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Russell Shaw has an
interesting post about
Verizon planning to offer
all video content to their customer's set-top boxes in just 12-18 months using the fiber network. If you recall, I analyzed
Verizon's race to build out their fiber network, which I read about in a NYTimes article.
Teaser of Russell's post:
In a private note to several of his colleagues (including your truly) Dave Burstein of DSL Prime reports this morning he has found out that Verizon is about 12 to 18 months away from executing a plan to open the set-top box to all Internet video. This woud be done by means of Verizon FIOS, their broadband video service.
And by all Internet video, not just the video content provided by Verizon content partners, but all of it.
Hmmm. While Russell suggests that Internet video will be available, he doesn't give specifics how this would work. Will the set-top box feature a built-in web browser? Will it require a keyboard and mouse to navigate Internet video content on your TV and wouldn't this be a redux of the failed
Microsoft WebTV (now
MSN TV)? Or is Verizon planning instead to use a 4-way keypad on your typical TV set-top box remote control for content navigation? Plus using numbers 0-9 pressed multiple times to enter letters A-Z, which is a pain.
I would think that Verizon would have to partner with
YouTube,
Google Video, and other major video content players if they want to make it easy to navigate their Internet content simply using a 4-way keypad. They'd have to "skin" the web content in order to make it easily viewable and easily navigated from a remote control with no keyboard or mouse support.
Or perhaps, we will see a redux of the WebTV and similar devices, where future set-top boxes will have full keyboard/mouse support to enable Internet access for accessing online video content, as well as checking email, chatting/IMing, etc. Of course, a wireless keyboard/mouse would be preferred for the best 10' experience. Maybe it will support USB cameras as well for 2-way videoconferencing and audioconferencing over IP (VoIP). It could use Bluetooth for the audio part, so you can answer VoIP/video calls on your TV using your favorite Bluetooth headset, such as the
Plantronics 510-USB. Or since the set-top box is already connected to your home stereo system, you could pipe the caller's audio out your 5.1 surround sound speakers so you can have a headset-free, handset-free, speakerphone-type call in 3D surround sound!
Of course, then you'd need a really good echo canceller built into the set-top box, which will add to the unit cost of the set-top box. Still, a cool future concept. Not to mention cable companies typically charge you a maintenance fee on the set-top box, a remote control renting charge, etc. So I'm sure they could recoup their costs. So... ummm.. any takers? I can be a beta tester!
Anyway...
Check out Russell's post...
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Written by VoIP & Gadgets Blog on September 28th, 2006 with no comments.
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In an interesting
NY Times article,
Verizon says it must quickly build its fiber network to fend off rivals such as
Comcast and Vonage, which offer inexpensive voice alternatives. With cable companies and single-play VoIP providers (Vonage, Packet8, Lingo, etc.) offering cheaper voice, Verizon is in a race to stop customer defections. According to the article, Time Warner Cable, Cablevision and others are taking about 1,000 Verizon phone customers per day.
Verizon will spend about $20 billion before the end of the decade to reach 16 million homes from Florida to California. However, it is New York City with its dense population and greatest potential for revenue that has caused Verizon to spend about $3 billion to reach the city’s 3.1 million homes and apartments. With fiber, Verzion will be able to offer voice, data, and video services.
According to the article, "To sell the television services that it believes will really help it win back customers, Verizon needs to win a franchise from the city similar to what Cablevision and Time Warner Cable now have." This may be inaccurate, since I thought Congress's
H.R. 5252 removed the requirement to pay local municipalities a franchise fee? H.R. 5252 would allow providers of cable service to apply to the
FCC for a national franchise in lieu of negotiating separate franchise agreements with states and localities for providing cable service to a local area. Ironically, the bill also required VoIP providers to connect users to emergency 911 telephone service, as I
explained in a recent entry. I'll have to look into franchising requirements some more, but I thought a nationwide franchising law was passed by Congress.
Eventually FTTH (fiber to the home) will be commonplace - the race has already begun. My question is where does this leave "one trick" ponies like
Vonage which only do voice? The phone/comment lines are open...
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Written by VoIP & Gadgets Blog on August 14th, 2006 with no comments.
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Fresh from Verizon’s Chocolate-phone sugar high yesterday, the company reported its second quarter earnings today of $1.6 billion on revenues of $22.7 billion. Earnings were down from the second quarter of last year, but the company said revenues were up 25.6% from the year earlier.
Verizon can thank wireless for it’s pretty good quarter, which brought in revenues of $9.3 billion for the second quarter, up 18% from the previous year and added 1.8 million net new users. A bigger deal was the company grew its wireless data service revenues to 12.9% of total wireless service revenues, which brough in $1 billion for just wireless data. That’s a pretty big deal for a wireless operator in the U.S., though the percentage is not that impressive for carriers in countries in Europe and Asia.
