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Verizon Voicewing. I doubt Verizon will sue themselves.

Verizon offers voicewing, direct vonage replace, equivalent pricing, sameish features.

http://www22.verizon.com/ForYourHome/VOIP/VOIPHome .aspx

This is a commercial product, not residential. I don't think Vonage provides any SLA to their customers, nor it is regulated to demand some minimal reliability standards. They are working in "best effort" mode. While it is good for day to day regular phone use, I think it is not suitable for real time alarm system.

You see, the problem is that no VoIP provider gives you five nines availability SLA, but I think this is what government requires from land line phone providers.

No. The five nines thing comes from land line phone providers' demands for the equipment they purchase and use. Since your phone service usually depends on many pieces of equipment working simultaneously (and many wires remaining intact simultaneously), the actual reliability of your land line is much lower. For example, Verizon advertises three nines.

It isn't as much math as a play on the way we pronounce money. .002 cents isn't the same as $0.002. But 20 cents is expressed as $0.20 and it would be correct int saying if you had $0.20 in change being returned to you, the cashier gave you 20 cents change. So, I don't know what it is called but it is one of those things that gets interchanged around enough that it was finally done wrong. I think were the problem might be is were you get partial number or numbers that aren't equal to a hole cent.

Whoever modded this up might work at Verizon.

What you said is all valid, but you said it as though it illustrates the problem. It doesn't.

Yes, $0.20 is the same as 20 cents. That's not disputed. The problem is that Verizon quoted (repeatedly) "0.002 cents", but charged "$0.002". "0.002 cents" can be rewritten as "$0.00002".

I would love to find out how this ends.

I am also considering sending a note to Verizon to find out whether they now know the difference. (Online contact form, mailing address varies by state, find yours here.)

Side note: Why doesn't the cent sign (" ") appear on /.? (I pasted one in between the quote marks on this line. But even using the escape code I found here doesn't work...

It isn't as much math as a play on the way we pronounce money. .002 cents isn't the same as $0.002. But 20 cents is expressed as $0.20 and it would be correct int saying if you had $0.20 in change being returned to you, the cashier gave you 20 cents change. So, I don't know what it is called but it is one of those things that gets interchanged around enough that it was finally done wrong. I think were the problem might be is were you get partial number or numbers that aren't equal to a hole cent.

Whoever modded this up might work at Verizon.

What you said is all valid, but you said it as though it illustrates the problem. It doesn't.

Yes, $0.20 is the same as 20 cents. That's not disputed. The problem is that Verizon quoted (repeatedly) "0.002 cents", but charged "$0.002". "0.002 cents" can be rewritten as "$0.00002".

I would love to find out how this ends.

I am also considering sending a note to Verizon to find out whether they now know the difference. (Online contact form, mailing address varies by state, find yours here.)

Side note: Why doesn't the cent sign (" ") appear on /.? (I pasted one in between the quote marks on this line. But even using the escape code I found here doesn't work...

I'm in Howard County so this article covers the TV offering:

Howard County approved Verizon's franchise agreement on Jan. 3. The company expects to begin selling FiOS TV in the county by the end of April

I held off switching until I could do a complete switch over to FiOS. I think the package offering from Verizon FiOS only applied to savings with the VoIP offering (might have been a $5-10 difference) but as I stated above, I already have SunRocket and it is costing a lot less than Vonage, Comcast, or Verizon VoIP offerings.

Verizon sued "Montgomery County asking the court to require the county to negotiate a lawful franchise with the company.

When I worked for PG County, I recall that the county had some network deals setup with Comcast to connect the county offices. I wonder if Montgomery has similar deals and if they included anything to keep Comcast as an exclusive cable TV provider.

As much as I'd like FiOS, from looking at Verizon's Maryland FiOS page, Verizon isn't rolling out Fibre until the county has granted them a franchise to do TV over FiOS

The most recent article discusses the fact that Verizon sued "Montgomery County asking the court to require the county to negotiate a lawful franchise with the company. Verizon and Montgomery County have agreed to stay Verizon's lawsuit until the county council votes on the agreement. If the agreement is approved, the case will be dismissed."

So, while I don't know if Verizon is bundling the service to consumers, Verizon is certainly bundling the services to the Counties, since Verizon already has whatever permissions it needs for internet and voice services.

Not to mention that it's more than likely Verizon has no intention of investing in a FiOS network for poorer, more rural counties.

