# AT&T talks merger with DirecTV



## Johncv (Jun 11, 2002)

Is this good/bad for TiVo:

http://www.fiercecable.com/story/report-att-talks-merger-directv-deal-potentially-worth-40b/2014-05-01?utm_medium=nl&utm_source=internal


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

Don't think it will really effect TiVo. The DirecTiVo is way out of date compared to the Premier/Roamio units and AT&T U-verse is exempt from CableCARD rules so they aren't compatible with TiVo anyway.


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## moyekj (Jan 24, 2006)

I have a friend at work that switched from DirecTV to U-Verse just recently. Apparently U-Verse is a lot better than last time I checked on it since he said he didn't notice much of any picture quality degradation and he claims to have run a test where he was recording 4 HD channels at once and streaming an HD Netflix title all at the same time, which I told him I didn't think was possible given bandwidth limitations. My brief research seems to show that the top AT&T broadband tier over copper is 32 Mbps downstream (5 Mbps up) to share between Internet & TV.

So I think U-Verse may be a viable competitor now and there's no technical reason why TiVo could not strike a deal with them. I think the AT&T model of video over IP is going to eventually take over the video over QAM model, especially since the cable providers are the largest broadband providers.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

Yeah they're not using regular DSL in U-verse areas. They're using VDSL, which is fiber to the pole and then copper to the house. As long as the copper run is less then 1000' they can get very high data rates. (I think it's like 60Mbps) Since they are using H.264 an HD station should only require 8-10Mbps, which means there is easily enough bandwidth for your friend's test.


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

Dan203 said:


> Since they are using H.264 an HD station should only require 8-10Mbps, which means there is easily enough bandwidth for your friend's test.


I think ATT compresses it down to 5-6Mbps, which is why their HD quality is pretty much the absolute worst. They just don't have enough bandwidth to do decent internet and HDTV video streams at the same time.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

Maybe that's why they want DirecTV. If they can shift the TV over to DSS and then use the VDSL for internet and VOD it would make them more competitive with the cable companies.


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

Dan203 said:


> Maybe that's why they want DirecTV. If they can shift the TV over to DSS and then use the VDSL for internet and VOD it would make them more competitive with the cable companies.


Probably, but it should never be allowed to happen by the regulators. If AT&T wants to compete, buying DirecTV for $40 billion is NOT the answer. Just think of how much FTTH they could deploy for $40 billion. The problem is that AT&T isn't interested in competing. It just wants to take the easy way out and reduce competition at the same time so it can jack up prices and screw over consumers to max out its profits.


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## moyekj (Jan 24, 2006)

tarheelblue32 said:


> I think ATT compresses it down to 5-6Mbps, which is why their HD quality is pretty much the absolute worst.


 That was my thinking as well, but remember it is H.264 and Netflix Super HD streams max out around 6 Mbps and look remarkably good (better than many "HD" mpeg2 channels in my cable lineup).


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## buscuitboy (Aug 8, 2005)

I'm still on the fence about this merger, but I think this might be good in some ways. Mainly because it could then possibly allow "bundle" deals that could compete better with cable companies. I am with Comcast and currently have a "double play" package (internet and TV for $99). This allows for a big discount over trying to go with DirectTV and Uverse internet independently. 

I have looked into switching over to DirecTV, but if I did, internet only with Comcast would increase too much to basically void any savings. And going with Uverse internet along with DirecTV would be more expensive as well. It never made any sense for my needs. Having DirecTV and AT&T officially merged could hopefully bring some better prices & competition. 

Of course, from my understanding, ANY DSL still can't compete with cable internet either. Uverse in my area caps out at 18Mbs. Comcast just upgraded my internet for free to 105Mbs so it could still be a challenge if they merge. Although, I recently did read an article how AT&T is moving forward with their "gigapower" technology so maybe its possible, but would still be a game of catch up.


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

buscuitboy said:


> I'm still on the fence about this merger, but I think this might be good in some ways. Mainly because it could then possibly allow "bundle" deals that could compete better with cable companies. I am with Comcast and currently have a "double play" package (internet and TV for $99). This allows for a big discount over trying to go with DirectTV and Uverse internet independently.
> 
> I have looked into switching over to DirecTV, but if I did, internet only with Comcast would increase too much to basically void any savings. And going with Uverse internet along with DirecTV would be more expensive as well. It never made any sense for my needs. Having DirecTV and AT&T officially merged could hopefully bring some better prices & competition.
> 
> Of course, from my understanding, ANY DSL still can't compete with cable internet either. Uverse in my area caps out at 18Mbs. Comcast just upgraded my internet for free to 105Mbs so it could still be a challenge if they merge. Although, I recently did read an article how AT&T is moving forward with their "gigapower" technology so maybe its possible, but would still be a game of catch up.


No, no, and just no. AT&T should be deploying FTTH, not reducing competition by buying up a major competitor in the paid TV market.


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## JosephB (Nov 19, 2010)

AT&T will never do fiber to the home. They have some token deployments that they've talked about but if they have more than 100,000 subscribers on Gigapower in 5 years, I'll eat my hat.

AT&T's end goal is to move everyone over to LTE, except where they've already spent money on U-Verse. They've stopped additional deployments with no sign of starting again. 

Over time DirecTV would morph into just another pipe for AT&T to deliver bits to you. It's an infinitely more efficient way to broadcast data, particularly video. They could put an LTE modem in every set top box so that they all have two way capability. 

Whether they buy DirecTV or not, you can forget about deploying FTTH.


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

JosephB said:


> Whether they buy DirecTV or not, you can forget about deploying FTTH.


If that is their final decision, then fine. If they won't do it, eventually someone else will and all of AT&T's wirelines can just wither away and die a slow death. But we certainly can't reward their poor decision not to deploy FTTH by allowing them to buy up DirecTV. That would just be idiotic.


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## JosephB (Nov 19, 2010)

tarheelblue32 said:


> If that is their final decision, then fine. If they won't do it, eventually someone else will and all of AT&T's wirelines can just wither away and die a slow death. But we certainly can't reward their poor decision not to deploy FTTH by allowing them to buy up DirecTV. That would just be idiotic.


Uh, they *are* a private company, they can kind of do what they want with their money if it won't result in a monopoly (which this wouldn't). Saying they have to build out FTTH in order to be allowed to buy DirecTV makes no sense.


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

JosephB said:


> Uh, they *are* a private company, they can kind of do what they want with their money if it won't result in a monopoly (which this wouldn't). Saying they have to build out FTTH in order to be allowed to buy DirecTV makes no sense.


Great, well while our incompetent/corrupt regulators over at the FCC are letting Comcast/NBC Universal buy Time Warner Cable, letting AT&T buy DirecTV, and letting Sprint buy T-Mobile and Dish Network, maybe they can get Disney/ABC/ESPN to buy Verizon too. With net neutrality relegated to the dustbin of history, all those mergers will certainly be great for corporate executives and shareholders, not to mention the future private sector job prospects for FCC employees. If I didn't know any better, I would swear that we must have a Republican in the White House. God bless the United Corporations of Amerika.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

I don't think it's that bad of an idea. U-Verse isn't really in that many markets, and building it out to support the same number of subscribers as DirecTV would cost significantly more then $40B. FTTH is a good idea, but it's really, really, expensive. With DirecTV in the fold it allows AT&T to be completely wireless. They can use DSS for TV, LTE for internet and cellular for phone. And in areas that support it they could roll in U-Verse for internet (less latency and higher speeds) and POTS for phone.

It actually makes quite a bit of sense and if anything will put more pressure on cable companies to lower prices. As it is now the only way to get all the services cable offers is by paying at least 2 different companies. Having a direct competitor that offers all the same services could only be a good thing.


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

Dan203 said:


> I don't think it's that bad of an idea. U-Verse isn't really in that many markets


U-verse currently has about 11 million subscribers, which is more than FIOS has and about the same number as Time Warner Cable, the second largest cable company in the country.



Dan203 said:


> and building it out to support the same number of subscribers as DirecTV would cost significantly more then $40B.


So let's see here. It would cost AT&T approximately $1,000/home to build out FTTH, so $40 billion could get them 40 million customers. DirecTV has about 20 million subscribers, so if AT&T buys DirecTV for $40 billion, then they would pay about $2,000/subscriber.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

tarheelblue32 said:


> So let's see here. It would cost AT&T approximately $1,000/home to build out FTTH, so $40 billion could get them 40 million customers. DirecTV has about 20 million subscribers, so if AT&T buys DirecTV for $40 billion, then they would pay about $2,000/subscriber.


I meant potential subscribers. See it costs AT&T $1,000 per home to do FTTH, but with DSS the costs are virtually $0. There are some equipment and installation costs, but those are typically recouped up front or via a monthly fee.

AT&T is a huge corporation. Their one and only goal is money. They would not even consider this if FTTH was cheaper.


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

Dan203 said:


> I meant potential subscribers. See it costs AT&T $1,000 per home to do FTTH, but with DSS the costs are virtually $0. There are some equipment and installation costs, but those are typically recouped up front or via a monthly fee.
> 
> AT&T is a huge corporation. Their one and only goal is money. They would not even consider this if FTTH was cheaper.


Cheaper is not always better, especially in the long run. The main problem here is short-term thinking. Wall street bankers have made corporate executives become obsessed with the profits of the next quarter rather than the profits for the next 50 years. We need corporate profits to be based on sound, long-term investments in this country's future, rather than corporations seeing how much they can screw over their customers to make a quick buck for the next quarterly statement.

The government should absolutely not allow AT&T to buy DirecTV, as it would reduce competition and be detrimental to consumers in the long term. And if AT&T won't invest in a FTTH network for the 21st century, then federal, state, and local governments should be investing to build out their own FTTH networks to compete directly with U-verse and run them into the ground. We have let large corporations get away with murder in this country for decades, and it's time to put a stop to it.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

I don't think the government has a standing for blocking this merger. They're two completely separate companies with very little overlap, so they wont be creating a monopoly. This is much, much, less of a threat then Comcast buying TWC, and that looks like it's going to clear.

Although I agree that local governments should be investing in FTTH. A few towns/cities have done it and then leased the rights to use the fiber to service providers. But because the fiber is owned by the public the prices are much lower. That's something I'd like to see my town do.


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

Dan203 said:


> Although I agree that local governments should be investing in FTTH. A few towns/cities have done it and then leased the rights to use the fiber to service providers. But because the fiber is owned by the public the prices are much lower. That's something I'd like to see my town do.


Yes, I would like to see that too. I just hope you don't live in one of the 20-something states where Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, and Time Warner Cable have managed to bribe state legislators into passing laws making it illegal for municipalities to build out their own fiber networks. Sadly, my state is one of them.

In related news, all four of the Republicans running in the primary for the U.S. Senate seat in my state all said this week in a debate that they oppose net neutrality and would not allow the federal government to intervene in the business interests of cable and phone companies. But I'm sure that the campaign donations from AT&T, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon had nothing to do with their stance on the issue. You gotta love Republicans.

http://stopthecap.com/2014/05/01/no...all-over-themselves-attacking-net-neutrality/


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

I do, but according to this...

http://arstechnica.com/business/201...-internet-will-be-invalidated-fcc-chair-says/

the FCC is going to invalidate those laws.


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## JosephB (Nov 19, 2010)

tarheelblue32 said:


> Great, well while our incompetent/corrupt regulators over at the FCC are letting Comcast/NBC Universal buy Time Warner Cable, letting AT&T buy DirecTV, and letting Sprint buy T-Mobile and Dish Network, maybe they can get Disney/ABC/ESPN to buy Verizon too. With net neutrality relegated to the dustbin of history, all those mergers will certainly be great for corporate executives and shareholders, not to mention the future private sector job prospects for FCC employees. If I didn't know any better, I would swear that we must have a Republican in the White House. God bless the United Corporations of Amerika.


AT&T/DirecTV is a completely different animal than Comcast/TWC or anything else. AT&T and DirecTV overlap very little. DirecTV doesn't compete with AT&T in wireless, wireline broadband, or telephone service. They only compete in MVPD service, and the combined AT&T/DirecTV would still have fewer customers under the FCC's previous rules, rules that were ruled unconstitutional. I was a two time Obama voter, but even I can't see the regulatory justification for denying AT&T/DirecTV (but there are a host of reasons not to allow TWC/Comcast, even though I think that one will make it through too)



tarheelblue32 said:


> U-verse currently has about 11 million subscribers, which is more than FIOS has and about the same number as Time Warner Cable, the second largest cable company in the country.
> 
> So let's see here. It would cost AT&T approximately $1,000/home to build out FTTH, so $40 billion could get them 40 million customers. DirecTV has about 20 million subscribers, so if AT&T buys DirecTV for $40 billion, then they would pay about $2,000/subscriber.


AT&T only has around 5 million video subscribers on U-Verse. That's the only number that matters. Internet-only U-Verse subscribers don't count because DirecTV doesn't offer any internet services. AT&T is currently the 7th largest MVPD, not the second or third. A combined AT&T/DirecTV would be the second largest, if Comcast/TWC happens. DirecTV is currently second already.

And where did you get the number for how much it would cost to build out FTTH? The difference between sinking that $40 billion into capital expenditures and sinking it into DirecTV is that DirecTV is already generating cash flow and profits. Spending the $40 billion on burying fiber means that they have to wait to see any money, if they see any at all (since the max penetration is generally around 30%...a lot of the fiber they put into the ground will never be used).

I live in an AT&T state, I would LOVE to see fiber to the home, but I am also realistic and understand why AT&T would rather go after DirecTV. I also understand that there's not really much that the government can do to force AT&T to do one thing vs. another. We still live in a free society and private companies are free to spend their capital how they wish.


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## atmuscarella (Oct 11, 2005)

My basic view is we are heading to few (3 or 4) large companies that deliver all these services (Pay TV, Wired & Wireless Internet access, and telephone via wired & wireless services). I hope we end up with 4 but we could only have 3 depends on what happens in the wireless arena.


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

Dan203 said:


> I do, but according to this...
> 
> http://arstechnica.com/business/201...-internet-will-be-invalidated-fcc-chair-says/
> 
> the FCC is going to invalidate those laws.


LOL yeah right. I'll believe that when I see it happen.


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

JosephB said:


> And where did you get the number for how much it would cost to build out FTTH?


http://fastnetnews.com/fiber-news/175-d/4835-fiber-economics-quick-and-dirty



JosephB said:


> I live in an AT&T state, I would LOVE to see fiber to the home, but I am also realistic and understand why AT&T would rather go after DirecTV. I also understand that there's not really much that the government can do to force AT&T to do one thing vs. another. We still live in a free society and private companies are free to spend their capital how they wish.


Yeah there is very little the government can do to enroucage AT&T to do the right thing. Except killing any mergers/acquisitions they want to do, classify them as common carriers, put them under government regulated pricing, taking away their tax deductions/credits, revoke their wireless spectrum licenses, forcefully break up the company under antitrust laws. Yeah the government is simply powerless to influence their behavior.


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## JosephB (Nov 19, 2010)

tarheelblue32 said:


> http://fastnetnews.com/fiber-news/175-d/4835-fiber-economics-quick-and-dirty
> 
> Yeah there is very little the government can do to enroucage AT&T to do the right thing. Except killing any mergers/acquisitions they want to do, classify them as common carriers, put them under government regulated pricing, taking away their tax deductions/credits, revoke their wireless spectrum licenses, forcefully break up the company under antitrust laws. Yeah the government is simply powerless to influence their behavior.


The government has to have a compelling reason to kill a given merger. To force AT&T to expand FTTH is not a valid reason they shouldn't be able to buy DirecTV.


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

JosephB said:


> The government has to have a compelling reason to kill a given merger. To force AT&T to expand FTTH is not a valid reason they shouldn't be able to buy DirecTV.


Sure it is.


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## JosephB (Nov 19, 2010)

tarheelblue32 said:


> Sure it is.


In your mind it might be, but under the laws of the United States it is not.


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

JosephB said:


> In your mind it might be, but under the laws of the United States it is not.


Laws can (and should) be changed.

But even under current law, I think the standard is whether or not the merger will reduce competition and hurt consumers. There is no doubt that this merger would indeed reduce competition. Right now I can get TV from either Time Warner Cable, Dish Network, DirecTV, or AT&T U-verse. A merger between DirecTV and AT&T would reduce my choices from 4 to 3. Coincidentally, that is the same amount that competition would have been reduced for me in wireless if AT&T had been allowed to merge with T-Mobile. That merger, thankfully, was stopped by regulators. If going from 4 to 3 competitors in the wireless market was seen as an unacceptable reduction in competition, then I certainly think going from 4 to 3 paid TV competitors should be also.


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## Diana Collins (Aug 21, 2002)

AT&T buying DirecTV!! Human sacrifice!!! Dogs and cats living together!!! Mass hysteria!!! 

Well, if it happens, it will just confirm my switch to FiOS and Roamios.


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## atmuscarella (Oct 11, 2005)

tarheelblue32 said:


> Laws can (and should) be changed.
> 
> But even under current law, I think the standard is whether or not the merger will reduce competition and hurt consumers. There is no doubt that this merger would indeed reduce competition. Right now I can get TV from either Time Warner Cable, Dish Network, DirecTV, or AT&T U-verse. A merger between DirecTV and AT&T would reduce my choices from 4 to 3. Coincidentally, that is the same amount that competition would have been reduced for me in wireless if AT&T had been allowed to merge with T-Mobile. That merger, thankfully, was stopped by regulators. If going from 4 to 3 competitors in the wireless market was seen as an unacceptable reduction in competition, then I certainly think going from 4 to 3 paid TV competitors should be also.


Must be nice to live where you do. I have the choice of 2 pay TV operators (Dish or Direct) and 1 wired Internet provider (Frontier DSL).

But honestly I think most people have 3 pay TV choices and 2 wired Internet choices so you and I are exception on opposite ends.


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

atmuscarella said:


> Must be nice to live where you do. I have the choice of 2 pay TV operators (Dish or Direct) and 1 wired Internet provider (Frontier DSL).
> 
> But honestly I think most people have 3 pay TV choices and 2 wired Internet choices so you and I are exception on opposite ends.


Even though not everybody has access to all of the providers, the fact that providers set their prices nationally (or across all markets they serve) means that competition on markets other than your own can still have a beneficial effect to you. The more consolidation that takes place in the telecommunications industry, even if your markets aren't directly impacted, the worse the overall competition picture will become resulting in increased prices for consumers.


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## JosephB (Nov 19, 2010)

Just because a transaction reduces the number of competitors doesn't mean it will automatically be blocked. In *most* areas the number of competitors in the MVPD market won't change at all. In the areas where AT&T actually does have U-Verse TV, the market will go from at least 4 to at least 3, which is the number of competitors there were before AT&T got into the market.


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## mattack (Apr 9, 2001)

buscuitboy said:


> Of course, from my understanding, ANY DSL still can't compete with cable internet either. Uverse in my area caps out at 18Mbs.


Except for in price.. I have no idea how much speed one needs for e.g. Netflix (esp multiple streams), but if DSL is fast enough for that, I think for most people it would be "enough".

At least from the ads I've seen, U-verse seems to *sometimes* be allowing naked DSL for the advertised $19.99 or whatever. (For a long time, in the fine print, they'd say they require a home phone line for that price.) I realize this is only a halfhearted endorsement, but I'm all for cheaper/slower combinations, for those it would be good enough.

(I have cable internet + TV, but if DSL was enough for me and DSL + cable TV was cheaper, I'd do it.. currently I'm on a bundle that's I think cheaper than that though.)


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## True Colors (Oct 19, 2006)

AT&T is not going to pay to extend fiber into homes JUST because it would be nice to have. Profit based businesses do not operate that way.

Businesses need to be able to justify spending extra money by showing an expected return on investment. For fiber to the home, I just don't see it. Tons of extra money going out, very little extra coming back in. 

DirecTV and AT&T already operate much more like business partners than competitors. Did you know that AT&T has been an authorized dealer of DirecTV services for years? In fact, a good chunk of customers already have DirecTV services and ATT internet service combined into a single bill. 

Lots of differences.... 

Wireline vs wireless

AT&T Uverse is available almost nowhere. DirecTV is available almost everywhere. 

Uverse is concentrated in urban areas in a limited number of states. DirecTV does well in rural areas outside the reach of wireline providers.

Uverse is limited to a relatively low number of TV sets within a household. DirecTV has no maximum limit(great for hotels, etc.)

You could keep going on with that, but the point is easy to see. AT&T buying DirecTV would not be eliminating a competitor from the marketplace, because the two companies barely compete against each other as it is. 

TC


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

True Colors said:


> AT&T is not going to pay to extend fiber into homes JUST because it would be nice to have. Profit based businesses do not operate that way.
> 
> Businesses need to be able to justify spending extra money by showing an expected return on investment. For fiber to the home, I just don't see it. Tons of extra money going out, very little extra coming back in.


This is describing perfectly a failure of free-market capitalism. And whenever a market failure such as this occurs, the proper response is to have the government step in and make the needed corrections to the system. FTTH has enormous, long-term benefits and economic returns for consumers, internet-related businesses, and society as a whole. The fact that a for-profit business deploying the fiber is unable to capture as much of those societal returns in the form of their own profits does not mean it should not be built. The government needs to step in and build it.


