David Berlind, one of my bosses over at ZDNet, came up with an incredible statistic recently that deserves a lot more play than it got.

His source on this is Bob Frankston, co-founder of Visicalc and one of those great online friends I've never met personally. (As you can see by this picture, he's also well on his way to being a Truly Handsome Man (that is to say bald)).

Here's the key bit, as Berlind saw it:

By Frankston's calculations, for example, Verizon is reserving 99 percent of its government-ordained right of way (in the form of bandwidth that should be available to us as well as its competitors) for itself so that it may compete in the IPTV market.

Frankston's got the whole story, in hiw own words, here.

More on the flip.

Let's understand that. Verizon has 100 times more broadband capacity than they are willing to sell, and they just spent tens of millions of dollars in a successful effort to keep from wholesaling it. Instead, they want to get into the TV business.

The citizens of other countries are getting 100 Mbps broadband connections, while these people are selling it through an eye-dropper, at jaw-dropping prices, and hoarding the rest of it for....TV!

At the same time, as Marc Wagner of Indiana University notes, Verizon's cellular partnership, VerizonWireless, is pouring money into cellular broadband.

The difference between the two units, Wagner says, is that the phone company is regulated and cellular isn't.

But is that really the case? Verizon has full control in both spheres. It has a shared monopoly, with very few players, in both spheres. Four companies have nearly the entire cellular market, two companies have nearly the entire broadband and telephone markets, everywhere Verizon does business.

It's not that Verizon needs to be regulated or deregulated. What is needs is to be forced to endure competition.

Without competition, especially in the Internet broadband space, Verizon will continue to drag the U.S. economy down.