Broadband: The Battle for Long Island

Joseph Laszlo | November 03, 2005, 02:21 PM

Broadband Reports offers an update on their coverage of possibly the most contentious broadband battlefield market in the country: Long Island.

Cablevision, the local MSO, offers Optimum Online, which is among the fastest, if not THE fastest, major cable modem offering in the US, typically clocked at 3-5Mbps or better by Broadband Reports's speed test. And Long Island is also an early market for FiOS, Verizon's ambitious fiber-to-the-home infrastructure upgrade, supporting Internet speeds of 5-30Mbps.

Not resting on its laurels, Optimum is testing upgrades that would push its service into the 20-50Mbps range in the near future.

And of course you have insults in the press, and lawsuits...it's sounding pretty contentious.

Probably great for consumers.

Something I've wondered for a long time though: you're Verizon. You're building the Network of the Future, and can start in roughly any of the many markets you serve. Strategically, do you start building where you face a cable operator with a weak offering and a crappy network, or the one with the fastest network and an existing strong triple play bundle?

Granted Long Island communities have great demographics for new services...but Verizon has to serve lots of other places with similar demos.

Maybe you do it because you face the biggest competitive threat there.

But for a while my theory has been that Verizon's focused on Long Island because enough NYC-based Verizon execs live out there, and want to be served by the best network their company can build.

Probably wrong, I know. But I've heard worse reasons for building a network...