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## True Colors (Oct 19, 2006)

tarheelblue32 said:


> This is describing perfectly a failure of free-market capitalism.


Okay, well let's look at some of the other countries that do not have free market capitalism. How are they doing with their fiber to the home deployment.

In other words, your political views are clouding your basic common sense here.

And I disagree that the benefits would be "enormous." For the overwhelming majority of people it would not make the slightest difference.

TC


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

True Colors said:


> In other words, your political views are clouding your basic common sense here.


I was thinking the exact same thing about you.


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## Bigg (Oct 31, 2003)

AT&T should do FTTH for 100% of their customers, and Verizon should finish their build-out. Unfortunately, the AT&T executives, and the new executives at Verizon have the attention span of a gnat, and act like 2-year-olds saying "I WANT IT NOW", having a total inability to think about the long term ROI. If they had brains and competence, they would be moving to FTTH over their entire territory.

This merger sort of makes sense, in the sense that D* is in an awkward position not being able to offer internet, versus Comcast and other cable companies that can, but at the same time, it would create a weird mismatch between D* and AT&T in some areas, and D* and another phone company in others.

U-Verse is a wretched POS, but the answer to that is FTTH, not buying a satellite company. AT&T is in a good position in that they can build FTTH and be competitive, whereas D* has nothing on the internet side unless they partner, and anything that's really fast enough to compete is also fast enough to have it's own TV service.


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

Is there any particular technical reason why DirecTV doesn't do satellite internet? Dish Network does it right? I mean, I know it probably sucks ass in speed and latency and probably has a low data cap, but for people in rural areas with no other means of broadband internet service it would be better than nothing (or dial-up) right?


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## HarperVision (May 14, 2007)

tarheelblue32 said:


> Is there any particular technical reason why DirecTV doesn't do satellite internet? Dish Network does it right? I mean, I know it probably sucks ass in speed and latency and probably has a low data cap, but for people in rural areas with no other means of broadband internet service it would be better than nothing (or dial-up) right?


Yes they do, I believe it's HughesNet. http://www.directv.com/DTVAPP/content/packages/internet/hughesnet


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## jwbelcher (Nov 13, 2007)

Hughesnet used to be called DirecWay back when it was owned by DirecTV. I believe it was spun off and is now part of EchoStar.


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## JosephB (Nov 19, 2010)

tarheelblue32 said:


> Is there any particular technical reason why DirecTV doesn't do satellite internet? Dish Network does it right? I mean, I know it probably sucks ass in speed and latency and probably has a low data cap, but for people in rural areas with no other means of broadband internet service it would be better than nothing (or dial-up) right?


You just listed all the reasons DirecTV doesn't do satellite internet.

HughesNet was formerly part of the same parent company as DirecTV. However, due to the very limited market, it's not a money maker. Latency sucks (guaranteed minimum 500ms ping due to the speed of light and 44,472 mile round trip to space and back), capacity sucks, and satellites are expensive and so is the in-home equipment. With all of that, the only real market is for folks who can't get DSL or cable. Hell, now, LTE is even price competitive, and beats satellite internet at latency (caps are about the same).

Some of DirecTV's satellites were actually intended to be for internet access, but I believe it was when News Corp bought a controlling interest (or maybe Liberty, don't remember...it was when the management changed at any rate) they decided they needed to get into HD quick and to forget about the internet stuff. They repurposed the Spaceway satellites for local and national HD coverage and spun off Hughes to Echostar.

Even with HughesNet, DISH knows satellite internet isn't a viable competitor nationally. That's why Charlie Ergen bought up all that wireless spectrum. Satellite will serve a niche, but it won't keep him rich.


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## Bigg (Oct 31, 2003)

JosephB said:


> Latency sucks (guaranteed minimum 500ms ping due to the speed of light and 44,472 mile round trip to space and back), capacity sucks, and satellites are expensive and so is the in-home equipment.


This. The latency is the big killer. You can get some crazy bandwidth over satellite, but it's also crazy expensive. The US military can bring gigabit speeds into virtually anywhere in the world, but you can bet that costs millions upon millions of dollars. And it doesn't scale out well, as even a spot beam might be 50 or 100 miles wide, where a cable node might be for one block or building.


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## JosephB (Nov 19, 2010)

Bigg said:


> This. The latency is the big killer. You can get some crazy bandwidth over satellite, but it's also crazy expensive. The US military can bring gigabit speeds into virtually anywhere in the world, but you can bet that costs millions upon millions of dollars. And it doesn't scale out well, as even a spot beam might be 50 or 100 miles wide, where a cable node might be for one block or building.


Well in the military's case, it doesn't matter if it's a spot beam or not, since they are the only user on it.


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## Bigg (Oct 31, 2003)

JosephB said:


> Well in the military's case, it doesn't matter if it's a spot beam or not, since they are the only user on it.


True.


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## Johncv (Jun 11, 2002)

What going to change when AT&T buy DirecTV? Look like it going to happen.

Like to see a better box than the crappy Genie box I use now.  Want a Roamio but I know it not going to happen.


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## JosephB (Nov 19, 2010)

DirecTV is so big, and AT&T is so conservative, it will take a while before you see any changes. I suspect over time the U-Verse video product will go away and of course over time AT&T's fingerprints will be all over the hardware and service, but it won't be immediate at any rate.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

I'm betting that when this happen AT&T phases out U-verse TV and switches all their TV customers over to DirecTV. Basically they will move all linear TV to the existing DirecTV infrastructure and use their VDSL infrastructure for internet and VOD. This will allow them to better compete with cable companies because with their VDSL network dedicated to just internet they should be able to offer internet speeds that are similar to cable companies (i.e. 30-60Mbps)


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## moyekj (Jan 24, 2006)

Dan203 said:


> I'm betting that when this happen AT&T phases out U-verse TV and switches all their TV customers over to DirecTV. Basically they will move all linear TV to the existing DirecTV infrastructure and use their VDSL infrastructure for internet and VOD. This will allow them to better compete with cable companies because with their VDSL network dedicated to just internet they should be able to offer internet speeds that are similar to cable companies (i.e. 30-60Mbps)


 What about customers that can't get satellite reception? I'm guessing they will leave existing U-verse customers as is at worse even if they no longer promote the service.


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## moedaman (Aug 21, 2012)

Dan203 said:


> I'm betting that when this happen AT&T phases out U-verse TV and switches all their TV customers over to DirecTV. Basically they will move all linear TV to the existing DirecTV infrastructure and use their VDSL infrastructure for internet and VOD. This will allow them to better compete with cable companies because with their VDSL network dedicated to just internet they should be able to offer internet speeds that are similar to cable companies (i.e. 30-60Mbps)


30 - 60Mps is so last year.  Comcast just doubled my speed from 50/10 to 105/20. And what about the upload speed? Unless ATT goes completely FTTH (which it won't), can they match what the cablecos are doing?


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

moyekj said:


> What about customers that can't get satellite reception? I'm guessing they will leave existing U-verse customers as is at worse even if they no longer promote the service.


Perhaps. I doubt the number of people in that camp is very large though.


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## MikeAndrews (Jan 17, 2002)

Dan203 said:


> I'm betting that when this happen AT&T phases out U-verse TV and switches all their TV customers over to DirecTV. Basically they will move all linear TV to the existing DirecTV infrastructure and use their VDSL infrastructure for internet and VOD. This will allow them to better compete with cable companies because with their VDSL network dedicated to just internet they should be able to offer internet speeds that are similar to cable companies (i.e. 30-60Mbps)


Not a chance. The UVerse UI, DVR, and performance is much better than DirecTV. It's the best next thing to a TiVo.


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

Dan203 said:


> Perhaps. I doubt the number of people in that camp is very large though.


I would have to cut down a whole bunch of trees in my back yard to get a satellite signal, and that isn't going to happen. I like my trees where they are.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

moedaman said:


> 30 - 60Mps is so last year.  Comcast just doubled my speed from 50/10 to 105/20. And what about the upload speed? Unless ATT goes completely FTTH (which it won't), can they match what the cablecos are doing?


VDSL has a theoretical max of 55Mbps down and 3Mbps up. However there is a newer VDSL2 spec that goes up to 200Mbps max, with any portion of that being provisioned to up or down.

But no matter what cable will always have the fatter pipe. With DOCSIS 3.0 you can bind an unlimited number of channels so if they went pure IP on a 1000Mhz system the theoretical throughput would be over 7Gbps.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

MikeAndrews said:


> Not a chance. The UVerse UI, DVR, and performance is much better than DirecTV. It's the best next thing to a TiVo.


Well they may merge their DVR code into a new box for the DirecTV system. I'm talking about using the existing DSS infrastructure for broadcasting linear TV.

DirecTV has two major disadvantages over cable... Lack of internet and lack of real VOD. U-Verse has both of those but is very limited in it's linear video capabilities because of constrained bandwidth. By shifting all the linear TV over to DSS and using it's VDSL infrastructure strictly for internet and VOD they will be able to compete more directly with cable.

Honestly I really think this is a good move for both companies. It allows them to better compete with cable companies and might actually give consumers a better alternative.


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## Bigg (Oct 31, 2003)

Dan203 said:


> I'm betting that when this happen AT&T phases out U-verse TV and switches all their TV customers over to DirecTV. Basically they will move all linear TV to the existing DirecTV infrastructure and use their VDSL infrastructure for internet and VOD. This will allow them to better compete with cable companies because with their VDSL network dedicated to just internet they should be able to offer internet speeds that are similar to cable companies (i.e. 30-60Mbps)


Nope. Not going to happen. There are stupid people out there who just won't get satellite, but more realistically, there are people who live in the woods, and a lot of people who live in MDUs and can't mount satellite dishes. However, from what I have seen AT&T has done a poor job of setting MDUs up with U-Verse, even though it's an ideal setting for a VDSL service, and in some cases, they could even put the VRAD immediately adjacent to or in a building and offer really fast VDSL connectivity on the same platform they use for wiring streets.

Given that they have an IPTV platform, they should also get more aggressive with doing gigabit FTTB, where they can hand off the fiber to ethernet for the final run to an apartment or condo. They also have the advantage of being able to mix FTTN, FTTB, and FTTH on the same platform with varying provision speeds.

Not that I like U-Verse, I think it's a wretched POS, but they definitely aren't going to dump it.


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## Diana Collins (Aug 21, 2002)

We have been DirecTV customers for 12.5 years (we are switching to FIOS and TiVos in late summer) and so have lived through 3 different owners of DirecTV. None of the changes in ownership have made one bit of difference in the overall service. The biggest difference is that when News Corp owned DirecTV they killed the relationship with TiVo in favor of their own DVRs. I don't expect AT&T will have any more effect than Hughes, News Corp or Liberty did. Likewise, I don't expect Uverse will change. This is about programming contracts, back office savings, and overall profitability, not about merging or combining services.


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## JosephB (Nov 19, 2010)

Diana Collins said:


> We have been DirecTV customers for 12.5 years (we are switching to FIOS and TiVos in late summer) and so have lived through 3 different owners of DirecTV. None of the changes in ownership have made one bit of difference in the overall service. The biggest difference is that when News Corp owned DirecTV they killed the relationship with TiVo in favor of their own DVRs. I don't expect AT&T will have any more effect than Hughes, News Corp or Liberty did. Likewise, I don't expect Uverse will change. This is about programming contracts, back office savings, and overall profitability, not about merging or combining services.


I don't buy that. First off none of those prior companies fully purchased DirecTV. They only owned controlling interests. If AT&T buys every share of stock and integrates it, even if it's operated as a unit and not merged with U-Verse, there will be significant changes. That's just the way AT&T operates.


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## Diana Collins (Aug 21, 2002)

JosephB said:


> ...They only owned controlling interests...


I think Sir Rupert would disagree with your characterization. 

News Corp had a fairly major impact on a lot of the business. They shut down DirecTV Brazil and Mexico, transferring customers to the corresponding SKY services. They sold off Hughes Network Solutions to SkyTerra (later acquired by Echostar). They sold their interest in PanAmSat. All of this had the effect of making DirecTV a satellite TV company only, instead of the technology conglomerate that Hughes had been. This was in keeping with News Corp's goal of dominating satellite TV in the Western Hemisphere, and treating DirecTV as "SKY America." The only thing that happened that viewers noticed was the move into HD programming, which would have happened no matter who owned the company.


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## JosephB (Nov 19, 2010)

Diana Collins said:


> I think Sir Rupert would disagree with your characterization.
> 
> News Corp had a fairly major impact on a lot of the business. They shut down DirecTV Brazil and Mexico, transferring customers to the corresponding SKY services. They sold off Hughes Network Solutions to SkyTerra (later acquired by Echostar). They sold their interest in PanAmSat. All of this had the effect of making DirecTV a satellite TV company only, instead of the technology conglomerate that Hughes had been. This was in keeping with News Corp's goal of dominating satellite TV in the Western Hemisphere, and treating DirecTV as "SKY America." The only thing that happened that viewers noticed was the move into HD programming, which would have happened no matter who owned the company.


Yes, but DirecTV was never a fully consolidated subsidiary of News Corp. AT&T would be buying every outstanding share, not a 20% supervoting share like News and Liberty did.


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## Bigg (Oct 31, 2003)

The biggest change will just be bundling, but they do that to a limited extent now. They will offer U-Verse VDSL bundles with satellite now, which they currently don't. And some wireless bundles.

It will put them in a kind of awkward position with Verizon though, in the markets that Verizon bundles with D*, but I guess they are all buddy-buddy among the big telcos anyways.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

Isn't Verizon looking to sell off their POTS/DSL business anyway? Maybe AT&T will buy that up so they can offer these bundles in all markets?


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## JosephB (Nov 19, 2010)

Dan203 said:


> Isn't Verizon looking to sell off their POTS/DSL business anyway? Maybe AT&T will buy that up so they can offer these bundles in all markets?


AT&T just sold off all of their wireline business in Connecticut, including U-Verse (Verizon also included FiOS in the areas they sold off).

I don't think either of them are terribly interested in their wireline service areas anymore. In areas that are dense enough to make a decent profit, sure, but the rural areas are going to get hit hard by both Verizon and AT&T exiting those areas.


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## stevel (Aug 23, 2000)

Verizon sold off all their POTS/DSL/FiOS business in northern New England to Fairpoint Communications, a tiny SC-based carrier. It was an extremely bumpy transition for many years. Fairpoint service is fine, but they haven't made any improvements in all the years since and stopped their fiber deployment. I'm lucky to have fiber Internet service, and am glad I don't have to deal with Comcast, but I would like to see some forward motion.


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## JosephB (Nov 19, 2010)

Government intervention, including funding and subsidies and not just from the Federal level, will be required to improve networks, especially those outside of major urban areas. Title II classification of broadband as a utility is step one, and then step two is to force universal service (although it's hard to say who has to service a given area....it was easy to mandate Ma Bell service the whole country when they were the only phone company) and then some kind of universal service fee like applies to landline phones to subsidize the buildout in non-profitable areas or to push speeds higher.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

I agree that the internet should be classified as a utility. That would also allow the FCC to reinstate the net neutrality rules which were stuck down by the court specifically because ISPs are not considered utilities.


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## Bigg (Oct 31, 2003)

stevel said:


> Verizon sold off all their POTS/DSL/FiOS business in northern New England to Fairpoint Communications, a tiny SC-based carrier. It was an extremely bumpy transition for many years. Fairpoint service is fine, but they haven't made any improvements in all the years since and stopped their fiber deployment. I'm lucky to have fiber Internet service, and am glad I don't have to deal with Comcast, but I would like to see some forward motion.


They have done some improvements to the DSL infrastructure... they're offering 15mbps DSL, and they've even put in RDSLAMs in to service the islands up in the Big Lake...



JosephB said:


> Government intervention, including funding and subsidies and not just from the Federal level, will be required to improve networks, especially those outside of major urban areas. Title II classification of broadband as a utility is step one, and then step two is to force universal service (although it's hard to say who has to service a given area....it was easy to mandate Ma Bell service the whole country when they were the only phone company) and then some kind of universal service fee like applies to landline phones to subsidize the buildout in non-profitable areas or to push speeds higher.


Whoever the incumbent phone company is.

What would be really weird is if Verizon sold AT&T their copper and then AT&T offered U-Verse over the copper with Verizon doing FIOS... they probably wouldn't sell it though just for that reason.

A utopian future for broadband competition would have any developed area covered by a U-Verse style network, another company with GPON or WDM-PON, and then two cable companies. Or even 3 of those 4 would be great, as long as one of them is FTTH...


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

According to this BuzzFeed article

http://www.buzzfeed.com/peterlauria/the-big-new-50-billion-tv-deal-has-nothing-to-do-with-tv

AT&T wants the deal to get access to DirecTV's cash flow stream.


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

The only positive thing I can say about this merger is that it would make it highly unlikely that DirecTV and Dish Network will ever be allowed to merge.


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## Diana Collins (Aug 21, 2002)

Bigg said:


> ...A utopian future for broadband competition would have any developed area covered by a U-Verse style network, another company with GPON or WDM-PON, and then two cable companies. Or even 3 of those 4 would be great, as long as one of them is FTTH...


That very closely describes broadband in the UK (first time I recall the UK and "Utopia" being linked). 

I was just talking to a British ex-pat co-worker and he says 50/10Mbps broadband service in the UK averages only about £10 per month.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

For me a utopian future would be municipal fiber to the home with users able to choose whatever video provider they want because all video is delivered via IP over the internet.


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## atmuscarella (Oct 11, 2005)

Dan203 said:


> For me a utopian future would be municipal fiber to the home with users able to choose whatever video provider they want because all video is delivered via IP over the internet.


Funny I just posted something close to that (I was/am ok with a regulated utility) at the end of another post I made earlier today:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=10109067#post10109067​
Guess great minds must think alike


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

That would be perfect. Make data like electricity where you pay by the bit, then have video providers compete with one another nationally, or even globally, via IP delivery. Whether it's a linear multi-channel service like cable, al-la-carte channels, or pure VOD they all com into your home via IP on that single fiber line. Without the overhead of having to maintain the network cable prices should get cheaper. And if you throw in the competition that should drive down prices even more.


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## Bigg (Oct 31, 2003)

Diana Collins said:


> That very closely describes broadband in the UK (first time I recall the UK and "Utopia" being linked).
> 
> I was just talking to a British ex-pat co-worker and he says 50/10Mbps broadband service in the UK averages only about £10 per month.


Really? They have that much competition?



Dan203 said:


> That would be perfect. Make data like electricity where you pay by the bit, then have video providers compete with one another nationally, or even globally, via IP delivery. Whether it's a linear multi-channel service like cable, al-la-carte channels, or pure VOD they all com into your home via IP on that single fiber line. Without the overhead of having to maintain the network cable prices should get cheaper. And if you throw in the competition that should drive down prices even more.


Flat rate, not by the bit, as that would be a huge disincentive to providing high quality video. I want the c-band feeds bit for bit like Google Fiber does.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

Flat rate is fine by me. Where do I sign up?


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## HarperVision (May 14, 2007)

Dan203 said:


> Flat rate is fine by me. Where do I sign up?


www.keepondreamin.com


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

Dan203 said:


> Flat rate is fine by me. Where do I sign up?


All the paperwork in both directions is carried by Unicorn Express.


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## Bigg (Oct 31, 2003)

Dan203 said:


> Flat rate is fine by me. Where do I sign up?


Does your ISP meter now?


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## Diana Collins (Aug 21, 2002)

Bigg said:


> Really? They have that much competition?


Apparently...he said that at his place in the London suburbs he had the choice of 6 different ISPs.


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## Bigg (Oct 31, 2003)

Diana Collins said:


> Apparently...he said that at his place in the London suburbs he had the choice of 6 different ISPs.


Wow. Are those all separate physical plants, or do some share the same copper?


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## Diana Collins (Aug 21, 2002)

I think he said two of them were wireless, the rest all operated over the same wire.


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## HarperVision (May 14, 2007)

Check out this article from USA TODAY:

AT&T buys DirecTV for nearly $50 billion

http://usat.ly/1nboYX7


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## bootman_head_fi (Aug 3, 2008)

Funny how this merger no one seems to cry foul like they do with the Comcast/TWC deal.
U-verse and DTV are direct competitors. 
Comcast and TWC are not.
No one finds this a little strange?


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## stevel (Aug 23, 2000)

AT&T has zero presence in this region. (Not counting cellular.) I wonder what this will mean in the long term for me as a DirecTV customer.


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## zalusky (Apr 5, 2002)

I would guess they will attempt to partner where they don't have internet presence.

I am wondering if this means Uverse will be in a marketing sense since DTV might have stronger branding.


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

Wonderful. The new TV/internet service they offer can be called "U-DirT" to better reflect how they feel about their customers.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

tarheelblue32 said:


> Wonderful. The new TV/internet service they offer can be called "U-DirT" to better reflect how they feel about their customers.


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## jgametest (Oct 31, 2013)

immagine the possibilies if att labs is able to harness the technology it would be able to expand u-verse on a wider scale. 


Sent from my RM-917_nam_usa_214 using Tapatalk


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## JosephB (Nov 19, 2010)

bootman_head_fi said:


> Funny how this merger no one seems to cry foul like they do with the Comcast/TWC deal.
> U-verse and DTV are direct competitors.
> Comcast and TWC are not.
> No one finds this a little strange?


