Verizon’s Tiny Fiber Business

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Verizon (VZ) had some strong numbers in the first quarter. Revenue was up 6% to $22.6 billion. With one-time charges taken out, EPS improved from $.46 to $.54.

Wireless operations did especially well. Verizon wireless now has 60.7 million subcribers, up almost 15% year-over-year.

But, how are things going on the big initiative? The $23 billion to put fiber-to-the-home? The great hope for offering bundled TV, voice, and broadband to kick some butt against the cable companies?

Not too well,  it turns out. The new FiOS product has 348,000 subscribers. Verizon added 141,000 in the first quarter. Over at Comcast (CMCSA), the cable firm added over 500,000 voice-over-IP customers in the first quarter. Almost all of these migrate from the phone companies. Verizon’s partnership with satellite TV provider DirecTV (DTV) has more customers.

FiOS is supposed to be Verizon’s future. But, right now, it don’t look so good.

Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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