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Verizon: 8.5 Million Broadband Customers
6.7 million DSL, 1.8 million FiOS

The latest Verizon earnings show that the company added 266,000 new broadband customers in the first quarter, and the company now service some 8.5 million customers (1.8 million FiOS, 6.7 million DSL). Of the 1.8 million FiOS customers, 1.2 million of them have FiOS TV.

While FiOS growth is slow and steady (so long, copper) -- the real money was in wireless service for the telco. Wireless data revenue jumped 48.9% to $2.3 billion, and Verizon now says that 58% of their Wireless customers now have broadband capable devices.

Verizon Wireless customers sent 58 billion text messages and 1.1 billion picture/video messages. Given that users get billed to both send and receive these messages (unless they sign up for a SMS/MMS plan), it's no wonder wireless is such a cash cow. In January, Verizon raised the price of individual SMS messages to 20 cents, and the price of MMS (pic/video) to 25 cents.
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burner50
Proud Union THUG
Premium Member
join:2002-06-05
Iowa

burner50

Premium Member

I wish...

... They would come to iowa... Mediacom and Crap DSL isnt the best for options...

SeattleMatt
Streaming Tech Director
Premium Member
join:2001-12-28
Seattle, WA

SeattleMatt

Premium Member

Re: I wish...

It certainly doesn't look like folks are swarming to FIOS TV in "droves" like the forum fanboys state...

danclan
join:2005-11-01
Midlothian, VA

danclan

Member

Re: I wish...

said by SeattleMatt:

It certainly doesn't look like folks are swarming to FIOS TV in "droves" like the forum fanboys state...
yeah...not droves...more like flocks....massive flocks....
MrSpock29
join:2008-02-09
Hammonton, NJ

MrSpock29 to SeattleMatt

Member

to SeattleMatt
said by SeattleMatt:

It certainly doesn't look like folks are swarming to FIOS TV in "droves" like the forum fanboys state...
Out of 1.2 million fios tv customers, 262,000 were added in the last quarter alone. If they managed that same rate for the whole year, that would be over 1 million new fios tv customers this year, after ending last year with 1 million total. Yes, the base number is small, but still good penetration.
Ulmo
join:2005-09-22
Aptos, CA

Ulmo

Member

Re: I wish...

said by MrSpock29:

said by SeattleMatt:

It certainly doesn't look like folks are swarming to FIOS TV in "droves" like the forum fanboys state...
Out of 1.2 million fios tv customers, 262,000 were added in the last quarter alone. If they managed that same rate for the whole year, that would be over 1 million new fios tv customers this year, after ending last year with 1 million total. Yes, the base number is small, but still good penetration.
Loving fiber as I do, I pay attention and don't want it misinterpreted. Anyway, I think a potential big reason for adding those TV things lately is that infrastructure and TV rollout schedules are different: infrastructure is physical and has a physically moderated dollar-to-capability ratio that varies in a rather benign way. However, looking in terms of short term things, their TV rollout has been done substantially after their fiber rollout, and has been done on a more local-level political schedule, and lately a lot of that politics has been coming together in groups across the nation. As a result, the politics of TV in fiber has been turning it on in the past quarter much more so than in other periods. Therefore, the availability of TV in FiOS (FiOS TV) has shot up much, much, much, much faster over the last quarter or two than FiOS as a whole, since the fiber was sitting there just waiting for TV to come along, and to a major extent, that is borne out by how the potential customers react too.

So, the TV numbers need to be done in ratio to how much FiOS TV is available at any given moment, and you have to realize that the availability just jumped up in grandiose rate ratios to the actual FiOS layout amounts &/or rates.

That the FiOS TV availability suddenly going way up then caused the FiOS TV subscription to also go way up is by itself a positive sign for that service, of course, but much less so than such an activity if the FiOS TV availability itself was more like the general FiOS availability rates.

FWIW, I haven't checked the penetration rate claim you made. My impression is that the Verizon FiOS project, including all (telephone, internet, TV), has been going on moderately well: response is good enough that they can continue profitably, but it's not like just dumping everybody's bank account into the telco's coffers. Of course, that's a weak impression, so I could be way off.

What keeps it exciting is its future potential, and the potential for Verizon to either use or not use such potential.
TheOtherPete
join:2001-06-28
Boyds, MD

TheOtherPete

Member

More FIOS price increases coming?

Chief Financial Officer Doreen Toben "Verizon expects to increase the price of certain FiOS bundle services in the second quarter"
tmc8080
join:2004-04-24
Brooklyn, NY

tmc8080

Member

missing, fudged numbers..

if you want to read the report as an investor.. it's worded wonderful.. the sky is blue, making money hand over fist, blah, blah, blah...

read the real news: sprint faltered and is hemorrhaging wireless customers left and right. many of these defections go to the carrier which mirrors the service offerings closest: verizon... not at&t, not tmobile, not 3rd party carriers.

pots phone lines continue their slide downward (how about real numbers of lines lost, or is that too much of a bummer to concentrate on).. but offset by strong wireless and expanded dsl broadband revenue in secondary markets. so, not bad.. but it's still mixed with most of the fluff coming at the TV service customer gains. that market isn't as good as verizon makes it out to be. if I had proof, I'd say they're fudging the numbers that 2/3 of their FIOS customers have the TV service? no way, not possible.

bigpapae35412312
@verizon.net

bigpapae35412312

Anon

Re: missing, fudged numbers..

its a little suprising when they say two thrids, but I know certain towns like mine in Great Neck, NY, have flocked to the triple play from verizon, people are interested in deals and if they know that they get a better price from a triple play package, they are going with that. It would be stupid to break up your services with three carriers.

supergirl
join:2007-03-20
Pensacola, FL

supergirl to tmc8080

Member

to tmc8080
said by tmc8080:

if I had proof, I'd say they're fudging the numbers that 2/3 of their FIOS customers have the TV service? no way, not possible.
I sold 50% of my VZ shares since November 2007. I think the FIOS numbers are damn weak to be honest. VZ needs to fix its stupid ordering and billing systems. The report is too pretty.

Technogeez
Agape in amazement.
Premium Member
join:2007-01-20

Technogeez

Premium Member

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...
Ulmo
join:2005-09-22
Aptos, CA

Ulmo

Member

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.
EPS4
join:2008-02-13
Hingham, MA

EPS4

Member

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.