Verizon FiOS today adds television to its lineup of services in several suburban towns in the Syracuse area, as competition heats up in central New York for cable, telephone, and broadband service.  But the incumbent cable operator, Time Warner Cable, says it’s not worried by Verizon’s arrival, and a company spokesman predicts no price war will result.

Eight communities in the Syracuse area will now be able to choose Verizon FiOS television service in addition to broadband and phone service: Camillus, Clay, Cicero, DeWitt and Salina, and the villages of East Syracuse and North Syracuse in Onondaga County, and the town of Fleming in Cayuga County.

The arrival of television service is important for Verizon, because it lets them compete head-on with incumbent cable operator Time Warner Cable that already offers bundled packages of services, typically known as a “triple play” in the industry — telephone, cable-TV, and broadband.

Chris Creager, Verizon’s president of Northeast operations, claims competition for cable television in central New York will result in better service at lower prices.

“When we enter a market, customers win,” Creager said. “Usually, cable companies are more receptive to looking at prices.”

Time Warner Cable downplayed the competitive threat Verizon could pose to their operations in the region.

In a statement echoing the sentiment Time Warner Cable has expressed in most of the communities where FiOS competes with them, spokesman Jeff Unaitis said Time Warner Cable already has an advanced cable network and has experience delivering cable television service to Syracuse-area residents that Verizon lacks.  Competition is nothing new to Time Warner Cable, he said, noting the company has faced satellite television competition for years.  Unaitis also predicts no significant price cuts as a result of Verizon’s all-fiber FiOS system arriving in town.

Indeed, evidence suggests that Verizon’s FiOS service does not result in dramatic savings for consumers, with one significant exception.

New customer promotions often offer significant price savings, particularly for customers who sign contracts to remain with providers for one or two years, and choose bundled packages of multiple services.  Central New York customers signing up for Verizon FiOS for at least two services can receive a $150 gift card.  Customers choosing their “triple play” will receive $30 off their monthly bill for six months.

Once the promotional offers expire, so do most of the savings, unless a customer threatens to switch providers.  That often brings a renewal of their promotional package price for an extended period, although some providers limit the number of times a customer can take advantage of a promotion.  For consumers trying to optimize savings, that can start a ping-pong relationship with providers, as customers sign up for a promotion and then cancel service when it expires, taking their business to the other player in town.

Competition does often bring improved service, even when savings are elusive.  Broadband service in particular often benefits, as consumers enjoy faster speeds with fewer limitations in communities with FiOS as one of the competitors.

In Syracuse, Time Warner Cable has adjusted speeds upwards for its Road Runner service, in advance of Verizon FiOS’ arrival.  In contrast, speeds in Rochester, a city with no prospect for Verizon FiOS competition, has not seen a speed increase for standard service in several years.  In New York City, a system upgrade to DOCSIS 3 technology has allowed the cable company to offer a premium 50Mbps service tier.  The Syracuse Post-Standard explored the competition angle, and what central New York residents might expect to come from it:

Competition from FiOS, which offers Internet download speeds of up to 50 megabits per second, may push Time Warner Cable to deploy available technology to match those speeds, said Thomas W. Hazlett, a law and economics professor at George Mason University and former chief economist of the Federal Communications Commission. Time Warner Cable recently upgraded its New York City network to offer a 50-megabit option, compared with the maximum 15-megabit speed in Syracuse.

“If it’s like elsewhere, you’re going to see Time Warner respond,” Hazlett said. “They will increase speeds.”

Likewise, Verizon and Time Warner Cable will push each other to offer better channel lineups, better picture quality, on-demand programming and novel services, said Jeffrey Kagan, an independent telecommunications analyst in Atlanta. Prices also will be lower that they would be without competition, but don’t expect a big drop, he said.

The newspaper explored what each company offers customers:

$110 per month: Includes unlimited phone calls in North America; Internet at 15 megabits per second for downloads, 5 megabits for uploads; 255 standard-definition TV channels and seven high-definition channels.

