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Verizon's Solution to Terrorism: Eliminate Verizon Competitors
The New York Times has an article about Verizon lobbying for rate increases and to remove all requirements that Verizon provide telecom services to competitors, claiming that being a large, sluggish monopoly is somehow advantageous in responding to disasters, although Verizon hasn't managed to restore phone and data service in large areas of Manhattan yet. In a related story, an association of small ISPs has surveyed its members and come to the revelation that the Bells are stifling competition.
It doesn't mean that Verizon is right in wanting to squash all competition, but there are things called natural monopolies.
Your electric company is one. Water services.
I don't know what anyone else in the US is going through, but here in NJ, the electric company (PSE&G - Park, Sleep, Eat, & Go Home) for all their faults, works. My electricity is reliable as can be. And when it does fail, they're out here _immediately_ to fix it!
Natural monopolies, as long as there's oversight and consumer protection, can work.
In fact, sometimes it's BETTER to have a monopoly than not. Look at the mess in California's power when they tried to introduce competition.
Letting companies like Microsoft (which is NOT a natural monopoly) run around, are bad. They're just an unchecked bully.
Anyway, back to my point... I don't think Verizon being the only game in town is necessarily a bad thing... as long as they're kept in check, rates are kept reasonable, customer service is a MUST, and they provide the services required.
And they may have a point --- if all the equipment in the facilities were theirs, they could certainly have it back up and running quicker than following some silly FCC rules & procedures for working with other companies....
Get cable. Sounds like in your area its cheaper and more powerful. Why even bother with Verizon? I have them in my area and picked cable instead of their poor DSL.
This is not a troll fighting that cable is better than DSL. I support cable since its an alternative and forces the phone companies into having to compete which, in the long run, should allow for cheaper DSL and better service.
If you have an alternative than take it.
As for Verizon using the 9-11 terror attack as an excuse to stiffle competition: what a bunch of B.S. Greedy companies will use anything to get ahead. Microsoft was all behind calling computer viruses terrorist activity just to try to avoid fixing the problems they were having. Lord forbid they spend more time making their products more secure!
Not that I'm a fan of Verizon, or use them for any type of service whatsoever, but to say that large areas of Manhattan are still lacking phone service is quite an exaggeration.
According to the NY Times article, only 10,000 of the 300,000 (or 3%) damaged lines have not been restored, most of those in Chinatown the surrounding area. I personally live only a few blocks south of where the WTC once stood and never lost phone service for a second, and everyone else that I know in NYC that had lost service had it restored very quickly. I see Verizon workers working 24/7 in this and other areas trying to restore lost services.
Sure, Verizon is no angel, but gimme a break
Jordan
Phone lines running to your house are natural monopolies. Phone companies providing services and billing you for your calls are not. Before making any regulation, make a distinction between the two. The phone lines and dial tone can be provided best either by a single company that's heavily regulated, or by a municipal line-rental company (think Tacoma's municipal cable). The service and billing of calls, however, is in no way a natural monopoly, and eliminating choice in this will not help anyone.
Another interesting thought, though - phoneline-providing companies are not completely natural monopolies. I have AT&T Broadband for my local phone company, which means that my phone service comes over cable lines, which I'd have running to my house anyway; so if Verizon didn't have any competition in local phone that used its lines, or if there were no local phone lines at all, I could still have AT&T.
That said, it is an enormous undertaking rebuilding around several large central offices that were simply obliterated. In the bad-old-days where there was mother AT&T, this kind of mess would have brought people from all over the country in to fill the gap in raw bodies. We're left with the impression that this particular disaster was nearly 100% covered by Verizon people. Would calling for help to other operating companies have expidited the return to service?
All that said, at the beginning of deregulation was a proposal (squashed by lobbying) that central offices become 'open facilities' and all the copper in the street also become 'open'. Then these facilities would be serviced by a separate regulated monopoly which would level the playing field between the big, the small and the miscellaneous. Then outages like 9/11 would be dealt with by the 'open network operating company' as well as all those firms that provide dial tones.
I think it is probably time to revisit this as the ONOO would have sufficient scale to deal with network failures while still keeping real compition alive.
-- Multics
P.S. I have customers in Verizon and Ameritech/SBC. Give me Verizon *every* time. Ameritech genuinely sucks -- there are now times that simple things simply can't be done because there is no one left with the knowledge of how the damn system works.
This can in a way even be extended to file formats, protocols and even API's but that would cripple development (so there should be legislation that all file formats, protocols and API's have to be open:)).
Anyway...we don't live in utopia, so don't bother...
0x or or snor perron?!
This does not to me seem possible.
Now I am no expert on the history of utilities in the U.S. (maybe someone with a Ph.D. can shed some light on this), but it seems to me that many people seem to forget that Verizon and other utilities have the advantage of huge amounts of existing infrastructure. (In fact, "Verizon" didn't even install a lot of it -- they inherited it from AT&T in the breakup.) Not only that, but this infrastructure was installed with the aid of and through countless special arrangements with local and larger governments (e.g. the U.S. Federal Government's Rural Electrification Act of 1936).
These governments realized long ago that it was in their best interest to aid utilities in building public infrastucture, whether through loan guarantees, municipal franchises, or other means. Although private firms played a much larger role in the U.S. than they did elsewhere, the utilities' monopolies are nevertheless to some degree government-granted.
