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Technogeez
Gone but not forgetting
Premium
join:2007-01-20
 ·AT&T U-Verse
·Verizon FIOS
| Pricing still sensitive In my area, the local cable provider is offering a similar, $99/mo triple play, but it's using VOIP for telephony, not the POTS-over-fiber you get with FiOS. Yeah, it's probably a bit cheaper (after taxes and fees) than Verizon's deal, but I've got to say the picture quality on the FiOS TV signal far surpasses what I was getting from the cable company. The internet connection hovers around 10/2, and phone service is clear. Now, if they could just get over their billing vs customer service issues...
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|  Ulmo
join:2005-09-22
San Jose, CA
 ·Comcast
 ·SONIC.NET
| Re: Pricing still sensitive said by Technogeez  :In my area, the local cable provider is offering a similar, $99/mo triple play, but it's using VOIP for telephony, not the POTS-over-fiber you get with FiOS. Yeah, it's probably a bit cheaper (after taxes and fees) than Verizon's deal, but I've got to say the picture quality on the FiOS TV signal far surpasses what I was getting from the cable company. The internet connection hovers around 10/2, and phone service is clear. Now, if they could just get over their billing vs customer service issues... At this moment, Verizon and the "cableco" are similar. They can differentiate easily at this time in some stuff like:
* Good billing.
* Good customer order and service change and other support experiences.
* Good Video On Demand offerings.
* Good HDTV quality (not overcompress; ideally, they could get uncompressed streams, compress them into nice fat MPEG4 (x264) pipes, and then deliver that to customers, and really blow them away with quality, such as 1080p at high hertz; they could dual-carry the old fasioned 1080i/720p MPEG2 signals so that old setups could carry that stuff).
* Good telephone features. Decent pricing on same. Such as ring multiple lines, call transfer to anywhere in the world, etc.. well, you know what I mean -- not be stingy.
* While more channels usually doesn't mean better, sometimes certain good channels are missing from the lineup. Just keep at the game of trying to have good channel lineups.
You know, stuff like that generally. Quality
differences. There's a thousand things they can do to make themselves better than the other one, and a couple dozen of those really make big differences in customer experiences. Some of them are really cheap to provide. Some of them are cheap for both providers. Some of them are equally easy for both providers, regardless of how cheap. Some of them are cheap for one provider to provide and expensive for the other (e.g., Verizon could do switched digital video/IPTV like delivery of the abovementioned 1080p high hertz MPEG4 HDTV streams, and the few % that have the $ to get the sets and boxes that would like that stuff would just sync in with Verizon FiOS (TV) and leave the cableco behind, and those numbers would only grow with time since the # & % of 1080p sets will keep increasing, not decrease; but even though such an effort would be relatively inexpensive ($100K or so per channel), it would take a concerted effort to get the right experts in the right places, and be dedicated to a project like that (in both quality and quantity -- i.e., how many channels it works for), and actually negotiate the proper content provisions to obtain that quality of feed in the first place).
Some things are expensive, but easier for one provider than the other. It soulds like Verizon just DOESN'T GET IT when it comes to VOD: this is an obvious win for fiber over coax, and yet, coax is winning because of dedication to implementation.
Those are all completely upper-management related issues, mostly not technology bound, and in a few cases, fiber actually is better than coax hands down. | |
| | EPS
join:2008-02-13
Hingham, MA
| Re: Pricing still sensitive What makes you think content providers will provide uncompressed streams just for Verizon? Verizon would have to pay dearly for that, and I doubt there'd be too much difference between that and the MPEG2 streams they're already getting, and note that Verizon doesn't compress it beyond what they're given already. | |
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