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the future of broadband Thread

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Henry88:

--- Quote ---The slow death of DSL will cause the rapid rise of expensive broadband for underserved areas if Verizon’s Fusion home broadband service is any indication. Verizon on Tuesday launched its long-planned home broadband service powered by its LTE wireless network — trading slow in-ground copper for expensive airwaves on its end. And the consumer? They trade unlimited slow broadband from a wire for faster service that’s going to cost a pretty penny.
So what is this wireless panacea?

Verizon’s HomeFusion Broadband uses Verizon’s LTE network to offer homes broadband speeds of 5-12 Mbps for downloading and 2-5 MBps for uploading. For most users, this will be better than the older DSL speeds, which are about 6 Mbps close to the node but slow as you travel further away from the telco’s central office. Verizon will pop a small a cylinder packed with antennas on the side of your house in order to deliver the service, which comes with the same caps and pricing plans Verizon currently offers its cellular customers. And that’s really the rub.

All of the plans are usage-based, which changes the broadband paradigm from one of limited bits to limited bytes. Verizon’s plans begin at $59.99 of monthly access for 10 GB of data, and there is a $200 installation charge. If you consider that an hour of watching Netflix consumes about 1 gigabyte, you’re looking at about 8-10 hours of TV a month.

To be fair, Verizon says it is marketing this as an alternative for consumers in broadband-limited markets, where DSL or satellite might be the only options. In the case of satellite broadband, consumers also have caps and limited plans that cost a lot, so this compares somewhat favorably to those. But so far, HomeFusion Broadband will be available beginning later this month in Birmingham, Ala., Dallas and Nashville, Tenn., which are not exactly satellite country. Additional markets will follow.
So what’s this about the death of DSL?

Verizon may have started out as a collection of wireline telephone companies, but it has been rapidly abandoning its legacy copper by selling off its DSL businesses to Frontier Communications, Fairpoint and even the Carlyle Group. The plan, as we said back then, was to get rid of high-cost copper lines and come in later with wireless broadband that delivered better speeds. From an economics perspective, Verizon spent between $19 billion and $22 billion laying fiber to 16.5 million homes in the last few years. But it has invested a total of $22.3 billion billion in the last three years building its wireless network, which covers more than 285 million customers (all of that is not LTE spending and coverage). And those customers are likely to pay more per month and get less in terms of the data they transmit over the network.

AT&T seems to be learning from Verizon’s tactics. It recently hinted that it would sell its unimproved DSL lines (“unimproved” means they aren’t part of the fiber-to-the-node U-Verse deployment), according to Dave Burstein, editor of DSLPrime, an industry newsletter. This is, of course, after AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson admitted that DSL was an “obsolete” technology (although AT&T later tried to clarify its way out of that situation). And it makes sense. Why would AT&T want to keep DSL and its maintenance headaches around when it can offer a higher-dollar triple-play service on U-Verse and wireless access to those who can’t get anything else?
Faster, Pricier and Not Better

The problem with this transition from DSL in rural areas over to wireless, and the general loss of broadband players, can be summed up in one word: caps.

With HomeFusion, customers that may have had DSL are paying more for speed, but they are also giving up on all-you-can-eat broadband. That will put more people under the sway of caps since AT&T, Comcast(cmsca), Charter and smaller players all have caps on broadband service.

This is commonly thought to protect their pay TV businesses, because you can’t watch hours of HD television on a capped connection without somehow busting through your cap. But there’s a lot more to it. As Verizon notes in its press release for HomeFusion, the router can connect up to four wired and at least 20 wireless devices inside the home, using Wi-Fi. We’re moving to a society where everything is consumed via broadband, from our entertainment to our work, from our home automation to our security.

And once we’re there, the idea of letting that flow of traffic pass by without taking some cut from it is painful for operators that grew up charging people by the minute. In their eyes the byte is the new minute, and by golly, consumers will pay for it. As DSL and older connection technologies die, telcos want the unlimited plans that helped broadband succeed to die with it.
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http://gigaom.com/broadband/why-verizon-is-killing-dsl-cheap-broadband/

very cute indeed

MrTorso:
Great! Can't wait to be gouged!  Right now I have Verizon DSL because I refuse to deal with companies that have caps. I DL and stream a lot per month. I get 3mb down an while it is painfully slow compared to cable it is far cheaper ($38 a month) ad I don't have to worry about my account being suspended or cancelled for using to much bandwidth.

MartyS (Gromit):
 I just switched last fall from 3mbps DSL to cable, the real DSL speed was 2.8mbps and just wasn't cutting it for streaming video anymore.  I thought I'd have an issue with the 250GB cap but have only come close to it one month so far.  Price for 15mbps cable is only $5 a month more than the DSL.

 If verizon had offered 6mbps DSL I would have stayed, really only need 6 to do streaming.  My line stats were fine for 10mbps DSL but since they put fios in my area they stopped upgrading the DSL equipment, no one can get over 3mbps around here.  They really are neglecting the copper lines now.  Fios has no cap but even the cheapest plan is too expensive for what I need.

anais.jude:
As someone who has loved a smart phone and lost it....I will take getting Data Plan raped ANYDAY.