As much as I'd like FiOS, from looking at Verizon's Maryland FiOS page, Verizon isn't rolling out Fibre until the county has granted them a franchise to do TV over FiOS

The most recent article discusses the fact that Verizon sued "Montgomery County asking the court to require the county to negotiate a lawful franchise with the company. Verizon and Montgomery County have agreed to stay Verizon's lawsuit until the county council votes on the agreement. If the agreement is approved, the case will be dismissed."

So, while I don't know if Verizon is bundling the service to consumers, Verizon is certainly bundling the services to the Counties, since Verizon already has whatever permissions it needs for internet and voice services.

Not to mention that it's more than likely Verizon has no intention of investing in a FiOS network for poorer, more rural counties.

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I see that you are right. I must have misread the paperwork when they arm-twisted my wife into signing us up for FiOS about a year ago. (The door-to-door sales rep said, "Your DSL is going away." My wife, whom I had barely convinced to go to DSL about a year earlier, immediately caved. She cancelled the contract the next day after we talked about our relatively puny bandwidth needs. And therein lies a secret about what wives consider to be necessity.)

For the lazy:

http://www22.verizon.com/content/ConsumerFios/

You do realize thats for a commercial connection?

I think he is talking about the 30Mb downstream 5Mb upstream connection for residential, which is a big jump in price from the 15/2 price

Compare that to a T1

Yes, their business service is a lot better than a T1, with a 5 Mbps/5 Mbps with static IP for $209.95/month:

http://www22.verizon.com/content/businessfios/pack agesandprices/packagesandprices.htm

So about a 7 times improvement in price and performance, a healthy improvement, but considering that the Fiber Optic should be giving us Gigabit speeds if it is dedicated to Internet for no greater operating costs than copper, well I think it is understandable to be dissappointed that they are holding so much bandwidth back.

Essentially, they are giving us less than a couple percent of the new capacity for Internet communications and keeping the rest so they can sell add on services. Comparing what we are getting to what we had before is not good enough. We should be seeing far greater advances in broadband Internet. I am very much a libertarian, but it seems that people are not getting a good payback for the money we are investing in this and it is time for government intervention.

A libertarian approach would simply be to let whomever wants to provide a better service access to the right of way to run their fiber. The economy is being held back because this important new public infrastructure is being misallocated to make a quick buck putting entertainment before communication The costs of running fiber is coming down, so there is no reason to think that promoting real competition with the 3 companies that can offer the best service for consumers being given access to utility poles and underground rights of way. And if some company comes along that offers a better more economical service, then the 4th company should be allowed to run fiber also and then the least economical service should be required to take up their cable or forfeit it within a certain amount of time.

Either that or we need to have serious regulations about what services are offered on these lines. This is the public right of way that they are using, not merely their own private property, no person or company should be given a monopoly or effective monopoly on the public right of way without the government specifying what service is to be provided.

You must be smokin' some crack there, bra. Check it.

Well, hell, here in the US some people have fiber-optic connections as fast as 100 mpbs (Verizon's FIOS). It's a very very small percentage of people, but it still falls under the header "some people."

...the problem is maturity and responsibility.

I believe that, with current regulations in the United States, the recommended youngest age for owning a cell phone should be 18 (give or take a few years). Here's my reasoning behind this approximate age limit:

• Those $6.99/mo. "free" ringtones that are advertised between airings of Yu-Gi-Oh! and Digimon: Digital Monsters. A responsible person (minor or not!) would see right through that deception and wouldn't even consider buying something from those deceitful advertisers. Unfortunately, there's lots of 13-year-olds who fall for it, and it can cost their parents hundreds of dollars — hundreds of dollars that aren't easily disputed!
• Minors cannot get credit cards. For the most part, you need a credit card to buy a non-prepaid cell phone plan. Therefore, minors shouldn't operate a device that's easily abused and requires a line of credit.
• Cell phone providers have lots of mechanisms to prevent false/mistaken charges from being made, but subscribers rarely take advantage of them. It's typically only inquired about after a little Zach Morris wannabe makes a two-hour call to Akihabara at a rate of ¥130/min.

If you're a parent with a whiny kid who demands a cell phone, do your research. There are models out there that can be "locked in" to only allow a few phone numbers to be called. Wireless providers like Verizon can change your plan so it blocks the sending and receiving of text messages (those cost up to ten cents each!). Remember: you're basically giving your kid access to your line of credit — control your kids' spending like you control your own spending!

