Fred Wilson:

Today’s Wall Street Journal had a cover story on the Telco’s desire to charge consumers extra to download video from Google or a song from iTunes.
Sure, the Telcos might be able to get more money from people who need super fast, six sigma reliability Internet connections. There has always been a business model around super high performance networks.
But this is really just marketing spin. What’s really going on is the CEOs of Verizon, AT&T, Bell South and the other Telcos are looking at their margins going down month after month while the service providers like Apple and Google, who deliver their services to consumers over the Telco’s networks, are watching their margins go up and up.
Jarvis calls the Telcos "robber barons" and Om Malik calls this hairbrained scheme a "chimera".  I had to look that up.  Om’s either calling this money grubbing scheme a "fire breathing she monster" which sounds about right, or a "creation of the imagination" which it clearly is.

WiFi Free Spot:

Many Airport authorities are adding Free Wi-Fi high speed internet access as an amenity for travelers. Some offer access in the entire airport while others may limit access to specified terminal or waiting areas. In addition, many airline club lounges may have their own free access available.

Green Bay’s airport offers free wifi, while those of us in Madison are still waiting….

Props to TDS for taking the plunge locally. TDS’s fibre to the home service supports 10mbps down and 4mpbs upstream. Not a bad start. Jeff Richgels . Bundles range from $64 to $89/month.
David Eisenberg notes the need for net neutrality amongst the telco’s.

Doc Searls is right on:

How many small and home office (SOHO) businesses would be made possible by services that let people produce as well as consume?

How many small service businesses can’t grow because people can’t (or don’t bother to) run servers in their homes? How many business-building activities are strangled before they are born by prohibitively narrow upstream bandwidths?

Amen

David Isenberg:

There’s a consensus emerging among my friends Brough Turner, Bill St. Arnaud and Martin Geddes, that Network Neutrality by regulation is not practical. Each has their own reasons, but the conclusions converge inescapably with mine — given current industry structure, the incentives are all wrong. Vint Cerf’s fervent wish (hey, mine too, were it possible!) for a “lightweight, enforceable Network Neutrality rule” is a pipe dream. Any such rule I could think up would put today’s carriers in an untenable, self-competitive situation.

Local incumbent telco SBC (now known as AT&T after the acquisition) is evidently not going to bring fiber to the home. Rather, they are planning to use the long since paid for by us copper to the home infrastructure to send TV to subscribers…. competing with the cable companies (Verizon is installing fiber to the home). This all seems to me to be ill-advised. Why not help all of their customers grow their own media. That’s where the market is going… Lorne Manly and Ken Belson have more:

“It’s awfully difficult to see how a late entrant operating at a dramatic cost disadvantage and employing a strategy of charging less for more has any shot at earning acceptable returns,” said Craig E. Moffett, a cable and satellite analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company.

Verizon’s decision to run fiber-optic cable all the way to customers’ homes is a calculated – and expensive – risk, and a counterpoint to AT&T’s television strategy. Verizon will spend an estimated $22 billion through 2010 burying high-capacity cables, according to Sanford C. Bernstein research. But that substantial investment gives Verizon the flexibility to add data-hungry high-definition programs, faster broadband speeds and other features that customers like Mr. Rodges are already enjoying. Though costly, these fiber connections are seen by Verizon as the only way to reliably leapfrog the competition. By the end of 2006, the company expects to make these fiber-based services available to six million homes in its territory, including Fairfax, Va., and Huntington Beach, Calif.
By contrast, AT&T is installing fiber cables only to within 3,000 feet of homes and using compression technology to make sure that television, phone and broadband signals can travel the rest of the way over older and narrower wire already in the ground. That will save billions of dollars in construction costs and help AT&T start selling television faster. Sanford C. Bernstein estimates that AT&T will spend more than $7 billion through 2010; the company has said that it will spend about $4 billion through 2008.

Staci:

Verizon: FiOS On Schedule To Pass 3 Million Homes By Year End From a client note by UBS analyst Aryeh Bourkoff: Verizon CFO Doreen Toben told attendees at the UBS Global Communications Conference Thursday that the Keller, TX launch of FiOS was on track for double-digit penetration by the end of the year, ahead of expectations. Verizon still expects to cover 3 million-plus homes passed by the end of the year with launches coming in New York, Texas, Massachusetts, Florida and California, and 6 million or 20 percent of the footprint by the end of ’06.
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