Verizon has paid dearly to build a fast network. Now it needs customers

VERIZON can get shirty about the word “fibre”. America’s second-biggest telecoms operator successfully complained to the Better Business Bureau that competitors had touted “fibre-optic fast” to consumers, even though their broadband networks did not run fibre all the way to the home, as Verizon does. This is not just a techies’ argument. By an order of magnitude, an all-fibre network is the fastest way to move information from one place to another on the internet and Verizon has the largest such network in America. The difficult bit is making money from it.

The company is betting that highbandwidth web services will create a huge demand for fast networks—and profits. But that is in the future. In Japan and South Korea, two other countries with fast networks, the government has subsidised the laying of new fibre. In America, which has relied on private investment, Verizon is having to shoulder more of the risk. …