I already have it. 15 megabit/sec down, 2 megabit/sec up. Finally, I have true high-definition TV and static-free phones, as well.

Of course, it depends on where you live. I was fortunate to be in one of the early deployment areas. However, the speed of the service depends on the competition. Where I live, 15/2 is the highest speed for a reasonable price. Elsewhere, people are getting 20/5 (or even higher) for a similar price.

Once it's installed and configured correctly, it has been reliable. But, there have been administrative problems every step along the way.

It's supposed to be in all of the existing players. But, the enforcement of the down-rez'ing is enabled on a per-disc basis. Movie A might require HDMI for high definition, while Movie B will not.

Most of the studios have announced they will not enable this flag on the discs they distribute until sometime in the future. But as I noted in another posting, I really wonder what will be distributed until then: the movies that no one really wants? Will they release popular movies without the down-rez flag set?

I have a pre-HDMI projection TV. I'm perfectly happy with it, and am not going to run out and buy a replacement just because the movie studios decided to cripple it a few years after I bought it. If HD players drop in price to the point of being an impulse purchase, I might buy one before I replace my TV.

But the studios must clearly label their HD-DVD or BluRay discs to indicate whether it can be viewed in high-definition without HDMI. If it's not labeled and I buy one and find that it's been restricted to standard definition, it's getting returned as defective for a full refund.

Or I may skip the HD player altogether. FIOS TV will be installed at my house in a couple of days, and it includes an HD PVR. I own only a handful of DVDs and rent everything else from NetFlix. For almost the same monthly cost, I can subscribe to several premium HD movie channels and record movies until I'm ready to watch them.

I rarely watch movies more than once, and usually don't find the extra content on DVDs to be interesting. My selection will be limited, but I won't have to worry about whether I can view the movie in high definition.

Actually, yeah, we do. One example: Verizon FIOS.

What country has the largest square footage of industrialized space in the world?

Every time some other country's telco produces a better service than our own, this comes up. It didn't explain why consumers can't get 100mbps in our most dense cities, or 1gbit, and it still doesn't explain why we can't get 2.5gbps now. Even in the places that already have fiber to the home, the best I can do on FiOS is 30M/5M for $180. Meanwhile ATT seems to be giving up on SBC's fiber deployment, at least for this iteration. According to that article they're possibly hoping to come out ahead sometime in the hazy future with 100mbps connections.

If things are going to get better, we must not settle for the same old tired excuses. Isn't it funny how in the intarweb of tubes, the ISPs are handing out tiny little coffee stirrers for their users to sip through, then whining that they have to break network neutrality and double charge companies for the bandwidth they already paid for to keep those little straws from clogging up? Stinks of artificial scarcity and greed to me.

I live in NJ and have the following options: Cablevision's optimum online, normally about $45 a month and I get 10-15mbs but that's cable so it's shared with my neighborhood, I have seen good burst downloads late at night but I'd say I average half that speed. They have a special for new customers $99 a month for cable tv, internet and IP phone for a year and that includes a free DVR for a year also. Verizon's FIOS which uses Fiber to the home http://www22.verizon.com/content/consumerfios/pack ages+and+prices/packages+and+prices.htm Prices and packages are in the link. I guess i'm one of the luckier ones? It's fast enough but nothing is ever fast enough.

Verizon FiOS has been rolling out fiber for a couple years now, and will be expanding their networks pretty much as quickly as they can.

I am not sure what you concider "gouging" but my DSL from Verizon (3.0mbps downstream) is only $30.00/month. Compare that to cable from Comcast (all that is available in the area) for ~$60/month, and Verizon is not a bad deal. Been working fine for as long as I've had it.

Btw, their website says that DSL is as low as $15/month.

The FIOS connection mentioned in the article is 15Mbps. Small b. Bits. 15,000,000 bits/second. RTFA or see the Verizon FIOS website.

Also, kilo/mega prefixes are ALWAYS decimal, NEVER binary when measuring line speed in bits/second.

Hmm... You seem to be on the same plan I am.
" Up to 768 Kbps/128 Kbps $14.95 /mon."
http://www22.verizon.com/ForHomeDSL/channels/dsl/p ackages/default.asp

Wow, that's a bargain... your posts made me curious and I did some research, they say the 30/5 plan starts at $177 a month... http://www22.verizon.com/FiOSForHome/channels/FiOS /root/package.aspx

How'd you swing that deal?

