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Verizon Accused of Slighting Copper Infrastructure
High Fibre writes "Regulatory hearings in Virginia raise questions about Verizon's stewardship of its copper infrastructure, with workers accusing the telecom of cheaping out on maintenance in Virginia due to its preoccupation with its FiOS network. Ars covers the fracas and gives more time to Verizon than the local media do. From Ars: 'During testimony given before the Virginia State Corporation Commission last week... workers painted a dire picture of the state of Verizon's copper network, saying that the equipment required to make repairs — including tools and cable — is not even available.' Verizon disagrees, saying that while it's a challenge to manage and maintain both networks, they are not neglecting their copper infrastructure." A union official gave written testimony about the Verizon problems, presumably so that individual workers would not have to testify in public and open themselves to retribution.
"Verizon more likely wants to dump the copper and go with FOIS to all."
What it really means from a Government "fair play" point of view is that Verizon doesn't have to share or lease it's Fiber Network and therefore removing all competition. When folks pay for monthly phone service from verizon you are paying for the maintenance of the infrastructure of the copper network. Now that they have fiber, they could care less about copper.
I think one of the happiest days of my life was being able to kick Verizon off of my property when Speakeasy(now bestbuy) began offering VOIP. Even though I have the capability to get FIOS, I kept them from running the line. Verizon support stinks and so does their shitty treatment of customers. It's my bandwidth, and I should be able to run whatever I want regagardless if it's a web server or mail server.
Can you tell I hate Verizon?
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
Please accept this humble opinion as to a union's bad rep. It grows not from protecting benefits per se, but from demands to maintain rigid, hyper-sensitive work rules. My experience was from doing payroll for a unionized warehouse. There was 1 forklift and 4 guys qualified to run that forklift. Every time someone jumped on or off the forklift, they qualified for a higher rate of pay, which I consider to be hyper-sensitive to start. What really made it a pain was at the end of the day, the sum of time 4 guys spent on that fork-lift always exceeded the number of hours in the work day. Could the company simply pay a higher rate of pay for the higher skill level, regardless of whether someone was actually on or off the forklift? Of course not. We had to track the hours, and it was never the union's fault that the hours were falsified. Unions apparently have grown to thrive in an adversarial environment where they exploit every weakness of bargaining or management, and since that's their bread-and-butter, that's what they get: branded as an unreasonable adversary.
Ibid.
The local cable provider around here is very good about fixing things and running a fast network, but even they don't have the power a single provider would.
Consider some of the items you get with open-competitive comm service:
Now, think of the stuff we had under the previous system:
I think it's time to re-regulate all telecom. The private companies have been given a chance, and proven they can't police themselves.
A lot of people who didn't like the old system complain that they had to rent their phone, or that the pace of innovation wasn't as fast under a single provider. In my opinion, having reliable service is worth forgoing the buzzword-of-the-week. I'd be interested in hearing what people think about this.
You're pretty close I'd say, but then miss your own point.
Unions are a victim of their own success. They got better contracts and better benefits, which raised the price of the goods and services produced by union shops. Laws of the free market then shifted business away from union shops to offshore and non-union shops. Unions then resorted to some questionable tactics to "fight to keep what they have" from heavy lobbying and lawmaking to outright extortion and violence.
This fight has cost our country, and has negatively affected *your* wages as well as mine. This is not information from Faux News, just google economists and unions. E.g. , economists Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway of Ohio University calculated that labor unions have cost the American economy $50 trillion over the past 50 years alone and it also found that wages in general suffered dramatically as a result of an economy that is 30 to 40 percent smaller than it would have been in the absence of labor unionism.
Sorry, I know it's good for you and your family right now, but you can't mess with the free market without consequences down the road.
-Ryan C.
I don't know where all the anti-union rhetoric comes from, but I suspect it comes from unions having better contracts with better benefits, and then the general public getting pissed when unions fight to keep what they have.
I tend to agree, but there are some exceptions. Sometimes unions can destroy companies by refusing to compromise. Eastern Airlines was put out of business because its unions refused to change their contracts. Mainly though, they're a great deal for anyone who's in them. Whether the conservatives admit it or not, the unions were what grew the middle class in the 50s and 60s. Having a steady job you won't get fired from on a whim allows you to buy a house/car/whatever and not worry so much about where your paycheck is coming from. Also, I think that if labor was stronger, you wouldn't see things like CEOs getting $50 million pay packages for doing nothing.
If IT were unionizable, I'd be on-board in a second. Think about all the stuff you don't typically get as an IT employee... Generous vacation you're actually allowed to take. Clear definitions of your work hours, duties and rules. Not having to play the salary-negotiation shell game. Encouraged long-term employment, and therefore better domain-specific knowledge within your industry. Paid training. Etc.
