Posts Tagged ‘fiber’

Ivan Seidenberg shines the “light” on Verizon’s FIOS strategy

Monday, October 5th, 2009

verizoncopperplant

Dave Burstein at DSL Prime reports that Ivan Seidenberg effectively says the the wireline voice telecom business is dying:

“we have to pivot and make a shift from the voice business to the data business and eventually to the video business. … we must really position ourselves to be an extremely potent video-centric asset.”  He further states, “The issue there is perhaps it is like the dog chasing the bus a little bit. So what I need to do is get ourselves focused around the following idea, that video is going to be the core product in the fixed line business. … I shed myself of the burden of chasing the inflection point in access lines and say I don’t care about that anymore.”

Despite Seidenberg having been one of the few telecom industry visionaries to truly embrace data/video as the future of the industry as long as 10 years ago, it still sounds strange (heretical, in fact) to hear a telecom CEO say “I don’t care about that [access lines] anymore.”  On the other hand, I believe Seidenberg is correct in focusing Verizon’s strategy on the combined communications capabilities of its wired and wireless footprints. (more…)