Why is the parent modded insightful? Modems are all over the freaking place. Any analog large-pipe that carries data requires a modem; cable, DSL (including T1, T3, etc). If you are a home owner with internet access (and don't have FIOS), you most likely have a modem. And regardless, the point is that Hayes isn't popular anymore. With all their resources, they could have switched to home networking equipment or online multimedia or microwave macaroni and cheese, but instead they faded into obscurity.

1. Contact whatever local government entity it is that might handle problems like this. You might be surprised to discover that sometimes even small towns have an ombudsman or such for this.
   
2. Contact your local Better Business Bureau. Verizon will notice when they show up in the Top-10-Complaints-For-Our-Area news stories on slow days.
   
3. Contact your State Public Utilities Commission (or equivalent). Verizon is a monopoly, enjoys all sorts of privileges, make them treat their customers with some respect.
   
4. Contact your State Department of Consumer Affairs (or equivalent). Verizon is selling you are service which they are no longer delivering, get some state employee with a direct number to Verizon's complaints office on the case.
   
5. Kick 'em to the curb. Who do you hate less? Your phone company, your cable company, or some other sort of ISP? Grit your teeth and see if the grass really is greener on the other side.
   
6. Get your own domain with your own mail servers and your own filters and not be dependent on any unresponsive monopoly. No more lock-in to them, no more stealth filtering, no inane challenge/response systems, unless you activate them.
   
7. And finally, start calling "real people" at Verizon. Put your detective skills to work and post the direct numbers for the these folks. Trust me, they'll toast the ass of whomever has made this mess when their collective secretaries start fielding calls about it!

Ask and ye shall receive: Call Intercept. Mostly, at least; this only works for unidentified calls, meaning where caller ID is unavailable or blocked, but otherwise it does exactly as you suggest.

try http://www22.verizon.com/FiOSForHome/channels/FiOS /root/address_entry.asp?
there is a link right there for verification by address if you haven't notice. if you did and still did not qualify, it's a unfortunite i guess then.

Comcast is cable modem. FTTH he's talking about is via Verizon. Speeds there range from 5/2 to 30/5mbps.

Of course the question is, Can I get it? http://www22.verizon.com/FiosForHome/channels/Fios /HighSpeedInternetForHome.asp
I'm not in their database (and I don't have verizon phone number) so no high-speed access for me. :-(

Don't know where you live but..

Aerial fiber is roughly $50k/mile to install. That is with pole attachments, pole replacement, fiber and splicing. You can normally do it for $30k/mile when things go well.

Underground fiber is quite a bit more *if* you need to trench your own conduit. Most likely you can lease interduct inside existing conduit, you pay roughly $500/mile/YEAR to lease the interduct then you pull the fiber through that.

$500,000 to 1/4 mile of fiber is insane, you must not be looking very hard.

If you live in Verizon territory take a look at http://www98.verizon.com/wholesale/business/poleco nduit/midatl/0,18815,atl,00.html/

*ahem*, Yes they are.
Where have you been?

Wrongish in a nitpicky way. FIOS is FIber Optic Services or something along those lines. Thus any service not based on fiber wouldn't be FIOS. See the wiki page or Verizon's about FiOS page.

This was actually decided by a court case years ago, you own the cables in your house (Hence, Verizon now charges you when there are problem in your home). One question I would have is whether the cable TV and FIOS and live on the same cable, or if this is a way to force adoption of FIOS TV

Verizon has been surprisingly willing to cable up homes accepting FIOS for almost no money, I've been wondering how long that can go on. Then again, they take a durprisingly long view of this stuff.

Man I want FIOS :(

Fine, AT&T will own a large corner of the DSL market, all the while Verizon is working on rolling out FIOS, which will make DSL and cable look downright pathetic. The posters who have said that this is a different world now with many different alternatives to what Ma Bell used to offer are true. Telecommunications is a much bigger market, with more open and robust offerings.

Forget BPL. It sucks in too many ways and interferes with licensed services.

Universal DSL, fiber, ethernet, or [your favorite physical layer here] would go a long way to avoiding this nonsense. All required services can be run over a data link, but I don't see the carriers supplying this, except for Verizon FIOS.

And besides that, ISPs tend over estimate the amount they spend on infrastructure so they can justify higher prices. Verizon, for example, predicts$91.7 billion USD revenue for 2006 and laying fiber and installing switches is probably the least costly of all there operations. I bet they spend more on advertising than anything else. I wouldn't be surprised if this doomsday senario is a plot by the MBAs to prep consumers for price hikes even though they already have the profits to fix the problem.

