* Verizon offers naked DSL service to customers porting numbers to wireless
Verizon is now offering naked DSL to a select group of customers who are porting their wireline phone numbers to wireless, yet want to maintain their broadband service.
Verizon says it’s been unbundling DSL from wireline voice since April and has offered the broadband only service to a “very narrow number” of customers to date. The cusotmers are in the former BellAtlantic region of the Norteast and Mid-Atlantic, a Verizon spokeswoman says.
The RBOC is evaluating rolling out naked DSL as a more broadly available service but it’s not easy to do that, the spokeswoman says. Verizon’s database is all geared toward phone customers, she says.
Keeping broadband intact with wireline voice has, until now, been a strategy RBOCs employed for keeping voice access line revenue and stemming losses to cable companies and alternative providers. But increasingly, the Bells are unbundling voice and DSL, either voluntarily or unvoluntarily, lest they forgo any and all local loop access.
Qwest earlier this year unveiled a naked DSL service for customers porting to wireless for primary voice service. BellSouth, however, is petitioning the FCC to halt state regulators from forcing the Bell to disengage voice and DSL.
BellSouth may want to reconsider. According to some analysts, naked DSL is the right way to go.
“Voice service is likely going to get very competitive over the next five years with at least half a dozen providers putting pressure on prices,” states John Hodulik of UBS warburg in a bulletin on Verizon’s move. “Verizon itself is likely to contribute to faster adoption of broadband telephony as it rolls out its own high-quality service in June. If customers like the service, a portion of them will likely want to cut the cord on the primary line and, without naked DSL, will be forced to move to cable, making Verizon a victim of its own success.”
The bulk of the ILECs’ assets are in its local infrastructure that connects the customer to the PSTN, Hodulik adds. Losing the customer to cable strands this investment, eliminates the opportunity to create new revenue streams in the future, and makes the economics of new investment in the access network more tenuous, he reasons.