The competitive situation for Comcast and TWC is different. It's not necessarily that Comcast/TWC eliminates a video competitor in the consumer market, it's that they would have an outsized number of subscribers. They could pick and choose winners based on channels they decide to carry or websites they decide to degrade the traffic for. If you want to reach a large number of internet users in the US, you'll have to do whatever Comcast wants you to do.

Plus, the elimination of competition between DirecTV and AT&T would occur in such a small relative area, it's not a major loss. Sure, AT&T "covers" 22 states with their wireline services, but U-Verse is only available in a small percentage of each of those states.



jgametest said:


> immagine the possibilies if att labs is able to harness the technology it would be able to expand u-verse on a wider scale.
> 
> Sent from my RM-917_nam_usa_214 using Tapatalk


AT&T no longer owns Bell Labs.


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## CrispyCritter (Feb 28, 2001)

JosephB said:


> Plus, the elimination of competition between DirecTV and AT&T would occur in such a small relative area, it's not a major loss. Sure, AT&T "covers" 22 states with their wireline services, but U-Verse is only available in a small percentage of each of those states.


But pretty much every U-verse area has DirecTV available. If AT&T were required to divest themselves of all U-Verse subs in order to merge, it would wipe out U-verse as a business.

I see the competition problem as being much more difficult for AT&T to overcome than it will be for Comcast.


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## stevel (Aug 23, 2000)

One of the theories I've seen espoused is that AT&T will encourage satellite usage, thus freeing some video traffic from U-Verse. This doesn't make a lot of sense to me. The much more plausible theory is that AT&T wants access to DirecTV's cash stream for funding wireless expansion.


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## Bigg (Oct 31, 2003)

U-Verse and DirecTV compete directly here in CT (although AT&T is selling us off to Frontier). However, DirecTV is already reliant on U-Verse for internet, as all the other fast internet options are cable, and they charge more if you use another provider for your video.

U-Verse has extremely patchy availability, but where it is available, it's somehow catching on.

DirecTV isn't going to replace U-Verse, but the issue is, it removes at least a partial competitor from the market. It's a weird match, as U-Verse is a more value-oriented service, whereas DirecTV is a premium service. What I could see happening is some cross-programming deals, especially DirecTV programming coming to U-Verse, as U-Verse has virtually unlimited channel capacity (even though you only get 4 HD streams in the whole house and it slows the internet down).


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

stevel said:


> The much more plausible theory is that AT&T wants access to DirecTV's cash stream for funding wireless expansion.


AT&T's wireless expansion is on the downhill slope. The theory I've read is that AT&T wants DirecTV's cash stream to fund increased dividends to shareholders.



Bigg said:


> U-Verse has extremely patchy availability, but where it is available, it's somehow catching on.


I've noticed this too. People seem to hate their cable company so much that they are desperate for any alternative, even an inferior one like U-verse.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

I still think that once the merge is actually complete (couple years?) they'll start pushing video subscribers over to DirecTV and using their U-verse infrastructure strictly for internet. The combination of DSS for linear TV and U-verse for internet and VOD allows them to more directly compete with cable offerings. It's a little more hassle to set up, since it's basically two separate services, but bundle pricing and a single bill might make it enticing to some. Plus, as someone above mentioned, some people hate cable so much their willing to try any alternative.


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

Dan203 said:


> It's a little more hassle to set up, since it's basically two separate services, but bundle pricing and a single bill might make it enticing to some.


But you don't have to pay $45 Billion to buy DirecTV to give people a single bill option or a bundling discount. If DirecTV and AT&T want to give people a discount for having both services, then they can just give people a discount.


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## mr.unnatural (Feb 2, 2006)

I saw a report on the sale this morning on one of the news networks (I think it was CNN). The general consensus was that the sale basically benefited both companies and not so much the consumer. The only way I can see the consumer getting anything out of this arrangement is that DirecTV will now have the ability to bundle internet and phone service along with their satellite TV service.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

tarheelblue32 said:


> But you don't have to pay $45 Billion to buy DirecTV to give people a single bill option or a bundling discount. If DirecTV and AT&T want to give people a discount for having both services, then they can just give people a discount.


Cooperation by companies like that is pretty rare and hard to maintain long term.


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## randian (Jan 15, 2014)

U-Verse is dead. AT&T stopped building it out years ago. Verizon has done the same with FIOS even though FIOS (unlike U-Verse) was a well-regarded and very in-demand service. Buying somebody like DTV is the only way they can expand their customer base since they've abandoned growing it by expanding their cable-tv subscriber base.

I can't see either delivering wireless home broadband via LTE-Advanced because they simply don't have the spectrum to deliver the necessary bandwidth. They hardly have enough to satisfy their mobile customers, and home use is probably an order of magnitude higher.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

mr.unnatural said:


> I saw a report on the sale this morning on one of the news networks (I think it was CNN). The general consensus was that the sale basically benefited both companies and not so much the consumer. The only way I can see the consumer getting anything out of this arrangement is that DirecTV will now have the ability to bundle internet and phone service along with their satellite TV service.


By having the ability to bundle linear TV, internet and phone and offer higher speeds by pushing video over to DSS they become more competitive with the cable company. That should benefit all consumers as it'll create more real competition with less compromises which should push prices down.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

I wonder if this will have any effect on how the FCC treats DirecTV, or even Dish, with regards to CableCARDs, or whatever it's successor is? The DSS providers got special waivers originally because they were small and at the time you could buy their receivers at retail. But now that AT&T is at the helm I doubt the FCC is going to give them any sort of special pass because of their size. 

I know there is a technological issue that will prevent them from ever using CableCARDs, but I really hope that all MSOs are forced to use whatever the successor to CableCARD is.


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

randian said:


> U-Verse is dead. AT&T stopped building it out years ago. Verizon has done the same with FIOS even though FIOS (unlike U-Verse) was a well-regarded and very in-demand service. Buying somebody like DTV is the only way they can expand their customer base since they've abandoned growing it by expanding their cable-tv subscriber base.


Satellite is more "dead" than U-Verse or FIOS. U-Verse and FIOS could grow more if they wanted, but anyone who wants satellite at this point already has satellite. The number of satellite TV customers will not be growing significantly in the future no matter what.


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## randian (Jan 15, 2014)

tarheelblue32 said:


> Satellite is more "dead" than U-Verse or FIOS. U-Verse and FIOS could grow more if they wanted, but anyone who wants satellite at this point already has satellite.


That's my point. If you can't grow your customer base because you refuse to expand to new cities, how do you expand your customer base? You buy somebody else's customers. It doesn't matter that the new customer base isn't growing either.

I wonder what's going to happen to U-Verse & FIOS infrastructure. They aren't expanding or improving it (and in the case of U-Verse was no great shakes to begin with), so are they just going to run it into the ground? Spend as little as possible until it rots?


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## trip1eX (Apr 2, 2005)

tarheelblue32 said:


> Satellite is more "dead" than U-Verse or FIOS. U-Verse and FIOS could grow more if they wanted, but anyone who wants satellite at this point already has satellite. The number of satellite TV customers will not be growing significantly in the future no matter what.


I don't think FIOS or U-Verse could grow more if they wanted to. I mean that sounds like me saying I could buy a much bigger house and better car and go on 5 more vacations this year if I wanted to.

I guess I could. But it wouldn't make much financial sense.


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## randian (Jan 15, 2014)

trip1eX said:


> I don't think FIOS or U-Verse could grow more if they wanted to.


Not in their existing markets, perhaps. They could expand service into new cities though. FIOS in particular was talking about doing exactly that, though they never really followed through on that promise. Some states, in particular Florida, have cable tv rules that encourage such expansion.


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## bootman_head_fi (Aug 3, 2008)

JosephB said:


> They could pick and choose winners based on channels they decide to carry or websites they decide to degrade the traffic for. If you want to reach a large number of internet users in the US, you'll have to do whatever Comcast wants you to do.


This is based in FUD.
Comcast has been held to net neutrality since the NBC deal and even after the supreme court decision that doing what you propose would be legal. 
Even AT&T said they would bind to net neutrality for this deal.
That specific argument doesn't hold water.

As far as what channels they put on, think about it. Isn't there too many bundled channels already? That isn't Comcast, AT&T, DTV etc fault but that of the media companies who only sell bundles for distribution.
Have you seen the list of cable channels Viacom owns? 

Now if we argue that customer support can get worse, resources stretched, etc, I'm with you there. Those are valid concerns for the customer.


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## JosephB (Nov 19, 2010)

bootman_head_fi said:


> This is based in FUD.
> Comcast has been held to net neutrality since the NBC deal and even after the supreme court decision that doing what you propose would be legal.
> Even AT&T said they would bind to net neutrality for this deal.
> That specific argument doesn't hold water.


They are not bound to those rules in perpetuity.


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## mr.unnatural (Feb 2, 2006)

Dan203 said:


> By having the ability to bundle linear TV, internet and phone and offer higher speeds by pushing video over to DSS they become more competitive with the cable company. That should benefit all consumers as it'll create more real competition with less compromises which should push prices down.


That's what I was thinking, but the report seemed to indicate otherwise. It was being broadcast on the TV in the break room at work and I was just passing through so I didn't get the full context of the report. OTOH, this was on CNN so take it for what it's worth.


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## aridon (Aug 31, 2006)

Here is the deal. Uverse is garbage. The DSL speeds pale in comparison in most areas to what Comcast offers and the cost is pretty high. Especially when the promo rates run out. The PQ sucks on the tv side of things as well.

By purchasing D* AT&T can now free up all the bandwidth on their already bandwidth starved copper lines. They can use their existing installers to be cross trained to install dishes (synergy savings) and offer significantly higher speeds.

They can also offer bundles with wireless, TV and internet to combat the Comcast triple play offers.

They also gain D*'s cash flow.

If they really want to push the envelope they can use the free cash flow to invest in dropping fiber to everyone replacing the old copper that is there. IF they did that they would be a power house. Imagine offering D* with 100mbs internet and wireless for a nice bundle?

Win win. No telling if they do the last thing but if I were the CEO I'd be pushing for that because despite the costs involved you will be setting yourself up to be the premiere provider of internet in the country for the next century.


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

aridon said:


> Win win. No telling if they do the last thing but if I were the CEO I'd be pushing for that because despite the costs involved you will be setting yourself up to be the premiere provider of internet in the country for the next century.


They don't care about the next century, all they care about is the next quarter. Long-term strategic planning is no longer valued in the market. Eventually, this will be their undoing.


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## trip1eX (Apr 2, 2005)

randian said:


> Not in their existing markets, perhaps. They could expand service into new cities though. FIOS in particular was talking about doing exactly that, though they never really followed through on that promise. Some states, in particular Florida, have cable tv rules that encourage such expansion.


But the whole reason they stopped is because of the money it cost to build out fiber to the home and the returns they have been getting on that investment.

And now look at these threads about how everyone is cutting the cord. If this is the start of a large movement then it can only hurt returns. Those people will just get internet.


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## Bigg (Oct 31, 2003)

Dan203 said:


> I still think that once the merge is actually complete (couple years?) they'll start pushing video subscribers over to DirecTV and using their U-verse infrastructure strictly for internet. The combination of DSS for linear TV and U-verse for internet and VOD allows them to more directly compete with cable offerings. It's a little more hassle to set up, since it's basically two separate services, but bundle pricing and a single bill might make it enticing to some. Plus, as someone above mentioned, some people hate cable so much their willing to try any alternative.


They may push some subs over to DirecTV who "outgrow" U-Verse, and they could have installers cross-trained. However, they can't totally get rid of U-Verse's video product. There are many places where it can go that DirecTV can't:

1. People who live in MDUs.
2. People with trees.
3. People who have an irrational fear of a pizza-sized object on their roof that says "DirecTV" on it.

This is really ironic, since there are still some of those awful old SBC-DISH dishes around.



Dan203 said:


> I know there is a technological issue that will prevent them from ever using CableCARDs, but I really hope that all MSOs are forced to use whatever the successor to CableCARD is.


You could force some variant of CableCard on DirecTV, but the TiVo would need a SWiM tuner built in to work...



trip1eX said:


> I don't think FIOS or U-Verse could grow more if they wanted to. I mean that sounds like me saying I could buy a much bigger house and better car and go on 5 more vacations this year if I wanted to.


FIOS and U-Verse have a lot of room to expand. U-Verse is very patchy, and there are a TON of crossboxes that don't have VRADs right now, and can't currently get U-Verse, including many that would be a textbook example of where FTTC/FTTN works well (if it works well anywhere). FIOS has many areas it's not in at all that are owned by Verizon, as well as a lot of roads, complexes, and buildings that are in FIOS areas, but aren't actually connected to FIOS.


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## tallmomof2 (May 3, 2014)

From what I've heard and read AT&T is buying DirecTV for the Sunday Ticket. There is a condition that if the DirecTV execs can't renew the Sunday Ticket with the NFL then the acquisition won't happen.


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## trip1eX (Apr 2, 2005)

Bigg said:


> FIOS and U-Verse have a lot of room to expand. U-Verse is very patchy, and there are a TON of crossboxes that don't have VRADs right now, and can't currently get U-Verse, including many that would be a textbook example of where FTTC/FTTN works well (if it works well anywhere). FIOS has many areas it's not in at all that are owned by Verizon, as well as a lot of roads, complexes, and buildings that are in FIOS areas, but aren't actually connected to FIOS.


AGain I think that's cause they don't have the money to expand. It isn't that they don't have "room."

They like money. IF they were making a decent return on the capital they deployed in the fiber to the home build out then you think they would do more of it.

The only other thing that makes sense to me is they see how wireless would become a good substitute for much less capital deployed.

Or in ATTs case maybe it has something to do with DirectTV being a much more cost effective way for them to deliver video content.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

Bigg said:


> They may push some subs over to DirecTV who "outgrow" U-Verse, and they could have installers cross-trained. However, they can't totally get rid of U-Verse's video product. There are many places where it can go that DirecTV can't:
> 
> 1. People who live in MDUs.
> 2. People with trees.
> ...


Nothing guaranteeing they wont just say FU to those people and dump U-verse TV completely. Although since U-verse is pure IP it wouldn't really hurt them to keep both around. Unless there is some business issue with maintaining both sides.


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## Johncv (Jun 11, 2002)

aridon said:


> Here is the deal. Uverse is garbage. The DSL speeds pale in comparison in most areas to what Comcast offers and the cost is pretty high. Especially when the promo rates run out. The PQ sucks on the tv side of things as well.
> 
> By purchasing D* AT&T can now free up all the bandwidth on their already bandwidth starved copper lines. They can use their existing installers to be cross trained to install dishes (synergy savings) and offer significantly higher speeds.
> 
> ...


And, if AT&T really want to grow customer base they would replace ALL the crappy set top boxes with TiVo Roamios, but we all know pig will fly before that happen.


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## Diana Collins (Aug 21, 2002)

The big problem Verizon faces with FiOS expansion is the huge cost of stringing new cable. Obtaining right of way rights is difficult to negotiate and towns wring every last cent they can from the company. Add in the extremely high labor and material costs and you end up needing some pretty serious revenue to justify the expense. So far, that revenue has not materialized. Verizon sells phone and internet to many more FiOS customers than they sell TV service to. I'm willing to bet that AT&T has seen the same thing, only amplified since FiOS is far more attractive than Uverse.

As far as AT&T moving towards using DirecTV and phasing out Uverse video, it has been suggested that there are some that can't or won't accept satellite TV. Let's look at the places where satellite doesn't seem to work...

Apartment buildings: DirecTV currently has a substantial business in apartment (MDU) installations. They are also developing a new distribution system (a variation of their current SWiM system) that runs over the existing cable in any centrally wired building.

Line of sight problems: These are usually more of a problem in urban areas where a tall building be the obstacle. I've seen very densely wooded lots be able to find a spot for a dish. There are also creative ways to deal with this (see below).

The "ugly dish" sentiment: This can be driven by the homeowner or a neighborhood covenant. Often the issue is being able to see the dish from the street, which is easily handled most of the time. But again, this can be addressed.

The solution to both line of site and "dish-phobia" problems is to move the dish to a central location. AT&T could build a hybrid DSS/copper system where the satellite dish is located at a central neighborhood location and the signal is then delivered to the home via copper. This could use a dedicated pair, or coax if available, freeing the Uverse pair for broadband only. Again, DirecTV already has the technology to support this sort of installation.

These are all mid to long term developments that may or may not happen. Near term, AT&T gains a few important benefits. First, they get a big cash flow, improving their performance which will drive the stock price up. Secondly, the biggest single ongoing expense for cable and satellite operators is the cost of content. Growing from 6 million to over 26 million subscribers will allow AT&T to cut deals that make their TV operations more profitable. Finally, they go from being a 22 state operation to a 50 state operation (plus Puerto Rico and Latin America).

More speculatively, as more and more broadband traffic moves to wireless, there are some interesting possibilities in the use of DirecTV's spectrum. For example, over the next 10 years DirecTV will phase out their SD distribution. This will require replacing a lot of legacy receivers that are incompatible with the newer HD signals, but it will happen eventually. That will release the entire DBS spectrum at 101WL and the portions that DirecTV owns at 110WL and 119WL. Then there is the newly licensed RDBS spectrum at 99WL and 103WL. Added together, that's about equal to all of the spectrum currently in use for HD distribution. What they could do with all that spectrum is quite intriguing.


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## atmuscarella (Oct 11, 2005)

Diana Collins said:


> What they could do with all that spectrum is quite intriguing.


Actual 1080P? 4K? It will also be interesting to see how fast there adapt H.265 which could "effectively" double their spectrum again.


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## JosephB (Nov 19, 2010)

Dan203 said:


> Nothing guaranteeing they wont just say FU to those people and dump U-verse TV completely. Although since U-verse is pure IP it wouldn't really hurt them to keep both around. Unless there is some business issue with maintaining both sides.


The AT&T CEO specifically said they intend to keep both U-Verse's IP distribution and DirecTV's satellite distribution in place.

They'll save bandwidth and money by pushing as many people to DirecTV as possible and only using IP for distribution when they must (such as MDUs). Plus, they could theoretically use DirecTV to backhaul to VRADs instead of the infrastructure in the ground. Technology already exists to encapsulate DirecTV signals into IP packets and send it over ethernet in MDU situations. There's no reason they couldn't adapt that technology to push the dish a little further upstream if necessary. Plus, DirecTV has online viewing infrastructure in place already and controls their entire technology stack, meaning they can adapt and change it as they need to. U-Verse uses a fully off the shelf system purchased from Microsoft (now Ericsson) and they have little room to modify it as needed.

I suspect getting a fully-owned and developed platform without having to start from scratch was an important input into the decision to buy DirecTV.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

I doubt they will use dishes at the VRAD as they have fiber to those already and it has more then enough bandwidth to handle all of their customers. The choke point is the copper running to each house. I'm sure that once they are up and running they will start to push customers toward using DSS for TV so they can offer them higher internet speeds. Those that can't will be allowed to stay with U-verse but with limited internet speeds.


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

Dan203 said:


> Those that can't will be allowed to stay with U-verse but with limited internet speeds.


The really sad thing is that AT&T is more than willing to sell you the more expensive U-verse internet speeds even though it is physically impossible for you to actually receive those speeds. Most customers never know the difference because they never run a speed test.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

Yeah with VDSL the speeds drop quickly as wire length increases.The truly fast speeds require less then 1000'. Most people are further and can only get 25Mbps at best.


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

Dan203 said:


> Yeah with VDSL the speeds drop quickly as wire length increases.The truly fast speeds require less then 1000'. Most people are further and can only get 25Mbps at best.


My house is about 2600' from the VRAD, so U-verse is a non-starter for me. With the tall trees surrounding my house, I couldn't even get satellite if I wanted it. My choices are Time Warner Cable or nothing. My only hope is that Google Fiber will one day come to my doorstep somewhere around the time that CableCards are completely phased out. If I ever have to go back to Time Warner's cable boxes I think I may have to shoot myself.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

I'm stuck with cable too. Around here AT&T DSL is only 6Mbps so cable is the only option for decent internet speeds.


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## MikeAndrews (Jan 17, 2002)

tarheelblue32 said:


> The really sad thing is that AT&T is more than willing to sell you the more expensive U-verse internet speeds even though it is physically impossible for you to actually receive those speeds. Most customers never know the difference because they never run a speed test.


Ya think so? The installer runs a speed test and will tell you if you can't get that level of service. NO customers ever run a speed test?


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## Bigg (Oct 31, 2003)

trip1eX said:


> AGain I think that's cause they don't have the money to expand. It isn't that they don't have "room."
> 
> They like money. IF they were making a decent return on the capital they deployed in the fiber to the home build out then you think they would do more of it.
> 
> ...


They absolutely have the money to do it, they just don't have the will to actually spend the money. That's the reason they didn't just do fiber in the first place.



Dan203 said:


> Nothing guaranteeing they wont just say FU to those people and dump U-verse TV completely. Although since U-verse is pure IP it wouldn't really hurt them to keep both around. Unless there is some business issue with maintaining both sides.


They don't want to lose a big market that they have worked hard to build up. They also can offer a larger, and more localized channel selection on U-Verse than they can on DirecTV. The only situation I could see them pushing people over is people who want faster internet packages.



