The reason cable companies have wireless spectrum to trade to Verizon is they wanted to have the capability to provide to their customers seamless coverage. They bought spectrum. They paid real money for it. The belief that they could pull it off was probably just to get a bargaining position.
Seamless coverage, cable broadband at home with bandwidth that at any point in time will never be matched by wireless. As wireless data rates go up so do wired.
A single contract. One bill. Wired and wireless internet. At a price. Perfect business sense. Will it cost more, less, or equal to the two individually? Wait and see Is it good for consumers? Who knows. Rich On 10/17/2012 8:25 PM, Manfredi, Albert E wrote:
Monty Solomon posted: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/24/business/media/verizon-airwave-purchase-unites-mobile-and-cable-companies.html I actually find this sort of collusion annoying and unnecessary, and consumers should wise up and think on their own, for a change. There was a similar piece on the WSJ (IIRC) some weeks ago, that my wife pointed out to me. The issue is simply that Verizon has no easy way to provide anything better than ADSL to the majority of its customers, in terms of cabled broadband. I didn't know, but they never intended for FiOS to be country-wide. And at the same time, the cable companies don't have the wireless spectrum. So Verizon is thinking, let's leverage off cable companies' faster broadband service (faster than ADSL), and we'll offer them the wireless connectivity in return. So, why do consumers need for these services to collude? Why make it easy for them to collude? There's no excuse, from the consumer's point of view. Don't the cable companies ALREADY offer their different tiers online, to those with the MVPD username/password? Yes. And the customers can get to this content from any broadband link they choose. Even today. If consumers can already access this MVPD content, over whatever cabled or wireless broadband service they choose, then why imply that there are some extra benefits that would accrue with this collusion? There aren't. Device makers can easily provide the sort of photos-from-cell-phone-to-TV-screen service that they can dream up already, without needing the service providers to stick their fingers in the pie. Just build a credible "connected TV," for heaven's sake, or build an easy HDMI or other device to plug into the TV, to give it Internet access. Or, use a PC. I still have a tough time understanding what the deal is about. But it seems obvious to me that this "great deal" can only work with more collusion between service providers and CE vendors. Cripple the TVs enough, or wall in the MVPD content enough, and that's about the only way these "great deals" can make any sense. Bert----------------------------------------------------------------------You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways: - Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org - By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line.
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