My daughter Hannah recently asked me, “Do you ever think ‘Is this real?’”
I asked her to elaborate. She said, “I mean, is this real, or is it a dream?”
Everyone thinks that sometimes, I told her, mentioning that it was a pretty profound thought for a girl of five. “Yeah,” she replied, “I’ve been thinking that since I was four.”
I thought about that conversation this morning after spending 20 minutes on the phone with an automated voice attendant, trying to cancel my husband’s AOL subscription. After I was finally put in touch with a human and asked that the account be cancelled, she claimed she couldn’t hear me and that I needed to call back. A moment later, the same phone rang and worked fine. So I had to wonder if this was part of an elaborate plan by AOL to stem churn. It sounds crazy, I know. But far crazier things have happened (remember bandwidth swapping?). And it seems like the world of communications is becoming so cutthroat that service providers will do just about anything — including plugging their ears and saying “la la la” — to survive and thrive.
Then again, maybe my dim view on what was probably just a fluke was colored by all the conspiracy theories I’ve been hearing lately. And in calling them conspiracy theories, I in no way mean to indicate that I don’t think they are plausible.
One of the interesting things I read recently was an e-mail from Think Equity Partners LLC saying that it believes AT&T Inc.’s IPTV strategy and rollout schedule is likely to change. It says that Project Lightspeed, which substantially will leverage VDSL2, will be scaled back in terms of homes passed over the next two to three years. “The target had been 18 million homes in three years. Instead, we believe AT&T will put greater emphasis on its Homezone joint venture with EchoStar Satellite LLC. We believe the fundamental reason AT&T is likely to do this, is that it will realize it will need a lot more bandwidth to be competitive with all-wired IPTV when competing against cable TV and satellite companies.”
Think Equity says AT&T may blame this on any number of reasons, including slow upgrade cycle to VDSL2, Microsoft Corp.’s unstable software, lack of working HDTV and/or the pending BellSouth Corp. merger. “Either way,” says the e-mail, “we believe the fundamental reason is that AT&T likely is realizing that 25mbps isn’t going to do the trick, but rather that it needs to plan for 100mbps or more to the home today, with a path to gigabit Ethernet to every home in the next 5 to 10 years at the most.”
Another interesting theory, relative to Verizon’s TV strategy, also is circulating. In fact, you may have read about it in my Q&A with Sam Greenholtz, principal at Telecom Pragmatics Inc., in last month’s xchange (see the Then & Now article from our May issue online). His theory is that Verizon’s FiOS is a Trojan Horse for an enterprise-focused strategy to reach more businesses with fiber, given that the vast majority of current projects and those being planned are in the I-95 corridor that runs between Boston and Richmond, Va., in the Verizon footprint. He says that the large majority of major business in the Verizon footprint also is located within this same area.
I’d love to hear your input on these theories and to hear your own theories. Please send me an e-mail with your thoughts at pbernier@vpico.com.
Until next time,
Paula Bernier
Editor in Chief
