Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day
As reported by 24/7 Wall Street, telephone companies like Verizon and Cingular are lagging behind the cable companies (i.e., Comcast) in broadband sales. Although Verizon is performing well with new cell phone customers (1.9 million), their broadband subscriptions have yet to do as well.
“One of the specific disappointments is the lack of strong growth in broadband Internet subscription, although overall the results were good,” said Albert Lin, an analyst at American Technology Research.
How come? They’re all still playing catch-up, plain and simple. Verizon has been trying to compete with their optical fiber network, but even that effort has only brought in slightly more than 100,000 customers so far. Of course, this is still a game of leapfrog. Telco supporters point out how much faster and how much longer life fiber optic has. Cable supporters just point to the numbers (literally millions of new subscribers to VoIP services for each of the major cable companies). The broadband war has only just begun.