Fiber? or wireless?

At the end of the article they say

"People talk about the risks of doing this," says Michael Render, who tracks fiber buildouts for RVA, the research firm. What they should be talking about, he says, is the risk of not building out fiber. "The world is changing very rapidly."

Definitely Reinvent

Which is kind of true. Verizon - like all the telecoms companies - needs to reinvent itself. Just going around extracting 10cents/minute for long distance isn't going to last long. With Skype giving US long distance away for free people (techy and non-techy alike) are finally going to buy a headset with microphone and get addicted to Skype - and that will be yet another step on the way to the death of the old "phone" companies.

But Which Reinvention?

But when they're busy reinventing themselves - do they really want to sink the majority of their profits into physical plant expenses that put fiber in the house when WiMax can deliver 300mbps to several nearby homes without the $1000 worth of cabling and NIU on the side of each house? Plus, if you could use a mesh network and...then you don't have to lay nearly as much fiber around the place cutting down that cost.

Personally, my bet is on wireless. Yeah, it may have problems in nasty storms and yeah, people can packetsniff, but there are solutions to those problems and wireline has its own problems. Like, hurricanes. When Katrina hit, the cellular and satelite salesmen were in the next week saying "Cable won't be back for months - buy with us, we're in business NOW." That's compelling.