Tag Archives: Ronan Dunne

Is the Line Between Wireless and Wireline Blurring?

In the Bernstein Strategic Conference in May, Ronan Dunne, Verizon CEO and EVP for Verizon Consumer talked about his vision for the future of 5G. During that presentation, he made a statement that has been bugging me for weeks, so I finally had to write about it. He said that he can foresee a day when consumers will purchase home broadband in the same way that they buy wireless service today. He said that will happen because the line between the wireless and wireline business are blurring.

Dunne is talking about a future when 5G is ubiquitous and where people won’t perceive a difference between landline broadband and 5G broadband. In a term used by an economist, Dunne foresees a day when wireless broadband is a pure substitute for landline broadband – where a customer won’t perceive a functional difference between the two products.

Verizon offers several wireless products, so let’s talk about them individually. The predominant Verizon product that is in every market is cellular broadband. This uses cell sites to beam voice and data traffic to cellphones or other devices that are connected to a cellular data plan. Those cellular plans are incredibly stingy in terms of the amount of broadband that can be used in a month, with the unlimited plans offering a little more than 20 gigabytes of data before a user has to pay more or become restricted. The specifications for 5G set a goal of 100 Mbps for cellular broadband speeds within a decade. That kind of speed might be a substitute for landline broadband today from a speed perspective. But networks are not likely to achieve these speeds for at least five more years, and by then I think cable companies will be considering increase urban broadband speeds to something like 250 Mbps. I have to question if cellular broadband speeds can keep up with the speeds provided by landline connections.

Of more importance is that cellular speeds drop when entering a building. Anybody who has walked into a large building using their cellphone understands that cellular signals don’t perform as well indoors as outdoors. By the time I walk 100 feet into my neighborhood grocery store, I often have zero bars of data. While speeds don’t drop that drastically in most homes, when outdoor cellular speeds hit 100 Mbps, indoor speeds in most homes might hit half that number. With slower speeds and incredibly stingy data caps it’s hard to see cellular broadband as a pure substitute for a landline broadband connection.

I also don’t think that the gimmick product that Verizon and others are selling in urban city centers that offers gigabit speeds using millimeter wave spectrum is a landline substitute. The product requires closely spaced small cell sites fed by fiber – but the big gotcha is that the millimeter wave spectrum won’t penetrate a building and barely even make it through a pane of glass. This is an outdoor product for which I still struggle to understand a willing market. It’s certainly not a substitute for landline broadband, except perhaps for somebody who is always outdoors.

The newest wireless product is Verizon’s fixed wireless access (FWA) that beams a broadband signal into the home from a pole-mounted transmitter at the curb using millimeter wave spectrum. I have to suspect that this is the product Dunne is talking about. I would agree with him that this is a pure substitute for landline broadband. But that’s because this is just another variation of landline broadband. This technology has historically been referred to as fiber-to-the-curb. Verizon is using a wireless transmission instead of a fiber line for the last hundred feet to reach a home – but this technology requires building the same fiber into neighborhoods as fiber-to-the-home. This is not a wireless technology since 99% of the network is still comprised of fiber. Anybody using this service can walk to their curb to see the fiber that is carrying their broadband. This technology is a clear substitute for a landline fiber drop – but it’s not a wireless network other than for the last 100 feet to a home.

The other way to challenge Dunne’s vision is by comparing the volume of traffic used by landline and wireless networks. The vast majority of data traffic is still carried over wires and the gulf between the data carried by each technology is widening every year. Consider the following chart from Cisco from 2019 that shows the volumes of monthly data traffic in North America by type. This is expressed in exabytes (one billion gigabytes).

Monthly Exabytes 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022
Homes 35 43 53 64 75 90
Cellular 1.3 1.8 2.5 3.4 4.5 5.9
Business 6.5 8.3 10.3 12.8 15.5 18.5
Total 43 53 66 80 95 114

Both home and business broadband are carried on wires. In 2020, only a little more than 4% of all of the data traffic in North America is carried wirelessly. For wireless technology to be a pure substitute for wireline data, wireless networks would have to be capable of carrying a much bigger share of data – many times what they carry today. The laws of physics argue against that, particularly since landline data usage is growing at an exponential rate. It’s hard to envision wireless networks in our lifetime that can handle the same volumes of data as fiber-based landline networks.

This is not intended as a major criticism of what Dunne said. The country will be better off if Verizon offers a competitive alternative to the cable companies. However, Verizon is like the other cellular companies and can’t talk about 5G without overstating the potential. I know has to keep hyping 5G for Wall Street and I sympathize with that need. But we are still very far from a day when the average household will view landline and wireless data to be pure substitutes.

