Is 5G the real reason Verizon is moving to IP TV?

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Verizon's FIOS coverage in VA is terrible since it's only around the northern VA, Richmond and VA Beach/Newport News areas. The rest of the state has no coverage.

Scott

 

Yet, those 3 metro areas account for about 5 million of Virginia's 8 million population.

Wireless tech makes a lot of sense in the less dense parts of the state, well, that is as long as the wireless tower/antennas don't get taken out by a storm.

 

My bad. 5ghz showing up with the router as 5G was confusing, but learning.

 

Do it. The first thing you notice here in the northeast is the level of professionalism with the guys they send out to install FIOS. No sleazy private contractors or low wage personal. They seem to be proud of who they work for and the work they do. They are all Union people.

2nd thing you notice if bundling three services, telephone, internet, and cable, it's priced lower than Comcast/Infinity and the telephone service is better.

3rd thing you notice is that when streaming from your provider, it throttles up after a little while and not down like Comcast/Infinity did. The picture quality on cable is better across all channels, not just the most popular or premium channels.

4th you may want to reward the competitor that is forcing the competition in the area.

 

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Just print out the pricing deal so you have a hard copy of it. Make sure the details are listed. FIOS has so many deals going on that the potential is there for them to mess up your billing initially. Everything else about the service is great.

Also note that the real download Internet speed is 10 Mbps FASTER than the posted speed because FIOS reserves 10 Mbps for VoD HD. But if you're not using VoD, FIOS let you use that extra bandwidth for Internet instead.

Be aware that after the new customer contract is up the price is going to jump up a lot unless you call in and ask for deals.

 

First consider 5G doesnt exist even as a candiate release .
"
Based on the above observations, some sources suggest that a new generation of 5G standards may be introduced in the early 2020s"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G

There isnt even a revision in UMTS , to support a "5G" version. It incremental similar to umts>HSPA>LTEv1> (not decided )

 

Thanks for easing my mind guys!

 

FIOS is the better service, hands down, even though they still aren't utilizing anywhere close to the full capability of their existing system (more HD channels and gigabit internet, neither of which they are willing to do).

Sure, by land area, but by POPs, other than Alexandria, they have most of the populated areas covered.

 

I'm still glad I have FiOS here in Northern VA. I'm going on nine years with FiOS now.

 

I grew up watching TV using an antenna, The reason most people I know including me switched to cable was to get more channels and more reliable TV. In rural Iowa where I grew up weather always caused problems with reception and there were only 4 channels. The choice of cable had nothing to do with with looks of the antenna. Now I have an antenna again and I get a lot of channels and the picture is way better than what I got from u-verse or am getting from TWC now. Now though I live in Southern Calif. I only have TWC TV now is because of a couple of cable only channels that I watch a lot. But when my cheap year of TWC TV is up I will probably switch to sling or VUE for these channels.

If people knew how much better the picture quality was from OTA, more people would use antennas and stream what else they need.

If I can get 1 gbps from 5G to the home as cheap as the 300 mbps from TWC of course I will love an antenna. Since Google is investing in this I think this is very likely to happen. When this happens Google will expand way faster then they are now and we can break the monopoly that cable and the Teleco have on internet access. The only downside to 5G to the home for me is that it is still at least 4 or 5 years away. That is probably still sooner that I will get fiber to my house.

 

You don't understand the huge swath of suburban customers and the push to eliminate antennas from entire developments and even entire cities.

People don't want antennas anymore.

 

I'd say the average American doesn't want a huge metal yagi antenna perched on their roofs like back in the '50s and '60s. But lots of people don't mind small antennas; look at all the little DBS dishes you see everywhere for DirecTV and Dish. As for any push to eliminate antennas, that's illegal. The federal government has ruled that homeowner associations, condo/apartment management, etc. cannot keep you from putting up an antenna or dish to receive TV.

And if Google Fiber does implement millimeter-wave wireless beaming to get their gigabit internet from the street to the house (instead of running fiber all the way to the home), it will make it much less costly and much faster for them to roll out that service around the country. I don't think the receptor antenna mounted on homes would be very big if Starry Internet's "Starry Point" antenna is any indication. (Starry is a start-up aiming to offer broadband via millimeter-wave wireless.)