Diana Collins said:


> The big problem Verizon faces with FiOS expansion is the huge cost of stringing new cable. Obtaining right of way rights is difficult to negotiate and towns wring every last cent they can from the company. Add in the extremely high labor and material costs and you end up needing some pretty serious revenue to justify the expense. So far, that revenue has not materialized. Verizon sells phone and internet to many more FiOS customers than they sell TV service to. I'm willing to bet that AT&T has seen the same thing, only amplified since FiOS is far more attractive than Uverse.


They actually both sell TV to a really good percentage of their total subscriber base. FIOS internet-only is priced so insanely that DirecTV and DISH subs are more likely to either go with slow DSL or get cable for internet, as the de-bundling penalty is far smaller than with FIOS.

FIOS is expensive to build out, but it's MUCH cheaper to maintain than the mess of copper that AT&T has built up. If you drive from a U-Verse area to a FIOS area (near me there are both, in what amounts to the same city that's 3/4 in one state, and 1/4 in another), and you notice that Verizon has a small fraction of the amount of copper up on the poles that AT&T does. It looks to me like they've added more to support U-Verse, although at best, they haven't taken anything down since the days of virtually every house having two phones lines. Verizon's combined FIOS and copper lines are FAR smaller than AT&T's mess of copper.



> As far as AT&T moving towards using DirecTV and phasing out Uverse video, it has been suggested that there are some that can't or won't accept satellite TV. Let's look at the places where satellite doesn't seem to work...
> 
> Apartment buildings: DirecTV currently has a substantial business in apartment (MDU) installations. They are also developing a new distribution system (a variation of their current SWiM system) that runs over the existing cable in any centrally wired building.
> 
> ...


That is great for some MDUs that have deal with DirecTV, or where they allow individual dishes, like one that I used to live in. It doesn't help for a lot of others, where AT&T already have the right to be in the building as the incumbent telco, and if they really wanted to make big moves, could put a VRAD immediately near the complex to get fiber as close as possible.

Some wooded areas can get dishes installed, some can't. Ironically, here in CT, we have big problem with DirecTV because of how low 119 is, how far north we are, and how many trees we have, and AT&T is trying to sell us off to Frontier.

The dishes being ugly thing is a fictitious pile of BS, but there are a LOT of people who subscribe to it, and have an irrational fear of pizza-size dishes. There is no way to get over this irrational behavior because it's irrational. Also, while no HOA or covenant can ban dishes smaller than 1 meter, many people don't know their federally protected rights under OTARD.



> More speculatively, as more and more broadband traffic moves to wireless, there are some interesting possibilities in the use of DirecTV's spectrum. For example, over the next 10 years DirecTV will phase out their SD distribution. This will require replacing a lot of legacy receivers that are incompatible with the newer HD signals, but it will happen eventually. That will release the entire DBS spectrum at 101WL and the portions that DirecTV owns at 110WL and 119WL. Then there is the newly licensed RDBS spectrum at 99WL and 103WL. Added together, that's about equal to all of the spectrum currently in use for HD distribution. What they could do with all that spectrum is quite intriguing.


Hmmm, I didn't know that. They could increase the HD lineup and start doing 4K and other stuff with all that extra capacity. U-Verse has an incredible lineup now due to the IPTV technology, albeit missing AJAM for no apparent reason, but it doesn't have the bandwidth for better quality HD or 4k.



Dan203 said:


> I doubt they will use dishes at the VRAD as they have fiber to those already and it has more then enough bandwidth to handle all of their customers. The choke point is the copper running to each house. I'm sure that once they are up and running they will start to push customers toward using DSS for TV so they can offer them higher internet speeds. Those that can't will be allowed to stay with U-verse but with limited internet speeds.


Exactly. That concept makes absolutely no sense. The VRADs have fiber running to them, and dishes wouldn't work on so many levels!

They may do that for customers who want more internet speed, although with QoS, they can do both with U-Verse, and the internet just slows down a bit while watching TV like it does now.


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## Johncv (Jun 11, 2002)

Diana Collins said:


> The big problem Verizon faces with FiOS expansion is the huge cost of stringing new cable. Obtaining right of way rights is difficult to negotiate and towns wring every last cent they can from the company. Add in the extremely high labor and material costs and you end up needing some pretty serious revenue to justify the expense. So far, that revenue has not materialized. Verizon sells phone and internet to many more FiOS customers than they sell TV service to. I'm willing to bet that AT&T has seen the same thing, only amplified since FiOS is far more attractive than Uverse.
> 
> As far as AT&T moving towards using DirecTV and phasing out Uverse video, it has been suggested that there are some that can't or won't accept satellite TV. Let's look at the places where satellite doesn't seem to work...
> 
> ...


Woman, you know your stuff. :up::up::up: Do you work in this industry, if so what do you do. More important is where in god good earth do find the time to edit this at 5:23am.


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## trip1eX (Apr 2, 2005)

Bigg said:


> They absolutely have the money to do it, they just don't have the will to actually spend the money. That's the reason they didn't just do fiber in the first place.


Laying fiber is no guarantee of profit. Verizon did FttH and they stopped expanding too. ATT and VZ need to make sure they can cover their debt. And since VZ, at least, has had ftth in many areas for many years now I think they have a good idea of their returns.

I don't see why they wouldn't have the will to spend the money to deploy more ftth if the returns were decent.


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## Johncv (Jun 11, 2002)

AT&T's Stephens: DirecTV deal will create synergies in set-top boxes, advertising and content

Read more: AT&T's Stephens: DirecTV deal will create synergies in set-top boxes, advertising and content - FierceCable http://www.fiercecable.com/story/at...op-boxes-advertising/2014-05-21#ixzz32OnaSr00 
Subscribe at FierceCable

Have to vent: *"Stephens didn't provide specifics about the video product that AT&T is envisioning, but said that the company would try to take the best of AT&T's U-verse product and DirecTV's satellite product and create an offering that makes both products better." *

Really, crappy1 + crappy2 = crapper3 as far as I am concern. Why can't the stupid people in charge just use TiVo? Both AT&T and DriectTV are paying TiVo now. Hell I would pay them more money to use a TiVo Roamio. End vent.


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

trip1eX said:


> Laying fiber is no guarantee of profit. Verizon did FttH and they stopped expanding too. ATT and VZ need to make sure they can cover their debt. And so far returns on capital deployed haven't been there and so they slowed down.


AT&T and Verizon are both making tons of money off of wireless. There is no reason why they can't use the profits from wireless to subsidize the buildout of FTTH. FTTH does have a good projected return on capital, it's just the returns are over 50+ years, and neither company seems willing to wait past the next quarter.


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## moedaman (Aug 21, 2012)

tarheelblue32 said:


> AT&T and Verizon are both making tons of money off of wireless. There is no reason why they can't use the profits from wireless to subsidize the buildout of FTTH.


 And this is the exact reason why both ATT and Verizon quit expansion of those networks. Wireless offers higher margins, less regulation, less infrastructure maintenance and a non-union workforce. All wins in the their eyes. Neither one is going to dump wireless profits into fiber unless they have to.


> FTTH does have a good projected return on capital, it's just the returns are over 50+ years, and neither company seems willing to wait past the next quarter.


Everyone needs to remember that stock options are a large part of CEO compensation. Rising stock prices and dividends, while important to all shareholders, are extra important to upper executives who aren't going to be there in 50+ years. Once they get paid and retire, they couldn't care less if that company sticks around that long. Until stock options are removed from the equation of compensation, short-term thinking won't go away.


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## murgatroyd (Jan 6, 2002)

tarheelblue32 said:


> The really sad thing is that AT&T is more than willing to sell you the more expensive U-verse internet speeds even though it is physically impossible for you to actually receive those speeds. Most customers never know the difference because they never run a speed test.


AT&T is more than willing to sell you U-verse whether it is physically possible for you to get it or not. So I'm not surprised.


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## randian (Jan 15, 2014)

trip1eX said:


> Laying fiber is no guarantee of profit. Verizon did FttH and they stopped expanding too. ATT and VZ need to make sure they can cover their debt. And so far returns on capital deployed haven't been there and so they slowed down.


How much does it cost per subscriber? I wonder exactly what they mean by "returns aren't there".


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## trip1eX (Apr 2, 2005)

randian said:


> How much does it cost per subscriber? I wonder exactly what they mean by "returns aren't there".


Well if you borrow $1 million to buy a McDonalds and you only get back $10k every year you probably won't be taking out another loan to buy a second McDs anytime soon. Your return wouldn't be there.

But if you made $100k a year from your $1 million investment then its like well maybe I should buy another.

I can't see another reason except wireless why they wouldn't continue the build out. Everything I remember reading,from the very beginning of VZ's buildout, always mentioned concern about VZ never making back the initial investment or it taking too long.


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## trip1eX (Apr 2, 2005)

tarheelblue32 said:


> AT&T and Verizon are both making tons of money off of wireless. There is no reason why they can't use the profits from wireless to subsidize the buildout of FTTH. FTTH does have a good projected return on capital, it's just the returns are over 50+ years, and neither company seems willing to wait past the next quarter.


good projected returns on capital don't mean waiting 50+ years.


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

trip1eX said:


> good projected returns on capital don't mean waiting 50+ years.


So I guess that means I should quit my long-term investing and just switch to day trading.


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## slowbiscuit (Sep 19, 2006)

Johncv said:


> Have to vent: *"Stephens didn't provide specifics about the video product that AT&T is envisioning, but said that the company would try to take the best of AT&T's U-verse product and DirecTV's satellite product and create an offering that makes both products better." *
> 
> Really, crappy1 + crappy2 = crapper3 as far as I am concern. Why can't the stupid people in charge just use TiVo? Both AT&T and DriectTV are paying TiVo now. Hell I would pay them more money to use a TiVo Roamio. End vent.


Not following how DirecTV has a crappy TV product, they arguably have the best pic quality and channel selection. You can quibble about whether their Genie DVR setup is crappy or not compared to Tivo, but D* is far superior to U-Verse for example.


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## MikeAndrews (Jan 17, 2002)

tarheelblue32 said:


> AT&T and Verizon are both making tons of money off of wireless. There is no reason why they can't use the profits from wireless to subsidize the buildout of FTTH. FTTH does have a good projected return on capital, it's just the returns are over 50+ years, and neither company seems willing to wait past the next quarter.


Yeah, lord knows why AT&T spent $6 billion over 3 years to build out U-Verse.


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## Diana Collins (Aug 21, 2002)

Johncv said:


> Woman, you know your stuff. :up::up::up: Do you work in this industry, if so what do you do. More important is where in god good earth do find the time to edit this at 5:23am.


Thanks! I'm not in this industry (I work in enterprise software sales) but I have been around for quite a while. I was a moderator on DBSDish.com, the first satellite TV site back in the 90's, then started a new site with the DBSDish founder called DBSForums that I ran for several years. We switched from Dish Network to DirecTV in 2001 specifically to get the Series 1 DirecTivos. At one point we had 5 Series 2 DirecTivos running, all with dual drives and hacked to support MRV and running TivoWeb Plus.

Oh, and I'm on the east coast, so it was 8:23am for me.


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## trip1eX (Apr 2, 2005)

tarheelblue32 said:


> So I guess that means I should quit my long-term investing and just switch to day trading.


Well if that's your conclusion then you might want to quit investing.


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## Diana Collins (Aug 21, 2002)

Bigg said:


> ...They actually both sell TV to a really good percentage of their total subscriber base. FIOS internet-only is priced so insanely that DirecTV and DISH subs are more likely to either go with slow DSL or get cable for internet, as the de-bundling penalty is far smaller than with FIOS....


I currently (for another 2 months) subscribe to DirecTV for TV and have FiOS for internet and phone. The "unbundled" price for FiOS is less than the unbundled price for the same service from my local cable provider, Cablevision. I personally know about 50 families in my town with FiOS and only about 10 of them get FiOS TV (the rest use one of two satellite providers).



Bigg said:


> ...That is great for some MDUs that have deal with DirecTV, or where they allow individual dishes, like one that I used to live in. It doesn't help for a lot of others, where AT&T already have the right to be in the building as the incumbent telco, and if they really wanted to make big moves, *could put a VRAD immediately near the complex to get fiber as close as possible*...


Or, a dish on the roof.



Bigg said:


> ...Some wooded areas can get dishes installed, some can't. Ironically, here in CT, we have big problem with DirecTV because of how low 119 is, how far north we are, and how many trees we have, and AT&T is trying to sell us off to Frontier.......


Only foreign language programming is on 119 these days. All of DirecTV's English language programming comes from 101 (SD) or 99 & 103 (HD).

The low sight lines on the east coast for 119 is why Dish Network runs two completely separate satellite constellations, one for the Eastern US (at 61.5, 72.7 and 77) and one for the Western US (at 110,119 and 129).


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## Diana Collins (Aug 21, 2002)

tarheelblue32 said:


> So I guess that means I should quit my long-term investing and just switch to day trading.


Running a business isn't an investment, it is a job - the job of the CEO. His job description is to run the business as efficiently as possible to maximize the return to the investors.

If you bought a stock that wasn't going to return an increase in value or a dividend for 50 years, you'd probably move on to another stock. Stockholders want returns this month, not way down the road.

Let's say Verizon were to do exactly what has been proposed - take wireless profits and plow that into a massive fiber expansion. The resulting drop in quarterly profits would cause their stock price to fall, which would cause investors to sell the stock, causing the price to fall more. Keep that up for a few quarters and the CEO will be out of a job.


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

Diana Collins said:


> Running a business isn't an investment, it is a job - the job of the CEO. His job description is to run the business as efficiently as possible to maximize the return to the investors.
> 
> If you bought a stock that wasn't going to return an increase in value or a dividend for 50 years, you'd probably move on to another stock. Stockholders want returns this month, not way down the road.
> 
> Let's say Verizon were to do exactly what has been proposed - take wireless profits and plow that into a massive fiber expansion. The resulting drop in quarterly profits would cause their stock price to fall, which would cause investors to sell the stock, causing the price to fall more. Keep that up for a few quarters and the CEO will be out of a job.


Then for-profit businesses obviously cannot be entrusted to build and manage this country's wired internet infrastructure. The states or federal government should use eminent domain to nationalize all wired infrastructure and take the decisions about its future out of the hands of CEOs and shareholders that can't think past the next quarter.


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## Diana Collins (Aug 21, 2002)

tarheelblue32 said:


> ...The states or federal government should use eminent domain to nationalize all wired infrastructure and take the decisions about its future out of the hands of CEOs and shareholders that can't think past the next quarter.


There is certainly a rationale for that sentiment. The current state of affairs is like relying upon the car companies and oil refiners to build roads. If we had used that model we would have 12 lane highways between the major cities and dirt paths to rural communities (sort of exactly what we have in broadband today). The only time letting the service provider manage the building of the medium over which the service is delivered has worked has been in heavily regulated utilities. The telephone network was built by AT&T when it was THE Phone Company and had no competition, and the power grid was built when the power industry was vertically integrated and more closely regulated, with geographic exclusivity. In both of these cases, by removing exclusive franchises/statutory monopolies the continued expansion and upgrade of the networks has been ignored.

The fact is that broadband internet should be seen by government as being a public utility whose expansion to serve every single citizen is a key goal, just like electric and telephone service was seen in the last century. In exchange for keeping their networks open and neutral to the source of the traffic, and building out broadband service to serve every single household, the providers should be granted exclusive franchises by geographic area.


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## stevel (Aug 23, 2000)

Diana is also a respected member at dbstalk.com. I always learn something from her posts there.


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## slowbiscuit (Sep 19, 2006)

Diana Collins said:


> The fact is that broadband internet should be seen by government as being a public utility whose expansion to serve every single citizen is a key goal, just like electric and telephone service was seen in the last century. In exchange for keeping their networks open and neutral to the source of the traffic, and building out broadband service to serve every single household, the providers should be granted exclusive franchises by geographic area.


Agree 100% but we're way too far down the payoff/revolving door road for this to happen (sans some massive public uprising, but if we don't care how the NSA is raping us I'm not seeing how we're going to care about getting fleeced for HSI).

Even if the FCC wants to go common carrier for ISPs, the massive number of lawyers involved will make sure it gets tied up in the courts forever.


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## Bigg (Oct 31, 2003)

trip1eX said:


> Laying fiber is no guarantee of profit. Verizon did FttH and they stopped expanding too. ATT and VZ need to make sure they can cover their debt. And since VZ, at least, has had ftth in many areas for many years now I think they have a good idea of their returns.
> 
> I don't see why they wouldn't have the will to spend the money to deploy more ftth if the returns were decent.


Fiber is very profitable if you amortize it over an appropriate amount of time, like 30 years. And Verizon isn't even doing a good job with FIOS. If they switched to MPEG-4 to be able to offer an even better channel lineup, and they offered a gigabit internet product, they would be that much more competitive with cable. They are price competitive, but not enough so. They should get more aggressive, and they will get more of the market. Instead, they are finding creative ways to nickel and dime their subscribers.



tarheelblue32 said:


> AT&T and Verizon are both making tons of money off of wireless. There is no reason why they can't use the profits from wireless to subsidize the buildout of FTTH. FTTH does have a good projected return on capital, it's just the returns are over 50+ years, and neither company seems willing to wait past the next quarter.


Right, Wall Street, the investors, and the executives all have the attention span of a 2-year-old, and scream "I WANT IT NOW!". Telcos should be thinking over a 30-year span, as infrastructure takes at least that long to pay for itself. When thinking over that time period, there is no way to justify NOT putting in gigabit fiber to every customer.



Diana Collins said:


> I currently (for another 2 months) subscribe to DirecTV for TV and have FiOS for internet and phone. The "unbundled" price for FiOS is less than the unbundled price for the same service from my local cable provider, Cablevision. I personally know about 50 families in my town with FiOS and only about 10 of them get FiOS TV (the rest use one of two satellite providers).


I'd like to know what pricing you have on FIOS internet. From what I've seen on their site, they charge $80-$90/mo for internet only, depending on which tier you get, which is completely insane. I'm not familiar with CableVision's pricing scheme, but on Comcast, it appears to be $55-$65, depending on tier. I'm in a relatively unique position in that we have a local overbuilder in addition to Comcast and AT&T that offers 55/10 for $60/mo, although that's only a few $ less than Comcast.



> Or, a dish on the roof.


A lot of MDUs aren't physically set up for that to work, and in other cases, the owner wouldn't allow it. AT&T had a legal right to be in the buildings via copper, and they can upgrade that to VDSL simply by sticking a VRAD near the MDU they are trying to serve.



> Only foreign language programming is on 119 these days. All of DirecTV's English language programming comes from 101 (SD) or 99 & 103 (HD).
> 
> The low sight lines on the east coast for 119 is why Dish Network runs two completely separate satellite constellations, one for the Eastern US (at 61.5, 72.7 and 77) and one for the Western US (at 110,119 and 129).


Hartford-New Haven's SD locals are on 119, and thus *I think* Hartford-New Haven is required to have an SL5, not an SL3, even though the locals are available in HD on 99c or 103c. I'm not positive that they still *require* an SL5, but I very, very rarely see an SL3 around here, so it probably requires a special exception or something to install one.

DISH was kind of forced to, since 129, where they have a lot of HD stuff, is nearly impossible to get on the east coast, as is 61.5 on the west coast. It also helped them a LOT with locals. You'd basically have to be living under a forest to not be able to get DISH EA in CT, however, it's irrelevant, as they have chosen to effectively not compete in the NYC DMA or all of the state of CT due to their lack of YES and SNY.



Diana Collins said:


> There is certainly a rationale for that sentiment. The current state of affairs is like relying upon the car companies and oil refiners to build roads. If we had used that model we would have 12 lane highways between the major cities and dirt paths to rural communities (sort of exactly what we have in broadband today). The only time letting the service provider manage the building of the medium over which the service is delivered has worked has been in heavily regulated utilities. The telephone network was built by AT&T when it was THE Phone Company and had no competition, and the power grid was built when the power industry was vertically integrated and more closely regulated, with geographic exclusivity. In both of these cases, by removing exclusive franchises/statutory monopolies the continued expansion and upgrade of the networks has been ignored.
> 
> The fact is that broadband internet should be seen by government as being a public utility whose expansion to serve every single citizen is a key goal, just like electric and telephone service was seen in the last century. In exchange for keeping their networks open and neutral to the source of the traffic, and building out broadband service to serve every single household, the providers should be granted exclusive franchises by geographic area.


That's a good point. They talk of "competition", but until there are multiple companies who want to build out (and it may not make sense to have 3-4 providers in every area), then they should be regulated as the monopolies that they are.


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## Diana Collins (Aug 21, 2002)

Bigg said:


> ...I'd like to know what pricing you have on FIOS internet. From what I've seen on their site, they charge $80-$90/mo for internet only, depending on which tier you get, which is completely insane. I'm not familiar with CableVision's pricing scheme, but on Comcast, it appears to be $55-$65, depending on tier. I'm in a relatively unique position in that we have a local overbuilder in addition to Comcast and AT&T that offers 55/10 for $60/mo, although that's only a few $ less than Comcast...


I pay $59.99/month for 75 down/35 up service. If I switched back to Cablevision, they would change me $49.95 for 15 down/3 up.



