[blu] Verizon Fios

[bbj at innismir.net (Ben Jackson)]

On Mon, 8 Aug 2005, Tom Metro wrote:

> The above technology was originally developed at GTE I believe (one of
> the predecessors to Verizon). I remember hearing about it from a friend
> that was working on a test deployment. That was over 5 years ago. It
> seems like it took them forever to actually get it deployed. I think it
> has been speculated that they were dragging their feet waiting for the
> prospect of a more favorable regulatory environment so that they
> wouldn't have to share the new technology with their competitors. On the
> other hand, it wasn't fear of competition, but cluelessness that led to
> the glacially slow rollout of DSL (as others have mentioned).

To be honest, the various PUCs aren't the lightning-fast entities you may
think they are. It takes a helluva lot of convincing to let a utility
deploy a new technology. I believe it took Bell Atlantic at LEAST two
years to get regulatory approval to become a long distance provider in MA.
IIRC, Verizon started depolying FTTP early last year in FL (?). Plus, I'm
sure, that while it might have been worked on 5 years ago, doesn't mean
that it can be instanateously deployed. I'm sure VZ had to up a bunch of
their infrastructure to do this nationwide.

The other half of the equation is that GTE may have been playing with this
on an experimental basis. As in "Here, we'll give you this for $30 rather
then the market value of $150, but you get to be our guineau pigs,
m'kay?". Such things are not unheard of.

Ugh. I can't believe I'm defending Verizon, let alone the Great Telephone
Experiment. I'm going to take a shower.

					~Ben


--
/"\  Ben Jackson
\ /  bbj <at> innismir.net - http://www.innismir.net/
 X   Member of the ASCII Ribbon Campaign Against HTML Mail
/ \