In a recent article at Silicon Alley Insider , a wall street analyst came to the conclusion that Verizon building out a fiber network is a bad idea. I wrote a fast post listing several reasons why the analysis is at best way off the mark.
I extract it here but link to the post below.
The original article at SAI.
The short term (what i call idiot analysis) of a stock always makes me chuckle. If a 15 year wait for return on investment is too long for you Moffet that is you but some investors actually buy on those horizons.
I had to blink at the screen when I read the ending of the article indicating that Moffet thinks the best thing to do now is nothing??? huh??? Like the horse cart manufacturers did as the car came on the scene eh? Where are they now? No, only someone on LSD would do nothing, by acting NOW Verizon does several things.
a) They get first mover in marketing the converged service that will be cheaper for them and us, more powerful in terms of bandwidth provisioning, more reliable thanks to the optical fiber that doesn't need replacement nearly as often as copper.
b) They get to compete with a superior service against the permanently crippled (thanks to their copper cables) cable providers. Even if they take an early hit now, like the proverbial tortoise and hare , the technology advantage of fiber will provide the competitive pressures that really eat into their cake.
c) They get an early start on building or providing network access to products in the home that currently are not networked. The companies that provide the interfaces to these devices will be the ones people go to and recommend to their friends, that can amount to a huge advantage in market dominance as far as mind share is concerned.
The type of analysis that Moffet did suffers from one major flaw, his ignorance of all the ways that Verizon can profit from the new network that are not even currently envisioned by us today. It is like some one mentioned earlier, what if Edison and Westinghouse decided it was too expensive to build out the wirelines. They had no idea that devices like microwave ovens, Radar sets, FM Radio's , CD Players, TV's and computers would ever be connected to them...all they cared about what light and maybe morse code...yet the networks provided the ability for those products to spread to every wired home. Moffet needs to realize he's just as ignorant (or more) of the coming enabled applications that FTTP (fiber to the premises) will provide as Edison was about the usefulness of wired lines.
I extract it here but link to the post below.
The original article at SAI.
The short term (what i call idiot analysis) of a stock always makes me chuckle. If a 15 year wait for return on investment is too long for you Moffet that is you but some investors actually buy on those horizons.
I had to blink at the screen when I read the ending of the article indicating that Moffet thinks the best thing to do now is nothing??? huh??? Like the horse cart manufacturers did as the car came on the scene eh? Where are they now? No, only someone on LSD would do nothing, by acting NOW Verizon does several things.
a) They get first mover in marketing the converged service that will be cheaper for them and us, more powerful in terms of bandwidth provisioning, more reliable thanks to the optical fiber that doesn't need replacement nearly as often as copper.
b) They get to compete with a superior service against the permanently crippled (thanks to their copper cables) cable providers. Even if they take an early hit now, like the proverbial tortoise and hare , the technology advantage of fiber will provide the competitive pressures that really eat into their cake.
c) They get an early start on building or providing network access to products in the home that currently are not networked. The companies that provide the interfaces to these devices will be the ones people go to and recommend to their friends, that can amount to a huge advantage in market dominance as far as mind share is concerned.
The type of analysis that Moffet did suffers from one major flaw, his ignorance of all the ways that Verizon can profit from the new network that are not even currently envisioned by us today. It is like some one mentioned earlier, what if Edison and Westinghouse decided it was too expensive to build out the wirelines. They had no idea that devices like microwave ovens, Radar sets, FM Radio's , CD Players, TV's and computers would ever be connected to them...all they cared about what light and maybe morse code...yet the networks provided the ability for those products to spread to every wired home. Moffet needs to realize he's just as ignorant (or more) of the coming enabled applications that FTTP (fiber to the premises) will provide as Edison was about the usefulness of wired lines.
Comments