Hey Telcos: Stop Talking and Give Us More Bandwidth
Verizon and other big telecommunications companies continue to wave the flag for higher bandwidth speeds. Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg led the charge at Big Telco's yearly shindig in Chicago this week, saying that "100 Mbps is just the beginning."
This is becoming kind of a tired mantra to my ears. If any telco chieftain can trumpet the virtues of high bandwidth it's Seidenberg, however. The company just announced that it had hooked up its millionth fiber-optic customer. Verizon accounts for the lion's share of consumer fiber-optic lines over the past few years. No other company has even come close to Verizon's momentum in pumping up bandwidth speeds.
Seidenberg also said what telco industry people have been saying for years--there's just no limit to the amount of bandwidth people want. Just ask traffic management companies like Sandvine and Ellacoya that constantly monitor Net traffic.
While broadband speeds are indeed increasing, it's happening so gradually that we're still doing the same old things--Internet use, voice (VoIP), file sharing--that we always have with the additional bandwidth, we're just doing those things faster. That's a very good thing. But at some point, perhaps when ISPs commonly sell 50+ Mbps service at reasonable rates, we'll see a flurry of wholly new apps and services--services that couldn't run on the low-bandwidth speeds we have today. These apps would let us do things we never thought we could do before online.
The only reason more of us aren't clamoring for increased bandwidth now is that we have accepted the frailties of the low-speed DSL and cable speeds of today--slow page loads due to network congestion, crappy-sounding VoIP service, slow downloads, low-quality Internet video, etc.
At the same time, nobody is capturing our imaginations with the high-band-width services of the future.
Can you imagine turning on Internet TV on your PC and seeing perfect HD video and a million video titles to choose from? Can you imagine sitting on your couch during a picture-perfect virtual office visit with your doctor?
Well, it's all coming. Just not very fast. It would help if big ISPs like Verizon and AT&T would build their fiber optic networks faster and bigger. But they have no real competition in the U.S. (cable networks are bound by old networking technology), so they move slowly, at a pace Wall Street will tolerate. If only Google would buy enough fiber optic infrastructure across the country to become a competitive ISP. That would put a fire under Big Telco's behind.
What do you think?
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I agree. This year Verizon installed FiOS (fiber to the home) in my neighborhood. I was salivating for high quality TV, data, and voice all from one vendor. Then to my surprise, their package requires that I buy DirecTV for video! Huh? Hopefully this will change once they have built-out our entire service area. But when?