Fiber to the home, thanks to competition


Posted on August 14, 2006  /  1 Comments

In the 1990s, I was involved in intense debates in the US about how to incentivize telcos to bring fiber closer to the home. It’s finally happening, and guess what is driving it? Competition.

“Verizon will spend about $20 billion by the end of the decade to reach 16 million homes from Florida to California. But it is in New York City where Verizon has the most at stake, because New Yorkers are some of the nation’s biggest buyers of video, Internet and phone services. The company plans to spend about $3 billion to reach the city’s 3.1 million homes and apartments.

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 — another reason to get the fiber network up quickly.”

Full story

1 Comment


  1. Thanks God there is no TRC in US.
    I pay 270$ for 64kbps internet line in Sri Lanka and also 40$ for 30MB internet line in US.
    I can download 15MB file in 2 seconds in US and I spend around 2 hours in Sri Lanka for download the same file. But that is a good thing – while file downloading I can think of dear mothers of TRC.

    Telecommunication system in other countries for us is like the high school pretty girl everyone interested in dating and thinks about – talk about – whole day – but never gets chance date her. But we can look at her and talk about her all the time.