While one might suggest that governments simply give the same aid to competing utilities in running another set of lines/pipes to every consumer, that is not only a very wasteful suggestion, but also one that ignores the fact that times have changed and it's no longer so easy to install the infrastructure. (I certainly don't want the streets torn up any more than they have to be.)
It is so unreasonable, then, that we ask these utilities to provide other companies access to the infrastructure that we helped them put into place? (...without dragging their feet and making every install from a competitor take gratuitously long)
Finally, while I agree that some things, like the maintenance of the two copper wires that run from my apartment building to the CO, lend themselves well to natural monopolies, it's not clear that all the other things that Verizon tries to do (Internet access, long distance service) should fall under the same umbrella.
The free market is a great ideal, and I'm all for it, but there are some circumstances where practical concerns make it unattainable and outside interference is required to prevent abuses. Pretending those practical concerns don't exist does not make them go away.
Editorial: An article in a publication expressing the opinion of its editors or publishers.
Slash is an editorial web log. Repeat this to yourself over and over: "Despite all claims to the contrary, Slash is an editorial web log. Slash is slanted toward what its readers want to see and believe. Slash is not a news site."
Everyone and their cousin seems to be using the tragic events of September 11th as a way to push their laws, change their polices, etc. For example, I've noticed that movie theaters make a big deal about you bringing in bags. Is Osama bin Laden going to come to a tiny movie theater in the middle of nowhere? I doubt it. Is it going to make it harder for people to bring in their own food and put more money in the pockets of the movie theater? Yup.
I assume I don't need to mention all of the insane laws that have been passed to give the government more power to eavesdrop on inoccent people ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H spot terrorists. Nor do I need to mention that more than 1,000 Muslims are in jail on no real charges at all, but the government seem to think that being Muslim means that they must be connected... I'm not saying that they don't have some possible terrorists, but, umm... I have my doubts that there were 1,000 people involved. I'd rather see a potential terrorist go free than a perfectly innocent person rot away in jail only because he's from the Middle East.
My intent isn't to bash the government, but merely to comment on how sick and disgusted I am by all the people profitting from the attack.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
Michael, please refrain from pushing your political views on others through your position as a slashdot editor.
Yes, please, if you wish to editorialize, become an edito... oh wait.
I mean, you can't be so opinonated when you are working for a respectable news service as opposed to a narrow interest-group related news-gathering site... er, wait...
I mean, you have a priveleged voice as editor, it's not like I can just post a comment and disagr... er, um...
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
We probably took part in this survey, and we concur with most of the results. As a small NYC based ISP, we depend entirely on Verizon to conduct our business. Perhaps I can lend some views from the inside.
When the dialup market was worth being in, Verizon (which was once in part Bell Atlantic, which was once in part Nynex) took years to increase capacity to our office. We just could not add dialups fast enough to meet the demand. There were many periods where our lines were hopelessly busy and there was very little we could do but harass Verizon.
This is important. We had to work extra hard around Verizon's deficiencies to provide a reasonable quality service. Eventually capacity was increased, but by the time that happened, the dialup market had dried up. Oh well.
We depend on Verizon to network our offices. One business we're involved with is "lighting" buildings with T1s and sharing it with tenants for a reduced price.
Lately, Verizon's been pretty stable and we haven't had any major catastrophes. Several years ago the story was much different. T1s would constantly go down. Adding redundant lines to different locations was in many cases useless (since the redundant lines went down at the same time!), and often quite expensive.
Verizon definitely knows that this is a business they should take care of. They're much more responsive to T1 problems, but there's still room for improvement. They are getting better though. Perhaps we're just lucky?
Our adventures in DSL-land have been.. interesting. We resell Verizon ADSL (but provisioned to our network) and the rate it's sold to us leaves us no choice but to price it higher than Verizon's offerings. This isn't that bad since our customers come to expect that they pay a little more for higher quality service from us, but it must be nightmarish for ISPs trying to sell it as a mass-market commodity.
The most significant value-added feature we offer over Verizon ADSL is that when it goes down, customers simply report it to us and we take care of harassing Verizon to get it fixed. Then we get back to our customers with the progress that's been made.
Talk about innovation!
We partnered with NAS to provide SDSL, and they seem to be the only major DSL carrier that can narrowly avoid bankruptcy. Verizon now offers SDSL though (to us, for resale) for significantly less, so NAS's future is still uncertain.
Verizon's quality of service has improved noticably in the past few years. It's still very substandard, but they're much more attentive to problems now. Maybe we're just having a good year. Keep up the complaints people, they might actually be listening.
Oh, also! We're lucky enough to be one of the few ISPs to partner with AOL Time Warner. We could be selling cable internet by sometime next year.
But the FTC has to approve the deal. Our tiny less than 20 employee company was being grilled by FTC officials on a whole range of issues. Apparantly this looks very suspicious to them.
AOLTW execs explained to us that they see sound economic advantages in partnering with small ISPs and want to do it despite FTC interference. Whether this is genuine or not will remain to be seen.
But I've already said too much.
Shameless plug time: If anyone's interested, we're New York Connect.Net, Ltd.