"Verizon Communications is considering shedding millions of its local wirelines to gain $30 billion to pay for the rollout of advanced fiber and wireless technologies. The company reported that its 2004 third quarter profit remained flat, while its wireless business helped push revenue up 6.7% to $18.21 billion in the third quarter 2004, up from $17.06 billion in the third quarter 2003. Verizon Communications reported losing 666,000 business and consumer wirelines in the third quarter 2004. The company is now considering dropping 15 million of its remaining wirelines and seeks to transform itself into a wireless and broadband company. (Source: Wall Street Journal) "
Whoa... now this is interesting. Verizon has been a really big player in wireline business... What's curious is that they still want to provide Broadband, but they require a phone line to have a DSL. I am guessing that many of their subscribers use the cheapest form of a phone line for DSL but use a wireless phone as their main means of communication. This is the first instance of such a shift at least as far as I know. I wonder how the baby bells will do. What kinds of bundling will they try to offer to keep their customer base? BT in Britain has done some very interesting things with offering various wireless-like services to their wireline subscribers, like SMS ability. In the land of SMS that is understandable of course (not as important here at least no quite yet).
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