What Does Verizon's 'HomeFusion' Mean?

Verizon Wireless has announced commercial availability of its fixed wireless broadband service, called “HomeFusion.”

Dallas, Nashville, Tenn., and Birmingham, Ala., will be the first areas to get the service, later in March. By the end of the year, Verizon hopes to provide it everywhere it has coverage with its new “LTE” wireless network.

Some will say the service will appeal primarily to homes in rural or remote areas that cannot buy cable modem service or digital subscriber line or fiber to the home service. Others are not so sure. Some might characterize the service as a facilities-based way for Verizon to sell fixed broadband outside the areas where it already provides FiOS or other fixed network service.

Some might say the primary competition is the satellite broadband providers. Others might argue the primary competition will be out-of-market fixed line providers.

The receive hardware costs $200, but installation appears to be free.  Service starts at $60 per month for 10 gigabytes of data.

Verizon says the service will provide downstream service at 5 Mbps to 12 Mbps.  Upstream speeds are said to range between 2 Mbps and 5 Mbps. Real world speeds might be faster or slower, depending on time of day and number of users on the network.

A national Long Term Evolution network represents a facilities-based network that can be used to sell fixed broadband connections, to many consumers, “out of region” with respect to Verizon’s fixed line service territory. And that out of region business might represent 80 percent of U.S. homes.

Since Verizon has largely completed it in-region fixed network upgrade to FiOS (with a couple of exceptions), the HomeFusion effort does not represent an alternative to upgrading to FiOS in region. For one thing, the consumption caps are too low to support a typical fixed network amount of data consumption, which, by some estimates, is about 15 Gbytes a month, per households.

But LTE might be a very-reasonable way to pick up fixed broadband market share for users who presently do not watch lots of streaming video, do not plan to do so, and might therefore be perfectly happy with 10 Gbytes a month of usage. 






Edited by Jennifer Russell