Comments on: Verizon Wireless About to Buy Alltel Cellular : Why This Should Be Very Good For Nelson.

By: BPL : Verizon Responds To NCL Inquires Regarding Installation | Nelson County Life Magazine : News And Weather For Nelson County, VA & Wintergreen

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 03:42:26 +0000

[...] into Nelson County have been stopped, and they are scrapping plans to build such a network here. However, with the recent proposed merger of Alltel into Verizon Wireless, that would give the compan… No official details of abandoning the plan have been released but numerous property owners, some [...]

By: Bryan Williams

Bryan Williams — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 18:04:40 +0000

I hope this is good news… for Alltel customers! I’ve been enjoying EVDO at the house on Adial Rd. (near church) for over a year since Alltel added the service to the tower near Woods Mill. With the Kyocera K2 wireless router I can pop my PC5750 aircard into I’ve got a relatively speedy network connection in and around the house.

It’s nice to be sitting on my deck in the middle of the woods writing this. I get a consistent 1.5Mbps connection; not bad and a hell of a lot better than dialup which is all that was available for years.

By: John Taylor

John Taylor — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 18:58:14 +0000

No question that even after inevitable roaming-competition divestitures, this will be good for Nelson County cell coverage. A larger issue is where this puts Nelson County overall in having good total communications access to the rest of the world. Most of the tech experts no longer consider the pithy 1.5M or 3.0M Verizon DSL speeds to even be broadband. The current broadband definition is 5M-30M++ to the home. There are two ways to get it there — fibre optic or wireless. Fibre optic is too expensive for a thinly populated county. That leaves wireless such as Verizon’s EVDO or some future form of WiMax as the delivery vehicle.

The reality is that we seem to be in a Verizon/VerizonWireless world. That’s not much competition to force better service or pricing.

The only current leverage point here may be making sure the county insists on a certain level of speed, price, and availability in exchange for tower approvals …