Verizons own numbers prove consumers want fiber

No matter how you spin them, numbers don’t lie. American consumers are paying the world’s highest prices in growing numbers to get Verizon’s FiOS service while V’s  fixed line voice and DSL businesses are crashing. Moral to the story: people want a big, fat unrestricted pipe, and they will pay more for it even in hard times.

So why is it only a select few of Verizon’s customers can even get FiOS? There is no excuse for every urban / suburban market to not have access to fiber but one: A duopoly that has bought and paid for the federal government that regulates them.

Verizon said 282,000 homes added FiOS high-speed data in the fourth quarter, and almost 1 million added it in 2008 for a total of 2.5 million subscribers out of almost 10 million homes passed. Those additions helped make up for losses in Verizon’s DSL business, which lost 68,000 DSL-based connections in the most recent three-month period after losing 96,000 during the previous quarter.

Verizon’s consumers also continued to drop their landline telephones, but not as rapidly as some had feared. In the fourth quarter, Verizon lost 3 percent of landline subscribers, up slightly from the 2.8 percent loss in the same period last year. In 2008 Verizon lost 12.2 percent of its landlines leaving 20.96 million still connected; it lost 10.8 percent of them in 2007. (Gigaom)