Have centum call seconds (CCS) been replaced by time spent as the dominant metric in our digital world?If I remember the Erlang tables the peak-hour call volume on a fixed-line, voice-only telephone network is 3.6 CCS per line, meaning that the network was designed for the average user to make a telephone call lasting 360 seconds (or 6 minutes) in the hour with the highest traffic volume.
But, according to Ivan Seidenberg, CCS have been rendered “quaint” by FiOS:
“We don’t look any different than Google,” he said. “We can begin to look at eliminating central offices, call centers and garages.”
Which sounds like the day Scott McNealy announced to Sun Microsystems that the company would start selling servers on eBay. Sure. In the future, Verizon won’t need data centers or service technicians…all those will be in the cloud.
I’ve been trying to find a widget that will paint my house and fix my roof, but the app store seems to be falling short in that regard.
So the real question is whether the PayTV business will be big enough to fill the gap left by declining telephony revenues. The problem is a pretty massive mismatch between the two. Fixed line telephony was $185 billion (and falling steadily) in 2008 in the U.S.; and PayTV was $96 billion at the same time.
The best case scenario will put Verizon’s FiOS PayTV revenues at around $5 billion by 2015…which definitely won’t make up for the fixed-line business the company is planning on giving up.
Perhaps it’s time to consider carpentry, wood delivery and house calls. Those are things I need today — and would definitely pay for — if Verizon hadn’t pulled out of Northern New England.
Well, Ivan, I hope it works out for you. If it doesn’t, I hear that Scott McNealy is looking for work and may have an eBay store just waiting for an energetic self-starter.