AT&T Brings “Blazing-Fast” Internet Access And Advanced Fiber-Based Services To 25,000-Plus Florida Businesses.

“Under Project VIP, AT&T has lit up 750 multi-tenant office buildings across the state, helping take the ‘speed of business to next level’… crews have installed fiber to an additional 750 multi-tenant (MTU) buildings across Florida, making fiber-based broadband services available to more than 25,000 business customer locations.”

AT&T’s Project Velocity IP (VIP) is a three-year investment plan to expand the RBOC’s wireless and wireline broadband networks, by year-end 2015. That’s LTE and U-Verse.

Verizon had a similar plan pre-2000, where business parks had fiber deployed in them via GTE Smart Park projects. It is easy in greenfield sites, like business parks as roads and utilities are being installed before buildings. Afterwards it is more expensive and thus less profitable.

Fiber to the Biz is where all the profit is left in the marketplace. Cable companies are attacking this market segment now as well. The consumer space is flat and hyper-competitive. That just leaves cheaper and bigger broadband pipes to the SMB space of over 28 million businesses. There is also the IT and cloud services to those 28 million businesses.

Holman Jenkins, the Internet Innovation Alliance really loves your editorials in your boss’ paper, the WSJ. I’m just not sure you do get it.

The IIA is an ILEC astroturf group. The group is not about Innovation at all. What was the last thing that the ILECs innovated? VoIP came from companies like Vonage, that the old guard sued to high heaven when they got too big. Cloud services came from companies like Google and Amazon. The only Innovation the ILECs do is steal it. They haven’t had an original idea in their heads since Bell Labs created DSL in the sixties. Oh, and it took 3 DLECs to bring DSL to the public – or we would still be paying $1500 for a T1.

Google Fiber isn’t about demonstrating how much regulation there is. Way to reach to pull that factoid out.

Googel Fiber is about demonstrating to the public and the regulatory agencies that Gigabit fiber is not only possible, but that the ILECs have purposefully not provided to America in the name of profit.

You make an argument about the high cost of regulation and running two networks. One of those networks has earned the ILECs a tremendous rate of return for many, many years to the point that ILECs were able to spend hundreds of billions on cell networks, data centers, cloud services, and buying companies.

Just like EarthLink was able to use its admittedly dwindling revenue from dial-up to pivot the company, ILECs were able to do the same.

Let’s not forget that the Rural LECs were given big money by USF for their plant. At any time, they could have built out fiber with RUS loans and other monies. But they just milked the cow – until the cow is too old to give milk (in their opinion).

Windstream just announced how well it is doing in consumer broadband. That is DSL, Holman. DSL that runs on copper, Hholman. The same copper that CenturyLink, Frontier and Fairpoint are still making use of and revenue from. What part of the telecom industry are you looking at?

Is fiber nice? Absolutely. Why do we hear about fiber so much in the last few years? one, the media only knows how to sing one tune. Like you, they don’t know shit about the industry but can re-print a press release like no one’s business. And they can parrot anything an advertiser says. Kind of like you and IIA.

The other really big reason: fiber has been the same cost to build out with for the last few years. Loans became available due to RUS, ARRA and other programs. Regional CLECs and PCOs bet on themselves to profit off of a big investment in fiber. An investment that they made themselves without government funds.

Google proved that the ILECs (and to some extent the cablecos) have been short changing us for years. VZ (for one) received rate hikes dating back to 2000 for putting in FTTX, but did not deliver on that promise in many states including NJ and PA. I think they spent that money on lobbying, astroturf groups (IIA) and press junkets.

Yes, we do need fiber networks in metros. The Internet is the engine of our economy – IF the NSA doesn’t destroy it first. We need copper too. Ethernet over copper is a cheaper, faster to deliver service than copper. AT&T may hate copper but its U-Verse platform runs on it for the last mile via VDSL2.

In summary, Google proved that Gigabit fiber networks were economically possible – and the ILECs had cheated us by not providing it. The copper plant is still necessary. Don’t want it? Spin it off or sell it. Many providers have built out fiber to the community without government funds or Wall Street bonds. If they can do it, why can’t the ILECs or the cablecos?

