If there was any doubt that the role of broadband in American life is at a tipping point, consider this: Home buyers are more interested in whether a home has an all-fiber-optic Internet hookup than whether there’s a community pool. Or a daycare center. Or a nearby convenience store.
In new surveys just reported, even people who have never had a fiber link rank an ultra-fast connection tops out of five key options.
This news tells us two things:
First, Internet hookups really matter inside the American home. It’s no longer about checking e-mail or buying a book or a shirt. Functionally, the Internet is growing up…and penetrating deeper into our lives. When something matters more to us, we get serious about quality. We don’t buy the cheapo child safety seat.
The second lesson is: Verizon has assumed a pivotal role in the transformation of Internet-based services from novelty to life tool. Choosing five years ago to build fiber optics right to American homes and businesses has proven not only a great business decision, but a visionary solution to bandwidth demand issues now emerging.
Stu Elby, Verizon’s vice president of network architecture, notes in an interview that our fiber strategy has been to offer more capacity than folk need at the moment, knowing that innovators will…and do…put it to use. He said we’ll maintain that strategy because fiber has a theoretically limitless capacity.
That capacity, he said, will come in handy soon, as we become a nation that publishes or pushes outward more and more content. Verizon’s industry-leading 20 Mbps upstream speed will certainly support that transition.
And that’s why people looking for new homes are also looking for the best broadband they can get and looking for FiOS. The luckiest buyers will find a FiOS Optical Network Terminal already installed in the home they are looking at. “People are insisting on FiOS,” says Bill Heilig, Verizon vice president of corporate marketing.
So as you drive the neighborhood and see homes with “for sale” signs, check the side of the house for a Verizon Optical Network Terminal. Chances are, that’s the home that will sell first.
UPDATE 6/30/09) See GigaOm's related coverage here.