Can 5G Replace WiFi?

Verizon recently posted a webcast with investors where Ronan Dunne, EVP and CEO of the Verizon Consumer Group said that he believed that 5G hotspots using millimeter wave spectrum will eventually displace WiFi in homes.

He cites major benefits of 5G over WiFi. He believes that a 5G network will be more reliable and more secure. He thinks that people will value the safety that comes from having traffic inside their home being encrypted as it rides Verizon’s 5G network compared to the more public nature of WiFi where every neighbor can see a home’s WiFi network.

He also cites the convenience of being able to transfer 5G traffic between networks. He paints a picture where a customer making a call or watching a video using a home 5G hotspot will be able to walk out the door and seamlessly continue the session outside on their cellphone. That’s pretty slick stuff should that ever come to pass.

The picture he’s painting for Verizon investors is a future where homes buy a Verizon 5G subscription to use in place of WiFi. This is part of Verizon’s ongoing effort to find a business case for 5G. His vision of the future is possible, but there are a lot of hurdles for Verizon to overcome to achieve that vision.

It’s going to get harder to compete with WiFi since the technology is getting a lot better with two major upgrades. First, the industry has introduced WiFi 6, which brings higher quality performance, lower latency, and faster data rates. WiFi 6 will use techniques like improved beamforming to greatly reduce interference between WiFi uses within the home.

Even more importantly, WiFi will be incorporating the new 6 GHz spectrum band that will increase bandwidth capabilities by adding seven 160 MHz bands and fourteen 80 MHz bands. It will be much easier to put home devices on separate channels when these new channels are added to the existing channels available on 2.4 and 5 GHz. This means that 5G will be competing against a much improved WiFi compared to the technology we all use today.

Another big hurdle for Verizon to overcome is that WiFi is ubiquitous today. WiFi is built into a huge number of devices, and a homeowner might already own a dozen or more devices capable of using WiFi. Verizon will have to somehow convince homeowners that 5G is so superior that it’s worth replacing the panoply of WiFi devices.

Another hurdle is that there is going to be WiFi vendors painting almost the same picture as Verizon. The makers of WiFi routers are already envisioning future devices that will introduce millimeter-wave spectrum including 5G into the home. There are vendors already working on devices that will provide both WiFi 6 and 5G using millimeter-wave connections simultaneously, using the publicly available 60 GHz V band. These solutions envision offering everything that Verizon can do, except the ability to roam seamlessly in and out of a home – and it will be done by selling a box instead of a new monthly subscription.

Another interesting hurdle to switching home networks to 5G is that there might be separate 5G solutions for each cellular carrier that uses different bands of spectrum. It’s relatively easy for device makers today to build a cellphone or other device that can use different cellular carriers because the carriers all use similar spectrum. But as each cellular company picks a different mix of frequencies moving forward, there is likely going to be cellphones and other devices that are specific to one carrier. It’s impossible to build a cellphone with today’s battery technology that can receive a huge range of spectrums – the multiple antenna systems would drain a cellphone dry in no time.

The largest hurdle of all is that WiFi is free to use after buying a WiFi router or meshed WiFi devices for the home. There is no monthly subscription fee to use the wireless WiFi connections within the home. Verizon clearly foresees a world where every home has a new monthly subscription to use its in-home 5G network.

Mr. Dunne makes one good point. It’s becoming increasingly clear that public WiFi networks are susceptible to hacking. A 5G network controlled by a carrier should be a lot safer than a WiFi hotspot managed by a coffee shop. The big question is if this enough incentive for people to buy 5G-capable devices or for coffee shops to switch to 5G networks. Even should coffee shops go with a 5G solution, will homes follow suit?

Mr. Dunne vision has an underlying assumption that people will value data security enough to be willing to pay more for it. He envisions people choosing a managed network when they have a choice. He could be right, and perhaps there will be enough data breaches in coming years with WiFi that the paradigm will change from WiFi to 5G. But it’s going to be incredibly hard to dislodge WiFi, particularly when it’s evolving and improving along with 5G.

Even if Mr. Dunne is right, this shift is not coming soon, probably not within this decade. For now, WiFi has won the device war and any shift to 5G would drag out over many years. It’s going to be incredibly difficult for the cellular carriers to convince everybody to switch to 5G.