All you pointed out is how the ILECs got outsmarted by Google because some companies look for solutions, other companies look for excuses.

Windstream says that the consumer DSL business remains its second fastest growing revenue stream in its portfolio. It should with all the CAF + RUS funds it received. WIND has “penetrated 71 percent of its access lines with broadband. .. Windstream is getting about $10 a month from complementary services such as hosting and virus protection it sells to consumers.” It’s all about the upsell to increase ARPU.

Level3 rolled out Complete Voice, a new SIP trunk service. “The Voice Complete platform enables enterprises to securely connect more sites with greater operating and cost efficiency, incorporating a fully native PRI (primary rate interface)-handoff capability and other new performance-enhancing features.” Yeah. wow.

There’s a school of thought that says the established tools of enterprise communication – telephony, instant messaging, email and video – don’t cut the mustard even when glued together with presence and presented as unified communications and collaboration. What’s needed to make a business really hum along, the argument goes, is enterprise social networking. [source]

“It takes a great deal of network infrastructure to enable unified communications and collaboration, but many IT professionals are now focusing on the application-layer issues of UCC.” [source] It’s all about INTEGRATION.

Some marketing advice.

What do you do about Free? “Sell something better than free.” We live in a time of hyper-competition mixed with a lack of effective mass marketing. Luckily, we also live in a time when everything is automated and customer service is poor. The bar is set so low that it should be easy to raise that bar and make a profit.

“Make a product or provide a service that’s worth paying for,” writes Seth Godin. Make it Remarkable — that means, make it worth remarking about.

Design a product that is built for a specific audience, like the way you do for E-rate.

“You don’t need a better way to talk about what you do, or a better gimmick, or a better social media strategy. In fact, you need to reinvent and rebuild what you make for a new reality, a reality where paying for something is an intentional act of buying something way better than the free alternative.” [Seth]

The other thing about Free is that it pre-supposes that the buyers only care about price, which you would think is the case but isn’t. Looking at just pricing is examining the wrong metric. Kodak “made the mistake of misdefining quality. They thought that what would ensure their future was better fidelity film. And without a doubt, they delivered on the promise of ever better film stock, with all the things a professional photographer could hope for,” writes Seth Godin.

“It turns out that what people actually wanted was the ability to take and share billions of photos at vanishingly small cost. The ‘quality’ that most of the customer base wanted was cheap and easy, not museum quality.” So Kodak and Polaroid were looking at the wrong metric. Think about the iPhone commercial – people just want to take and share photos, which is one reason Instagram was acquired by Facebook for $1B. Even FB knows that it’s value is in (1) the network; and (2) the photo sharing. Yahoo missed this with Flickr.

Think about this another way. It isn’t Free or Low Price. It’s connection, Value, Time, Improvement, Efficiency, Local – or some other metric that you are forgetting (as you focus just on price).

“Quality is not an absolute measure. It doesn’t mean ‘deluxeness’ or ‘perfection’. It means keeping the promise the customer wants you to make.”

That promise you make is your brand, your vision, the story you share with your tribe.

Your Tribe are your customers and employees and partners. That’s your Big Data to be analyzed in order to identify your best customer / partner / employee profiles.

All this time you were staring at the wrong factors and metrics.

A couple of e-books for you to read.

One is The Flinch by Julien Smith, which is published by Seth Godin’s Domino Project and is free right now on kindle. It is about how boxers have to learn not to flinch in order to be a boxer. We flinch in reflex, but to take big risks we have to learn not ot flinch.

I mention this ebook when I speak: Breaking the Time Barrier is the first e-book by Fresh Books. It is a story about web designers pricing out their work. A spin o not trading time for money and defining your Value.

Many of you know who Rackspace is. Hugh MacLeod is a cartoonist and author I love. This e-book tells the story of what he learned about Rackspace’s growth while working with them on culture and cartoons.