Doc Searls had an interesting article about this a while back.

Let's hope I'm completely wrong and the ISPs intentions are good and noble.

Breaching a contract aside, my Verizon DSL cost 14.99 a month, with a 1 year commitment.

No modem fee, no shipping fee, not an introductory rate. 768

Offer by Verizon Online for all new DSL customers. A $19.95 shipping and activation charge will apply to each DSL order.

Offer subject to change without notice. Other terms and conditions apply. Valid through 02/18/06.

After this "introdutory price," it's probably around $40-$50 per month.

That DSL modem probably ain't free and must be bought or rented for at least a buck per month.

Saying it's only $13-$15 per month is a little misleading when the rate will probably double (at least) after a year.

I haven't seen significant price cuts to "regular" broadband rates in the same way I've seen cuts to "introductory rates."

It gets worse.

Vonage's target market is home users with high speed connectivity. The vast majority of home users with high speed connectivity use either cable or DSL, with a small but increasing number using services like Verizon's FIOS.

Now, anyone who's got DSL doesn't need Vonage for their primary phone service. True, there's a market for second lines, but the big money is in homes with one phone line.

This leaves cable users. I don't know about the rest of the country, but here in NYC, Time Warner Cable is heavily promoting their own VOIP service. While the more tech savvy people I know are flocking to Vonage-like VOIP services to use with their cable modems, plenty of people would much rather buy phone service from a company they already do business with. Yes, even when that company is evil, monopolistic, and incompetent.

The people I know who are most likely to have a continued reason to use Vonage are friends who have moved out of the country. Domestic long distance is cheap enough that moving within the US doesn't really cost that much in phone calls. I have friends in Israel who have Vonage boxes with numbers in their parents' local areas. This is a pretty limited market.

Look for this stock to soar on the first day or two of trading. There are plenty of people who know technology but not business who will assume that a company with a good idea is a good investment. It's probably going to be more like Tivo, which had a great idea but has not managed to make itself enough of a dominant player to turn that idea into profits.
-JMP

...adding a fiber adapter to motherboards as standard? With the limitations that wire has, is a fiber connection directly on your motherboard, or as a cheap alternative add-on card, that far off?

Verizon already offers Fiber To The Home in some markets. Imagine a direct fiber connection to your PC.

Well, you're missing part of the point.

Verizon is interested in becoming a "cable company"--like Time-Warner, Cox, Comcast, Cablevision, etc. To do this, they have to "build out" their connections to your house in order to provide more bandwidth. While they'll certainly sell that extra bandwidth to consumers, they also want to get into the business of selling content like HBO, Showtime, Comedy Central, etc.

So, ideally, what they'd do is sell you a 5Mbps Internet connection and--to pull a number out of my ass--a 20Mbps video connection. Sure, it may be over the same 25Mbps wire coming into your house, but the packets for their TV stuff would get priority over the Internet packets to make certain that your TV didn't stutter while you were downloading Google videos.

The problem is, the Telecom Act won't let them do this. The Telecom act says that they have to sell you the 25Mbps connection. While they can provide you with the TV services, they can't give priority to the TV services you paid them for over other services. Thus, you may see your DVR start dropping frames while you download Google video.

Again, the telecoms see these content-services as helping to pay for this bandwidth build-out. There are plenty of people who think their 5Mbps connection is great for connecting to the Internet. They're not going to pay an extra $50/month for 25Mbps until/unless the services become available. So, Verizon wants to provide the service to try to convince you to pony up that extra money.

maybe I won't be upgrading to FIOS. The county commission just approved the request for Verizon to offer television services for a portion of the county.

http://newscenter.verizon.com/proactive/newsroom/r elease.vtml?id=93233

I'm going to go ahead and forward this article to all the county commissioners. Verizon will have some explaining to do when they ask public "right of way" for the rest of the county. Too bad this article didn't come sooner when they dug up my front yard and cut my Adelphia coax.

The internet is just like a long distance phone provider/company. Verizon owes the customer the same level of quality, whether they choose Verizon or AT&T/MCI/Sprint for long distance service, Verizon was granted "right-of-way" to provide a service. If they don't provide that service then the franchise should be revoked.