Sure, they have their problems. But faulting people just because they have it better than you is not a good way to go. Heck, if you told me to give up a small percentage of my salary for guaranteed high wages and raises every year, I'd say you were crazy not to sign up. Just having someone negotiate the terms of your employment for you is reason enough.
The net effect here is that people in poor areas face degraded service while people in wealthy, high-density areas have enhanced service and options. This is exactly what common carrier status and state funding of telecomm was supposed to avoid.
The regulations pre-date the Internet, that's the problem. Here in NH, Verizon is putting nothing into its telecomm infrastructure except in the very densely populated part of the state near Boston, where they want to sell TV over FiOS. The rest of the State they're happy to leave at 35% (it varies) DSL service penetration.
And in a way, who can blame them? They're a public company, they only have so much money to invest, and it's not maximally profitable to invest in rural areas.
That's a failing of the Government granting the monopoly status, not Verizon. Yeah, I hate to defend them, but it's not useful to attack them - it's not going to help. This problem can only be solved by the regulators, either by requiring service levels or doing away with the monopoly grant. If one believes natural monopolies exist, then a service level requirement is the only way forward.
Ironically, it's the rural areas that can most benefit from high-speed Internet, and the least likely to have it (in the US anyhow).
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
It is my opinion that unions have lost their purpose. Back before we had labour laws, employers could push unsafe working conditions on people, withhold pay, and fire them without severance. These kinds of things don't happen any more, or when they do, there's legal actions that can be taken against the company.
Imagine how stupid this argument would sound if you were talking about SEC violations, theft, murder, etc. "There's a law against it, that means we don't need anyone watching out for employees."
The only thing unions currently accomplish is to set the salaries too high, and make it impossible to fire anybody, even when they do a bad job. Look at any unionized organization and you will see evidence of this.
Salaries are too high for union workers? Before you heap any scorn on them, why don't you worry about the idiot boards of directors who pay CEOs insane amounts, especially those with a track record of failure. That is a true corruption of American-style meritocracy. And yes, unions make it harder to fire people in general (not just incompetents). That means that the supervisor must work with HR and carefully document every screw-up, thus guaranteeing no one will get fired without good reason.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Well, having worked with Unions a time or two, the things that irk the living hell out of me about unions are as follows:
1) The "Screw you I'm Union" attitude that they cop whenever performance is an issue, or, especially, when you ask them to help with something that is not explicitly covered in their contract. As far as they're concerned that job is their property, and it can't be taken away without a huge costly fight, and so they know they're not going to be held accountable.
2) The near-unbearable sense of entitlement. The world owes them, not just a job, but a job, top notch benefits, a pension, and an annual salary increase not tied to performance.
3) The slimy tactics they use to discriminate against non-union workers, whether it's old school intimidation, or blacklisting companies that work with non-union employees, or lobbying state governments to require union credentials to get a license for skilled work.
Union's started off as a good thing, and they put forth some good change. But now? Now they're more like a parasite than a symbiote; they'll kill their host and not give a damn, because they've got to get theirs.
Heavily unioned industries in this country are doing like crap; it's hard to be competitive and flexible when your workforce decides what you're going to be building a year in advance.
I can't even imagine what that would be like in I/T...Server meltdown in the night, "Ah screw you, I'll fix it in the morning." Major security breach in the financials system, "Get someone else, I'm on my coffee break." Have to wait 4 hours to replace a hotswap harddrive because the guy whose job it is to officially do that thing is working the night shift. Can't allowed to move a computer across the room because that's the job of your unioned building services people.
Screw that.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
While you have a valid point, my argument is not that such things never happen outside of a union shop, only that the prevalence is increased, and your attempt to place unions and corporations into some kind of false dichotomy has been noticed and is not appreciated.
Don't try to put words in my mouth. I don't appreciate it.
Look, this is based on direct observation, so why don't you take your patronizing attitude and blow it out your ass? I've worked in union shops (luckily, in a non-union position) and I've worked in non-union shops, and I've seen what I've seen. The plural of anecdote is not data, but every time I see a union do anything, I see certain people at the top taking advantage of the people below them in the union, and I see the union used to protect people who do not do their job from being terminated.
Is it okay for a manager to protect someone who doesn't do their job? Of course not. Is it okay for a union to do the same thing? Of course not. And the fact that managers do it doesn't excuse the fact that unions do it, or the other way around. It's all bad.
