dslwanter I’m happy that enough people are switching. It disappoints me when I hear people talk about why fiber expansion has been so slow over the past decade. It takes a lot of capital up front, and financing for it can be tough to acquire and justify. The part I don’t get is why anybody sticks around on cable when they can get fiber – the fiber operators are almost always better priced and empirically better offerings, technically speaking.
That lagging uptake really is an impediment to getting more traction on fiber expansion. If every neighborhood saw 50% or more switching, you’d see every operator trampling each other to build out as fast as possible. While I know Armstrong is notorious for their pricing, I commend them for not falling into the CableLabs trap that the larger MSOs have, continuing to kick the can down the road on a technology that is a dead man walking. They saw that the future of wired broadband is in fiber, and started making moves – 6 years ago now? – to be positioned to continue competing if and when the likes of AT&T/Comcast/Lumos/Omni showed up with fiber.
Meanwhile, Charter committed to high-split, which would only get them up to 1 Gbps upload speeds and do nothing to improve their awful latency, knowing that by the time they reached many of the neighborhoods with those upgrades 6-8 years later, there’d already likely be a fiber competitor at nearly every one of those addresses with symmetrical gigabit and lower latency at a lower price, and 2×2 Gbps and higher options as easy to deploy as a config push to an ONT. By the time Comcast and Charter are done with mid-split/high-split, they’re going to have to start all over again ripping out everything they just replaced in order to remain competitive. And this time around, they have pressure from FWA for the price-conscious customer and it’s broadly available fast since there’s no OSP to build or upgrade, along with fiber for customers who need reliable better-than-best-effort service. How do you compete when cell carriers can undercut you on price and fiber is competitive on technology, and to some degree, price as well?
I think it would be detrimental if Armstrong loses so many customers that they can’t compete at all. I’m glad that they saw and made the right move from a technology perspective. The only thing holding them back now is figuring out how to navigate customer retention and growth. They will have to start playing the promo game. There’s no way around that. Nobody’s going to come back to pay more for just for their “customer service” – especially when those customers’ last interactions with Armstrong’s customer service team will have been being told to go pound sand when challenging Armstrong’s pricing versus their competitors.
And as @kirk1233 said, a double or triple play would help. They could cut a lot of their legacy costs by getting out of the TV business, both from a content carriage cost perspective and technology perspective. I believe MCTV, who they are now trying to acquire, already did that some years ago. Nowadays, small operators just partner with YouTube TV or DIRECTV Stream to offer a TV product, often with a bundle discount and/or bundled billing to give it some value-add. Windstream, who was infamously once the wireline spin-off of ALLTEL, now partners with AT&T for their wireless double-play, offering a $20/mo discount for anybody who has their wired broadband service and an AT&T postpaid wireless account.
I didn’t mean to write a novel, but I guess it’s been a while and I had a lot of say while watching all this unfold. We definitely don’t live in the traditional duopoly DSL/HFC world we did 5-6 years ago. Nobody is buying (or selling, for that matter) copper wire dial tone service anymore, wireless matters more and bundles are back, fiber is starting to actually show up after an eternal wait, and FWA is a factor for the price-conscious and those who previously had no affordable broadband options. Having waited the better part of 20 years, since first hearing about Verizon’s FiOS actually bringing fiber to the home, it’s fulfilling to see it finally reach the mainstream and become so commonly available in this region of the country.
