Verizon Makes Sure NYC Gets Plenty of Fiber
Today's New York Times has this fascinating piece about Verizon's race to install fiber cable on the residential grid in New York City. Verizon is reportedly spending $3 billion to wire up 3.1 million homes and apartments throughout the city.
About half way down the first page, I came across this stunner:
With such a high concentration of potential customers, competition is fierce — and Verizon has been losing ground. Time Warner Cable, Cablevision and others are stealing about 1,000 Verizon phone customers a day, and their discounted services are making it hard for Verizon to win them back…
One thousand customers a day? That's a lot, but competition is indeed fierce, and prices are dropping. Two days ago, I picked up the mail at my house in San Francisco and found two pieces of junk mail bulk mail offers hawking VoIP services. One was from Vonage, and one was the TV/internet/voice combo-pack from Comcast. Both of them were cheaper than what I'm paying a local company right now for just internet and cable TV — no voice. And my contract is only one year old.
So, Verizon technicians are working overtime to install fiber at a cost that approaches $100 per foot in some areas of NYC. That's a hefty price compared to the $7-$25 per foot range in the 'burbs. We're talking about a very serious investment — this type of massive shift signals the impending death of twisted copper pairs.
No word on what those top secret Skype-blocking boxes cost to install…
[Pic from Tek Nek Toys]