$120 per month: unlimited phone calls in North America; Internet at 25 MBPS for downloads, 15 MBPS for uploads; free Wi-Fi access on nationwide network of hotspots; 275 standard-definition TV channels and 70 high-def channels.

$130 per month: Same package as $120, but with Showtime, 16 more standard-def channels and eight more high-def channels.

Creager said Verizon will lock in the price for two years.

Time Warner Cable’s regular rate for its “All the Best” triple play is $135.50. But new customers can get an introductory rate of $115 for a year, including free use of a digital video recorder for six months, according to the company’s Web site. The service includes unlimited phone calls in North America; Internet downloads at 10 megabits per second, uploads at 1 MBPS; 214 standard-def TV channels and 70 high-def channels.

Time Warner also offers a $100-per-month introductory package that includes fewer TV channels — 154 standard-def and seven high-def.

Several TV news video reports, and a Verizon video press release can be found below the page break.

… Continue Reading

"PPC-1" - Pipe Network's new fiber link opens this week

Ongoing connectivity issues and lack of competition continue to leave Australians with expensive, slow, and usage-limited broadband service.

This week, Pipe Networks will make a small dent in improving international connectivity when it activates its new PPC-1 fiber link between Sydney and the U.S. territory of Guam in the Pacific. The project, first envisioned in December 2006, took nearly three years to complete at a cost of more than $175 million U.S. dollars, and has a design capacity of 1.92Tb/s run over two fiber pairs.

Telecommunications analyst Paul Budde said Pipe Networks, along with others “would help to reduce this problem and will therefore provide ISPs with better prices,” which was supposed to result in a lifting of Internet Overcharging schemes like usage caps.

Not so fast.

Broadband providers in Australia have taken notice of Pipe Networks’ new pipeline, but many have not lowered prices or removed usage caps.  The lack of competition has kept a price war from taking place.  Ovum senior telecommunications analyst David Kennedy told Australian IT that without a price incentive, a lot of customers, particularly those served by Optus and Telstra, are unlikely to switch providers.

ADSL2+ Speeds drop dramatically the further away you live from the phone company's switching office

One DSL provider in Australia, Internode, has made some changes to its service offerings in response to the new fiber link.  The Adelaide-based company has simplified some of its service plans, cut the price of small office/home office pricing by about $9 per month, and increased the paltry usage cap on its Easy Broadband plan from 30GB per month to 50GB per month.  Internode’s Easy Broadband charges $44 a month for DSL service at 1.5Mbps/256kbps,  or in areas upgraded to ADSL2+ service, up to 24Mbps/1Mbps.  Actual speed on the latter service is highly dependent on how far away you live from the telephone company local switching office.

Internode chief executive Pat Tapper doesn’t think PPC-1 will make a huge difference for his company.

Internode sells "data blocks" for consumers intending to exceed their allowance.

“In the whole scheme of things the PPC-1 circuit doesn’t represent a huge spend in terms of what it costs to run the network. It will change a little bit in terms of our overall cost but only a very small amount,” he said.

“What it does give us is the ability to deliver more capacity to customers in downloads.”

That means a larger usage cap, but not cheaper pricing.

Internode customers that exceed the cap can purchase additional usage blocks, at pricing starting at $2.20 per gigabyte.

The evidence just keeps on coming that broadband in North America is not what it should be, remaining behind several Asian and European countries and not prepared for the broadband future.

Researchers at Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford and the University of Oviedo’s Department of Applied Economics, supported by Cisco (who does have an agenda to sell the equipment to improve service) analyzed almost 24 million speed tests measured by Speedtest.net for broadband customers between May and July of this year.

Both the United States and Canada, which consider themselves world leaders in broadband, might be surprised to learn they are behind more than a dozen nations, including one former Soviet republic.

The good news for the United States is that improvements have been made, primarily by cable and fiber optic broadband earning a bigger market share from slower speed telephone company DSL service.  The bad news for Canada is that Internet service there isn’t seeing the same degree of improvements, as vast parts of the country are stuck with DSL service for wired broadband indefinitely.

