Home | Sign up for newsletters!

About

Advanced Search

Carrier Services

Notebaert: Qwest To Keep Pushing Bandwidth

Carrier Still Weighing Options For Video Entertainment Services

      

Qwest Communications is “very focused” on driving “lots of bandwidth” to consumers in 2007 and will budget 40 percent of its capital spending on that effort, Richard Notebaert, the carrier’s chairman/CEO said during a presentation to the Citigroup 17th Annual Entertainment, Media and Telecommunications Conference in Las Vegas.


Qwest’s competitive video entertainment offering strategy is less clear, however as it may or may not include an IPTV offering.

“If IPTV plays out scalable, we’ll look at that,” Notebaert said. “We’re getting franchises as we go and in the meantime we have DirecTV (satellite) and we’re having very good success with them, get a percent of the monthly bill, pretty good margin and we’re very comfortable with it.”

Notebaert, unlike some of his RBOC counterparts, is very comfortable with the condition of Qwest’s networks and sees no need to invest heavily in fiber to the home.

“We’re more focused on fiber-to-the-node because our outside plant is in very good shape and we can get very high speeds out of it if our RTU (remote terminal unit) is in the right location and we feed the RTU with fiber,” he said.

Video can easily traverse these networks according to results being produced in Qwest’s labs, Notebaert said.

“If you take an HD (high definition) compressed circuit – MPEG-4 – and you really compress it in the lab today you can get a very good picture, I can’t tell the difference, of a basketball game at about 6 megs,” he said.

While this flies in the face of claims that HD requires at least eight megabits of throughput – and in the minds of some much more than that -- Notebaert insisted “you can get it down pretty low.”

Video, though, is only an afterthought for the carrier as it focuses on consumer bandwidth.

“Four years ago about 32 percent of our customers could get high-speed Internet from Qwest; today’s it’s 98 percent,” he said. “The basic speed then that we tried to sell was 256 (Kbps); today it’s a meg-and-a-half (1.5 Mbps).”

Over 50 percent of Qwest’s customers can get between 3 and 5 Mbps and 25 percent can get 7 Mbps, he said.

On the commercial side, Notebaert said, the company is continuing to transform from a “voice-dominated, voice- oriented business, circuit-switched world, into a data world, moving away from ATM and frame onto MPLS. Data and IP are what’s driving us.”

The adoption of new technologies such as MPLS are benefiting Qwest as it grows its data business, he said.

“If we were a company with a large legacy share it might be a different thing. We’re small, 5 percent national share, and we’re going against people that have double digit shares. We’re very hungry and we’re not trying to retain; we’re trying to acquire,” he concluded.

The M2M Switch - turning the wireless business model upside down -- September 1, 2010

Vivendi raises 2010 goals after strong first-half results -- September 1, 2010

FCC cuts off free nationwide broadband potential indefinitely -- September 1, 2010

Shipments of Bluetooth, NFC, UWB, 802.15.4 and Wi-Fi ICs will increase 20% in 2010 -- September 1, 2010

3PAR claims widespread uptake for VMware 'vSphere' service -- August 31, 2010

Related articles:

'Proactive Chat' gives telcos a new route to improve customer satisfaction -- August 26, 2010
Though it took a long time to arrive, online chat - the ability to communicate in real- time to a customer service operator via instant messaging - has now become well established as a mainstream way for customers to talk to their telecoms service provider in the UK. BT offers chat for business customers, Three Mobile uses chat for billing queries, while T-mobile customers are able to use chat for technical, sales, billing and coverage advice.

Rackspace Windows servers now generally available -- August 17, 2010
Rackspace Hosting, the world's leading specialist in hosting and cloud computing, announced last week the general availability of its Cloud Servers for Windows offering. The new service delivers a highly scalable environment ideal for Windows-based hosting, testing and developing applications and supporting the high levels of traffic required for launching online gaming platforms or the next social networking phenomenon.

Freescale and Indesit demonstrate Smart Grid washing machine -- July 27, 2010
Freescale Semiconductor and Indesit Company recently demonstrated a Smart Washer that can regulate its own energy use based on cost and availability at the Freescale Technology Forum in Orlando, Fla.

IEMR: market for GPS services will rise to $13.4 billion in 2014 -- July 20, 2010
IE Market Research Corporation (IEMR), a Canadian-based provider of market intelligence services, announced today the release of its Q3 2010 Global GPS Navigation and Location Based Services Market Forecast, 2010 - 2014.

M2M Zone Keep up with the latest in Machine-to-Machine Communications:

Read M2M Newsdesk
News, research, show coverage and more, covering the M2M industry.

Visit the M2M Zone
M2M Zone Seminars offer the latest information, directly from industry leaders and experts. The M2M Zone is a fixture at top-shelf trade shows including CeBIT and CTIA Wireless. Learn more about what the M2M Zone offers.


Horizon House Network
Microwave Journal
Wireless & RF News


BVD Electronic Publishing
Hosting & Development

Advertisement

©2010 Telecommunications Online & Horizon House Publications®.

 
Home | NewsGlobe | Events | Contact Us | Register | About Us | Advertise

All rights reserved. Privacy Policy.

Advertisement




Let the news come to you
Sign up for newsletters!