On the wireline side, Verizon gave some new details of its fiber service, which added 111,000 Fios Internet users in the quarter to bring the total to 375,000. Verizon’s fiber-to-the-premises, or FTTP, is only available to 4.5 million premises, and is planned to be built out to a total of 6 million premises by the end of the year. The company might be spending aggressively to build out both its wireline broadband and wireless networks, but the company really has no other choice as its traditional phone service is dropping off rapidly — a 7.4% drop in phone lines from the previous year.
Written by Katie Fehrenbacher on August 1st, 2006 with no comments.
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Verizon is the first U.S. carrier to start selling LG’s hot new ‘Chocolate’ phone, which Verizon customers can buy online today and in stores starting August 7th. Verizon says the deal is exclusive, and that it will be the only carrier in the U.S. to sell the device. LG is trying really hard to position Chocolate as its RAZR — a genre-busting design that becomes a brand unto itself.
Maybe its working - the LG/Verizon press release says there have been one million Chocolate phones sold worldwide already. That’s pittance compared to the tens of millions of RAZRs that have helped Motorola complete its turnaround.
The new phone is part of Verizon’s plan to give its VCAST music service a boost. The Chocolate comes pre-loaded and has an iPod-style click wheel. In addition Verizon says it will drop its monthly music charge fee, for which Verizon used to charge $15 a month service fee. VCAST has been a pretty slow starter out of the gate. Verizon won’t say how many music tracks its sold, but estimates are around 3 million.
That should cause further headaches to new MVNOs, Amp’d and Helio that seem to be having trouble lately. Verizon’s design-conscious, and media-savvy moves are squarely targeting the younger demographic, the bread-and-butter for the new MVNOs. Some MVNO’s business models are based on the idea that carriers like Verizon can’t sell youth-targeted data services as well as these niche players, and don’t have cool phones. Well, Chocolate addresses that issue… for now.
Written by Katie Fehrenbacher on July 31st, 2006 with no comments.
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The FCC just released a list of 168 qualified bidders for the AWS spectrum auction coming up on August 9th, and also announced that the process will not involve the controversial blind bidding. We’ve been following the companies interested in bidding pretty closely, and there were a few surprises in the FCC filings, including a group tied to Rupert Murdoch, DirecTV and Echostar, which put down almost a billion dollars that it can use to bid on spectrum.
Wireless DBS, the consortium tied to Echostar, DirecTV, News Corp, News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch and Echostar’s Charles Ergen, qualified to bid and paid one of the largest upfront payments out of the list of interested bidders, of $972.55 million. The group’s auction plans might involve WiMAX, and prove to be crucial to these companies future as triple play becomes common place. (The upfront payment is refundable if the company doesn’t win the specturm it desires, but could be an indicator of how much the companies are willing to spend.)
The cable consortium SpectrumCo, tied to cable companies Comcast, Cox, and Time Warner Cable and Comcast CEO and Chairman Brian Roberts, among others, qualified to bid and put down another large upfront payment of $637.71 million. Other cable groups like the Washington Post’s Cable One qualified and paid an upfront payment of $3.5 million. The Dolan Family, tied to Charles Dolan, Cablevision’s Chairman, qualified and paid an upfront fee of $149.98 million.
Most of the largest U.S. phone companies qualified. T-Mobile paid an upfront fee of $583.52 million, Cingular put down $500 million, and a company tied to Verizon paid an upfront fee of $383.34 million.
The company tied to Paul Allen, Bend Cable Communications, that we previously profiled, qualified to bid, and paid an upfront fee of $176,000. At least four companies backed by spectrum speculator “Super Mario” Gabelli qualified to bid, paid a total of $3 million in upfront payments. Controversial wireless bidder Allen Salmasi and Nextwave Telecom, qualified to bid through a company called AWS Wireless, and that group put down $142.83 million.
The group called POP Wireless, backed by BPL company Current Communications, which is funded by Google and Earthlink, that we profiled earlier, was listed as “not qualified to bid.” We’ll follow up with more on the upcoming auction before the big day.
Written by Katie Fehrenbacher on July 29th, 2006 with no comments.
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Verizon Wireless’ EVDO has won itself many fans, and those fans will have a lot to cheer about later this summer or early fall, when the company rolls out an upgrade to its wireless data network.
Verizon’s key supplier Nortel Networks today announced that it will be supplying gear to Verizon and has finished trials successfully. In comparison to today’s EVDO technology, the Rev A technology is able provide peak data rates of up to 3.1 Mbps on the forward link (information flowing from the cellular base station to the subscriber) and up to 1.8 Mbps on the reverse link (information flowing from the subscriber back to the cellular base station).
