Verizon will kick off tomorrow (January 30) bundled wireless service, which will be incorporated into the company’s existing line-up of voice, video and data services. Speaking during the company’s Q4 06 earnings call, President and COO Denny Strigl said “tomorrow we will announce the bundling of wireless into consumer plans.”
With the incorporation of a mobile voice and mobile video (Verizon Wireless has deals with YouTube, Revver and CBS to offer “TV” services on mobile devices) component into its packages of voice/video/data services, Verizon becomes the second major telco to push a combined landline/mobile package to consumers. Earlier this month, AT&T, fresh from its acquisition of BellSouth and the remaining portion of Cingular it didn’t already own, unveiled what it calls the Unity Plan, an unlimited calling package for customers who sign up for both AT&T landline and wireless services.
The move comes at just the right time for Verizon — the telco’s Q4 06 performance was tepid at best. Total adjusted revenue (taking into account asset sales and the acquisition of MCI) grew by 4% year-over-year to $22.6 billion while net income ticked up by only 2% to $1.8 billion.
Broadband subscriptions, including the company’s turbo-charged fiber-to-the-premises FiOS service, continued to grow, but at a much slower rate, even as Verizon continued to lose local access lines at a rapid clip. During the quarter, Verizon lost 920,000 local access lines and gained 409,000 broadband customers, a run-rate down 33% from the 613,000 net broadband subscriber additions posted in Q4 05.
By quarter’s end, Verizon served 687,000 FiOS high-speed customers, up 165,000 sequentially. Despite the growth, penetration of homes capable of buying the service stayed steady at 14%.
On the video front, Verizon ended the quarter with 207,000 FiOS video customers, up 89,000 over Q3 06 levels, by far the biggest quarter for FiOS TV growth since Verizon began reporting FiOS video customer counts. But, Verizon nearly doubled the homes capable of buying FiOS TV during the quarter, driving the overall penetration rate for the multichannel video service down from 10% at the end of Q3 06 to 8% at the end of Q4 06.
The telco’s DBS partnership with DirecTV, which enables Verizon to offer a video component in its service bundles in areas outside FiOS deployments, continued to inch upward. At the end of the quarter, Verizon served 540,000 DBS customers, up 44,000 sequentially.
Without a doubt, Verizon Wireless remains the big growth driver for the telco. By the end of the quarter, Verizon Wireless served 59.1 million mobile wireless customers, up 2.4 million sequentially, a run-rate 15% higher than the net Verizon Wireless additions posted during Q4 05.
Advanced services, such as text messaging, fueled even more accelerated revenue growth. Verizon Wireless revenues rose 16% year-over-year to $10.1 billion. Data revenues, however, soared 88% year-over-year to $1.4 billion as the number of customers using these advanced features climbed to 34.3 million, up 44% year-over-year.
(Reprinted from today’s IP Media Monitor.)
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 4:22 PM | Print | Comments (0)As the whole world knows, thanks to Leslie Cauley at USA Today, Verizon Wireless turned down a deal with Apple to be the exclusive carrier for the iPhone, a move widely considered to be short-sighted now. But Apple wanted too much control over how and when the iPhone got sold, repaired and replaced.
To drive home the company’s point, Verizon President and COO Denny Strigl said during the company’s Q4 06 earnings call that the telco would do it all over again. “Our take is that she [Leslie Cauley] was right on,” Strigl said during the Q and A portion of the call. “The iPhone product is something that we’re, quite frankly, happy not to be first to market on.”
Strigl seemed to suggest that the success of the iPhone, which won’t hit the market until mid-2007, is merely speculative. “Many are interested in comparing a future offering with what we have in the marketplace today,” he said. With no apparent awareness of the irony in his statement, Strigl said “It’s like comparing apples to oranges.”
He also suggested that Verizon has something up its sleeve that might be an effective competitive response to AT&T’s marketing of Apple’s mighty little device. “We’re very confident with our strategic partners and we’ve had a lot of good product from all three of our strategic suppliers and there too more on that as the year rolls out.”
(More on Verizon’s earnings later.)
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:18 PM | Print | Comments (0)The New York Times’ Noam Cohen has this interesting piece today about the increasing appearance of Wikipedia citations in court decisions. Since 2004, more than 100 judicial rulings have relied on Wikipedia entries, at least for background explanation. Although the Supreme Court has yet to cite Wikipedia in a decision, the circuit court of appeals, one level below the S. Ct., has named the user-contributed, web-based encyclopedia as a resource.
Courts typically rely on only well-established reference resources and Wikipedia itself warns about the accuracy and reliability of the crowd-edited entries. But, judges aren’t (for the most part) stupid people and they can see for themselves what we all see — Wikipedia is often more comprehensive, more up-to-date and more reliable than even the most respected dead-tree compendium.
“Wikipedia is a terrific resource,” said Judge Richard A. Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, in Chicago. “Partly because it so convenient, it often has been updated recently and is very accurate.” But, he added: “It wouldn’t be right to use it in a critical issue. If the safety of a product is at issue, you wouldn’t look it up in Wikipedia.”
One real problem with Wikipedia is that the entries are fluid, subject to constant change and revision, making it difficult for lawyers and judges in lengthy cases to go back and review Wikipedia citations. But, as Larry Lessig notes in the article, an archiving system called WebCitation is available to handle this quickly dated nature of Wikipedia, or any other web site for that matter.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:24 AM | Print | Comments (0)
It’s nearly impossible, and extremely unwise, for politicians as “public figures” to pursue defamation of character lawsuits. Yet, the growing importance of video clips in the political realm raises another new, and potentially more damaging, source of false and derogatory information that can hobble a candidate for public office.
The New York Times’ Tom Zeller has this piece about a video of presumed presidential candidate, Senator John McCain (R-AZ), which some “gremlin” posted to YouTube. In the video, McCain appears to be sleeping…during President Bush’s State of the Union address.
McCain’s rivals and foes have played up this video across the web, highlighting one of the Senator’s greatest weaknesses: his age. The problem is, McCain wasn’t sleeping at all. His head was bowed toward his chest while he was reading something and the camera angle simply made it seem as if he were sleeping. (I had the same reaction when I watched the State of the Union address. I wondered briefly if McCain were asleep but quickly realized he was reading something, as were dozens of other lawmakers in the chamber, something that the McCain campaign was quick to point out via this dueling YouTube video.)
Oh brother. As Zeller notes, the McCain video is one of the first “gotcha” videos in the 2008 presidential campaign, and by all indications, it’s going to be a long, long campaign.
And in that sense, the video brouhaha — a short-lived and misguided brouhaha, considering that he wasn’t sleeping after all — constitutes one of the first “macaca moments” of the 2008 campaign. It is also a sign that Mr. McCain — and every candidate who has, or will, throw a hat into the ring — will have a very, very long road ahead.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:24 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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