Verizon's Wireless Future http://arstechnica.co
Post# of 96879
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology...-in-years/
"If you think about 5G, you put the fiber down the road, which is what we’re doing in Boston," Verizon CFO Fran Shammo said at a recent Goldman Sachs conference. "Then all of the labor and the expense of drilling up your driveway connecting the [optical network terminal, or ONT] to your house and all the labor involved with that, all that goes away, because now I can deliver a beam... into a window with a credit card-size receptor on it that delivers it to a wireless router, and there’s really no labor involved and there’s no real hardware other than the router and the credit card. So the cost benefit of this is pretty substantial—at least, we believe it is."
Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam made similar statements during an investor call in July. "About half of our cost to deploy FiOS is in the home today and the next biggest thing outside the home is the drop," McAdam said. Verizon can cut costs substantially by "losing the wiring in the house and losing the drop," he said.
To that end, Verizon is planning to test a wireless video service for homes. Based on the not-yet-finished 5G standard, the service will be in several small towns by the end of March, and it will be free to the homes in the beta testing areas while Verizon evaluates the technology to prepare a wider rollout, McAdam said at an investor conference this week, according to an article in Fortune. This is separate from the Boston fiber deployment.