By Quadruple Play Do They Mean Four Times As Misleading?

from the that's-no-quadruple-play dept

Tom Royce writes in to point out a press release from a company that offers internet service to apartments and condos claiming that it's about to offer the first "quadruple play" in the New York market. The details, however, are problematic at almost every stage. First of all, we tend to have a problem with the use of "quadruple play," because it really misses the point. Quadruple play suggests that each of the four services (voice, video, broadband and wireless) are somehow equal -- when that's not true at all. What the world is moving towards is one where there's mobile data everywhere -- and voice and video are simply applications on that network, along with many other applications. However, even more problematic is that this company, Telkonet, isn't even offering what anyone considers to actually be a quadruple play. They're offering "voice, video, high-speed Internet and Wi-Fi service." Wait, suddenly WiFi is a separate service? On top of this, the "video" offering is entirely separate from the others, as the company just teamed up with a satellite TV provider -- again, nothing new at all as plenty of telco/broadband providers have done the same thing. Finally, it's hard to see how this company could credibly claim to be the first in this at all, as plenty of other companies offer voice, video and broadband -- as well as the ability to use WiFi (which still doesn't seem to fit in). It's great that the company wants to offer more services -- but it's not a quadruple play by any common definition of the term.