Don't try to distract people from my message with misdirection. As you can see from sibling comments, it's already failed.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
How is FiOS a monopoly? Even if it is, what is so bad about fiber? I read complaints on here quite frequently about how the US is lacking high speed internet and how countries like Japan and South Korea have these fat pipes. They get those fat pipes because they have fiber to the premises. Here in America, we are stuck with a legacy, POTS system. There are copper lines that have been there for longer than most of the people who post on /. have been alive, myself included. They need to be phased out at some point. I wonder if the Pony Express customers got mad at the monopoly the telegraph customers had over getting their messages delivered more quickly, and how dare Western Union dare to charge more for it?!
I'm having a hard time coming down on Verizon for re-investing their profits in an infrastructure that will take us to the next level. At work we have a multi-site WAN running on Verizon (MCI/UUNet) MPLS. Before that we had frame relay (at 128k). Am I mad about Verizon pushing us into MPLS and doing it for about what the frame circuits cost us? Hell no I'm not. Do I care that they might let their frame circuits degrade because they understand that MPLS is the better technology? Hell no I don't.
You can expect all that you want. The reality of the situation is that the Internet picture here in America kind of blows. It blows because we had to ramp everything up. The rest of the world got to watch us do it and then cherry pick the best parts of it. I remember hearing about these new "DSL line cards" on SS7 equipped 5ESS switches in 1994. Where the hell were Korea's fat pipes back then?
What expectation do you care more about? The expectation that the companies that provide the internet service to you are going to do what they can to improve their infrastructure, or the expectation that they should give you what you want at a price that you think is fair?
The "monopoly" that you are so against brought you the technology in the first place. They spent millions and millions of dollars and lord only knows how much R&D time, and installation time and maintenance time to give you the ability to get on the internet at all, period, end of story. But that's not good enough? You want it less expensively? You want competition? Where is that competition going to come from? Maybe the goverment should subsidize a whole new parallel infrastructure so that we can all have more choice?
I had a very informative conversation with a Qwest rep at Inter-Op, that God awful, buzzword ladden cesspool of marketting hype. The upshot of that conversation is that the lines are deregulated. Qwest can go into Verizon territory and sell DSL. AT&T can go into Qwest territory and sell T1 service. Any company can go into any market and sell their product. Small companies like Covad can offer DSL and T1 services to people who don't want to go with a "major" provider. Hell, even AOL and Earthlink will sell you a T1 if you want it. There is choice out there, there are options. The fact of the matter is that people don't want to pay for the options. The local providers often times are the best option because they can compete on *gasp* price due to the volume of business that they do.
Take all of the above with a grain of salt. I live in southern California where we have two cable companies and two phone companies. However where I live specifically, my only option for internet conn
Bravo.. FWIW, I used to be a [non-union] Verizon employee, and I can tell you FIRST HAND that the unions there have created a culture in which because there is no such thing as getting better pay for better work, the only way to increase your pay to work ratio is to work less than anyone else while getting paid the same. In many cases, this literally means doing NO WORK during regular work hours, to justify overtime to get the work done. Dont get me wrong - The management is NOT without blame - Rather than FIXING the problem through working with the unions, management has "wimped out" and used it as an excuse to do whatever they can to get rid of them, while accepting the interm losses in productivity. Nobody acts like they're working for the same company. It's amazing sometimes, because it gives the affect that there are three motives: That of the union worker, that of the manager, and that of the contractor. The contractors do the work that the union wont [or cant] and the management moves the contractors around like pawns to piss off the union. Now, specifically on this topic, Verizon is 100% banking on FiOS and couldnt give a crap about the condition of the copper plant that it paid for, and is now having to share with any fly by night CLEC at cut rate prices.. If they could sell off the cable plant and still have access to it, they would. VZ tried to get the unions to learn how to deal with fiber, but most of the techs said "That's not my job, and I dont want to learn" so because they can't be fired, they do nothing while contractors do the fiber, then the union bitches that they have no opportunity for growth in their job skills... Total BS. The shame of it all is that if FIOS wins, VZ will then be forced to share the transport with it's competition, even though VZ is the one who risked the $$ to get it installed. We should see more competition in different localities, but unfortunately, that isn't realistically scalable, and would create chaos. There is no easy answer.
-Steve Tired of voting for the "lesser of two evils?" Come talk about it on www.bothsidesarewrong.com
I bought a house with FiOS installed. When I went to have my speakeasy VOIP and DSL service transfered I found out that it couldn't be done. Why, because when the prior owner had FIOS installed they disconnected the copper lines. Verizon is bringing back the phone company monoply one house at a time. Once you get FIOS, no more copper and no more alternative providers. FiOS is pretty cheap right now but I'd like to see what happens when it gets to be the only game around.