I sympathize with Mr. Dunne’s dilemma. Investors want to understand where the revenues will come from to fund the expensive upgrades to 5G. Verizon and the other cellular carriers have tossed out a lot of ideas, but so far none of them have stuck to the wall.  Investors are getting rightfully nervous since there doesn’t appear to be any significant 5G revenues coming in the next few years. The carriers keep painting pictures of an amazing 5G future as a way to not have to talk about lack of 5G revenues today.

The Best Way to Bundle

I read an interesting quote recently in an article written by Mike Dano of FierceWireless. He interviewed Ronan Dunne, the EVP of Verizon Wireless. He quoted Mr. Dunne as saying, “In competitive markets, and the U.S. is one, if you’ve got real choice in the individual products, the cost of bundling is that you end up taking the second-best wireless product and you map it to the third-best TV bundle in order to get the cheapest broadband connection or fiber connection. No wonder you get $5 off at the end of the bill,”

That statement is a perfect lead-in to talk about the different ways to bundle. Mr. Dunne was referring to bundles like the one that AT&T does with DirecTV to try to get more video customers. That AT&T bundle is similar to what we see from most of the big ISPs. I wouldn’t even label these efforts as bundles, but rather as marketing specials that are designed to lure customers to buy specific product sets.

And Mr. Dunne is right. If you go to the web pages of all of the big ISPs you will see their pages splashed with really low-cost sounding specials. By now most people have figured out that the price for these specials increases at the end of the special term. And often people have found out that even with these specials that the actual price paid is higher because the ISP will load up these specials with all sorts of extra fees and charges that were not described in the advertising.

But Mr. Dunne is making an even more important point in that these specials end up luring customers to buy the smallest and least profitable products that an ISP sells. In order to get a cheap web price the ISP will pair their slowest broadband product with a small cable TV package. When customers contact the company to buy this special the customer service rep answering the phone then has an uphill battle to talk the customer into anything better – because they already have the advertised low price in mind when they call. Mr. Dunne went on to say that this kind of bundling is not attractive to Verizon wireless and that they would much rather sell premium products at a fair market price.

My clients face this same dilemma all of the time. I have some clients that take the exact opposite approach. They list all of their possible packages on the web, including those that might cost over $150 per month. But companies that do this face the opposite problem in that the high prices on the web might drive customers away from buying what they really want.

Many of my clients don’t post bundled pricing on their web sites for these exact reasons. They don’t want to lure people with false specials and they don’t want to chase customers away by talking about high prices. I see these clients taking several different approaches on how to handle bundling.

Some provide a discount for buying multiple services. For instance, they might discount $5 when somebody buys two products and $10 when they buy three. I’ve never particularly liked this kind of discounting for a few reasons. First, if a customer does buy your lowest margin products, such as your smallest cable package and a basic telephone line, then this discount might be giving away most of the margin on those small products. Another customer that buys the two highest margin products would get the same discount. I also don’t like the message that sends – it says that in general your products are overpriced.

I have other clients that don’t give any bundling discounts. They try to right-price each product on a standalone basis. They are not afraid to tell this to their customers and they take pride that they think each product is a bargain at the price they sell it at. I like this approach because I like the math. If a company ends up giving some sort of bundling discount to most of their customers then they have given up margin on every one of them. If you do the math you’ll see that you’d make more money with no discounts even with significantly fewer customers. A $10 bundling discount is giving away $10 of bottom line margin, which for most ISPs is a significant amount.

I’ve always asked clients who give big bundling discounts if they think they are saving any money when customers buy multiple products. The answer I get back – when they really think about it – is that they don’t save much. I think a lot of small companies bundle because the big ISPs do it and they think it’s the only way to do business. But I look at companies like Google and many of my other clients that don’t bundle and I see them getting similar market penetrations as my clients that offer bundles.

There is no question that it’s harder to sell without the bundle. It largely means that a sales call with a customer needs to be consultative and a good salesperson will ask a customer to define what they really want before talking price. Then, if the price is too high they will work with a customer to find a compromise they can live with. This kind of sales approach is going to sell a lot more of your premium products. And it’s going to make customers better understand just what they are buying. I think a lot of the customers that buy the cheap advertised bundles are not really happy with their products and are likely to churn at the end of the contract. What they really might want is faster data speeds or more TV channels, but when they start the conversation with the ISP based upon getting the lowest price that real desire gets lost in the transaction.

The main point of this conversation is that ISPs really need to examine their bundling practices. Just copying the big companies might mean giving away a lot of bottom line needlessly. And offering big discounts to new customers might not be adding many new customers after considering the churn and loyalty from customers who only buy due to the specials.