The most visible analyst covering this market is Craig Moffett of Moffett-Nathanson. He calls Verizon’s announcement ‘rather squishy’ and notes that there are no discussions about broadband speeds, products to be offered or pricing. Verizon has said that they would not deliver traditional video over these connections, but would use over-the-top video. There have been no additional product descriptions beyond that.
This announcement raises a lot of other questions. First is the technology used. As I look around at the various wireless vendors I don’t see any equipment on the market that comes close to doing what Verizon claims. Most of the vendors are talking about having beta gear in perhaps 2019, and even then, vendors are not promising affordable delivery to single family homes. For Verizon to deliver what it’s announced obviously means that they have developed equipment themselves, or quietly partnered on a proprietary basis with one of the major vendors. But there is no other ISP talking about this kind of deployment next year and so the question is if Verizon really has that big of a lead over the rest of the industry.
The other big question is delivery distance. The quoted 2,000 feet distance is hard to buy with this spectrum and that is likely the distance that has been achieved in a test in perfect conditions. What everybody wants to understand is the realistic distance to be used in deployments in normal residential neighborhoods with the trees and many other impediments.
Perhaps the most perplexing question is how much this is going to cost and how Verizon is going to pay for it. The company recently told investors that it does not see capital expenditures increasing in the next few years and may even see a slight decline. That does not jive with what sounds like a major and costly customer expansion.
Verizon said they chose Sacramento because the City has shown a willingness to make light and utility poles available for the technology. But how many other cities are going to be this willing (assuming that Sacramento really will allow this)? It’s going to require a lot of pole attachments to cover 30 million homes.
But even in Sacramento one has to wonder where Verizon is going to get the fiber needed to support this kind of network? It seems unlikely that the three incumbent providers – Comcast, Frontier and Consolidated Communications – are going to supply fiber to assist Verizon to compete with them. Since Sacramento is not in the Verizon service footprint the company would have to go through the time-consuming process needed to build fiber on their own – a process that the whole industry is claiming is causing major delays in fiber deployment. One only has to look at the issues encountered recently by Google Fiber to see how badly incumbent providers can muck up the pole attachment process.
One possibility comes to mind, and perhaps Verizon is only going to deploy the technology in the neighborhoods where it already has fiber-fed cellular towers. That would be a cherry-picking strategy that is similar to the way that AT&T is deploying fiber-to-the-premise. AT&T seems to only be building where they already have a fiber network nearby that can make a build affordable. While Verizon has a lot of cell sites, it’s hard to envision that a cherry-picking strategy would gain access to 30 million homes. Cherry-picking like this would also make for difficult marketing since the network would be deployed in small non-contiguous pockets.
So perhaps what we will see in 2018 is a modest expansion of this year’s trials rather than a rapid expansion of Verizon’s wireless technology. But I’m only guessing, as is everybody else other than Verizon.