Thread,
Here's my take of a recent interview done with Sprint's CEO, William Esrey. I'm only focusing on comments concerning "last mile" solutions and writing it as to how I interpreted it. Plus, I made it a little tongue in cheek. From a lot of their competitors comments, Sprint's marketing department went a overboard with ION. I bet Esrey was shocked how well it went. I think both CNBC, CNNfn, and I think CNN even carried the press conference as a breaking news live event! Anyway, this is how I interpreted what he was saying. :)
MikeM(From Florida)
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Q: How will you bring ION services to users around the country when you have to make deals with local exchange carriers everywhere to place your equipment in their central offices (CO)?
A: There are about 100 million households in the US. About 35 million of them may want ION service. There are 26,000 local COs. If we got into 4,000 of those COs, we could hit 20 million households. If we got into 2,000 COs we could hit about 16 million of those potential ION customers. I know I didn't answer your question, but just thought I would throw out the numbers because they sound impressive. Doesn't mean we're going to hook up a single home, but doesn't mean we ain't going to hook them all up.
Q: So what do you want to put in those COs to reach those houses?
A: We will be sticking DSLAM's in them. So we get the local loop from the local telco, because the FCC makes them give it to us. That's why we're crying to the FCC now. We weren't even certain we would get the okay when we made the giant ION announcement. So we're doing a lot of crying now and once the FCC feels our pain, we get the okay, and then stick the DSLAM's in them. Then we run over to the customers house and stick a Cisco box on their wall. Then bingo, they are connected to our ION backbone, 24 hours a day.
Q: What about the other last mile solutions? Wireless or Cable networks? Aren't those good options too.
A: We're looking at them. Cable needs that two-way plant built first. So that means it ain't ready for a lot of people. But it works fine to us. Too bad it ain't all two-way. But now when we stick that Cisco box on the wall, as long as it's got the bandwidth, the customer doesn't care how it works. XDSL gives us the bandwidth, so does the cable, so does wireless. How's that for dancing around the question? I'm not answering directly because when we made our huge ION announcement, I didn't want to worry about details like this. I guess we are going the xDSL route, but I just wanted to let you know the others work too.
Q: How you going to price your service?
A: We're not sure yet. It's complicated. I just wanted to make a HUGE splash with the ION announcement so I wasn't worried about a detail like billing. But now that you ask, With POTS you tied up the line for a long time because it's circuit switched. With Sprint's ION you give it up and share it, because it's packet-switched. So how we bill for it, will be an interesting puzzle we haven't answered yet. I said we were going to charge for data bits with my HUGE ION announcement, but then we got creamed by the media. So we're re-thinking it now and haven't figured it out.
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