HDTVFanAtic said:
I had wondered why Verizon had not said squat about FIOS in Pinellas County and figured they were considering it AARP central and thus focusing on Hillsborough.
Over the weekend I ran into the Mayor of Clearwater and asked why Verizon had not proposed anything in Pinellas and he informed me that they had a non-compete with Knology that ran until the end of the year. At that point he expected Verizon to go full steam ahead with FIOS in Pinellas.
Depending on how fast that happens, this could clearly spell the long term end of Knology as their financials look like crap anyway.
I did post on this many months ago and Verizon was planning to start wiring much of Pinellas County but just not offer service until the end of the year. Now this was halted because Knology was going to take them to court and say they couldn't even start laying the fiber until after the first of the year and as such Verizon just let things go because spending money fighting this in court isn't wise at this point considering that its only a matter of six months at the time this occured. As you have been told by the the Mayor of Clearwater Verizon will start laying fiber in Clearwater, Seminole, Largo and St. Petersburg at the start of the year. They expect to have all of Largo done in less than a year and they are working on getting a TV franchise agreement done as well. Verizon has contracts in place with PBS HD, NBC HD, CBS HD, Fox HD, ABC HD, WB HD and UPN HD. They are also very close to a contract with Sun HD and Fox Sports Net Florida HD as well. These contracts for the HD locals needed to be done for those in Temple Terrace but the end result is that every customer within the Tampa Bay area viewing market benefits from this.
Verizon has tons and tons of workers ready to go in this area and they also will be testing two of the new MDU ONTs for quite a few of the apartment complexes.
These ONTs will be able to use the existing coax cables in the apartments and both phone service and internet service will work over the copper wires inside each apartment unit. With current ONTs the internet requires an ethernet jack to be installed and because this is very expensive and time consuming todo in apartment complexes they have a new ONT that will offer internet via VDSL2 over the copper cables. The benefit of this is that because the data all the way upto the ONT (aka apartment) is fiber they don't have distance problems. So because the copper cable itself running just in the apartment has more than enough room to carry at least 100Mbps down and 50Mbps UP they see no reason to upgrade these apartments. They can't offer those speeds via DSL because that amount of bandwidth traveling over miles and miles of copper just can't get to the customer withiout getting corrupted. Now when all that bandwidth and data can be sent via fiber all the way to the apartment the data only has to travel over copper for less than 100 feet or less on average so no corruption occurs.
I know I might have said this twice but I just wanted to explain it as well as I could. Also the other issue with these MDU ONTs is that they need power and right now the way the system works is that one resident has to endup paying for all the power this ONT needs. Because of this most apartment complexes will need the local power company to install another meter box that will be used for just the ONT only. Verizon is very willing to have the apartment complex send them the bill for that meter and that bill would be spread out between all of the Verizon customers using that ONT device. This charge would only be no more than one dollar extra per month and that is pretty much assuming that your the only customer in the whole building connected to this ONT. The more that are connected to it the less you pay. Also keep in mind that a single family home pays more than one dollar a month in extra power for their ONT usage so don't think your paying more being in an apartment complex compared to a single family home because your not. It just has to be done differently. This issue really isn't that much of a problem.
For example many apartment complexes have been calling Verizon in Clearwater and telling them that they can run the ONT power into the meter that the laundry room uses and they will just pay the extra couple of bucks on their own just to get Verizon FIOS in their complex.
I hope this gives you an overview of what things are looking like so far.
