Let’s Kill Copper
01/13/2009 17:11
Well there it is. The Bloomberg report claims that Verizon Communications Inc.’s copper infrastructure will issue a death rattle and go gently into that good night by 2016 as the carrier moves to deploy fiber everywhere and migrate all customers onto VoIP. Now, Verizon has backpedaled on that statement, saying that’s not what it meant, but the specter of a copperless future officially is out of the bag, and not just because some hack like myself is predicting it. It’s a LEC that said it, and the retraction just can’t put that genie back in the bottle. Meanwhile, President-elect Barack Obama has broadband dreams and connectivity wishes inside his “Lifestyles of the Broke and Very, Very Unfamous” $800 billion economic stimulus plan. And you can bet that new copper is not going to be the physical plant medium of choice. The alleged “death to copper!” proclamation by Verizon CMO John Stratton has sparked a lot of commentary on the subject of whether the LEC — or any LEC — can convince its entire base to go all-IP for voice as well as a flurry of business modeling about whether it makes sense to deploy FiOS everywhere, even in rural areas. And well, um, it doesn’t. But that’s not the point. The point is, copper going away is as inevitable as T-Mobile USA dropping Charles Barkley as a spokesperson over his, shall we say, “traffic offense,” and it’s not going to require LECs to convert all their customers to fiber initiatives for it to happen. No, killing copper in the caves where it lives will be a war of attrition, my friends. Cellular and cable will continue to blast away at traditional landlines, and maybe the USF will be switched in focus from supporting voice to funding broadband (though there might not be enough there to fully fund such an initiative — I’m not saying there aren’t caveats). Maybe Obama will come through, and the end result will be more fiber and microwave development. Maybe WiMAX and LTE will be the path to really flip the switch. Maybe even these guys will help, in their own desperate, messed-up way. The point is, it’s over. Really. It’s just a question of how long it will take. Oh, sure, Verizon spokesman Eric Rabe immediately pulled out the life support machine, saying there’s no hard and fast timeline for the VoIP migration, though FiOS customers shall be encouraged (with all the subtlety of a Somali pirate, I’m sure) to get onto FiOS digital voice, which he said will become available in the middle of the year. As for everyone outside the 18 million homes covered by FiOS? A shrug about covers it. But then, it conveniently has offloaded some of its most rural and copper-y areas as it is. Not Verizon’s prob. I suspect a lot of the reluctance to commit is either to keep its base from panicking (Grandma+ VoIP? Not a good marketing combo), and/or avoid FiOS “buildout round 2” and churn questions, because let’s face it, no public company wants to talk capex and funding and uptake and all that yada yada investor-y crap these days. After all, there are layoffs to be done! (Ooh, I’d better knock on wood. Right now.) At any rate, Verizon shouldn’t be so worried about the status quo. Staking copper right through its lossy, distance-from-the-CO-dependent heart offers up so many opportunities. For instance, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation has said a $30 billion broadband program would create about 950,000 new jobs. Woohoo! And imagine the implications if we have VoIP as the common, network-supported bearer method for voice communications — imagine the business models that can be built with that as their premise. LECs, finally free of the bottlenecks and IP-lean, can play fast and loose in their ongoing, never-ending, almost mythic struggle with the cablecos. Makes fixed-mobile convergence strategies easier and more feasible to implement, too. And wireless in place of copper for rural areas has the potential to bridge the digital divide, so there’s a rising-tide-lifts-all-boats kind of aspect here too. There are a lot of rural LECs already in that boat, by the way. And besides, we wouldn’t want the industry to contribute any further to the death of us as a species, right? I really hope that last bit is just another Internet-based, end-of-days wing-nut, by the way.
User Comments !
I have 35 years at Qwest and in 1984 one of the big shots came into the garage and said that in 5 years we wouldnt have a job because of fiber!!!!!!!! That was 25 years ago.
Posted by: brian | January 14 2009 19:48:45
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