Bigg said:


> ...Hartford-New Haven's SD locals are on 119, and thus *I think* Hartford-New Haven is required to have an SL5, not an SL3, even though the locals are available in HD on 99c or 103c. I'm not positive that they still *require* an SL5, but I very, very rarely see an SL3 around here, so it probably requires a special exception or something to install one.
> 
> DISH was kind of forced to, since 129, where they have a lot of HD stuff, is nearly impossible to get on the east coast, as is 61.5 on the west coast. It also helped them a LOT with locals. You'd basically have to be living under a forest to not be able to get DISH EA in CT, however, it's irrelevant, as they have chosen to effectively not compete in the NYC DMA or all of the state of CT due to their lack of YES and SNY...


Forgot about the SD locals. AFAIK, the SL3 feedhorn assembly is the standard for HD installs everywhere. If you still have an SD TV they usually still hook it up to an HD receiver. The only SL5 installs happening anymore are all SD installs in markets where the SD locals are on 119 spotbeams, or for foreign language packages. They are, however, planning to stop to doing SD only installs if they have not done so already.

Of course, it wasn't just look angles that drove Dish to a dual arc system. They only had 22 transponder licenses at 119 (which is where they started) and 29 at 110 (acquired from MCI and News Corp, ironically enough) with no other assets in the area. DirecTV on the other hand, had all 32 transponders at 101, 3 at 110 and 10 at 119, plus had full slot Ka licenses at 99 and 103. Each Ka slot has twice the total bandwidth of a Ku DBS slot, so DirecTV has a massive amount of bandwidth within a 20 degree arc, most it within a 4 degree arc.

There was no way Dish could do HD on their 110/119 assets, so they cut a deal with Rainbow's Voom all HD service to acquire their 61.5 assets and cut a deal with Angel Broadcasting to get their 61.5 licenses. That let them get into HD, but as you point out, it was barely above the horizon from the West Coast. To solve that problem they leased the entire slot at 129 from the Canadians and stuck Echostar-V there until the Canadian Ciel Satellite Group launched Ciel-2. Dish also uses a Canadian satellite (Nimiq-5) at 72.5 and a Mexican one (QuetzSat-1) at 77. Thus, the 2 arc solution was born, at the cost of higher operating expenses (twice the uplinks) and paying satellite lease fees.


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## Jed1 (Jun 18, 2013)

Diana Collins said:


> There is certainly a rationale for that sentiment. The current state of affairs is like relying upon the car companies and oil refiners to build roads. If we had used that model we would have 12 lane highways between the major cities and dirt paths to rural communities (sort of exactly what we have in broadband today). The only time letting the service provider manage the building of the medium over which the service is delivered has worked has been in heavily regulated utilities. The telephone network was built by AT&T when it was THE Phone Company and had no competition, and the power grid was built when the power industry was vertically integrated and more closely regulated, with geographic exclusivity. In both of these cases, by removing exclusive franchises/statutory monopolies the continued expansion and upgrade of the networks has been ignored.
> 
> The fact is that broadband internet should be seen by government as being a public utility whose expansion to serve every single citizen is a key goal, just like electric and telephone service was seen in the last century. In exchange for keeping their networks open and neutral to the source of the traffic, and building out broadband service to serve every single household, the providers should be granted exclusive franchises by geographic area.


I have been looking to relocate to Chattanooga, TN and the city has set up their own fiber optic network using their Electric Power Board.
I was looking at getting work at the new Volkswagen plant and in my research I found out about the Electric Power Board. I see that Comcast tried to sue them to prevent them from doing this as if Comcast had any aspirations to do this themselves.
They are advertising $69.99/month for 1 gig speeds.
https://epbfi.com/gigsupport/

http://money.cnn.com/2014/05/20/tec...campaign=Feed:+rss/money_latest+(Latest+News)

https://epbfi.com/
https://www.epb.net/


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## murgatroyd (Jan 6, 2002)

tarheelblue32 said:


> Then for-profit businesses obviously cannot be entrusted to build and manage this country's wired internet infrastructure. The states or federal government should use eminent domain to nationalize all wired infrastructure and take the decisions about its future out of the hands of CEOs and shareholders that can't think past the next quarter.


And the government isn't much better -- they don't think past the next election cycle.


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## trip1eX (Apr 2, 2005)

Bigg said:


> Fiber is very profitable if you amortize it over an appropriate amount of time, like 30 years. And Verizon isn't even doing a good job with FIOS. If they switched to MPEG-4 to be able to offer an even better channel lineup, and they offered a gigabit internet product, they would be that much more competitive with cable. They are price competitive, but not enough so. They should get more aggressive, and they will get more of the market. Instead, they are finding creative ways to nickel and dime their subscribers.


30 years? That's exactly why they aren't rushing to build out their fiber network.

Level3 almost went bankrupt creating a backbone fiber network. And are stuck between a rock and a hard place for a very long time. That isn't going to turn out to be a good investment. Other companies did go bankrupt creating cross country fiber networks.

It isn't like VZ gets the market to themselves if they build out either. They have immediate competitors. AT the same time it isn't like the business isn't changing. The ability to charge for phone, tv and internet is getting weaker all the time. And what if wireless becomes a much cheaper way of getting internet to most homes?

The CFO recently said their capital is going towards wireless right now because the returns are much higher and wireless is more promising. They aren't going to start thinking about expanding FIOS again until they make more money from the capital they have already deployed.

It will be interesting to follow what Google is doing and see how that works in the longer run.


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## Diana Collins (Aug 21, 2002)

And that's after Level 3 acquired a lot of that fiber backbone at less than actual price when it acquired Global Crossing in 2011.


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## stevel (Aug 23, 2000)

I've read there's a LOT of "dark fiber" around the country - fiber that was laid out but never used.


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

trip1eX said:


> And what if wireless becomes a much cheaper way of getting internet to most homes?


Highly unlikely, due to the current laws of physics. But in the event that ever did happen, then all those massive profits they are currently raking in from wireless data will evaporate like a fart in the wind.



murgatroyd said:


> And the government isn't much better -- they don't think past the next election cycle.


The main problem with the government is that they are bought and paid for by the corporations. So the root problem is still the for-profit corporations.

Speaking of the devil... http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Comcast-Employing-40-Lobbying-Firms-to-Get-Merger-Approved-129075


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## randian (Jan 15, 2014)

trip1eX said:


> And what if wireless becomes a much cheaper way of getting internet to most homes?


Impossible. Not enough spectrum, and the high-frequency spectrum required to deliver big bandwidth has terrible building penetration requiring much denser deployment than they have now, eliminating any savings. They have enough to keep up with burgeoning mobile data demand, but home data demands are another kettle of fish.


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## Bigg (Oct 31, 2003)

Diana Collins said:


> I pay $59.99/month for 75 down/35 up service. If I switched back to Cablevision, they would change me $49.95 for 15 down/3 up.


You must be grandfathered in to something, as that's not the current pricing.



> Forgot about the SD locals. AFAIK, the SL3 feedhorn assembly is the standard for HD installs everywhere. If you still have an SD TV they usually still hook it up to an HD receiver. The only SL5 installs happening anymore are all SD installs in markets where the SD locals are on 119 spotbeams, or for foreign language packages. They are, however, planning to stop to doing SD only installs if they have not done so already.


I guess they are allowing the SL3s in Hartford-New Haven for new installs, but I very, very rarely see one. Seems to me they are defaulting to SL5's. Either that, or barely anyone has installed a DirecTV dish recently.



> Of course, it wasn't just look angles that drove Dish to a dual arc system. They only had 22 transponder licenses at 119 (which is where they started) and 29 at 110 (acquired from MCI and News Corp, ironically enough) with no other assets in the area. DirecTV on the other hand, had all 32 transponders at 101, 3 at 110 and 10 at 119, plus had full slot Ka licenses at 99 and 103. Each Ka slot has twice the total bandwidth of a Ku DBS slot, so DirecTV has a massive amount of bandwidth within a 20 degree arc, most it within a 4 degree arc.
> 
> There was no way Dish could do HD on their 110/119 assets, so they cut a deal with Rainbow's Voom all HD service to acquire their 61.5 assets and cut a deal with Angel Broadcasting to get their 61.5 licenses. That let them get into HD, but as you point out, it was barely above the horizon from the West Coast. To solve that problem they leased the entire slot at 129 from the Canadians and stuck Echostar-V there until the Canadian Ciel Satellite Group launched Ciel-2. Dish also uses a Canadian satellite (Nimiq-5) at 72.5 and a Mexican one (QuetzSat-1) at 77. Thus, the 2 arc solution was born, at the cost of higher operating expenses (twice the uplinks) and paying satellite lease fees.


Yeah, they needed the bandwidth. In the age of HD locals for close to 200 markets, however, the dual-arc solution does save quite a bit of bandwidth, as there's a big chunk of the country that is covered by both arcs.


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## Bigg (Oct 31, 2003)

trip1eX said:


> 30 years? That's exactly why they aren't rushing to build out their fiber network.


Infrastructure has to be amortized out over a 30-year period. The problem is Wall Street investors and company executives at both Verizon and AT&T who are too childish and impatient to be able to look at a 30-year payback on a major capital expenditure and go ahead with it. Without FTTH, the telcos have no wireline future.



> Level3 almost went bankrupt creating a backbone fiber network. And are stuck between a rock and a hard place for a very long time. That isn't going to turn out to be a good investment. Other companies did go bankrupt creating cross country fiber networks.


Backbone fiber is different from last mile fiber.



> It isn't like VZ gets the market to themselves if they build out either. They have immediate competitors. AT the same time it isn't like the business isn't changing. The ability to charge for phone, tv and internet is getting weaker all the time. And what if wireless becomes a much cheaper way of getting internet to most homes?


Wireless can't meet home bandwidth demand in all but the most rural areas (and even barely then) for the foreseeable future. Whoever owns the biggest pipes to the customer's place of residence will win, no matter whether it's QAM, IPTV, OTT, whatever. FIOS puts Verizon back in the game as a last-mile provider with a big pipe, and is far more robust than anything else widely deployed in the US.



> The CFO recently said their capital is going towards wireless right now because the returns are much higher and wireless is more promising. They aren't going to start thinking about expanding FIOS again until they make more money from the capital they have already deployed.


That's the problem. These companies are all run by people who think like screaming 2-year-olds "I WANT IT NOW". They seem to be incapable of adult though, which, in the business that they are in, involves 30-year amortization of large amounts of capital expenditure.



> It will be interesting to follow what Google is doing and see how that works in the longer run.


Google is in it for totally different reasons, although the fiber to the press release rollouts are rather entertaining. I don't know why Verizon hasn't actually done gigabit yet, even though they aren't in any Google Fiber areas, since their existing GPON infrastructure can do gigabit with a visit to the customer's house to switch them from MoCA to Ethernet. They have 18 million homes passed with FIOS, and they are currently building out to several million more in NYC, so that's a lot of actual gigabit that they could offer and advertise on (even if the actual take rate is tiny).


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## Diana Collins (Aug 21, 2002)

Bigg said:


> ...however, the dual-arc solution does save quite a bit of bandwidth, as there's a big chunk of the country that is covered by both arcs.


I'm not sure how you figure that. Each local market requires a certain amount of bandwidth, mostly delivered by spot beam. It doesn't matter where that spot beam originates, it is still the same total bandwidth. For national channels, Dish broadcasts them twice, once for each arc. Since the mix of satellites and their corresponding transponder capacities vary from one arc to the other, they can't even use the same set of statistical multiplexers to encode the content. They must completely duplicate almost all of the uplink equipment and consume double the bandwidth.

But, this is a discussion for another thread, and another discussion site.


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## Bigg (Oct 31, 2003)

Diana Collins said:


> I'm not sure how you figure that. Each local market requires a certain amount of bandwidth, mostly delivered by spot beam. It doesn't matter where that spot beam originates, it is still the same total bandwidth. For national channels, Dish broadcasts them twice, once for each arc. Since the mix of satellites and their corresponding transponder capacities vary from one arc to the other, they can't even use the same set of statistical multiplexers to encode the content. They must completely duplicate almost all of the uplink equipment and consume double the bandwidth.
> 
> But, this is a discussion for another thread, and another discussion site.


The spot beams have to be way bigger than the DMA, as DMAs are not designed to match an elliptical shape that comes from the equator at a certain satellite position... So having two arcs for much of the middle of the country helps a LOT.

Yes, national stuff is duplicated, and the northeast corner and western half of the country only have access to one arc, although the western part of the country has far fewer DMAs anyways. The biggest mess of DMAs is throughout the midwest, south, Texas, and Florida, which is exactly where both arcs are workable...


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## Diana Collins (Aug 21, 2002)

Bigg said:


> The spot beams have to be way bigger than the DMA, as DMAs are not designed to match an elliptical shape that comes from the equator at a certain satellite position... So having two arcs for much of the middle of the country helps a LOT.
> 
> Yes, national stuff is duplicated, and the northeast corner and western half of the country only have access to one arc, although the western part of the country has far fewer DMAs anyways. The biggest mess of DMAs is throughout the midwest, south, Texas, and Florida, which is exactly where both arcs are workable...


None of which answers the question of how this saves any bandwidth. The DMAs have to be covered and whether they come from the eastern arc or the western, it is the same bandwidth. DirecTV covers the same DMAs, with the same elliptical beams from GEO. The same local channels are delivered. I see no savings there. Then you have to transmit all SD and HD national channels twice.


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## trip1eX (Apr 2, 2005)

Bigg said:


> Infrastructure has to be amortized out over a 30-year period. The problem is Wall Street investors and company executives at both Verizon and AT&T who are too childish and impatient to be able to look at a 30-year payback on a major capital expenditure and go ahead with it. Without FTTH, the telcos have no wireline future.
> 
> Backbone fiber is different from last mile fiber.
> 
> ...


WEll I disagree whoever owns the biggest pipe to the consumer will win. Good enough and much cheaper usually wins.

And what if the biggest mobile internet pipe wins not the biggest wired line?

We all wouldn't mind having fiber connections. And I think that's where you're coming from. so I understand your sentiments

But ...wireless is where its at right now for these companies. And fiber is on the backburner because it isn't proving to be a great investment.

And I have no idea how much bandwidth is possible in wireless cellular tech over the next 5, 10, 15, or 20 years. I don't know if or how they could use it in conjunction with a fiber network for covering the last mile. I kind of doubt anyone here knows enough to predict that picture over time. The real point is tech changes. Fiber may prove to be overkill for the last mile to a home. And who knows how much speed a person will require in the future. Again good enough and much cheaper is typically a good place to be in the marketplace.

Plus this whole thing about gigabit connections being some sort of nirvana is ....not that i wouldn't want one, but ...I mean most of the traffic today is netflix. For any kind of text or reading or information my 30mbit connection seems pretty fast to me.

What do all these South Koreas out there do with their super fast connections that we are missing out on. I really haven't noticed the difference in my internet connection since it was 5-10 mbps a few years to the 30 mbps I have today except for the speed of large downloads.


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## JosephB (Nov 19, 2010)

stevel said:


> I've read there's a LOT of "dark fiber" around the country - fiber that was laid out but never used.


There is, but unfortunately it's not really useful for last mile ISP services, it's laid in major corridors between cities but not around neighborhoods.


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## Bigg (Oct 31, 2003)

Diana Collins said:


> None of which answers the question of how this saves any bandwidth. The DMAs have to be covered and whether they come from the eastern arc or the western, it is the same bandwidth. DirecTV covers the same DMAs, with the same elliptical beams from GEO. The same local channels are delivered. I see no savings there. Then you have to transmit all SD and HD national channels twice.


Everywhere in the eastern half of the US except PA and northeast, you can put some DMAs on Western and some DMAs on Eastern. Eastern only reaches about halfway into Texas and on up, but there are far fewer DMAs to deal with west of that line. Since locals are a huge chunk of their bandwidth, this helps them to have enough bandwidth to cover all of the DMAs. IIRC, Chicago is such a huge market that it's duplicated on both arcs, so that they have more flexibility with installations and some support for legacy split arc setups.

I'm not saying it's the desired way to do things if you were building a system from the ground up, but without the two arcs, DISH would be sunk bandwidth wise.



trip1eX said:


> WEll I disagree whoever owns the biggest pipe to the consumer will win. Good enough and much cheaper usually wins.
> 
> And what if the biggest mobile internet pipe wins not the biggest wired line?


U-Verse was built to have the same speeds, a few better features, like a 4-tuner DVR, and somewhat lower picture quality than cable in 2008-2010. It held its own for a year or two beyond that, and now it's falling behind rapidly. Comcast offers 50mbps as their standard package, with an option for 105mbps. U-Verse can only get 18-24mbps out to most locations, 45mbps to some, and they are limited to 4 tuners. Comcast's X1 has 6 tuners, only 5 of which are accessible, one for live TV, and 4 for recording, but they may open up the 6th at some point, and they are already a tuner head of the best U-Verse installs. And U-Verse's limit is for the whole house, not just that TV. With Comcast you can have as many tuners as you want, you could even have an HTPC with 24 tuners or more if you wanted. Sure, that's a fringe case, but the point is, they can scale X1 up, where U-Verse can't.

A bigger issues comes with 4K. U-Verse likely can't do 4K at all, if they can, it will several cripple the rest of the system. As it is, if you have too many shows DVR'ing, the internet slows down, which is pretty pathetic. Comcast can easily do 4k on existing QAMs on their rebuilt systems, or even on older systems if they start the MPEG-4 conversion.

Mobile doesn't have the bandwidth. There is no way to stream TV over mobile in any scalable way. LTE networks today are slammed in many major metro areas, and that's just for mobile apps, some limited video consumption, and the usual smartphone kind of stuff. You'd need a few orders of magnitude more mobile bandwidth. As it is, half of mobile traffic today is offloaded to wifi. If you got rid of just the wifi that uses cable, DSL, VDSL, and fiber to offload cell phone traffic, the LTE networks in many places would basically grind to a halt. And that's still with everything else going through cable, DSL, VDSL, fiber, or satellite.



> We all wouldn't mind having fiber connections. And I think that's where you're coming from. so I understand your sentiments
> 
> But ...wireless is where its at right now for these companies. And fiber is on the backburner because it isn't proving to be a great investment.


The reason that it's on the back burner is because the executives and the shareholders are childish, immature thinkers who can't see a 30-year amortizing of a multi-billion-dollar physical plant. FIOS only got built because of the previous CEO who was able to think like an adult, and look forward into the future, and he realized that he needed to roll the trucks, backhoes, and start deploying a bigger, fatter pipe than anyone else to stay relevant. Now in some ways, AT&T though ahead more with the first large-scale IPTV deployment, but they screwed up on the physical plant by running their futuristic IPTV system over 100-year-old copper, and spending billions making shoestring and bubble gum connections on their ancient copper that costs far more to maintain in the long run, and can't compete with coax.

To me, aside from not working with TiVo in it's current state, the ultimate would be an IPTV fiber system, which could partially be built as an FTTB system for MDUs, with VDSL for the final few hundred feet, with speeds of 100mbps or so, and an easy upgrade path in the future to either pull CAT-6 cable to each unit, or go full fiber. Verizon's VDSL system isn't bad, although it sounds like it only works in certain situations where they can get access to the coax for the video side of things, while bringing the internet in over VDSL.

What is even crazier with AT&T is that they didn't even build a robust VDSL system. They didn't push the VRADs out far enough, and they did the absolute minimum needed to offer triple play, and they did little FTTH. They could have even done a mixed deployment, with fiber for easy locations, like above ground utilities, or situations like where my parents live, where the developers put in extra conduits for future fiber connectivity back in the late '90s, which are now sitting there unused, waiting for someone to pull fiber through. It would be about the easiest fiber install imaginable.



> And I have no idea how much bandwidth is possible in wireless cellular tech over the next 5, 10, 15, or 20 years. I don't know if or how they could use it in conjunction with a fiber network for covering the last mile. I kind of doubt anyone here knows enough to predict that picture over time. The real point is tech changes. Fiber may prove to be overkill for the last mile to a home. And who knows how much speed a person will require in the future. Again good enough and much cheaper is typically a good place to be in the marketplace.
> 
> Plus this whole thing about gigabit connections being some sort of nirvana is ....not that i wouldn't want one, but ...I mean most of the traffic today is netflix. For any kind of text or reading or information my 30mbit connection seems pretty fast to me.


Fiber is cheaper over the long haul compared to AT&T's kludge with VDSL, but aside from that, wireless will not be handling everything for a very, very long time. Applications that saturate wireless networks seem to come along faster than the wireless companies can add more bandwidth, and that's without home-based connectivity running over wireless, and with half the traffic being offloaded. At the same time, home bandwidth use is going way up with a ton of unicast streaming video, and other uses for bandwidth rapidly increasing as well.

It is true that most users don't need gigabit, but the phone companies are in a situation where their copper is too slow, so the next step is fiber to the house. FIOS is doing well with 50/25 and 75/35 plans, which technology are more limited by the inside wiring than by the GPON fiber system. The inside wiring maxes out somewhere around 100-150mbps for MoCA, while the fiber can handle gig symmetrical. With fiber to the house, they could also make a robust IPTV system like Google Fiber, and pass the feeds straight through to the customer.

We don't know what the future bandwidth needs are exactly going to be, but we know that bandwidth demand is going to keep going up. It doesn't matter whether cord cutting ever becomes more than a tiny minority of people that Karl Bode loves to write about every day, or if people just start using more WatchESPN, more HBO Go, and other MSO-based streaming products, bandwidth demand is going to go up quite a bit over the next few years. And if 4k catches on, it will go up even more.