I live in Nashville, where Google Fiber is just starting their rollout. There's a lot of excitement about it and a lot of folks can't wait to drop Comcast or AT&T and switch to Google. Given the choice between having a 12-inch tall antenna mounted on your house or having your yard dug up to lay fiber optic cable, I tend to think more people would go with the former choice, assuming it promised reliable performance.

 

There are far fewer satellite customers than cable customers. A big reason is because people don't want dishes. Or can't have them. There are lots of places that the rules you are quoting don't work. Apartments without balconies as an example.

And I wasn't talking about forced standards, I was talking about standards the people living in places want.

 

Tell that to all the Yankees fans here in CT after two cable providers have been shut out of getting YES network. The DirecTV dishes are growing like weeds. As I drive around, I see a TON of DirecTV and even a few DISH dishes. Satellite providers have a fundamental business problem with internet bundling from cable companies. But the size of their dishes is not a problem, that's for sure.

Unfortunately, Joe Average doesn't really care how the service is delivered. Relatively few places use underground utilities, most places are aerial, so it's just another drop done from the pole, basically no disruption to anything. Plug and play. If people could get good service that they like, they'll be fine with a cantenna. Look at all the satellite dishes out there. People are fine with those.

People in the know prefer the fiber for technical reasons, but wouldn't have an issue with a little cantenna.

There are people, like my parents, who are irrational about having a dish on their house. But the bigger issue is cable and telco bundling of broadband or people who just do the default, or places with NLOS. It's true there are also places with no balconies, or where they are facing the wrong direction.

 

There is no evidence that satellite is growing acceptance at the rate you are claiming. I'm a big fan of directv but i know most people don't want any antenna of any kind.

 

DirecTV is not growing much, and the problem is twofold.

1. Cable company forced bundling for broadband. Much of the country only has cable broadband available. FIOS is doing very aggressive bundling, as are a few other providers. There are a few places where local ISPs, VDSL-capable CLECs, fiber co-ops, or others make having two different companies feasible. There are also parts of the 21-state AT&T territory now where they can bundle VDSL, but that's only parts of parts of 21 of the 50 states.

2. The decline of pay TV, cord cutting, and especially skinny bundling. DirecTV can't compete. They don't have internet to bundle with, even within parts of the 21-state AT&T service area where they have U-Verse VDSL or fiber available, it's not economical to install a dish and a bunch of hardware just for locals and HBO. Cable is already there, and they just plop a box in on the drop that's shared with internet and maybe phone.

Having a dish on the roof is not an issue for most people. People will switch when compelled to do so. Metrocast (now Atlantic Broadband), and now Comcast have gotten shut out of YES in Connecticut, and DirecTV has made a killing. If YES is that important to folks, they switch. Around here, there are dishes everywhere. We've got Atlantic Broadband in one area, and an old Comcast system with limited channels "competing" against a local overbuilder that's even worse on the TV side in another.

 

You keep saying that, but you have to actual facts to back it up. That might be your opinion, and you may have a few anecdotal stories to support that assertion, but I don't think you can provide any kind of universal evidence that "most people don't want an antenna of any kind."

In fact, the proliferation of cord cutting and people relying on OTA for locals seems to indicate just the opposite.

 

Some OTA can use an attic antenna, I don't think people would care about that if they have an attic they can use. I am in the Hartford CT area and as an experiment I tried an attic antenna, I could receive everything that is on OTA in my area but ABC as that is in New Haven CT, for ABC I would have to use an outside antenna I guess, and I have a two story home.

 

Yes, SOME people don't go with satellite because they don't want a dish on their roof, true. But there are other reasons, probably more influential reasons, why consumers may choose cable/telco over satellite, such as package pricing including internet, reliability, simple stasis, etc.

That said, it looks like a LOT of Americans don't mind having a dish on their roof. About 33.68 million homes, in fact, as of last year according to this source:
http://www.statista.com/statistics/...-the-largest-number-of-subscribers-in-the-us/

Granted, among the top 10 pay TV providers in the USA, non-satellite providers account for 53.1 million households. (Cable TV, not including telco providers Verizon and AT&T Uverse, total up to 41.63 million, meaning that satellite has about 81% as many subs as cable TV. I'm not sure I'd say that's "far fewer".)

So satellite accounts for 38.8% of the top 10 total pay TV subscriber base. That's a really big chunk and one that may be poised to grow as AT&T deprecates their Uverse TV service and shifts consumers to DirecTV.