The CBC reported the results as negative:

Canada has some of the poorest-quality broadband among advanced countries, according to a study of global internet infrastructure.

Canada placed 25th out of 34 countries in the University of Oxford’s ranking of innovation economies, far behind top-rated South Korea and just ahead of Australia and the United States.

Some key findings from the study appear below….

… Continue Reading

HK Broadband offers 100% Fiber Optic service to residents of Hong Kong

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 Hong Kong” for its dramatically faster broadband speeds.

Hongkongers have had several choices for broadband service over the years, most offering traditional DSL service throughout the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (Hong Kong is a territory of the People’s Republic of China). Priced around $32 a month, the most popular service choice offers residents 6Mbps downstream speeds and 0.6Mbps upstream. Some modern residential multi-dwelling units have a more advanced from of DSL service offering up to 18Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream.

HK Broadband represents a major competitive threat for traditional DSL service in Hong Kong, because the fiber optic network provides customers with faster speeds ranging from 25Mbps-1000Mbps.  The company also offers a bundle including broadband, a Voice Over IP telephone service, and IPTV (cable television) service with 80+ channels. HK Broadband offers symmetrical speeds on their network, which means your upload speed is as fast as your download speed. The company has pummeled its telephone network-reliant competitors with humorous ads that call out DSL’s slower speeds, particularly for uploads.

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p style=”text-align: center;”>[flv width=”450″ height=”360″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/HKBN Ad – Ants.flv[/flv]
HK Broadband “Ants” Advertisement: Ten Kung-Fu-Fighting-Ants, representing the downstream speed of a traditional DSL broadband connection, are shown ganging up on a single helpless ant, who represents the weaker upstream speed, demonstrating how traditional DSL services typically offer upload bandwidth that is only a 10th of the download speed.

HK Broadband offers 100Mbps service for $35 per month, just a few dollars more than DSL. But there is an interesting catch. HK Broadband, like other providers in Hong Kong, cope with inadequate international broadband connections. Instead of engaging in Internet Overcharging schemes like usage caps, such as those found in Australia and New Zealand, the company has instead capped the speed for websites located abroad at 20Mbps for both uploads and downloads. The 100Mbps speed is reserved for domestic websites. Some subscribers note they couldn’t get speeds much faster than that when accessing overseas sites regardless of the cap, so it has not presented a major problem. As connectivity improves, so should the speeds, according to company officials.

The company also has a unique residential service guarantee — they promise that you will receive at least 80% of the speed you subscribe to, or they refund double your money back. Of course, this applies only to connections made to websites within Hong Kong.

When you’ve got it, flaunt it, and HK Broadband’s fiber speeds are the hallmark of their marketing campaigns.

[flv width=”480″ height=”284″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/HKBN 100Mbps Ad.flv[/flv]

HK Broadband “Fat Pipe” Advertisement: Real life characters representing Internet content force themselves into a tiny pipeline, representing DSL, but are later liberated by a wide open fiber optic pipeline they can run through with room to spare.

The investment by City Telecom in their fiber optic broadband network has brought impressive financial results to the company, with customers taking more of their telecommunications business in HK Broadband.  That increases the average revenue per subscriber.  The company has also aggressively increased the level of investment to build out its network, producing an economy of scale that has reduced the costs to wire new subscribers.

Traditional Wall Street investors have often been unimpressed with expensive technology upgrades undertaken by telecommunications companies.  Notably, Verizon Wireless’ FiOS fiber to the home network was pummeled by several investor groups who complained Verizon was spending too much on their fiber network, even though their costs to wire each new customer has dramatically decreased with time.  City Telecom has turned that criticism on its head.  Among many of its competitors, City Telecom is the second most profitable, earning an 11% profit margin.

China Securities has showcased the company, noting it enjoys subscriber growth at levels greater than industry growth, is positioned with technology that assures it of long term stability in revenue and income growth, and despite all of the investments the company has made, retains a strong free cash flow.  Most of all, it has very happy subscribers who enjoy a well regarded broadband service, available at fast speeds and a reasonable price.

