| Who needs fiber within 5000 feet for $225? Would you personally pay $225 to get a fiber line within 5000 feet of your residence? I would not. In fact, I would rather ISPs lowered their monthly charges instead of constantly raising the bandwidth and creeping up the monthly bills.
I had a privilege to work for Sprint ION, which was the first foray into an integrated VoIP/broadband service from Sprint back in 1999 - 2000. As far as I know, Sprint invested 6 billion dollars in that venture. The most customers we had was 3,500. That comes out to be about 1.7 million dollars per customer. Sprint was charging customers about $90 per month at that point. The technology didn't work right, and eventually, Sprint had to close down the project and send all ION customers disconnect notices. Sprint was in a bad financial shape after that, having borrowed heavily for that project, and getting nothing in return. Sprint PCS and FON stock dropped like a rock from something over $100 per share in 2000 to less than $5 for PCS and $10 for FON per share in 2002. Investors lost billions of dollars on this. Sprint CEO had to resign. I along with thousands was laid off. The consumers got nothing from it either. The mistake was that Sprint came out with this idea way too early in the game. Had Sprint invested more frugally in that project by limiting it to, say, one city, they would have been on top of the game now, having had six-years' experience in commercially providing VoIP, fax over IP, and DSL in one package. So, I can't blame BellSouth for going very conservatively on fiber deployment to end customers. I don't really think customers need more bandwidth at this point. What customers need is a more reliable service at a cheaper price. That's my 2 cents worth. |
