Verizon Nearly Done with New FiOS Installs - The UpStream

Verizon Nearly Done with New FiOS Installs

posted Saturday Jan 24, 2015 by Scott Ertz

Verizon Nearly Done with New FiOS Installs

In early 2010, Verizon announced that they would slow down new FiOS installs at some point in the future, with the plan to stop new markets. Even though 2 years later they began ramping up again, it was only a matter of time before they completed their planned expansion. This week, Verizon CFO Fran Shammo said that they were nearing the end of new construction, saying,

I have been pretty consistent with this in the fact that we will spend more CapEx in the Wireless side and we will continue to curtail CapEx on the Wireline side. Some of that is because we are getting to the end of our committed build around FiOS, penetration is getting higher.

As the XLTE install has continued, and the speeds of wireless has gotten closer to that of wireline services, it makes sense that Verizon would want to focus their attention there. Wireline services are definitely not a growing industry, while wireless services are. This is especially important to a company who, as part of the same conference call, announced a net loss of $2.23 billion in the last quarter of 2014.

In regards to the overall health of existing FiOS subscriptions, Shammo said,

In broadband, we added 145,000 net FiOS customers in the quarter and 544,000 for the year. We have a total of 6.6 million FiOS Internet subscribers, representing 41.1 percent penetration... Overall net broadband subscribers increased 59,000 in the quarter and 190,000 for the full year. In FiOS video, we added 116,000 net customers in the quarter and 387,000 for the year. We have a total of 5.6 million FiOS video subscribers, which represents 35.8 percent penetration.

While this is good customer growth, it does not pay for the expansion of FiOS, or even the maintenance of a copper network. Hopefully they will use the money saved to speed up the expansion of XLTE, and even the 3G retirement plans, which will make room for more bandwidth. That will allow for Verizon to compete in a market that Clear tried to create - a wireless-based home Internet plan. Clear's network wasn't prepared to support the demand, though a renewed vigor from Verizon could make their network capable.

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