The incumbent telephone company’s network of copper wire, supporting lower speed DSL service, is not in the same position.  HK Broadband brought Alexander Graham Bell back to life to chastise the notion that a network more than 100 years old is appropriate for 21st century broadband.

[flv width=”480″ height=”360″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/HK Broadband Bell Ad.flv[/flv]

HK Broadband “Alexander Graham Bell” Advertisement: The inventor of the telephone makes a “special-guest” appearance pointing out the fact that the 100 year old telephone network wasn’t designed for today’s broadband connections. This is set in a traditional Chinese Hell-like environment to imply the hellish experience of surfing the Internet with a slow connection.

<

p style=”text-align: left;”>HK Broadband has not escaped the attention of its competitors, of course.  PCCW Limited, Hong Kong’s dominant telephone company, has been aggressively marketing its own fiber, DSL, and wireless broadband products, not allowing HK Broadband to win without a fight. PCCW has had to play catch-up with HK Broadband’s aggressive fiber deployment, which focused on residential and business customers from the outset.  PCCW’s fiber network was primarily intended for business customers, and now the company has been rapidly expanding their fiber network to residential customers.  Today, where PCCW fiber is available, customers can choose from 18Mbps, 30Mbps, 100Mbps, or 1000Mbps service plans.  Many PCCW customers will also be aggressively marketed a wireless mobile Netvigator add-on, one of PCCW’s more successful product lines.

[flv width=”294″ height=”240″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/PCCW Fiber Optics Ad.flv[/flv]

PCCW “Fiber Optics” Advertisement: Lampooning HK Broadband’s fiber optic network, PCCW says it had their own extensive fiber optic network laid before HK Broadband came around.  Its tagline, “…the real fiber optics broadband.”

A detailed presentation of HK Broadband and its potential attractiveness to investors was produced by China Securities and features an interview with NiQ Lai, the Chief Financial Officer of City Telecom.

[flv width=”640″ height=”480″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Chinasecurities-City Telecom Presentation September.flv[/flv]

[13 minutes]

Time Warner Cable introduces DOCSIS 3 service in New York today.

Time Warner Cable today finally launches new high speed broadband service possible from DOCSIS 3 upgrades.

Calling the new service Time Warner Cable Wideband Internet, the company will now market the 50Mbps/5Mbps residential service for $99.95 per month.

“With substantially increased Internet speeds, Time Warner Cable continues to lead the way as the most popular broadband provider in New York City. Time Warner Cable Wideband Internet gives all home network devices – desktops, laptops, gaming consoles and iPhones – our fastest connection yet,” stated Howard Szarfarc, Executive Vice President of the company’s New York City Region. “Time Warner Cable Wideband Internet customers can instantly multitask – and when family members are online simultaneously, everyone can get the speed they want at the same time.”

Calling the company a proven innovator, Szarfarc touted Time Warner Cable’s “advanced fiber-optic network” for making the upgrade possible.

Yet Time Warner Cable has dragged its feet on DOCSIS 3 upgrades for more than a year now, claiming such upgrades weren’t necessary because consumers weren’t clamoring for faster speeds.  The company also had a major misstep in April when it attempted to roll out an Internet Overcharging scheme that would have raised broadband service pricing for consumers up to 300%, with no immediate improvement in service.  Those plans were shelved indefinitely.

Providers like Time Warner Cable are looking to premium services to enhance revenue, and offering higher speed service has proven successful for the company in the past.  Time Warner Cable has positively reported revenue benefits from its Road Runner Turbo add-on product, providing faster speeds to consumers for an additional $10 per month.

The rush to DOCSIS 3 in metropolitan New York may have come from increased competition from Verizon FiOS, as well as consumer awareness of Cablevision’s 100Mbps broadband service, available in suburban New York neighborhoods.

Time Warner Cable Wideband Internet is available starting today in Manhattan (below 79^th Street), Staten Island and Queens (Fresh Meadows, Forest Hills and South Flushing). It will be available throughout the company’s entire NYC service area by Spring 2010.