My point is consumers decisions about who provides them their landline (regardless of whether it is VoIP or POTS) will be driven by the quality/price of the wireless component.

And a deal with Sprint will never be as effective as owning the business itself.

Point One:
The estimates I see of cord cutters (wireless only connections) go from single digits to maybe 25% of households by 2013 (deutsche bank, among others). That means that 75% of the households still have a landline phone. Thats more homes than have terrestrial cable of some sort today and more than have broadband Internet access. Sounds like a pretty big opportunity for a pretty long time. And the cash flow from phone service is great at $40, even $30. Ultimately, as market penetration progresses, you’ll see cable co’s come up with in-state and local calling plans to save money for people who don’t use their landline as much and increase their market coverage and get to the next levels of penetration.

Point two:
Wireless may trump wired voice one a one-off comparison from your perspective, but don’t make the mistake of assuming you are representative of the broader market. Would your parents agree? What about people who have lousy cell coverage at home(that’s me)? More importantly, your comment misses the fact that the nature of competition is changing from individual product price/value to bundled price/value equations. That’s why cable is able to stop losses to satellite and actually grow its core cable business with a three product phone bundle. I see it happening every day.

Point three:
There continues to be much upside in landline communications. A huge untapped opportunity is in small business (1-20 lines) market that is underserved by incumbents, aint ditching their landlines anytime soon and requires a relatively small incremental investment to harvest. Expect major cableco’s to announce small business phone initiatives within 12 months. I would posit that for the near term, the marginal economics of small business (landline) phone service are better for a cableco than anything wireless.

Full disclosure: I work for a mid-sized cableco…

It sounds like your general assumption is that cable and telco media services are going to be worthless once everyone fully adopts some “wireless standard”.

I have myself recently gone back and forth on the ideas myself. Here are my thoughts thus far.

1. The real market to fully capture is are those consumers that fall into the “last mile”.. because Business will never ever allow the continuity of its network infrastructure to ride the instability of wireless.. even WiMax.

2. Consider all network type services ( Megaband internet, Fully OnDemand TV and VOIP ) and who of all the players has the actual bandwidth to service the largest volume of usage. Consider Cable, Fiber, DSL and Wireless mediums.

So if we are simply looking at the laws of supply and demand, those who have the greatest “Supply” in this case bandwidth capacity per subscriber and the capacity of the largest number of subscribers wins.

Simply looking at this at the future, the only ones who’s networks stand to even compete in the arena of HIGH volume network services are the ones who can serve it up: Fiber ( Verizon + Bell South ), and the Cable co’s.

Some of us techies love the stability of a “Potts” based connection however PHYSICS dictates that you cannot transmit a digital signal over *DSL greater than one fourth of what Cable and Fiber is capable of.

Wireless is has not yet matured nor has the capacity to fully handle what DSL can handle on a per subscriber basis, and I have already pointed out that DSL cant handle what Network services consumers will be demanding of going forward.

WiMax is a very interesting technology indeed, however I do not believe it will supplant the “wired” mediums, however it WILL supplant the wireless cellular mediums as now many PDA/Cellphones come with wifi cards . We all know what that means… Skype and VOnage via PDA connected wifi/wimax telephone.

THis is a great discussion and I’d love to hear others opinions on my message.

The only way to counter Cablecos is what Verizon is doing;
that is taking fiber all the way to the home.

I would not put too much hope on Fixed-Mobile Convergence.
The main wireless providers (Verizon, Cingular) will fight
it. That is why the only serious provider thinking of FMC
is T-Mobile.

The answer is to program your mobile phone to the local emergency numbers.

This issue is non existant in ASIA though, where mobile is just a cheaper easier way to deploy to more people.

Back to the main point of this thread. Cablecos are in a knee jerk reaction to protect their customer base from the triple play threat from the Telcos. In the end this will be where the competition comes from. The only difference will be where the roots of the company lie and their last mile distribution network.

Why are cablecos trying to capture fixed-line business from the telcos? Because there are 175M fixed lines out there, generating over $70B in annual revenue, and the cablecos want a piece now, not a few years from now when a fixed-mobile converged s…..