comtech,

You can look at Verizon's published numbers for the facts in the case.

seven

I don't know how you arrived at that analysis of FIOS being excellent,except your talking about Verizon's fiber backbone. I'm a broadband technician, and I can't count the number of people who had dropped cable and went to FIOS then did a 360 back to cable! You see, Verizon is akin to someone with a 300 HP car that is being beaten by another person driving a 30 HP car.They simple don't have a clue as to how they should treat their customers. I don't if you know of a competitive cable provider called RCN, who tried to compete with Comcast. Well, they lost the race and so is Verizon FIOS!

Duh!,

I think I would say that it works in some environment but not others.  

seven

Verizon proved no such thing (assuming their quarterly reports and analyst presentations to be accurate and complete).  They've long since met the financial objectives that they presented to the analysts at the beginning of the FiOS rollout. Margins, ARPU, revenue growth and margin growth have been excellent.  And they decided that there is a strong business case for doing post-Sandy restoration with FiOS rather than trying to rebuild the copper network. They have a great product, a great franchise, and a great brand.

What Verizon proved is that winning strategies don't necessarily survive executive transitions.  

I'm confused.   Hasn't Verizon already established that the business model [deploying fiber for residential services]  is problematic from a private sector perspective ?   [And VZ has cherry picked the best locations for its FiOS service so they aren't even available] Some municipalities have attempted to build their own fiber networks [UTOPIA project in Utah comes to mind] with the intention of leasing the fiber to service providers.   Their ROI is stretched out over 30 years which is totally unacceptable in the PS.  That approach has had mixed success.   I believe it was outlawed in NC.   Nothing like having a forward looking legislature in the state house.  The Google Fiber thing in KC is great for KC but don't you think its a science experiment in the end ?  

Yes, they'd be wise to be paying close attention to that. Interestingly enough, Google said at the start that it will use the network to experiment with the kinds of apps and services that require those higher speeds.  So apparently that part of the effort is indeed experimental while they try to run the network as a money-making business venture. JB

Rather than assessing it as a competitive threat, cable operators should be finding out how Google intends to encourage more bandwidth use. A partnership there could help both of their businesses.

Running it as a business and turning it into a business are two different things. Some other quotes from Schmidt from today's talk:

Google Fiber coming to “hopefully more cities if we’re able to expand our service.”

When will Google know whether they'll expand?  “We’re trying to decide now.”

Keep the threat alive, but don't commit to anything more yet. Smart. JB