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Verizon Sells Off Rural Lines
ffejie writes "Verizon has announced that it will be spinning off rural assets to FairPoint Communications. These include all assets in the states of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. The deal will close sometime in 2007 and is worth $2.7 billion. 1.6 million phone lines, 234,000 DSL subscribers, and 600,000 long-distance customers will be moved to FairPoint in Verizon's effort to shed its low-margin lines in rural areas. The sale has been rumored since the summer at least. With Verizon aggressively rolling out high-speed FiOS (FTTP) in its service area, what will happen to the consumers stuck with a smaller telco like those moving to FairPoint?"
If their service is like Verizon's in Ohio, they'll be better off with the smaller carrier. A few years back I had to argue with them to get them to fix noise on my line. They repeatedly told me over and over that there was no noise on my line until the fifth time I called the person on the other end could hear it. This went on for two weeks. Turns out a rather costly piece of equipment was going belly up in their switching station one block away from my apartment. The technician stopped by and apologized profusely and then said he had no idea how long it would take to get repaired because they had to get approval to replace it. A week later it was replaced. A few miles south of this they have horrible lines (Waverly, OH area). They refuse to replace the lines, so every time it rains heavily or a storm blows through they have massive outages and end up working their guys 16+ hours a day all week to get their customers lines working again. I would hope that the smaller company would be more pro-active and more customer focused than Verizon has been.
It's too bad. I live in Bolton, in the Champlain Valley Telecom area. They've been great - I've had DSL for over five years, and I'm running about 3.5mbit download speeds right now. If I call tech support, I get someone in Hinesburg. I can't say enough good things about them. Having a local telecom company that owns their own equipment is key.
So will this new deal help? Who knows...
Well, as a Vermont resident, this wouldn't surprise me. Of course, plenty of the state is nothing but Bumfuckville where costs to deploy proper internet connections would be insane. My aunt, for example, in Braintree - absolute middle of nowhere with incredibly low population density and the only internet options being dial-up and supremely overpriced satellite. Neither cable nor DSL is an option for her, while both are a choice for me in Williston where we actually have people (and, more importantly, people with money and most of their teeth). I get to sit here on a 6Mbit cable line while she has a slow bandwidth-capped internet connection that doesn't work well in bad weather.
Though while househunting in NH, I was rather excited to find out that FIOS is available in what seemed to be pretty middle-of-nowhere locations. It would seem that Verizon isn't intent on screwing everyone over, just those people where it'll be geographically convenient.
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Unions are fighting this one because it will mean a further decline in wages in the industry if all those workers go non-union. That's bad for everyone if the rich keep getting richer. See http://stop-the-sale.org/ for their arguments.
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Vermonters often prefer local smaller business, cooperatives, and the like, to the national chains and providers. They do an excellent job up there of doing things their own way. Having FairPoint instead of Verizon will hopefully mean a telco that will work more closely with local government to provide innovate services that reach everyone. The big telcos have fought against things like municpal networks in the past. I don't think they will be missed.
Verizon have been making a land-speed record (for them) getting FIOS across southern NH. They've been making a bee-line straight for my house for the last 6 or 8 months (Salem, Derry, Pelham, Hudson, Nashua, from what I understand) and now that they're almost at my door, it looks like they might stop?
I really hope existing customers don't lose their existing access, and I hope the timeframe for this is such that they might not immediately cancel all upgrades.
Since they're going to be the majority stakeholder in the new company, my guess is they have no interest in depriving you of service you've already paid for, more likely is that they don't want to solely front the cost of supporting and building out a relatively sparse area.
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