Enjoy,

if Verizon wasn't charging me $45 per month for my DSL connection

Check out this verizon promo page:
http://www22.verizon.com/forhomedsl/channels/dsl/? LOBCode=C&PromoTCode=HPDL1&PromoSrcCode=L&POEId=TL 1HP

I just got my $47/month DSL bill reduced to $14 a month by signing up for a minimum 1 year contract. (not a problem as I hate the local cable company even more then Verizon)

It took sitting on hold and getting transfered around several times to do it. When I finally did get someone he told me that he couldn't transfer my account to the $14 one without shutting off my DSL for a minimum of 10 days and then opening a new account. I was politely persistent and asked to speak to his supervisor. I made a show of writing down both his and his supervisors names.

He argued some more and told me that the supervisor could not change things so I told him that was OK I after I spoke to his supervisor I would speak to his supervisors supervisor

Long story short, after more holding he agreed to change my rate to $14 a month.

Be persistent when you call the sales droids are told not to let existing customers change to the lower rate if they can help it.

Actually this is another glimpse into the Verizon mentality. If you had a customer that was a longterm/ loyal customer wouldn't you call them up to tell them how you were going to reward them by giving them a special rate? This is a great chance to do a little cross selling. I would. Stroking your best customers is always a great way to get more business out of them. But, that is not how Verizon does things. Their attitude is screw the good customers, they are not going anywhere anyway.

TFA is from "The Nation", which has a particular slant ... antiBigCorporation, TheSkyIsFallingBecauseWalMartIsTakingOver. Which has some merit, but can occasionally (and in this case definitely) be overly alarmist.

TFA furthermore makes references to white papers, but the link takes you NOT to primary source white papers, but to "democracticmedia.org", which links to "white papers" that are ... kept on the same site.

In other words: No primary source material. No proof other than innuendo and hype.

Now: would Verizon actually profit from a tiered system? Well -- it already does. Business-class DSL offers twice the bandwidth of Consumer-class DSL. Would they love to charge even more for a higher-differentiated tier system? Sure. Anyone surprised?

But now, the article would have us believe that in addition to a price tier for bandwidth, the telcoms are going to have a price tier for total usage (presumably per month, which is a type of bandwidth in a way). NONSENSE. It's unprofitable for the simple reasons that

(a) keeping the meter running on each little packet is a waste of their servers,
(b) customers are going to be very ticked when either they are "cut off" when they reach their limit or else are charged extra every month for overage (do you keep your cell phone plan if you get charged for extra minutes every month?),
(c) customers are going to be really ticked when little Johnny plays WoW for 36 hours straight and runs up a $130 bill.

As a result, sub-providers will spring up: people who pay Platinum for unlimited access -- and you know that telcos will have to have that top level available -- and then allow subscribers to tap in for a flat fee.

There is simply no way that a use-limited tiering system will prevent itself from collapsing.

depending on where you live, they do bring fiber to the home. i love my 15 down, 2 up service with 5 static ips. now i'm waiting for them to make fios tv available in my area so i can get rid of craplevision

And a large part of the other half, like this particular incident, is probably because the digger got an erroneous answer from the support number. A contractor for Verizon buried fiber optic cable (for FIOS) in my neighborhood late last year. Prior to their arrival, the cable, electrical, and natural gas utilities marked the locations of their respective cables/pipelines. But when they started boring two doors down from my house, they suddenly quit and packed up for the day.

I went out to watch a couple of days later, and asked what happened. They had nearly punched a hole in the natural gas line, because it wasn't properly marked -- and had to wait for the gas company to investigate. Apparently, natural gas lines have a wire next to the pipeline that pulses at a certain frequency, and can be picked up with a sensor. For some reason, the wire had been separated from the pipeline and was about 3 feet away.

A number of years ago, a friend of mine worked for a large computer company with a support center in Colorado Springs. A contractor digging post-holes for a fence did what they were supposed to do: called the telephone company for the location of a buried cable. The phone company marked the location of an adjacent cable that was no longer in use and instead directed them to the right-of-way for the new cable. So, when the digger pulled up bits of copper wire from every hole, the contractor didn't even blink -- it was supposed have been the old cable that had been decommissioned.

If you want something done, start contacting Verizon and make some noise.
Here: Mark Marchand, Director, Media Relations, (518) 396-1080
Email: mailto:mark.a.marchand@verizon.com
Also, contact your government representative and make some noise there too. This sort of thing is going on way, way too much - if we make ourselves annoying as hell to deal with, they will take notice.