Comcast has grown tired of the talk about Verizon and AT&T’s plans to use their new fiber-to-the-home infrastuctures to steal the cable company’s customer.
Their reasoning may be sound. Comcast moved into the VoIP business, which is aimed that the telephone companies’ core busines, several years ago. Telephone firm are only new entering the consumer TV market.
Only 24% of the homes that Comcast’s cable passes take its broadband service. Four percent of this base take phone service from the company. By 2010, Comcast thinks it can add another 10 million phone customers. By the end of this year, Verizon is only projecting that it will have 175,000 TV customers.
Verizon as ambitious projections for its TV service, but, like all projections about a new business, they are subject to customer reaction to a product they have not used.
Verizon is spending $18 billion to build out its fiber network.Some industry experts say that this cost represents nearly $10,000 to connect earch home to the new network.
Comcast is sitting with a big moat around it And, $18 billion is a lot of money to get back one home at a time.
Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about
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