> What do all these South Koreas out there do with their super fast connections that we are missing out on. I really haven't noticed the difference in my internet connection since it was 5-10 mbps a few years to the 30 mbps I have today except for the speed of large downloads.


I'm actually perfectly happy with my 105mbps Comcast connection, which I really want is better uploads, and better picture quality for my TiVo, which is what Verizon FIOS offers. Given that I want to get a job in a FIOS area anyways, I likely will be able to do this in the not too distant future.


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## Diana Collins (Aug 21, 2002)

Bigg said:


> Everywhere in the eastern half of the US except PA and northeast, you can put some DMAs on Western and some DMAs on Eastern. Eastern only reaches about halfway into Texas and on up, but there are far fewer DMAs to deal with west of that line. Since locals are a huge chunk of their bandwidth, this helps them to have enough bandwidth to cover all of the DMAs. IIRC, Chicago is such a huge market that it's duplicated on both arcs, so that they have more flexibility with installations and some support for legacy split arc setups.
> 
> I'm not saying it's the desired way to do things if you were building a system from the ground up, but without the two arcs, DISH would be sunk bandwidth wise...


So now they are duplicating *Chicago locals* on both arcs, along with ALL the national SD and HD channels. And this is somehow SAVING bandwidth? You've offered NO explanation of this claim. The DMAs are the same size and in the same places whether you are transmitting from the eastern sky, the western sky or anyplace in between. The DMAs contain the same channels regardless of from which slot they are transmitted. The only "bandwidth savings" Dish enjoys is that which comes from reducing the horizontal resolution of HD content and then overcompressing it.

There is absolutely no "bandwidth savings" by virtue of simply transmitting local channels from a slot that just happens to be more vertically overhead than another.


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## trip1eX (Apr 2, 2005)

Bigg said:


> U-Verse was built to have the same speeds, a few better features, like a 4-tuner DVR, and somewhat lower picture quality than cable in 2008-2010. It held its own for a year or two beyond that, and now it's falling behind rapidly. Comcast offers 50mbps as their standard package, with an option for 105mbps. U-Verse can only get 18-24mbps out to most locations, 45mbps to some, and they are limited to 4 tuners. Comcast's X1 has 6 tuners, only 5 of which are accessible, one for live TV, and 4 for recording, but they may open up the 6th at some point, and they are already a tuner head of the best U-Verse installs. And U-Verse's limit is for the whole house, not just that TV. With Comcast you can have as many tuners as you want, you could even have an HTPC with 24 tuners or more if you wanted. Sure, that's a fringe case, but the point is, they can scale X1 up, where U-Verse can't.
> 
> A bigger issues comes with 4K. U-Verse likely can't do 4K at all, if they can, it will several cripple the rest of the system. As it is, if you have too many shows DVR'ing, the internet slows down, which is pretty pathetic. Comcast can easily do 4k on existing QAMs on their rebuilt systems, or even on older systems if they start the MPEG-4 conversion.


Well no one said Uverse was better than cable.

I said the best pipe doesn't automatically mean winning. Good enough and much cheaper usually is what wins in the marketplace. It doesn't sound like U-verse is even good enough compared to cable. But also you have to ask yourself whether most customers care about the limits you mention. You also have to view U-verse in terms of this DTV acquisition. What kind of internet speeds can they deliver over Uverse if DTV handles most of the video in the distant future?

And jsut like you're comparing Uverse to cable why not compare cable to fiber. Is fiber going to be so much better than cable to the consumer. WE know technically it is a better technology in terms of bandwidth. But will that matter to the consumer experience?

And what if you start providing gigabit connections over fiber to people for $60 or so? I wonder how habits change as far as sharing goes. With that kind of bandwidth and the wifi technologies of today I can imagine alot more bandwidth sharing will be going on between households.

And again are the people in the world with these really fast connections doing anything with them that we should be doing? I guess I always hear about the fast connections but I never hear about what they are doing with them.



Bigg said:


> Mobile doesn't have the bandwidth. There is no way to stream TV over mobile in any scalable way. LTE networks today are slammed in many major metro areas, and that's just for mobile apps, some limited video consumption, and the usual smartphone kind of stuff. You'd need a few orders of magnitude more mobile bandwidth. As it is, half of mobile traffic today is offloaded to wifi. If you got rid of just the wifi that uses cable, DSL, VDSL, and fiber to offload cell phone traffic, the LTE networks in many places would basically grind to a halt. And that's still with everything else going through cable, DSL, VDSL, fiber, or satellite.


On one hand you like to bring up 30 years when talking about fiber. ON the other hand you don't seem to be seeing mobile technology past today. 

No one said wireless has the same bandwidth as cable or fiber today or will have in the future. I'm just saying who knows in 5 or 10 or 15 or 20 years how much faster it gets and who knows what kind of wireless/fiber hybrid system is possible in the future if any. Who knows how habits change.

LTE already might be a good enough internet connection for some people according to the speeds some say they get. Then consider that many, white collar types at least, have internet access at work. How much do they need that home internet connection?

Can a lower income person afford both?

What if the golden age of charging for data, tv and phone is over?



Bigg said:


> The reason that it's on the back burner is because the executives and the shareholders are childish, immature thinkers who can't see a 30-year amortizing of a multi-billion-dollar physical plant. FIOS only got built because of the previous CEO who was able to think like an adult, and look forward into the future, and he realized that he needed to roll the trucks, backhoes, and start deploying a bigger, fatter pipe than anyone else to stay relevant. Now in some ways, AT&T though ahead more with the first large-scale IPTV deployment, but they screwed up on the physical plant by running their futuristic IPTV system over 100-year-old copper, and spending billions making shoestring and bubble gum connections on their ancient copper that costs far more to maintain in the long run, and can't compete with coax.


Well 30 years amortizing doesn't mean they make money or have a decent return. It just means every year they write off 1/30th of their initial capital outlay.

The phone company's copper networks are ancient and are lacking in bandwidth. But what kind of speeds can ATT deliver over Uverse if they turned that network into internet only and delivered tv over Direct TV?

And an ancient network doesn't mean that building out a fiber network asap is a guaranteed money maker. I don't see why focusing on wireless now over fiber is so unreasonable given the returns of fiber and demand for mobile data.



Bigg said:


> Fiber is cheaper over the long haul compared to AT&T's kludge with VDSL, but aside from that, wireless will not be handling everything for a very, very long time. Applications that saturate wireless networks seem to come along faster than the wireless companies can add more bandwidth, and that's without home-based connectivity running over wireless, and with half the traffic being offloaded. At the same time, home bandwidth use is going way up with a ton of unicast streaming video, and other uses for bandwidth rapidly increasing as well.
> 
> It is true that most users don't need gigabit, but the phone companies are in a situation where their copper is too slow, so the next step is fiber to the house. FIOS is doing well with 50/25 and 75/35 plans, which technology are more limited by the inside wiring than by the GPON fiber system. The inside wiring maxes out somewhere around 100-150mbps for MoCA, while the fiber can handle gig symmetrical. With fiber to the house, they could also make a robust IPTV system like Google Fiber, and pass the feeds straight through to the customer.
> 
> ...


Bandwidth demand will probably go up. You don't when that will stop. You don't know if or when the next breakthrough will come that allows them to stream data much more efficiently than before through the same connection. You don't know the financial limits of what consumers want to pay for either. You don't know how much more data will go over wireless in the next 10 years and bypass last mile wired connections to the home.

I can already see that something might give when consumers are confronted with paying $50/month for wired data and $30-$50/month per person for mobile data. At some point a healthy portion of consumers will look at these 2 bills and one day discover that mobile data is all they need.

These companies are right to be leery of overbuilding. That can kill a company. Same thing as being too short sighted. You're just going from one extreme to the other. Neither in and of itself is a solution.

We don't know whether 4k will catch on or not. You don't know if customers really want to pay for more bandwidth either. You don't know if customers want to pay for mobile data and wired data. We don't know how many can afford it and which they would drop first.

I think you are looking at this from mostly a "what I want today" point of view. Not as much of a financial point of view of the average customers and the corporations. VZ has a market leading position in wireless. And wireless data is booming. It makes sense it is a priority.

Consumers as a whole don't always behave how I do. They don't always go for the best option either.

btw, I had FIOS and Comcast in same area and picture quality didn't seem any different. As happy as I was to get FIOS, I really couldn't tell the difference in the end.


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

It looks like wireless is the answer after all! (sarcasm)

"AT&T's solution for rural Americans without access to broadband service arrived this week with the introduction of an $80/month plan bundling a mandatory wireless home landline with a 10GB usage-capped Internet plan.

AT&T Wireless Home Phone and Internet has undergone market testing in selected northeastern areas (largely outside of AT&T's landline service territory). This week the service became available nationwide and is marketed to customers disconnected (or soon will be if regulators approve) from AT&T's traditional landline service. AT&T is petitioning to dismantle its rural and outer suburban wired landline network and transfer customers to wireless service. But AT&T's wireless replacement is both expensive and usage capped with an allowance that is just a fraction of what AT&T DSL offers:"

http://stopthecap.com/2014/05/27/at...-wireless-landline-replacement-10gb-internet/

With great wireless deals like this, who really wants FTTH anyways? (double sarcasm)


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## Bigg (Oct 31, 2003)

Diana Collins said:


> So now they are duplicating *Chicago locals* on both arcs, along with ALL the national SD and HD channels. And this is somehow SAVING bandwidth? You've offered NO explanation of this claim. The DMAs are the same size and in the same places whether you are transmitting from the eastern sky, the western sky or anyplace in between. The DMAs contain the same channels regardless of from which slot they are transmitted. The only "bandwidth savings" Dish enjoys is that which comes from reducing the horizontal resolution of HD content and then overcompressing it.
> 
> There is absolutely no "bandwidth savings" by virtue of simply transmitting local channels from a slot that just happens to be more vertically overhead than another.


You're totally missing the point here. There are a ton of DMAs out there, and if you can feed one from EA, and the neighboring one from WA, you save a LOT of bandwidth. Since you can do this for much of the eastern part of the US (south and west of OH/WV/VA basically), the bandwidth savings are rather large. Obviously spot beams aren't perfect so you can't re-use the same bandwidth on the same satellite for two neighboring DMAs, and sometimes for several DMAs, since the shape of the spots is determined by the angle of the satellite to the earth, and often has a totally different shape than the DMA.



trip1eX said:


> Well no one said Uverse was better than cable.
> 
> I said the best pipe doesn't automatically mean winning. Good enough and much cheaper usually is what wins in the marketplace. It doesn't sound like U-verse is even good enough compared to cable. But also you have to ask yourself whether most customers care about the limits you mention. You also have to view U-verse in terms of this DTV acquisition. What kind of internet speeds can they deliver over Uverse if DTV handles most of the video in the distant future?
> 
> And jsut like you're comparing Uverse to cable why not compare cable to fiber. Is fiber going to be so much better than cable to the consumer. WE know technically it is a better technology in terms of bandwidth. But will that matter to the consumer experience?


The problem is that U-Verse was engineered to equal cable in 2010, maybe 2011. It's now falling behind, and with 4k video and bigger DVRs (through the MSOs) just starting to come out, it's rapidly going to fall farther behind.

It could find a place in the market at a much lower price point, the problem is with a video service, there isn't much room to price lower, as the carriage fees are so absurdly high just to get the content.

Fiber isn't that much better than coax, but the phone companies don't have coax, so they have to go to fiber. FTTN just isn't good enough to compete with where coax is going.



> And what if you start providing gigabit connections over fiber to people for $60 or so? I wonder how habits change as far as sharing goes. With that kind of bandwidth and the wifi technologies of today I can imagine alot more bandwidth sharing will be going on between households.


The people who are sharing internet connections are already doing it with 50+mbps cable connections. Most people don't as it's a bit tricky to set up, and people are concerned about privacy/security/liability with other people on their connection.



> And again are the people in the world with these really fast connections doing anything with them that we should be doing? I guess I always hear about the fast connections but I never hear about what they are doing with them.


No one really needs a gigabit. But your home internet connection not being the bottleneck for anything would sure be nice. Upload speeds are also far better than what we have today.



> On one hand you like to bring up 30 years when talking about fiber. ON the other hand you don't seem to be seeing mobile technology past today.
> 
> No one said wireless has the same bandwidth as cable or fiber today or will have in the future. I'm just saying who knows in 5 or 10 or 15 or 20 years how much faster it gets and who knows what kind of wireless/fiber hybrid system is possible in the future if any. Who knows how habits change.


The thing is, it will take years just for the wireless companies to dig out of their current bandwidth crunch, and to keep up with the rising demand for mobile video applications. At the same time, home video bandwidth consumption will just keep going up with more streaming and 4k. Looking into the future, there will be even more of a gulf between wireless and wireline, not less.



> LTE already might be a good enough internet connection for some people according to the speeds some say they get. Then consider that many, white collar types at least, have internet access at work. How much do they need that home internet connection?


Some people use LTE as their main connection, but the plans are heavily capped, and have to be, as peak speeds are similar to cable, but the capacity just isn't there. Anything more that very light, casual use is just too much for wireless networks to handle.



> Well 30 years amortizing doesn't mean they make money or have a decent return. It just means every year they write off 1/30th of their initial capital outlay.


I know. But if you amortize over 5 years, or even 10 years, of course a fiber network is going to lose money. They make good returns on a 30-year amortization.



> The phone company's copper networks are ancient and are lacking in bandwidth. But what kind of speeds can ATT deliver over Uverse if they turned that network into internet only and delivered tv over Direct TV?
> 
> And an ancient network doesn't mean that building out a fiber network asap is a guaranteed money maker. I don't see why focusing on wireless now over fiber is so unreasonable given the returns of fiber and demand for mobile data.


Also, bringing video in via satellite won't help what internet packages they can offer, as they already share bandwidth between the two sides via QoS.

They can't compete with their ancient copper networks. It's do or die, and they don't seem to understand this basic concept because of their childish outlook on long-term investments in infrastructure.

Wireless and wireline are two different things. They should be investing in them and operating them as separate, profitable businesses, not bleeding wireline dry for wireless and basically just putting it out there to die. Unfortunately, regulators are just letting them let their phone networks die. It should be like use it or lose it- upgrade you network or lose it to someone who will.



> Bandwidth demand will probably go up. You don't when that will stop. You don't know if or when the next breakthrough will come that allows them to stream data much more efficiently than before through the same connection. You don't know the financial limits of what consumers want to pay for either. You don't know how much more data will go over wireless in the next 10 years and bypass last mile wired connections to the home.


You have it all backwards. Wireless networks are going to offload congested wireless networks. Your thought process is basically saying that the traffic is going to bypass the giant 16-lane highway for little, congested main street, and that doesn't even factor in the expense of mobile data, specifically because it is narrow and congested.



> I can already see that something might give when consumers are confronted with paying $50/month for wired data and $30-$50/month per person for mobile data. At some point a healthy portion of consumers will look at these 2 bills and one day discover that mobile data is all they need.


That doesn't work when you have 10GB of shared data or something vs. 300GB+ on a home connection.



> These companies are right to be leery of overbuilding. That can kill a company. Same thing as being too short sighted. You're just going from one extreme to the other. Neither in and of itself is a solution.


They are being extremely short sighted. If they weren't they would be laying as much fiber as they could ever year until their entire network was fiber, and all the copper could be eliminated.



> We don't know whether 4k will catch on or not. You don't know if customers really want to pay for more bandwidth either. You don't know if customers want to pay for mobile data and wired data. We don't know how many can afford it and which they would drop first.
> 
> I think you are looking at this from mostly a "what I want today" point of view. Not as much of a financial point of view of the average customers and the corporations. VZ has a market leading position in wireless. And wireless data is booming. It makes sense it is a priority.
> 
> ...


You're not looking at the long-term viability of these businesses. Copper landlines have no long-term viability. They are too small a pipe. These companies need a bigger pipe. FIOS was Verizon's answer, but they only built it out something like halfway and then gave up, because they got a new CEO who thinks like child, not the far more adult-like CEO they had previously. If your current method of doing things has ZERO long-term viability, you have no option but to do something else. And that's what FIOS is. U-Verse is a little more muddy, as it's sort of a stop-gap technology that sort of works now, but it clearly headed for obsolescence unless the platform is switched over to a physical fiber infrastructure.


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## Diana Collins (Aug 21, 2002)

Bigg said:


> You're totally missing the point here. There are a ton of DMAs out there, and if you can feed one from EA, and the neighboring one from WA, you save a LOT of bandwidth. Since you can do this for much of the eastern part of the US (south and west of OH/WV/VA basically), the bandwidth savings are rather large. Obviously spot beams aren't perfect so you can't re-use the same bandwidth on the same satellite for two neighboring DMAs, and sometimes for several DMAs, since the shape of the spots is determined by the angle of the satellite to the earth, and often has a totally different shape than the DMA...


So, let me get this straight...if I beam down 100mbits/sec from two different points in the sky, it magically consumes less than an aggregate 200mbits/sec of bandwidth????

I don't know what maps you are looking at, but on the ones I use, cities don't move around, and the DMAs don't change much. So, if you know what you're doing, it isn't any harder to maximize frequency reuse when laying out spot beams. One of the interesting benefits DirecTV got from using the Spaceway satellites was that their phased array antennas allowed the size and power distribution of the spot beams to be adjusted. This allowed DirecTV to adjust the beams as they brought up additional DMAs, but this was all from one arc. If you want to use the same frequency in two adjacent spots you don't need a different arc, just a different satellite in the same arc. In fact, DirecTV (and I have to assume Dish as well) uses the same frequency twice in the *same* DMA by transmitting from two satellites in the same arc.


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## Bigg (Oct 31, 2003)

Diana Collins said:


> So, let me get this straight...if I beam down 100mbits/sec from two different points in the sky, it magically consumes less than an aggregate 200mbits/sec of bandwidth????


NOOOOOOOO!



> I don't know what maps you are looking at, but on the ones I use, cities don't move around, and the DMAs don't change much. So, if you know what you're doing, it isn't any harder to maximize frequency reuse when laying out spot beams. One of the interesting benefits DirecTV got from using the Spaceway satellites was that their phased array antennas allowed the size and power distribution of the spot beams to be adjusted. This allowed DirecTV to adjust the beams as they brought up additional DMAs, but this was all from one arc. If you want to use the same frequency in two adjacent spots you don't need a different arc, just a different satellite in the same arc. In fact, DirecTV (and I have to assume Dish as well) uses the same frequency twice in the *same* DMA by transmitting from two satellites in the same arc.


Since the spot beams end up having to hit at least a couple of DMAs in order to cover one, you end up needing several sets of spot beams to cover all the DMAs. Since the biggest hodge-podge of DMAs is in the area that DISH can cover with either arc, they can checkerboard which DMAs are on EA vs. WA in that area, and thus reduce the number of number of sets of spot beams that each arc needs. It's not as efficient as if it was a single arc like DirecTV, but it is still a significant bandwidth savings over a single arc of equal capacity to their current EA or WA. The most bandwidth constrained part of the US for DISH is the northeast, as it is EA only, and the western part of the country, which is WA only, has relatively few, very geographically large DMAs. However, given that the Northeast isn't quite as bad of a hodge-podge as the Midwest and South, and much of it is either near the ocean, or near Canada, where no other DMAs exist, the puzzle all fits together for DISH.


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## Diana Collins (Aug 21, 2002)

Bigg said:


> NOOOOOOOO!....


Fine...then there is no bandwidth savings. The only way to "save bandwidth" is to push more data through the same bit rate pipes. So, you admit that there is no bandwidth being saved.


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## Bigg (Oct 31, 2003)

Diana Collins said:


> Fine...then there is no bandwidth savings. The only way to "save bandwidth" is to push more data through the same bit rate pipes. So, you admit that there is no bandwidth being saved.


Oh, I see what you're saying. No, there's no bandwidth saved per se. Eastern Arc simply adds MORE bandwidth than what they had before from Western/split arc setups.

I was thinking in terms of bandwidth saved vs. if they had only one arc. Neither DISH arc has enough bandwidth to serve the whole country, even if either of them had a decent "view" of the whole country...


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## Series3Sub (Mar 14, 2010)

Still a bit off topic, but the Dish's dual arc is a temporary solution (for many years to come--should it still be a major DBS by then, most likely owned by Verizon by then) and not an efficient one. The big plan is to bring everything back to 110/119 and TWEENERS, and better compression technology such as Broadcom's new encoding tech that can send 4K over existing internet to the home or the next MPEG (still being worked on, I think) with performance at least as good as Broadcom's. Most of the EA is LEASED slots with one being for Dish Mexico and owned by Echostar, I think. The HD sat at 129 for the WA is also leased and must return for Canadian use after the 15 year lease ends.

The EA was created primarily because some parts of the east coast are NOT able to see 129 (used mostly for HD) and Dish simply did not have the bandwidth at its legacy WA to meet the requirement of must carry rules. That is an unacceptable business situation. The dual arc was a compromise because Dish could not acquire other slots closer to its legacy WA and the FCC was holding those precious "tweener" slots for the failed Spectrum 5 (114 was one of those slots), so Dish had to do a dual arc. Now, it seems Dish may get 114 after all. The tweeners and the jump in encoding tech well see every thing back to the WA arc, but that is years away. For what it is worth, DirecTV continues to hold and "use" transponders at 110 (only a few) and 119 (something like 10) that are Dish's primary sat slots. So Dish doesn't even have all the bandwidth at those slots.


