Verizon’s Seidenberg Says 4G Could Replace Home Internet and Cable

• Kevin Krause
• 14 years ago

In case you haven’t heard, Verizon is pretty cised for its 4G LTE network, and they have good reason to be. Initial speed tests have been pretty astonishing, and Ivan Seidenberg, CEO at Verizon, is pointing to this and more as reasons why their new network will grow into a “modest substitute” for home cable and internet. His view isn’t that this will happen instantly, but as infrastructure grows and pricing settles down Seidenberg expects more and more people to cut the cord of traditional wired services.

And while I have spoken on this before, and am excited about the idea of mobile broadband replacing home internet the way cellular phones have made obsolete the landline, current bandwidth models just seem ludicrous if this is to happen. For $50 and 5GB per month, good luck downloading any high quality movies or streaming HD content without reaching your cap well before the moon has cycled around.

On a somewhat promising note, at the same conference Seidenberg mentioned that VZW is still sorting out how they will handle bandwidth and pricing for 4G smartphone plans. He suggested that on the low end of the scale, 10GB would be the “floor of what people will do.” So perhaps we can expect higher monthly caps at similar pricing to current data plans once the first 4G handsets launch, but we will have to wait and see. And we will all look back to a time when there was such a thing as “unlimited” data and remember the good old days.

[via Engadget]