Sam Gustin writes for “Portfolio’s Daily Brief”:1 about the “fiber” battle that Verizon and Time Warner Cable are having in new ads on TV:
bq. Verizon’s Smith said the Time Warner ad is designed “with the intent to deceive the consumer.”
bq. “Time Warner Cable does not deliver fiber optics to your door,” Smith said, though he acknowledged that Time Warner uses fiber optics in their network backbone. “This is fun. They’re saying, ‘Let’s poke at each other and dupe the consumer.’ But the real losers are the consumers, who are getting fooled.”
bq. “People don’t really care about fiber-schmiber,” Harrad said. “What they care about is the service. We don’t feel that Verizon is doing anything that we haven’t been doing for the last ten years.”
bq. Referring to Verizon’s ads, Harrad said, “Their new service sounds new and improved, but marketers do that all the time when there is nothing new under the hood.”
Of course both sides are right. VZN isn’t doing anything that new, and of course promised decades ago to do what they are finally getting around to do now. And TWC isn’t providing fiber to the home, which makes their infrastructure much older and slower.
The real questions are:
# When is Verizon going to offer FIOS in NYC?
# When is Time Warner Cable going to give us real bandwidth (as in 30-100mbps)?
[1]http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/daily-brief/2007/08/20/battle-of-the-broadband
Filed under: New York City, News