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## Bigg (Oct 31, 2003)

Series3Sub said:


> Still a bit off topic, but the Dish's dual arc is a temporary solution (for many years to come--should it still be a major DBS by then, most likely owned by Verizon by then) and not an efficient one. The big plan is to bring everything back to 110/119 and TWEENERS, and better compression technology such as Broadcom's new encoding tech that can send 4K over existing internet to the home or the next MPEG (still being worked on, I think) with performance at least as good as Broadcom's. Most of the EA is LEASED slots with one being for Dish Mexico and owned by Echostar, I think. The HD sat at 129 for the WA is also leased and must return for Canadian use after the 15 year lease ends.
> 
> The EA was created primarily because some parts of the east coast are NOT able to see 129 (used mostly for HD) and Dish simply did not have the bandwidth at its legacy WA to meet the requirement of must carry rules. That is an unacceptable business situation. The dual arc was a compromise because Dish could not acquire other slots closer to its legacy WA and the FCC was holding those precious "tweener" slots for the failed Spectrum 5 (114 was one of those slots), so Dish had to do a dual arc. Now, it seems Dish may get 114 after all. The tweeners and the jump in encoding tech well see every thing back to the WA arc, but that is years away. For what it is worth, DirecTV continues to hold and "use" transponders at 110 (only a few) and 119 (something like 10) that are Dish's primary sat slots. So Dish doesn't even have all the bandwidth at those slots.


What the heck are the Canadians going to do with 129? It's so far west, it can't serve Toronto or Montreal, so it can really only serve Vancouver. They'll keep leasing to DISH. For east coast markets, EA is a big deal, and I doubt that they're going to let it go anywhere.

DirecTV has Spanish language stuff on 119, I thought 110 is empty now? They had HD up until 2008 when it moved over to 99c/103c.


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## trip1eX (Apr 2, 2005)

Bigg said:


> You're totally missing the point here. There are a ton of DMAs out there, and if you can feed one from EA, and the neighboring one from WA, you save a LOT of bandwidth. Since you can do this for much of the eastern part of the US (south and west of OH/WV/VA basically), the bandwidth savings are rather large. Obviously spot beams aren't perfect so you can't re-use the same bandwidth on the same satellite for two neighboring DMAs, and sometimes for several DMAs, since the shape of the spots is determined by the angle of the satellite to the earth, and often has a totally different shape than the DMA.
> 
> The problem is that U-Verse was engineered to equal cable in 2010, maybe 2011. It's now falling behind, and with 4k video and bigger DVRs (through the MSOs) just starting to come out, it's rapidly going to fall farther behind.
> 
> ...


 It's never been an argument that copper isn't crap. The issue is whether it is worth it to build out a fiber to the home network. ...whether it is a good investment or not. There is a difference. And really the issue is more whether VZ should be concentrating on wireless now or fiber buildout. I don't think they closed the door on fiber so much as said hey, wireless is so much better for us. Mobile data is exploding. I don't think that's childish or short sighted.

And there is a difference between building out a fiber to home network in a vacuum with no competitors and building one into a market where you have competitors and competitors who will have much lower costs with a good enough network. And that's just cable. There's also satellite for tv.

VZ has a market leading position in wireless and can charge the most because by most accounts they have the best wireless network. I'd probably focus on that too instead of fiber.

Wireless is connected to the 16 lane highways. IT wouldn't replace them. It's about bypassing the congested main street.

It doesn't even have to be cellular. Some form of wifi that covers the "last mile" could take over. And again if Uverse just provides internet and satellite does the video ...down the road then....is that a good enough technology combination for the next 20 years? What would those projected costs and profits be compared to building a fiber to the home network?

And yes your home internet has a much larger data cap today. Of course. Do most people come close to hitting that? What will be the data caps of wireless tomorrow? And the speeds? Will people want to pay 2 internet bills? And what point does the consumer start to say, 'Hey you know what? Wireless internet is good enough for me.'

You don't know.

So stop being so certain of the next 30 years.


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## Diana Collins (Aug 21, 2002)

I think a lot of the conversation has been focused on the wrong issues. When talking about wireless, we seem to be discussing 4G LTE as the "state of the art." It is not.

LTE as currently implemented by Verizon, AT&T, etc., is a rushed to market version of "real" LTE, which is just now being rolled out as LTE-Advanced.

Beyond LTE-Advanced there are newer spectrum bands (at higher frequencies) that are being developed. While the higher frequencies can support higher bit rates, they don't penetrate buildings as well, making them undesirable for mobile uses but just fine for "pole to home" purposes. Add in some of spectrum manipulation tricks that Artemis and companies like them are building to deliver each user within a cell the full capacity of the link, and there is no longer any need for a wire of any kind running into the home in order to deliver a gigabit connection.

But that is more technology. I direct everyone's attention to the issue of Net Neutrality. The principle that all bits are equal on the internet is about to die at the hands of the FCC. It now seems inevitable that the internet will bifurcate into one layer that everyone has access to and another layer that costs lots and lots of money to use. So, yes, people may prefer to take the crowded local road when the "16 lane superhighway" costs 100 times as much to use. Your subscription to Netflix, Amazon and your cable company's IP delivered content may come over the gigabit link, but most everything else will be coming over a link that will make 4G look as fast as lightning.

No company is going to make a network infrastructure investment that takes 30 years to provide a return on investment. Let's look back at the world of 1984:


In January, Apple introduced the Macintosh - the first personal computer with a graphical user interface (although, it was B&W with a resolution of 512x342 pixels) using an 8Mhz 16 bit processor with 128k of RAM for a price of $2495.
The fastest communication link available to home users was 1200 baud dial-up modems.
Ethernet existed in two forms: Thick Ethernet with vampire taps and transceiver cables, and "Thin-net" Ethernet, running on RG-58, with BNC T-connectors. Maximum speed was 10 megabits/second.
IBM introduced the IBM PC/AT, with a 6Mhz 80286 CPU and 640K RAM but no hard drive for around $6000

So if you were making an investment that would pay off in 30 years, what would anyone of thought of back then? 5 years is a long time in IT and telecomm, 10 years is an age. 30 years is literally an eternity. I'll guarantee you that 30 years from now fiber optic cable will NOT be the most commonly used delivery medium for end users. I don't know what it will be, but it will be something no one has thought of yet.


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## Bigg (Oct 31, 2003)

trip1eX said:


> It's never been an argument that copper isn't crap. The issue is whether it is worth it to build out a fiber to the home network. ...whether it is a good investment or not. There is a difference. And really the issue is more whether VZ should be concentrating on wireless now or fiber buildout. I don't think they closed the door on fiber so much as said hey, wireless is so much better for us. Mobile data is exploding. I don't think that's childish or short sighted.


One should not come at the expense of the other. Yes, they are one separate company, but they are two different services, and should be invested in separately. Not investing in fiber is childish and short sighted. For the telcos, it's do or die. DSL is already an almost dead technology and no one really wants POTS anymore. U-Verse VDSL is a super expensive way (in the long run) of buying time, as it's already maxed out on bandwidth, and has no room to grow for 4k video or faster internet, or 12-tuner DVRs or anything else.



> And there is a difference between building out a fiber to home network in a vacuum with no competitors and building one into a market where you have competitors and competitors who will have much lower costs with a good enough network. And that's just cable. There's also satellite for tv.


That's a tough one, as the markets with little competition can easily yield high uptake rates, but competitive markets are key, as the longer they wait, the longer and more entrenched the competitors get.



> It doesn't even have to be cellular. Some form of wifi that covers the "last mile" could take over. And again if Uverse just provides internet and satellite does the video ...down the road then....is that a good enough technology combination for the next 20 years? What would those projected costs and profits be compared to building a fiber to the home network?


The cost is whether AT&T even wants a seat at the table. U-Verse is maxed out, and they need to do fiber in order to stay competitive. Of course, they should have just done fiber in the first place, as U-Verse is an incredibly expensive and difficult to maintain kludge.



> And yes your home internet has a much larger data cap today. Of course. Do most people come close to hitting that? What will be the data caps of wireless tomorrow? And the speeds? Will people want to pay 2 internet bills? And what point does the consumer start to say, 'Hey you know what? Wireless internet is good enough for me.'
> 
> You don't know.
> 
> So stop being so certain of the next 30 years.


There's not enough bandwidth in wireless. All the new bandwidth coming in from technology advances gets eaten up for mobile use. Wireless internet works in extremely rural areas, and basically nowhere else.



Diana Collins said:


> I think a lot of the conversation has been focused on the wrong issues. When talking about wireless, we seem to be discussing 4G LTE as the "state of the art." It is not.
> 
> LTE as currently implemented by Verizon, AT&T, etc., is a rushed to market version of "real" LTE, which is just now being rolled out as LTE-Advanced.
> 
> Beyond LTE-Advanced there are newer spectrum bands (at higher frequencies) that are being developed. While the higher frequencies can support higher bit rates, they don't penetrate buildings as well, making them undesirable for mobile uses but just fine for "pole to home" purposes. Add in some of spectrum manipulation tricks that Artemis and companies like them are building to deliver each user within a cell the full capacity of the link, and there is no longer any need for a wire of any kind running into the home in order to deliver a gigabit connection.


Yeah, a gigabit connection shared with 10,000 other people. Verizon FIOS has 2.4gbps shared with 32 people, and they can just run more fiber to bring the split ratio down if they want to do gigabit to the home.



> But that is more technology. I direct everyone's attention to the issue of Net Neutrality. The principle that all bits are equal on the internet is about to die at the hands of the FCC. It now seems inevitable that the internet will bifurcate into one layer that everyone has access to and another layer that costs lots and lots of money to use. So, yes, people may prefer to take the crowded local road when the "16 lane superhighway" costs 100 times as much to use. Your subscription to Netflix, Amazon and your cable company's IP delivered content may come over the gigabit link, but most everything else will be coming over a link that will make 4G look as fast as lightning.


The CDNs will all pay, and we'll all end up paying more for everything, so AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast can make more money. Actually, almost all of the CDNs pay for better peering today. It's horrible what the telcos and cable cos are doing, they are basically using mob tactics to extort money out of content providers, but with a non-neutral connection, things aren't just going to slow to a crawl.



> No company is going to make a network infrastructure investment that takes 30 years to provide a return on investment. Let's look back at the world of 1984:
> 
> ...
> 
> So if you were making an investment that would pay off in 30 years, what would anyone of thought of back then? 5 years is a long time in IT and telecomm, 10 years is an age. 30 years is literally an eternity. I'll guarantee you that 30 years from now fiber optic cable will NOT be the most commonly used delivery medium for end users. I don't know what it will be, but it will be something no one has thought of yet.


It's infrastructure. You can keep swapping out the ends to get faster and faster speeds. Fiber laid many years ago is still in service with equipment that they could only dream of back then. In 30 years, the technology is going to be way better, but it still has to either run over copper (coax) or fiber.


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## Diana Collins (Aug 21, 2002)

Bigg said:


> ...It's infrastructure. You can keep swapping out the ends to get faster and faster speeds. Fiber laid many years ago is still in service with equipment that they could only dream of back then. In 30 years, the technology is going to be way better, but it still has to either run over copper (coax) or fiber.


Yes, and nearly every company that laid fiber 30 years ago is out of business today. The companies that bought up the fiber assets on the cheap did well, but the actual installers lost their shirts. The economics have not much changed since then. Installing fiber as a backbone network makes money, bringing it to the home costs more than you can possibly recoup unless you have significant market penetration. When Verizon stopped expanding FiOS they had passed 18 million homes with FiOS and only 5 million customers (they are up to around 6 million now). Until they can get another 4 million or so subscribers, they are not getting an acceptable ROI. At the rate they are going, that will take about 4 to 6 years. At that point, they may start expanding again.

The bottom line is they were way too optimistic about the market share they would capture and built out FiOS too quickly. Compare the pace of Google Fiber - they are going much slower having seen what happened with FiOS.


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## Diana Collins (Aug 21, 2002)

Bigg said:


> ...Yeah, a gigabit connection shared with 10,000 other people. Verizon FIOS has 2.4gbps shared with 32 people, and they can just run more fiber to bring the split ratio down if they want to do gigabit to the home...


No, a multi-gigabit connection shared with a few hundred households. What AT&T has shown is that running fiber to the neighborhood makes financial sense. Verizon has shown that running it to the premises is a much harder model. The major cost is the labor (my original FiOS install took all day). However, if you service those homes wirelessly, then all you have to do is drop ship the customer a receiver. Just like satellite transmissions are able to reuse frequencies by employing vertical, horizontal, left hand circular and right hand circular polarization, there are techniques being developed to allow multiple clients on the same frequency without the sharing of the allocated bandwidth (this is what Artemis has already demonstrated).


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## Bigg (Oct 31, 2003)

Diana Collins said:


> Yes, and nearly every company that laid fiber 30 years ago is out of business today. The companies that bought up the fiber assets on the cheap did well, but the actual installers lost their shirts. The economics have not much changed since then. Installing fiber as a backbone network makes money, bringing it to the home costs more than you can possibly recoup unless you have significant market penetration. When Verizon stopped expanding FiOS they had passed 18 million homes with FiOS and only 5 million customers (they are up to around 6 million now). Until they can get another 4 million or so subscribers, they are not getting an acceptable ROI. At the rate they are going, that will take about 4 to 6 years. At that point, they may start expanding again.
> 
> The bottom line is they were way too optimistic about the market share they would capture and built out FiOS too quickly. Compare the pace of Google Fiber - they are going much slower having seen what happened with FiOS.


Verizon is already making good money off of FIOS, and they would do even better if they actually wanted to actively compete with cable, not just be a "me too" kind of product like they are now. The only way FIOS is losing money is if you do some phony accounting and amortize the physical fiber infrastructure over a very short period of time like 5 or 10 years. If you amortize it correctly, FIOS is doing quite well. The difference in backbone and last-mile fiber is that Verizon is a duopoly player (if you count cable), whereas the backbone providers way over-built, and then technology made a lot of that fiber useless (at least for long enough for the companies to go under).

Google Fiber is a totally different business model, and a totally different goal.

If AT&T had done U-Verse the right way and done fiber from the get-go, they would have a larger market share than they do, both because they wouldn't be subject to the ~3000' and ~5000' (single pair and pair bonded) limitations of VDSL, and because they could deliver a better product. They would also have saved the billions that they threw away on upgrading their 100-year-old copper network, and maintaining the kludge that U-Verse created.



Diana Collins said:


> No, a multi-gigabit connection shared with a few hundred households.


I was referring to your references to wireless, which are ridiculous. Cellular towers can serve thousands of people. The only place that cellular can possibly replace wireline is in very rural areas, with a lot of LTE spectrum, and with DBS for the video side of things.



> What AT&T has shown is that running fiber to the neighborhood makes financial sense. Verizon has shown that running it to the premises is a much harder model. The major cost is the labor (my original FiOS install took all day). However, if you service those homes wirelessly, then all you have to do is drop ship the customer a receiver. Just like satellite transmissions are able to reuse frequencies by employing vertical, horizontal, left hand circular and right hand circular polarization, there are techniques being developed to allow multiple clients on the same frequency without the sharing of the allocated bandwidth (this is what Artemis has already demonstrated).


It's not physically possible to push that much bandwidth through the air, and it won't be for a long, long time. And even then, as wireless technologies have gotten faster and faster and faster, they still aren't that reliable. Signals still drop and get interrupted. Wired technologies don't. Fast Ethernet was far superior to 802.11b more than a decade ago, and today, Gigabit Ethernet is still far superior to 802.11n or 802.11ac.

AT&T screwed up bigtime. They built a kludge that's already completely out of bandwidth, while their cable competitors are having fun torturing AT&T by slowly turning the heat up. AT&T just keeps trying to add to the big kludge that they have already wasted billions on, and spend millions upon millions maintaining every year instead of doing it the right way and running GPON fiber.


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## Diana Collins (Aug 21, 2002)

Bigg said:


> Verizon is already making good money off of FIOS, and they would do even better if they actually wanted to actively compete with cable, not just be a "me too" kind of product like they are now. The only way FIOS is losing money is if you do some phony accounting and amortize the physical fiber infrastructure over a very short period of time like 5 or 10 years. If you amortize it correctly, FIOS is doing quite well. The difference in backbone and last-mile fiber is that Verizon is a duopoly player (if you count cable), whereas the backbone providers way over-built, and then technology made a lot of that fiber useless (at least for long enough for the companies to go under)...


First of all, you don't "amortize" an asset, you amortize debt. You depreciate an asset. Both have very specific rules under GAAP. However, neither are what is relevant here. What you are calling "amortization" is actually Return On Investment (ROI). ROI is calculated using a variety of factors including cost of money, opportunity cost and others. Again, there are accounting rules - companies, particularly public ones like Verizon, can't just make this stuff up. The fact is that the ROI on fiber to the premises is poor...less that could be earned by simply putting the money in the bank.



Bigg said:


> ..I was referring to your references to wireless, which are ridiculous. Cellular towers can serve thousands of people. The only place that cellular can possibly replace wireline is in very rural areas, with a lot of LTE spectrum, and with DBS for the video side of things...


Wireless is not just cellular. You continue to insist that the it will be years and years before anything faster than LTE is available. Of course, faster wireless options exist today. While the implementation costs is probably as high as fiber to the home, 802.11ad can deliver over 6 gigabits/per second. You seem to be stuck thinking of wireless as strictly one session per channel. There are so many ways to slice up a channel, without reducing effective throughput on any session, to list them all would take pages.



Bigg said:


> ...It's not physically possible to push that much bandwidth through the air, and it won't be for a long, long time. And even then, as wireless technologies have gotten faster and faster and faster, they still aren't that reliable. Signals still drop and get interrupted. Wired technologies don't. Fast Ethernet was far superior to 802.11b more than a decade ago, and today, Gigabit Ethernet is still far superior to 802.11n or 802.11ac...


Sorry, you are wrong...you can push that much bandwidth through the air, and you can do it today (at a price). The only challenge is to make it economical and consumer oriented - neither of which are years long processes.



Bigg said:


> ...AT&T screwed up bigtime. They built a kludge that's already completely out of bandwidth, while their cable competitors are having fun torturing AT&T by slowly turning the heat up. AT&T just keeps trying to add to the big kludge that they have already wasted billions on, and spend millions upon millions maintaining every year instead of doing it the right way and running GPON fiber.


So, how many multi-billion dollar telecommunications companies have you run? It is easy to play Monday morning quarterback. AT&T did what they could with they what had and the resources they were willing to spend. Last time I checked, AT&T as a whole was doing rather well. Their business doesn't start and end with UVerse. At the rate people are dropping traditional POTS service AT&T could probably solve a lot of their last mile problems bonding multiple pairs together. Even with their problems, UVerse is growing, while the cable companies that are "torturing" them continue to lose subscribers.

But they and Verizon have both, independently, come to the conclusion that wireless transmission of some form will have better ROI than pulling more cable. You may think you're smarter that they are, and smarter than the rest of us, and you may be right...but I wouldn't bet on it.


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## Series3Sub (Mar 14, 2010)

Bigg said:


> What the heck are the Canadians going to do with 129? It's so far west, it can't serve Toronto or Montreal, so it can really only serve Vancouver. They'll keep leasing to DISH. For east coast markets, EA is a big deal, and I doubt that they're going to let it go anywhere.
> 
> DirecTV has Spanish language stuff on 119, I thought 110 is empty now? They had HD up until 2008 when it moved over to 99c/103c.


Canadian politicians have a problem with the USA. They current lease to Echostar at 129 was good business for Ciel Sat Group and so the Canadian govt. "gave in." However, the Canadian Govt. allowed the lease of a Canadian asset to a US company at 129 ONLY on the condition that the slot be used for use in Canada ("the people of Canada) at the end of the 15 year lease. Given how Canadian politicians don't like USA and their past behavior on patriotic issues, it is NOT going to be leased for an additional 15 years. It is a principal to them that is truly something we Americans, capitalists to the hilt, can't get our heads around. For us it is always the $$ and forever economics, but for our neighbors to the north they see Canadian assets differently. Further, Dish doesn't NEED 129 by the end of the lease. Perhaps even less so as Dish's OTT service via internet to be launched this year matures on the years to come. _*"If I were building Dish (Network) today, I would not be investing in satellites,"*_ was Charlie Ergen's quote during a quarterly earnings conference call just a few years ago. He really is the wizard who has and still sees into the future better than any CEO (Chairman) in the TV biz today. Also, Canadian slot 118 will also merely finish its 15 year lease and no longer be needed by Dish as they are in the process of moving their entire International offerings to IPTV and Dish World streamed on devices like Roku. It's just hard for us to see into the future, but Ergen not only sees it, he has spent money on it and built the path for it from tons of servers for his OTT service coming this year, to his spectrum buys that have the two arcs being unnecessary a decade from today.


