De Blasio Makes $70M Commitment Toward Universal Broadband In NYC

Re:De Blasio Makes $70M Commitment Toward Universal Broadban... by revelation on Monday May 04, 2015 @05:13PM (#9489242)

I think you're missing the option that Verizon is just plain terrible. You can both have a monopoly, charge high and still get a low operating income. It tells us nothing about the underlying economics of the problem at hand.

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Re:De Blasio Makes $70M Commitment Toward Universal Broadban... by rayiner on Monday May 04, 2015 @06:08PM (#9489562)

I think it tells you a lot about the underlying economics that an organization that's so successful at making money on wireless can't even eke out a 5% operating margin on wireline.

Verizon has invested about $23 billion on its network, and has 6.6 million FiOS subscribers. That's about $3,500 per subscriber. Chattanooga spent $330 million on its network, to serve 65,000 subscribers, or over $5,000 per subscriber.

To ball-park Google's KC rollout. Estimates are $85 million to wire the neighborhoods, plus $500-600 per house. They've got about 32,000 subscribers,[1] so about $3,250 per subscriber.

[1] Based on the reported 27,000 video customers and using Verizon's 85% ratio of video to broadband customers.

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