If you care about the state of our nation's telecommunications infrastructure or just your own service, you should watch this Charlie Rose interview with Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg and then read the comment I posted. If you can't locate my response, it is reprinted below.
I've been following telco history for a while and clearly recall Bell of PA promising in the late 80's to bring fiber to the curb by 1996, not 2001 as Mr. Seidenberg suggests. And while Verizon is tearing up vast trunks of copper laid but never used under Philadelphia's Broad St. (and passing those costs on to consumers), I still can't get FIOS service to my relatively affluent urban neighborhood, a few blocks from the old B of PA HQ. Let's see. What else can't I get?
It's been raining here and the old copper junction box in the middle of my street is a rat's nest of bad splices that go out when the weather gets bad, so until tonight, my high speed internet had been mostly off 5 evenings running. While I could get a Vodafone chip to use overseas on unlocked Moto phones, there's no Verizon tech solution to get those same phones on to the proprietary Verizon network. Seidenberg's assertion that the phone makers pick and choose their networks is a little disingenuous. Telco(network and device) technologies leapfrog over previous iterations and provide jarring rather than smooth upgrade paths. If computer co's followed the same fitful model, can you imagine how few of today's (taken for granted) computing advances we’d have?
Verizon's tech support and trouble ticket resolution is often infuriating if you're a power user and I can only assume even moreso if you're not. Their upselling on FIOS packages confused the heck out of my senior citizen parents resulting in services they didn't need and hefty charges they didn't expect. It bordered on deceptive.
Seidenberg promised to roll out G4 later this year. I'm waiting to see how long it really takes and what I'll have to give up to get it. Like all of the second/third/fourth generation Baby Bell reincarnates this is still a company that only reacts when spurred by what little competition it gets. But since post-divestiture, it remains a quasi-monopoly and is largely unconcerned about competition, its primary business model is driven mostly by amortization schedules of its aging but expensive infrastructure. Consumer clamor for choice, open architecture and state-of-the-art services take a distant third as a business driver. At least in Europe and Asia, government oversight of and investment in their telco monopolies drives innovation that we stateside won't see for years. Telemedicine and other futuristic bandwidth on demand services that Seidenberg was riffing on are concepts that have been around since the 80's. Though their service is fairly reliable, it used to be better.
This not a company on the cusp of the telecommunications revolution, rather it has been dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. In this business sector only two things spur innovation—government oversight or true competition. Since Verizon has neither, it is content to stay its uninspired course.
I've been following telco history for a while and clearly recall Bell of PA promising in the late 80's to bring fiber to the curb by 1996, not 2001 as Mr. Seidenberg suggests. And while Verizon is tearing up vast trunks of copper laid but never used under Philadelphia's Broad St. (and passing those costs on to consumers), I still can't get FIOS service to my relatively affluent urban neighborhood, a few blocks from the old B of PA HQ. Let's see. What else can't I get?
It's been raining here and the old copper junction box in the middle of my street is a rat's nest of bad splices that go out when the weather gets bad, so until tonight, my high speed internet had been mostly off 5 evenings running. While I could get a Vodafone chip to use overseas on unlocked Moto phones, there's no Verizon tech solution to get those same phones on to the proprietary Verizon network. Seidenberg's assertion that the phone makers pick and choose their networks is a little disingenuous. Telco(network and device) technologies leapfrog over previous iterations and provide jarring rather than smooth upgrade paths. If computer co's followed the same fitful model, can you imagine how few of today's (taken for granted) computing advances we’d have?
Verizon's tech support and trouble ticket resolution is often infuriating if you're a power user and I can only assume even moreso if you're not. Their upselling on FIOS packages confused the heck out of my senior citizen parents resulting in services they didn't need and hefty charges they didn't expect. It bordered on deceptive.
Seidenberg promised to roll out G4 later this year. I'm waiting to see how long it really takes and what I'll have to give up to get it. Like all of the second/third/fourth generation Baby Bell reincarnates this is still a company that only reacts when spurred by what little competition it gets. But since post-divestiture, it remains a quasi-monopoly and is largely unconcerned about competition, its primary business model is driven mostly by amortization schedules of its aging but expensive infrastructure. Consumer clamor for choice, open architecture and state-of-the-art services take a distant third as a business driver. At least in Europe and Asia, government oversight of and investment in their telco monopolies drives innovation that we stateside won't see for years. Telemedicine and other futuristic bandwidth on demand services that Seidenberg was riffing on are concepts that have been around since the 80's. Though their service is fairly reliable, it used to be better.
This not a company on the cusp of the telecommunications revolution, rather it has been dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. In this business sector only two things spur innovation—government oversight or true competition. Since Verizon has neither, it is content to stay its uninspired course.
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