Though it is highly unlikely that we will all see those speeds, but they will be substantially higher than what we get today - 200 kbps in good areas of coverage. In this week’s podsession, Niall and I discuss the the impact of 3G, and other wireless access technologies. (You can download it here.)
Written by Om Malik on July 20th, 2006 with no comments.
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The bandwidth speed battles between Cablevision and Verizon are getting bloodier. Cablevision has been pushing the envelope and is forcing Verizon to do things a Bell typically doesn’t like to do - offer real broadband level speeds.
Verizon has announced that it will sell a 50 megabits down and 10 5 megabits up connection for $90 a month. (Thanks Tom, for pointing out that the business offer was 50/10.) The service is available where Verizon FiOS network is live in the states of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.
This is an interesting move -does this mean Verizon is now just a pipe provider (and there is nothing wrong with that.) I have argued this is the best recourse for the phone companies is to sell more bandwidth at premium prices - turn the Moore’s law to their advantage.
Written by Om Malik on July 18th, 2006 with no comments.
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In a tit-for-tat battle,
Vonage today announced that it has acquired ownership of three patents from Digital Packet Licensing Inc. that enable voice over internet protocol technology (VoIP). The three acquired patents, U.S. Patent Nos. 4,782,485, 5,018,136 and 5,444,707, are directed to the compression of packetized digital signals commonly used in VoIP technology.
This acquisition of these VoIP patents is obviously in response to
recent litigation by Sprint and
also Verizon. I speculated that the rash of lawsuits by the carriers against Vonage, knocking Vonage's stock down even further, could be "sweet revenge" for bringing down their profit margins. But it could also be a precursor to a takeover of Vonage by
Sprint or Verizon. The cheaper Vonage stock goes, the less money it takes to acquire them.
In any case, Vonage is claiming that this "acquisition of these three significant patents now places Vonage in control of pending litigation against Sprint Communications LP and
Verizon Communications, among others, in federal court for infringement of one of these VoIP patents." We'll see.
As if on cue, Klausner Technologies, Inc. announced today that it has filed suit against Vonage Holdings, Inc. for patent infringement, with damages and royalties estimated at $180 million. The lawsuit asserts that the Vonage VoIP voicemail platform infringes Klausner Technologies' U.S. Patent. 5,572,576. Klausner Technologies filed a $200 million patent infringement lawsuit against America Online (AOL) before AOL gave in and licensed it for AOL Voicemail. I sincerely hope this isn't one of those "obvious" patents and Klausner Technologies isn't extorting money for obvious ideas. I hate patent trolls.
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Written by VoIP & Gadgets Blog on July 10th, 2006 with no comments.
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Vonage said today that it has been served with a
patent infringement lawsuit filed by Verizon. The lawsuit from
Verizon Service Corp. and
Verizon Laboratories Inc. alleges that
Vonage infringed on seven patents related to VoIP technology. The timing of this lawsuit is more than suspicious. With
Vonage facing lawsuits from its customers over its
failed IPO and its stock continuing a downward spiral, I'm wondering if this isn't simply
Verizon going for the jugular while
Vonage is down.
Already, the stock is down
2.24% ($9.60/share) 7.92% ($8.84) today
(Update: Broke the $8 barrier). What sweet revenge
Verizon could have simply by hurting Vonage's stock whether or not the lawsuit has any merit.
Vonage more than any other VoIP company is responsible for bringing <$30/month unlimited voice calling to residential homes which
absolutely killed the RBOCs profit margins - forcing them to price match and get into the VoIP game much sooner than they would have liked.
I wouldn't be surprised if AT&T/SBC, and other telephone companies sue
Vonage now that they are a public company. Certainly the phone companies have "deep pockets" to hurt Vonage. A few more hits to
Vonage stock by the carriers using lawsuits will certainly bring
utter glee to the boardrooms of the large carriers. Revenge is a dish best served cold...
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Written by VoIP & Gadgets Blog on June 19th, 2006 with no comments.
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Now Cingular is getting into the music business?
If I'm reading the Wall Street Journal correctly (and I usually do), then Cingular is joining the fray with Verizon and its V Cast music service to give the iPod a run for its money.
Unfortunately, the phone companies (or "wireless service providers") seemingly face a never-ending uphill battle to make their cell phones into cool, practical MP3 players that anyone wants to use. (What is it about that iPod anyway?)
Maybe Cingular's partnership with Napster, Yahoo Music and eMusic will make this turn out different?
Once again, we the gadget consuming population will vote with our wallets (nice ramp up to Election Day, eh?)
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Written by VoIP & Gadgets Blog on January 1st, 1970 with no comments.
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