Russell Shaw is a specialist in mobile computing, telephony, networking and covers these fields regularly for numerous print and online publications. Russ writes the popular IP Telephony blog on ZDNet and contributes regularly to The Industry Standard blog as well. Author of seven books, Russ' latest book is Wireless Networking Made Easy.
John Yunker is president of Byte Level Research. He closely tracks emerging wireless technologies and their impact on consumers and carriers alike. Over the years he has written a number of major reports on technologies such as Wi-Fi, WiMAX and cellular technologies.
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Verizon Wireless announced in their Q3 call that they now have 75,000 broadband wireless subscribers. That may not sound like very much for a comapny with 42.1 million subscribers, but hey, they've got to start somewhere. And we're not talking about an inexpensive service; at $80/month this is strictly a business service right now.
The 75,000 does not reflect the 14 cities that the BroadbandAccess service is now avaiable in. Most of the cities only just went live. My guess is that the majority of the subscribers are based the DC area, with a healthy percentage based in San Qualcomm (I mean, San Diego).
So, let's see, 75,000 x $80/month equals $6 million per month.
Here's a good piece about Verizon, Sprint and Cingular in Bloomberg
Question: Now that Sprint is deploying a similar EV-DO network, when will Verizon Wireless start dropping prices, and how low?
My prediction: $59/month by this time next year. And bandwidth will no longer be "unlimited."
UPDATE: It looks like Verizon Wireless may be testing a $15/month package for consumers, similar to what Sprint is doing. I'm assuming that their business data plans won't be quite so aggressive, but who knows. Maybe my estimate is way off; I certainly hope so.