Verizon at Home

[#1]

(Ed's note: This is the first in a series of Verizon community blogs that will be cross-posted each Friday as part of Forum Discovery Fridays on Verizon at Home. Today's blog is from Link Hoewing of Verizon's PolicyBlog and AVP of Internet and Technology Issues.)

I got a note from an old friend just after Verizon announced its new 300 mbps/65 mbps service, posing this question: “I’ve been asked what people will ever do with all of this capacity. Do you have an answer?”

I hesitated to give the quick response that came to mind given my own experiences with innovation in technology.  Back in 1976, I got my first computer when Timex came out with a small machine that hooked to your TV and saved data to a cassette tape. Then in 1981, I bought an “IBM “clone” (a computer made from knock-off parts based on the then-very popular IBM personal computer) that my brother-in-law made and sold. As I recall, it came with a 20-meg hard drive, and I distinctly remember his comment: “You’ll never need all of this memory.” Yeah, right.

But let me delve into this matter a little more seriously. Why a 300 meg offering now? Why do – or will –  consumers need or want it?

First, the sheer number of broadband-enabled devices in a home. It was not too long ago (in the late 1970’s) when homes had only a few media or communications devices. They were all analog, did not “talk” to each other, and could perform one task well, playing a record, for example (I know, “What’s a record?”) but that was it.

Now, many homes have six or seven communications devices connected to the home network at the same time, sharing the home WiFi cloud coming off the router and using the same broadband connection. In fact, it is becoming more common for even just one person to have multiple connected devices – a PC, a tablet, a smartphone, for example. In short, the bandwidth demand from so many devices is increasing.

Further, the Pew Center has pointed out that even when digital devices are not connected to a home network, data can be swapped or transferred from device to device. This too can drive broadband demand as people seamlessly pop out a memory card from a camera, download the pictures and movies just taken at the birthday party, and whisk them off to others over a social network site or upload them to a picture-sharing site. 

Second, the usage patterns of consumers are changing. It used to be that memory in the PC was critical. After all, once you created a PowerPoint presentation or edited your own home movie, you had to be sure you had storage space. Increasingly, people are storing much of what they produce in the cloud. Transporting such data requires bandwidth and the more people in a home or small business use the cloud, the more upstream demand there will be.  People frequently ignore or forget about the upstream piece of broadband, but it is increasingly important and FiOS does “up” really well.

Third, the devices themselves are increasingly demanding. The new iPad, with its extremely high resolution, averages four-times the bandwidth demand of the previous version. Until the iPad, some might have scoffed at the notion that more resolution is important and a major selling point to consumers, but it clearly is. Any device that requires that more pixels be sent to it for display purposes puts more demand on the network. 

Tablets are only the start. The newest flat-screen TVs have 4K displays, approximately two-and-a-half to three-times the pixel displays of the current 1080 TVs. While these new TVs are expensive, they won’t stay that way, and given the reception the iPad high-resolution display has received, it is a safe bet that 4K TVs will find a home in many households. These TVs require 70 meg download streams to display video and the next generation of TVs – the 8Ks – will take up to 250 megs.  Sounds like ever-growing demand for more bandwidth.

Fourth, we have only begun to really tap into the potential of broadband to enhance the delivery of important services like health care. Our CEO just gave a speech on health-care technology and made this point well:

“Wireless and broadband networks are evolving rapidly, putting high-speed video capabilities within reach of an increasing number of users. And we’ve seen a revolution in the behavior of consumers, who have come to expect anytime-anywhere access to everything in their digital lives. Yet for all of this innovation, technology has yet to truly transform health care as it has other sectors of the economy.”

We have a long way to go to take the power of high-speed networks and meld it with medical technologies to create better healthcare solutions, make health care more accessible, and improve outcomes. But much is changing in the medical field with regard to communications and broadband technologies. Already about half of doctors have tablets and a large majority have smart phones. The number of hospitals that now use electronic medical records has grown dramatically in recent years. And mobile apps of many kinds now exist to help people monitor chronic conditions or remember to take their medications.

But as Lowell said, this is only a start. Chronic conditions that need continuous monitoring are a major challenge for our health-care system. Broadband technologies can connect patients from their homes, and provide doctors with continuous updates on their conditions. New technologies like 64 Slice CT scans can illustrate in amazing detail problems patients may have with their internal organs, but such scans require up to 3GB of capacity to transmit. Sending such a scan over a FiOS connection might take less than a minute. Sending it over traditional broadband connections could take 12 minutes or more. So, high-speed connections can be life-savers, especially in situations, where instant analysis is required from a doctor who is home or on the road. The demands of these new technologies – and the improvements that can come from better monitoring and better patient-doctor interactions including via video calls – are going to make broadband capacity ever more important.

So, is offering 300 megs simply a case of “build it and they will come?” I think it is a case of skating to where puck is very likely to be. That’s thinking ahead to create both platforms that can support the ideas and concepts of innovators, as well as to ensure the customer has what they need when those innovations become available.

[#2]

Let me have GPON and I will tell you.