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Carrier Services
Notebaert: Qwest To Keep Pushing Bandwidth
Carrier Still Weighing Options For Video Entertainment Services
by Jim Barthold
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.
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