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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?"
They get better service?
Big telcos like Verizon tend to focus on large population areas first, because that's where the money is. Which means that the major cities get more options and better service while Bob Newhart over in Middlebury, Vermont can forget about ever getting Fiber service. In fact, I'd guess that the sale of the rural lines in these areas are being done specifically so that Verizon doesn't have to deploy FiOS as promised.
In comparison, a small company like Fairpoint is going to have to focus on the customers they've got. Which means either making them happy, or losing the business to local Co-Ops setup to provide the missing services.
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I don't know anything about FairPoint, but when I went to a small 13,000 household telco my service improved greatly. Prices went up a bit, but only a few percent and my service has been great.
Not sure, but do you know any "larger telcos" that do anything but s*** on their residential customers? My best experiences with phone and data services have been with "regional" providers; the only reason I gave up my last one was that I moved to an area where the only two choices were AT&T and Charter (lose lose).
This means they anticipate a Democratic-leaning FCC in the coming years. By creating structural seperation for the markets where they don't want to roll out FiOS, they insulate themselves from the impact of a ruling to the effect that they have to roll out service in an equitable manner.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Great! Now I'll have to go all the way to Fairpoint Station to pay my bill. That's way out in the boonies!
Wimax is perfect for rural areas and a smaller telco can much easier make deal with various suppliers for test cases. Intel would be a perfect choice since they are already spending billions on Wimax.
Help fight continental drift.
Vermont already has CoOps and municipal internet. Burlington Telecom provides FTTP over which they serve voice, television, and data.
Great! Now I'll have to go all the way to Fairpoint Station to pay my bill. That's way out in the boonies!
Not to mention you could be put on trial for humanity's crimes, by an omnipotent super-being.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
If anything, this could make it that much better. Verizon ignored those area because they have a much higer density (therefore more potential customers per mile) in urban/suburban areas. Now with those people under a more local telecom, the company doesn't have to focus on anything but those local customers. And it's not like there's no competition. Satellite broadband is there, even though it's probably expensive, and who knows what kind of wireless broadband might be available. (I don't live up there so I don't know.) So, the new company should be far more aware of customer service than Verizon ever will be.
It's rather presumptuous to assume that the customers will be let out to dry just because the big, bad Verizon is leaving.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
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...
Maine Governor John Baldacci (D) has commented on the proposed selloff. As is his wont, the comment said absolutely nothing.
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
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.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
Satellite is crap. The VSAT people give you like 3GB/mo. That's fucking worthless, I can't even use it for business two days a week with a three gigabyte cap. Skyblue has no capacity out here and hughes wants like $110/mo for their lowest level of service now, and I've heard from numerous people who have gotten capped on their service as well. Like it or not the satellites simply cannot handle a useful amount of traffic. It would be far more effective to just put up a bunch of autonomous wifi repeater blimps than to fuck around with all these satellites.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
Rural customers in Vermont couldn't get DSL from Bell Atlantic. And they still can't now that the bills have a Verison logo on them. Oddly, they can get DSL from some of the smaller local providers -- notably Waitsfield Telecom which is pretty much the poster child for usable rural broadband for customers in its service area in the Central part of the state.
Unless the Vermont Public Service Commission suddenly grows some balls -- something they've never shown much sign of having -- I imagine that things will get worse, not better with this sale. The governor says that broadband is one of his priorities. But IMO he's a political hack -- mostly mouth. OTOH, occasionally I'm pleasantly suprised. Maybe Jim Douglas or the next governor or the one after that will take some meaningful action.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Our crooked semi-socialist government will do same thing for internet connectivity that was done for voice connectivity. Residents of rural America with cry and whinge about how it isn't fair that they don't get the same service everyone else gets, and demand that they get at the same price. Eventually one of their Congressmen will introduce a bill requiring phone companies to pool a portion of their profits and use it to supply broadband to needy people in rural areas. The phone companies will get their Congressmen to amend the bill to instead charge everyone in the country with internet access a monthly fee and that money will be used to provide broadband to the backward hicks who want to live in the middle of nowhere and still enjoy the comforts of civilization. And everyone in America will continue the slow grind towards our eventual slavery to the wants of others.
So close. It would have been perfect if you'd written it as, "Hi. I'm Larry from L.D.&D. Telecom, and this is my brother Daryl and my other brother Daryl."
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In rural areas where the population is really spread out, it doesn't make sense to have everyone connected directly to a central office. You can only run copper so far. So what they do is set up a series of remote terminals and run T1s or sometimes an OC3 between them. If you live in the middle of nowhere, you might go through 7 or 8 remote terminals before you hit a central office. Typically, the remote terminals can't be more than a few kilometers apart. Having all that equipment spread out is expensive to maintain. When something isn't working, someone has to get in a truck and drive to the remote terminal to figure out whats going on, replace a card, etc. Plus, they have to maintain power at all those remote terminals.
By going to fiber, they can eliminate all those remote terminals. The BPON and GPON specs allow you to go 20km without a repeater. That means all that powered equipment at the remote terminals that's prone to failure can get replaced with passive optical splitters. At the same time, they can offer cable TV and high speed internet service to areas that never had it before and increase revenue.
Also, the company I worked for that is selling all that equipment to Verizon built their BPON solution on the same platform that was used for remote terminals. Basically, any network that has that remote terminal equipment already installed can plug in a BPON card into any remote terminal and offer fiber service out of it. That allows the rural service providers to slowly upgrate their network with minimal investment.
Obviously fiber service isn't going to be offered everywhere, but you might be suprised at some of the locations where it starts showing up.
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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This is why, sometimes monopolies are something not so bad, it depends on the country where you live. Here in Japan NTT is a virtual monopoly for landlines, but I am in a semi-rural area and I have fiber-to-home.
In Mexico Telmex is also a virtual monopoly, the prices suck and the technology as well, but you can use DSL more less in all simu-rural areas.
Same policies for all the country. In general I hate monopolies but this is one of the few good points on them.
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You know why they pay $69? BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT IT COSTS!
It is a mistake to warp economics so that all customers pay the same price even though some customers cost far more to serve than others. If the telco company has to run and service two miles of cable to provide service to you but only has to run and service 100 feet of cable to provide service to me, you should pay more than I do.
paintball
I live in Marshfield, VT, and I have been well-served by FairPoint for years. I've had a DSL connection for over a year, and the speed keeps increasing at no extra costs.
The few times decades ago I was serviced by NYNEX (now Verizon) and it sucked. You'll be much better off with FairPoint, in my experience.
Those waiting on a phone, those waiting on a dialtone!
For those who know nothing about FairPoint Communications. Their strategy is to buy up markets that no one else wants to serve and operate them for as cheaply as possible. Quality of Service will not go up...it will go down in a huge way. I work in one of their tech support call centers. We used to be their exclusive tech support for all of their subscribers, however their service was so bad it was costing us money since we have a standard monthly billing, we ended up telling to them to take a hike. One market had about 60% of their subscribers calling in every month. Every time it rained everyone lost sync on their modem. That properties' tech support has been outsourced overseas. The worst Fairpoint property my company still handles has 976 subs. We plan for 390 of those calling in each month. Our overall average for Fairpoint companies is about 25% of their customers calling in for internet support each month.