I miss you, iPhone! *sniffle* Ahhh, iPhonely

Henry88:

--- Quote ---Verizon Wireless today announced "HomeFusion Broadband," a totally uncompetitive home broadband service that delivers pretty good 4G speeds to the residents of Birmingham, Alabama, at the punitive price of $59.99 for a mere 10GB.

Nobody who's ever dealt with home broadband thinks that 10GB is an acceptable amount of monthly data for a high-speed, primary home connection. Cell phone carriers get away with low data caps in large part because they aren't primary home connections; buried in most mobile data contracts is a warning not to use the system as your primary Internet link.

Verizon's cap is lower than almost any other service designed for homes, and it's lower than the average broadband user consumes. AT&T says its average U-Verse user gobbles up about 21GB per month, as a justification for imposing a 150GB or 250GB monthly cap. Verizon, meanwhile, caps neither its DSL nor its FiOS at all.

Verizon's $50 for 10GB is half the price of what the company usually charges for mobile-phone data, and on phones, that's the industry standard. But that just shows how mobile-phone data paradigms can't replace a roomy home broadband connection. If phone-level data caps come to our homes, we'd have to give up most of our current ways of using the Internet, never mind future ones.

At home, we use the Internet very differently than we do when we're on the move. We watch video on big screens. We download albums full of music. We play games. We Skype for hours on end. We use several devices in the same house, on the same connection. According to our calculations, you'll be able to use up Verizon's HomeFusion Broadband cap in about six hours of Netflix. Per month. That's all you get.

Internet services are only going to become more data-hungry with time, too. Just look at our TVs, getting larger and higher-resolution. Look at Google and Apple serving up video to them; look at the various Internet-connected gadgets we're buying, and how they all connect to your home Wi-Fi, all at once.

We in the U.S. desparately need more home broadband competition. We have some of the highest broadband prices in the world, largely because of a lack of competition. As The Economist reported in 2010, the U.S. measures poorly in almost every gauge of broadband speed, cost, and penetration. But a service so limited that you can only use it six hours a month doesn't help the problem one bit.

Verizon Tries to Snow the FCC
There's one provider HomeFusion competes well with, of course: HughesNet. HughesNet is the much-beloved, much-despised satellite Internet system people in deep rural America use, and it charges high rates for low data caps because of the inherent high cost of satellite connections. Verizon is describing HomeFusion as a product for cities and suburbs, though, not for deep rural areas.

Yes, you could argue that Verizon's solution would be good for "light users," some small percentage of the population willing to gently sip their Internet as they check their email twice a day or whatever. I know those people exist. Some of them are on HughesNet. But the HughesNet subscribers I know generally chafe at their data caps; they rightfully think their limited Internet is a second-class service compared to what people in metro areas get.

I'm not sure Verizon intends to sell a single subscription here. Its audience is more likely members of Congress and FCC commissioners. You see, up until recently Verizon's parent company was working to build out a true home broadband solution: its award-winning FiOS, a fiber-optic system with great speed and roomy capacity.

But that came to an end in December when Verizon decided to enter a deal with cable companiesto buy some unused wireless spectrum of theirs. In exchange, it seems - though Verizon of course would deny a quid pro quo - the company decided to build out no more FiOS after the next few years, and to just resell cable Internet.

The cable spectrum buy hasn't cleared the government, though, and the FCC has been looking harshly upon wireless deals that appear to reduce competition, like the failed AT&T/T-Mobile merger. So HomeFusion is a smokescreen, a scrim, a paper banner that says "Hey, we aren't out of the competitive broadband business!" If this is their offering, they are absolutely out of the competitive broadband business.

What About the Spectrum Crunch?
The HomeFusion announcement is also odd considering that Verizon has been whining very loudly about how it doesn't have enough spectrum and about how we're on the verge of the mobile Internet becoming a massive traffic jam.

Verizon refuses to make research on its own spectrum usage public, resulting in a long string of hilarious rants from The Verge's mobile editor, Chris Ziegler, on Twitter.

"I can't think of any other industry where it's acceptable to be this vague about how you're using a national resource," he tweeted, and then, later, "this hot dog is made out of [REDACTED]. we estimate that if you don't allow us to acquire oscar meyer, we'll be out of hot dogs by 2015." Oh, just go look at the whole feed.

If Verizon is running out of spectrum, it shouldn't be introducing a new home broadband product. It also shouldn't be afraid to show the public how efficiently it's using its spectrum, if the company wants more. And if Verizon is interested in home broadband competition, it shouldn't be introducing a service with such a limited data cap that it doesn't compete.

At the moment, this all just looks like a transparent land grab, with no benefit for Americans at the end of it.
--- End quote ---

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2401196,00.asp

a double standard if i ever saw one

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