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## cram501 (Oct 23, 2002)

Diana Collins said:


> Wireless is not just cellular. You continue to insist that the it will be years and years before anything faster than LTE is available. Of course, faster wireless options exist today. While the implementation costs is probably as high as fiber to the home, 802.11ad can deliver over 6 gigabits/per second. You seem to be stuck thinking of wireless as strictly one session per channel. There are so many ways to slice up a channel, without reducing effective throughput on any session, to list them all would take pages.
> 
> Sorry, you are wrong...you can push that much bandwidth through the air, and you can do it today (at a price). The only challenge is to make it economical and consumer oriented - neither of which are years long processes.


It really doesn't matter if it's cellular or some new wireless technology. You will have a connection that is less clean, less responsive, and more prone to issues. When going over the air, you will have interference. That makes it less reliable. They can create protocols to work around the issues, decrease response time so it's less noticeable, but it's there. As use goes up, the problems go up and it's hard to expand to a spectrum that doesn't exist.

I disagree on the time frame. When they have a technology that is economically feasible, make it widely available, get devices that can communicate and utilize it, and not charge me ridiculous prices for reasonable bandwidth, it will be years. Eventually I think they will come up with a solution but I believe they are jumping the gun.



Diana Collins said:


> So, how many multi-billion dollar telecommunications companies have you run? It is easy to play Monday morning quarterback. AT&T did what they could with they what had and the resources they were willing to spend. Last time I checked, AT&T as a whole was doing rather well. Their business doesn't start and end with UVerse. At the rate people are dropping traditional POTS service AT&T could probably solve a lot of their last mile problems bonding multiple pairs together. Even with their problems, UVerse is growing, while the cable companies that are "torturing" them continue to lose subscribers.
> 
> But they and Verizon have both, independently, come to the conclusion that wireless transmission of some form will have better ROI than pulling more cable. You may think you're smarter that they are, and smarter than the rest of us, and you may be right...but I wouldn't bet on it.


Both Verizon and AT&T have both come to the realization that, right now, they make more money from wireless. It doesn't mean they'll make more money for internet access via wireless and they seem incapable of separating the two. The technology isn't there yet and I'll be surprised if they can pull it off in the next decade (not that they are looking that far ahead).

My belief is that both Verizon and AT&T will start expanding and upgrading their physical networks again when they come to that realization OR sell off land lines all together.


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## Diana Collins (Aug 21, 2002)

Well, technical issues aside (we'll have to agree to disagree there) nobody is doing FTTH anytime soon (except Google, who is doing it slowly, bribing local officials and doing it all in the first place just to shame the ISPs) until it has a decent ROI. As I said in the part of my post you didn't quote:

...the ROI on fiber to the premises is poor...less that could be earned by simply putting the money in the bank.


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## cram501 (Oct 23, 2002)

Technological problems will be an issue with any wireless communications systems. The extent all depends on the environment and how close they get to capacity. 

ROI for infrastructure is always initially poor. It takes years to make it worthwhile. Verizon and AT&T are focused on wireless purely for short term profits, it's short term growth potential, and to get around regulation. Because of their short sighted goals, they most likely will suffer for it in the long run. I don't think it has anything to do with long term ROI. Management will let the next guy deal with the lack of investment.

It would be nice to have a reliable, low latency wireless avenue. It will probably happen eventually but it's vapor ware until it's implemented in a real world scenario.


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## dlfl (Jul 6, 2006)

Diana Collins said:


> I think a lot of the conversation has been focused on the wrong issues. When talking about wireless, we seem to be discussing 4G LTE as the "state of the art." It is not.
> 
> LTE as currently implemented by Verizon, AT&T, etc., is a rushed to market version of "real" LTE, which is just now being rolled out as LTE-Advanced.
> 
> ...


I like that kind of talk! Run the signal up the pole with fiber (or maybe cable in the short term), then see if a wireless pole-to-home system will salute it! I hope your futuristic technical intuition is correct! There is a strong wave of anti-wi-fi sentiment currently because streaming over home networks is usually more reliable with wired ethernet. But I'm optimistic about technical advances and I sure would like that "drop ship me an internet transceiver" world compared to my current cable modem and its truck rolls.


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## Bigg (Oct 31, 2003)

Diana Collins said:


> First of all, you don't "amortize" an asset, you amortize debt. You depreciate an asset. Both have very specific rules under GAAP. However, neither are what is relevant here. What you are calling "amortization" is actually Return On Investment (ROI). ROI is calculated using a variety of factors including cost of money, opportunity cost and others. Again, there are accounting rules - companies, particularly public ones like Verizon, can't just make this stuff up. The fact is that the ROI on fiber to the premises is poor...less that could be earned by simply putting the money in the bank.


Maybe it's not amortized for tax purposes, but it effectively is for accounting purposes, since you have to figure out how much it costs over a given period of time, like a year. If you want to call it ROI, fine. The ROI on FTTH is excellent, if you use the right time periods. It's not going to get a good ROI or an ROI at all if you think in terms of 5 or 10 years, because that's a ridiculously short period of time for infrastructure. There's a reason that house mortgages are amortized over 30 years, and that's just one little house.



> Wireless is not just cellular. You continue to insist that the it will be years and years before anything faster than LTE is available. Of course, faster wireless options exist today. While the implementation costs is probably as high as fiber to the home, 802.11ad can deliver over 6 gigabits/per second. You seem to be stuck thinking of wireless as strictly one session per channel. There are so many ways to slice up a channel, without reducing effective throughput on any session, to list them all would take pages.


Wifi isn't going to help build a network that can do what GPON fiber can do. Wifi is limited to a few hundred feet at best. Sure, you can slice and dice one way or another, but at some point, you're going to just run out of bandwidth. Even U-Verse's pathetic bandwidth looks rather large compared to AT&T's wireless network. And U-Verse is already behind the game compared to cable.



> Sorry, you are wrong...you can push that much bandwidth through the air, and you can do it today (at a price). The only challenge is to make it economical and consumer oriented - neither of which are years long processes.


You can push gigabits through the air, yes. However, it does not scale. There is no way that you could push enough bandwidth through the air to even offer U-Verse wirelessly today, no matter what technology and how much spectrum you used. Even a dense grid of wireless sites would have thousands of subscribers on each site in urban areas.

To bring it back to the thread topic, what would be economical in rural areas would be for AT&T to use LTE for phone and data, and offer reasonable home internet packages, and bundle the TV with DirecTV.



> So, how many multi-billion dollar telecommunications companies have you run? It is easy to play Monday morning quarterback. AT&T did what they could with they what had and the resources they were willing to spend. Last time I checked, AT&T as a whole was doing rather well. Their business doesn't start and end with UVerse. At the rate people are dropping traditional POTS service AT&T could probably solve a lot of their last mile problems bonding multiple pairs together. Even with their problems, UVerse is growing, while the cable companies that are "torturing" them continue to lose subscribers.


It's not Monday morning quarterbacking. I was saying the same thing when AT&T started their idiotic U-Verse program. It was obvious back then that FIOS, at least the fiber part, was the right way to go. Whether Verizon should have gone IPTV is up for debate, as their system today is completely out of capacity for additional video channels. However, since they are running BPON and GPON, it wouldn't be hard at all to slap an IPTV system on top of their existing product, and over time phase out QAM, or run a hybrid system and not tri-mux anything on the QAM system, with the less popular content on the IPTV system. In fact, I think they might have the ability to do that today, except for CableCard support for the non-QAM material...

U-Verse has no long-term viability. They've found some customers who hate the cable company and will try anything that's not Comcast or TWC or whoever. However, over time, as their bandwidth needs grow, and U-Verse can't deliver, they will go back to cable, unless AT&T start running a huge amount of fiber.



> But they and Verizon have both, independently, come to the conclusion that wireless transmission of some form will have better ROI than pulling more cable. You may think you're smarter that they are, and smarter than the rest of us, and you may be right...but I wouldn't bet on it.


They're two different businesses, and if they had competent leadership, would be run basically separately, with each getting the upgrades that it needs.



Series3Sub said:


> Canadian politicians have a problem with the USA.


So they're going to take back 129, which can basically only serve Vancouver, just to spite us? That makes no sense. OTT plays aren't going to replace DBS anytime soon. Many DBS subscribers either have slow DSL, or can't get good internet access at all, so that approach makes little sense. I'm sure DirecTV will be eager to suck up several million customers if Charlie Ergen drives them away.



cram501 said:


> My belief is that both Verizon and AT&T will start expanding and upgrading their physical networks again when they come to that realization OR sell off land lines all together.


Yeah, they have to do one or the other. Hopefully, they do the former, since they have the deep pockets to do massive fiber build-outs that smaller telcos don't have, especially after the deals are made worse by creative accounting by the incumbent selling the lines off.



Diana Collins said:


> ...the ROI on fiber to the premises is poor...less that could be earned by simply putting the money in the bank.


ROI on fiber is good... if you account for it properly. Verizon should also get back in the game, offer $70/mo gigabit, and switch to MPEG-4 on the QAM side to just blow the cable companies out of the water on channel selection.



cram501 said:


> ROI for infrastructure is always initially poor. It takes years to make it worthwhile. Verizon and AT&T are focused on wireless purely for short term profits, it's short term growth potential, and to get around regulation. Because of their short sighted goals, they most likely will suffer for it in the long run. I don't think it has anything to do with long term ROI. Management will let the next guy deal with the lack of investment.
> 
> It would be nice to have a reliable, low latency wireless avenue. It will probably happen eventually but it's vapor ware until it's implemented in a real world scenario.


Exactly. They are falling farther and farther behind on the wireline side as a result of their focus only on short-term profits. Gee, that sounds like a lot of businesses, as well as government in the US.

No one has ever made wireless that's as reliable as wireline, and probably never will. Cisco's dual-band enterprise Wifi gear comes close, but even then, it's just not as reliable and consistent as Ethernet.


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## Diana Collins (Aug 21, 2002)

Bigg said:


> Maybe it's not amortized for tax purposes, but it effectively is for accounting purposes, since you have to figure out how much it costs over a given period of time, like a year. If you want to call it ROI, fine. The ROI on FTTH is excellent, if you use the right time periods. It's not going to get a good ROI or an ROI at all if you think in terms of 5 or 10 years, because that's a ridiculously short period of time for infrastructure. There's a reason that house mortgages are amortized over 30 years, and that's just one little house...


"Tax purposes" is accounting. Again, there is no such thing as using "the right time periods" when calculating ROI. There are rules about how is calculated and the the time period over which the analysis is done. Let's take an example of a delivery company buying a bigger truck. While the bigger truck will allow the company to take on larger jobs, and may increase revenue by, say 10% and that 10% pays for cost of the truck in 3 years, it may not be a wise investment. You need to not only look at the cost of the truck and the revenue, but also the increased fuel cost of a larger truck when moving smaller jobs that don't fill the truck (decreasing profitability), the opportunity cost (what other useful things could you do with that money if you didn't buy the truck, and which you can't do if you do buy it), and factor in inflation. If inflation is 3%/year, then your revenue increase is only 7% because your total revenue is worth 3% less each year than the year before. Over a 30 year period inflation become a major factor. If an investment costs $1 million dollars, and inflation is 3%, then over a 30 year period you need to generate about $2.5 million just to break even, never mind make money. Then you have the actual cost of money - that's what you would earn by not spending the money at all, but rather investing it in a instrument with a guaranteed return (different finance department have different values, but they all have one). Technically, CFOs don't even look at ROI, they look at internal rate of return, which is very similar in concept, but more rigorous.

So, it is not as simple as "spend a billion now to make 10 billion in 30 years." That COULD be a good investment, but it could just as easily be like throwing the money away.

Note to any accountants that read this: I know I have grossly oversimplified the subject, but I have done that in the interest of brevity, and really am just trying to the make the point that this is not a simple calculation.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

Tax purposes is 99% of the reason for 99% of the accounting.


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## Bigg (Oct 31, 2003)

Diana Collins said:


> "Tax purposes" is accounting. Again, there is no such thing as using "the right time periods" when calculating ROI. There are rules about how is calculated and the the time period over which the analysis is done. Let's take an example of a delivery company buying a bigger truck. While the bigger truck will allow the company to take on larger jobs, and may increase revenue by, say 10% and that 10% pays for cost of the truck in 3 years, it may not be a wise investment. You need to not only look at the cost of the truck and the revenue, but also the increased fuel cost of a larger truck when moving smaller jobs that don't fill the truck (decreasing profitability), the opportunity cost (what other useful things could you do with that money if you didn't buy the truck, and which you can't do if you do buy it), and factor in inflation. If inflation is 3%/year, then your revenue increase is only 7% because your total revenue is worth 3% less each year than the year before. Over a 30 year period inflation become a major factor. If an investment costs $1 million dollars, and inflation is 3%, then over a 30 year period you need to generate about $2.5 million just to break even, never mind make money. Then you have the actual cost of money - that's what you would earn by not spending the money at all, but rather investing it in a instrument with a guaranteed return (different finance department have different values, but they all have one). Technically, CFOs don't even look at ROI, they look at internal rate of return, which is very similar in concept, but more rigorous.
> 
> So, it is not as simple as "spend a billion now to make 10 billion in 30 years." That COULD be a good investment, but it could just as easily be like throwing the money away.
> 
> Note to any accountants that read this: I know I have grossly oversimplified the subject, but I have done that in the interest of brevity, and really am just trying to the make the point that this is not a simple calculation.


If they're looking at fiber over a 5- or 10-year period of time, they're definitely doing something wrong. The ONTs and PON switches and whatnot are probably a 5- or 10-year item, but the actual fiber that's in the ground or on the poles is a 30-year investment, if not longer.

In the case of FIOS, when you account for other costs and benefits, you also have to look at cost avoidance, which is huge by thinning out the copper plant and going to fiber.


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## Adam1115 (Dec 15, 2003)

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/25/business/media/fcc-approves-att-directv-deal.html



> Federal regulators have approved AT&T's $48.5 billion takeover of the satellite company DirecTV, creating a new major force on the country's media landscape.
> 
> The Federal Communications Commission announced on Friday that it had granted approval of the merger, with conditions. Earlier this week, the Justice Department announced that it would not challenge the acquisition. The regulators were reviewing whether the deal would serve the public interest or harm competition.


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

Well, this means that the TWC/Charter merger is also probably going to be approved. Now the question is who will buy DISH.


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## dswallow (Dec 3, 2000)

tarheelblue32 said:


> Now the question is who will buy DISH.


Here's hoping for Proctor & Gamble.


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## atmuscarella (Oct 11, 2005)

tarheelblue32 said:


> Well, this means that the TWC/Charter merger is also probably going to be approved. Now the question is who will buy DISH.


How about a Dish, T-Mobile, & Frontier hook up? Gives the new company nation wide cell & TV coverage plus significant amount of local telephone/wired ISP.


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

atmuscarella said:


> How about a Dish, T-Mobile, & Frontier hook up? Gives the new company nation wide cell & TV coverage plus significant amount of local telephone/wired ISP.


They'll need to do something like that. Otherwise DISH will be at a significant disadvantage where AT&T can bundle together DirecTV with a broadband internet connection either over their copper, fiber, or LTE networks.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

I think previously Dish was offering a bundle deal with AT&T DSL in markets that had AT&T. I assume that's over now that they are competitors.


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## MikeAndrews (Jan 17, 2002)

dswallow said:


> Here's hoping for Proctor & Gamble.


You're soaking in it!


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## MikeekiM (Jun 25, 2002)

Wow... I love DirecTV...

I just switched to Comcast on a 2 year contract that no one can touch... Everytime I mention my "deal" to AT&T, the sales team can't touch it...

$69.99 for 50mbps internet + 140+ channel television for 24 months... That's $35.00 a service for two years!

Here's hoping that in 24 months, the AT&T/DirecTV merger results in a great new customer package for me to move back to!


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## sar840t2 (Mar 1, 2003)

What are the chances of the combined AT&T and DirecTV coming up with a way to stream DirecTV's content (in HD) over broadband? And if that happens, what are the chances of TiVo supporting an app that lets you play that content?

I don't really want to switch to DirecTV's DVR and put up a dish, but if I could watch what I want from their line-up over broadband and ditch Comcast cable TV I'd be happy. Until Comcast reintroduces their 250 GB monthly cap that is .


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

AT&Ts system is very bandwidth deprived in most areas. In most places they are using VDSL for both internet and TV, so you get roughly 40Mbps to share between your internet and TV. That's why you can only have 4 "tuners" at a time. I think the main reason they want DirecTV is to get rid of the TV content on the VDSL and switch people over to using a dish for TV and the VDSL strictly for internet. It's really the only way they can compete with the bandwidth available to cable companies.


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

Dan203 said:


> AT&Ts system is very bandwidth deprived in most areas. In most places they are using VDSL for both internet and TV, so you get roughly 40Mbps to share between your internet and TV. That's why you can only have 4 "tuners" at a time. I think the main reason they want DirecTV is to get rid of the TV content on the VDSL and switch people over to using a dish for TV and the VDSL strictly for internet. It's really the only way they can compete with the bandwidth available to cable companies.


Technically, it isn't the *only* way they could compete with the cable companies. They could deploy FTTH like they should have done in the first place.


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## StevesWeb (Dec 26, 2008)

tarheelblue32 said:


> Technically, it isn't the *only* way they could compete with the cable companies. They could deploy FTTH like they should have done in the first place.


As in should have done 50 years ago.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

tarheelblue32 said:


> Technically, it isn't the *only* way they could compete with the cable companies. They could deploy FTTH like they should have done in the first place.


That's expensive, and in some towns impossible depending on the political landscape. Using the dish for TV and the VDSL for internet is the only way they can compete cheaply.


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## MikeAndrews (Jan 17, 2002)

StevesWeb said:


> As in should have done 50 years ago.


In 1965?


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

Dan203 said:


> That's expensive, and in some towns impossible depending on the political landscape. Using the dish for TV and the VDSL for internet is the only way they can compete cheaply.


If they want to do it on the cheap, then as a customer I expect a better price. If Google Fiber will give you 1Gbps and great quality HD channels for $120/month, then I expect 12Mbps and crappy quality HD channels from U-verse for $25/month.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

Well with the DirecTV/ATT combo they can offer DirecTV TV channels, which have decent quality, and 40Mbps VDSL and compete mostly with the local cable MSO. Google is a whole other beast. They seem to force the cable and telco MSOs to really innovate in the areas they pop up in. Hopefully some day they'll make it everywhere, but for now ATT only need to worry about them in a handful of areas. In most places they're just competing with the cable MSO, so their needs are a bit more modest.


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## MikeekiM (Jun 25, 2002)

I would gladly welcome a double or triple play that had DirecTV satellite television, combined with UVerse broadband...

DirecTV satellite has never let me down.

I switched to Comcast 2 months ago, and I have been disappointed in the service outages that I get every so often...today I had a three hour service outage for both television and internet (that was actually estimated to be 5 hours, but they were able to bring it in by 2 hours).

This sort of outage never plagued me with AT&T or DirecTV.


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## StevesWeb (Dec 26, 2008)

MikeAndrews said:


> In 1965?


OK, 30 years ago.


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## slowbiscuit (Sep 19, 2006)

One of the interesting things about this merger is that the FCC won't allow them to exclude new IP based TV delivery from caps like Comcast has been able to do after the NBCU merger.

We'll see if that's actually enforced and whether that means the Comcast deal will be revisited (they weren't supposed to be able to favor stuff like their upcoming Stream service over Sling etc. either).


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## Scooter Scott (Jun 1, 2015)

Diana Collins said:


> Well, technical issues aside (we'll have to agree to disagree there) nobody is doing FTTH anytime soon (except Google, who is doing it slowly, bribing local officials and doing it all in the first place just to shame the ISPs) until it has a decent ROI. As I said in the part of my post you didn't quote:
> 
> ...the ROI on fiber to the premises is poor...less that could be earned by simply putting the money in the bank.


My local company is doing FTTH...they're rolling it out to all of their customers.


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## JosephB (Nov 19, 2010)

AT&T has stated publicly and in FCC filings that they do not plan to drop U-Verse distribution (meaning, TV signals over VDSL). They have said that they plan to standardize on the DirecTV "platform" meaning they will eventually drop the Microsoft/Ericsson Mediaroom set tops, and all AT&T TV customers, whether they get their signals from outer space or a copper pair will have DirecTV-developed software. Long term U-Verse will be FTTH instead of FTTN anyway so bandwidth will not be a problem.

They've also said they're working on revamping the DirecTV platform, so I would suspect the DirecTiVo days are numbered yet again.


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

JosephB said:


> Long term U-Verse will be FTTH instead of FTTN anyway so bandwidth will not be a problem.


Very wishful thinking. Some U-Verse will be converted to FTTH, but almost certainly not all, at least not in my lifetime.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

If they go FTTH I'd definitely look at switching for internet. But I doubt they will. They just installed Uverse in my neighborhood and it's the standard fiber to the curb and then VDSL to the home.


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## JosephB (Nov 19, 2010)

tarheelblue32 said:


> Very wishful thinking. Some U-Verse will be converted to FTTH, but almost certainly not all, at least not in my lifetime.


Those that don't get FTTH will eventually be abandoned and off-loaded to wireless.


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## Chuck_IV (Jan 1, 2002)

JosephB said:


> Those that don't get FTTH will eventually be abandoned and off-loaded to wireless.


Or sold off to companies like Frontier(like what happened here in CT).


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