Consolidated Communications → Look out, FairPoint - Verizon is knocking on your door

I found a door hanger on my house today for Verizon's "Homefusion" 4G LTE broadband Internet service. The price is $60 for 10Gb/month standalone, or it can be bundled with an existing Verizon "share everything" plan (aka, "Share everything in your wallet with Verizon"). This is what many predicted years ago in the discussions during the Verizon asset sale. It will be interesting to see if there's any significant uptake of this offering; the price isn't too out of line with what Comcast or FairPoint charge, but the data limit is significantly less.

Interesting - as you said this was predicted at the time of the sale.

They also have competition from competitive local exchange carriers (CLEC). I just discovered G4 Communication has very attractive residential rates for POTS and ADSL. They took over Vitts bankruptcy assets in 2000 and have been in the commercial space for years. They also seem to being buying up some of the local dial up companies, but hard to imagine that is still a viable business. They are not just a reseller but colocate equipment in the FairPoint COs so they are taking advantage of UNE to serve the last mile. I don't know when they began offering aggressive residential pricing - hope they are prepared to support non-technical users.

»www.g4communications.com/

I'm thinking seriously about switching our POTS voice and ADSL to G4: more features, higher speed (probably) and lower price to boot.

Plus they are a local company and I try, within reason, to support local companies.

/tom

The door hanger appeared in my mailbox today.

Interesting they are only comparing it to Satellite, dial-up and DSL but not Cable.

The fine print says there is a 10GB cap per month and charge of $10 per Gig after that. I've never had to pay attention to how much data we use but if we assume a typical Netflix movie is 90 minutes long and streams at 1Mbp/s that is about 1/2GB per movie. So once you hit your cap each movie is going to cost $5 just for the bandwidth.

$60 a month + 6-42% for additional fees is kind-of pricey. That being said for folks without other alternatives probably worth looking into. But I don't think it is going to be the FairPoint DSL killer I though it would be unless Verizon lower prices and/or increase caps. If they do that and can actually deliver advertised speed FairPoint is going to be in trouble.

/tom