaskis Country, Banff, Calgary, and other spots all over southern Alberta, we came away with the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Good […]
August 31, 2009
Tweet A federal appeals court in Washington has struck down, for a second time, a rulemaking by the Federal Communications Commission to limit the size of the nation’s largest cable operators to 30% of the nation’s pay television marketplace, calling the rule “arbitrary and capricious.” The 30% rule, designed to keep no single company from […]
August 27, 2009
Tweet Less than half of Americans surveyed by PC Magazine report they are very satisfied with the broadband speed delivered by their Internet service provider. PC Magazine released a comprehensive study this month on speed, provider satisfaction, and consumer opinions about the state of broadband in their community. The publisher sampled more than 17,000 participants, […]
Subscribe
This is definitely a threat to competition, the playing field isn’t fair and the players are just dividing up the territories and services amongst themselves.
Both AT&T Verizon knows that 4g service is the future as long as they pay politicians to keep the FCC’s hands off it, keep it unregulated, and charge through the nose with per-Gig fee’s and any other metered or tacked on charges they can think of.
If that means giving up their landline broadband, even their fiber, so be-it.. the upside on their unregulated market vs a regulated one is so much greater for the ability to squeeze profits out of it.
The 2nd problem is Wall St., wall street doesn’t want more than the 2 players AT&T and Verizon in the game, heck if it were up to them they’d prefer just 1 company owning the entire cellular market, but at least 2 makes it seem like there’s competition. As long as there’s a duopoly going matching each others pricing at the max consumers are willing to tolerate they can continue to maximize profits and returns for investors. I
They have no interest or desire to invest in any other company besides those two, investing in Sprint, T-Mobile, or Cable Companies that have spectrum and need more capital investment would only increase competition, improve those services, and drive down cellular plan pricing to competitive prices to almost half of what Americans currently pay to AT&T/Verizon.
Competition is bad for profits.
The Cable Companies would be great triple-play competitors offering TV/Internet/Cellular, but faced with big players like AT&T and Verizon will billions to throw at attacking them in the market, it makes more sense for them to acquiesce to Verizon’s bullying taking a fat check for their spectrum and getting the assurance that Verizon will mutually agree to not compete with their Cable services. Verizon in return gets to concentrate fully on their 4g build-out with much higher ROI than landlines and Fiber would ever return to them.
Essentially a win for all companies involved as their ‘exclusive’ markets are protected from competition with a gentlemans agreement, everyone gets paid, and everyone is guaranteed to make even more money in the future.
Oh except consumers are guaranteed to pay more in the future…
[...] Wednesday, executives from Verizon, Comcast, and various experts on anti-trust law and competition testified before a Senate committee to help decide the fate of a deal worth more than $3.6 billion that could reshape the face of [...]
[...] Wednesday, executives from Verizon, Comcast, and various experts on anti-trust law and competition testified before a Senate committee to help decide the fate of a deal worth more than $3.6 billion that could reshape the face of [...]
C- Beneficial collaboration. 3 new MVNO’s enter the market that previously weren’t there and whom had no intention of launching their own networks before now. FiOS rollout is over. Verizon is actively selling arms of it. They’re done in that space. As an entire corporate entity (VZ Communications + VZ Wireless), their focus is very clearly on enterprise services with their hardline services (corporate) and wireless for retail. MVNO’s are often cheaper than the parent network, the caveat being you supply the device… easy to do with it being Verizon.
So how isn’t this good? There’s going to be more service providers in wireless, where before this was going to remain unused space. There’s going to be another avenue to obtain TV and home TV service, where before the parent company had shelved, and even sold parts of, their similar service…
Win/Win.
The problem with MVNO’s is the wholesale pricing and access rules set by their suppliers. They are both carefully calculated to ensure no reseller can challenge the parent provider. The prepaid space is where most MVNO’s seem to survive, but notice they are no real competitive threat to the companies that supply the service, and a lot of MVNOs not affiliated with Sprint, TMO, Verizon or AT&T are finding the market increasingly unprofitable.
The real problem here frankly is Wall Street which absolutely loathes capital spending. If Verizon stood their ground more strongly over FiOS deployment, a lot more service areas would have fiber to the home service today, but investment in network upgrades always kills the stock price. Instead, we have talk of these “partnerships” which are really just reseller agreements that require no capital investment. Verizon pitching Comcast or Time Warner nets them a quick shot of $200 referral bonuses which look great on the quarterly financial report, but delivers nothing in the long term except the certainty the cable company will not get into the wireless space.
These quick fixes remind me of the independent phone companies. Their “triple play” is most often phone, DSL, and reselling Dish or DirecTV.
It’s the same phony competition Canada endures from prepaid MVNOs that are almost always owned and operated by the companies that provide the infrastructure. Consumers think they are choosing from competing providers when they actually are not.
Canada has the right idea opening their market space up to foreign-owned providers who will front sufficient capital to build networks while domestic providers are scared away by investment banks and home grown investors.
Mexico’s Carlos Slim, who owns Tracfone, is probably going to be the first foreigner to push into the U.S. market since Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile.
I agree with your assessment the landline business is increasingly focused on enterprise customers and wireless for consumers (where the ARPU potential is enormous). But landline providers could still play an important part of the consumer market if they’d invest in their networks. Consumers will learn real fast wireless broadband will not replace wired service for years to come. It’s often slower, subject to more congestion, and resource-limited.
I still have clueless people drop by here and tell me fiber to the home is dead because WiMAX is here. Seriously. Even providers in the city of Moscow consider WiMAX deader than Stalin and are hot-switching to LTE sometime this year.
The other thing I hate with the MVNO’s is because they’re bound with their agreements to AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, etc.. while they may announce a great innovative service plans with low pricing, or unlimited data.. at any point when it gets popular their provider simply changes terms on them requiring them to raise pricing, or drop unlimited and go with a metered per Gb at the same or higher price than the provider.
We;ve got several new Cellular companies announcing service now too that are piggybacking on Sprint and their WiMax network for cellular.. and I totally agree that’s a deadend just based on limited coverage let alone all the other negatives.
WiMax is just as dumb as the WiFi Access point deployment hype that preceded it by companies making huge buys of equipment to build out Wifi networks that never had the range, speeds, or transmission through obstructions necessary to be remotely useful outside a Starbucks. It’s never been the right technology, and never been the right time.
[...] [...]
I wanted to toss my monitor out of the window every single time Cohen claimed that they’d offered the spectrum to every other carrier. That’s such bull. You don’t think there would be a feeding frenzy for that spectrum? He really expects us to believe that only Verizon, the carrier with the most spectrum, was the only one who was interested in it? This is AT&T/T-Mobile all over again! Do they think we’re stupid or something? Yeah, of course it’s very convenient that there’s no public proof of these “offers” to other carriers. They should not be able to sell this to another company. If a company doesn’t want spectrum, which is a finite resource, they shouldn’t be allowed to sell it themselves, it should be required to go to public auction first and then the selling company can get some proceeds from whoever wins the bid at that point.
[...] Wednesday, executives from Verizon, Comcast, and various experts on anti-trust law and competition testified before a Senate committee to help decide the fate of a deal worth more than $3.6 billion that could reshape the face of [...]