By Tim
Young
Who delivers your bits and bytes? As you read this article, what's the access technology delivering these words? Is it a telco? A cable provider? We've spilled a good deal of ink on this topic over the years, but there's still more to say. We thought we’d revisit the battle between these worthy foes a few years later to see what has changed and what has stayed the same. The race continues.
The Players:
According to the NCTA, cable television began rather inauspiciously in the 1940s and 1950s as a way to enhance poor reception of over-the-air television signals in mountainous areas. From those humble roots, cable operators have taken advantage of their relatively fat pipes to offer a spate of next-gen applications to consumers.
Telcos, on the other hand, began with voice and existed as a voice-only service for the better part of a century. Only more recently have these companies begun to offer video service, with mixed results.
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Both segments can offer real-deal triple play with relative ease and are set to do battle. |
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population) were asked to rate their digital video services.
Six categories were considered (channel choice, image quality, sound quality, reliability, value, and support), each ranked on a 5-point scale from Worse to Better. Ultimately, Verizon FiOS topped the survey with a reader score of 84/100 (vs 74/100 for its nearest
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From two disparate starting points, these industries have reached a point of direct competition with one another for voice, data, video, and beyond. Both segments can offer real-deal triple play with relative ease and are set to do battle.
The Race:
Ultimately, the battle for market share is a collision between two separate technologies, lexicons, and corporate cultures. However, the hallmark of the battle is that the longer it goes on, the less aware the end consumer is that there is any difference at all between technologies. Voice is voice. Video is video. Data is data.
Consumer Reports performed a survey in 2007 in which 35,660 respondents (all of whom were Consumer Reports subscribers, so not necessarily a full cross-section of the
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competition, DirecTV). Verizon FiOS was the only provider to snag top rankings in every category. DirecTV had top ratings in only three. No cable company included in the survey received top ratings in any of the six areas.
Meanwhile, the fact that VoIP is no longer remotely experimental, and most assuredly ready for prime time (which some still debate, but I guess there are folks out there debating heliocentrism and the roundness of the Earth, too...), means an erosion of one piece of market share that telcos have clung to tightly ever since Bell called Watson over for a little chat.
A report by Insight Research Corp released in the fall of 2007 estimates that the incumbent phone telcos will lose over 17 million residential phone lines to cable competitors between the
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