Slashdot Mirror
Verizon Copper Cutoff Traps Customers
theodp writes with more mainstream attention to an issue discussed here a month back: "As it hooks up homes and businesses to its FiOS fiber-optic network service, Verizon has been routinely disconnecting the copper infrastructure that it was required to lease to other phone companies, locking customers into higher broadband bills, eliminating power outage safeguards, and hampering rivals. A Verizon spokesman argues customers are being given adequate notice of the copper cutoff, which includes this read-between-the-lines fine print: 'Current Verizon High Speed Internet customers who move to FiOS Internet service will have their Verizon High Speed Internet permanently disabled after their FiOS conversion.'" Customers are supposed to be informed by both the sales person and the installer that their first-mile copper will be cut, and this is not happening.
That's not entirely correct. We tried to call them, but couldn't get through. Not our fault.
I'm not from there, but isn't their cable service in the area? Do the cable service offer BASIC TELEPHONE SERVICE AT NO EXTRA CHARGE? If not, then Verizon is violating the law.
Also it is stated numerous times if you do any research on the internet. I also heard that if you request it, they will keep the copper lines intact. I didn't really care, I never used the copper lines in the 2 years I had been in my house anyway, so they can disconnect whatever they want.
Well, telecom companies have the unique property of being unreasonably bloated bureaucratic beasts with a very naughty agenda that make the 3v1l [MP|RI]AA gang look like really angry little kids throwing a temper tantrum. Indeed, pretty much all American phone companies spend their free time trying to figure out how they can squeeze out more profit--does the name "Ma Bell" and what happened to it ring any, er, bells? I think this is less "omg! liberal media bias!" and more "Yes, corporate interests really are that malicious, and they've probably got lobbyists changing the definition of common carrier status to make this all legal."
The readers of Slashdot have a strong anti-corporation bent. Slashdot's system tends to cater to this by its very nature.
The reality of this "first mile cutoff" I think is much simpler and less onimous than these posts want to make out, but I don't have the link handy. I'll find out first hand myself soon, getting FIOS by the ned of the month.
I have no idea what the lease terms are, but I'm very suprised there isn't either a guaranteed renewal or option to buy for the leasee. How could you build a business on something that could be yanked out from under you without recourse?
We are all just people.
From a sales point of view, why would you want to tell someone "Oh by the way, there's no turning back, if you decide you don't like FIOS, you're fucked because we're going to cut the old line as soon as you switch" ? Alot of people are going to be disturbed by that & it could be the deal breaker in alot of cases.
From a Verision point of view [font size="0.002"]maintaining both networks must be pretty expensive[/font].
It's like polar bears going to a new iceburg when they realize the one they're on is about to rollover. Some polar bears are going to have a shitty time making the swim to the new iceburg, but the quicker everyone gets over there it better.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Anyone know if Verizon FiOS is going to ever be available in Cedar Park, TX? Or something equivalent from AT&T/SWB?
Runesabre
Enspira Online
Wilful destruction of existing infrastructure for no reason exception to "cut off" their competitors? They're going to the special hell.
Whether Verizon is doing these things or not is
independent of whether the editors have anything
to gain.
As part of the "deal" the phone companies made with the government a long time ago I thought POTS was one of the "Universal Services", which has a federal tariffed rate. My feeble understanding is that obligated the phone company to provide that service to anyone at the federal rate.
So, once the copper is cut, shouldn't you be able to order that service, and make the reinstall cost be on Verizon's nickel? If enough people did that, might they not find it unprofitable to cut the copper?
If a company acts in a manner that a semi-informed reader base finds repugnant, wouldn't you expect to find us calling foul? Verizon just makes it a little easier by painting a huge bulls-eye on their back.
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
Nothing like screwing over any future resident of a house. I guess that's something that would need to be included in a home sale. "By the way, buying this house will lock you into Verizon's broadband." Doesn't seem right.
This has been an ongoing conversation here in Maryland for almost two
years. You need to be HOME when then lines are connected, or they remove them.
You can insist to keep the lines during your phone order, but it won't
do any good.
ride shotgun on your copper or it goes away !!
And don't believe anything verizon tells you.
member: novalug, baltolug, calug
This can only help those phone companies. Once we're done deregulating the telecommunications industry, we can start getting rid of those pesky traffic light and parking restrictions that regulate where and how I drive MY car.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
It just doesn't make any sense. They're trying to put fiber in to homes, something that is not very profitable and companies have failed many times in the past. This is something all nerds would love, unlimited bandwidth to the home but the only article I see are about how they're cutting copper off and replacing it with fiber? Who cares?
Seriously? I have not had a land line in five years - and the three years I had it before that was because the dormitory I lived in provided it for free. Cell phones and VoIP are making POTS a thing of the past.
... (I grew up in the rural Midwest) but then again, their copper isn't threatened, is it?
And yes, yes, I know the rural communities don't have good cell coverage and VoIP due to shitty internet connections
You can't please the average Slashedotter. You guys have complained for years that telecoms are not replacing copper with fiber. Now Verizon replaces copper with fiber, and you bitch.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Is verizon required to lease out the fiber now that they are 'cutting off' the copper? It seems to me that the copper infrustructure should be the failsafe fallback should something happen to the fiber or if power goes out. People should always have the ability to cal 911 in the event of a power outage
Do they actually yank the wires out and sell them for scrap? If they just rip them out of the punch down blocks then the next company can punch them down again.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Maybe it is news because verizon and the other telcos and cable companies keep coming up with new (which makes it "news") shaft the consumer things? I'd go as far as saying cutting the copper is deliberate sabotage of critical national infrastructure and a violation of the implied trust the telcos got when AT&T was broken up and they were allowed to take over parts of the publicly paid for copper infrastructure. Yes, that's right, the public paid for every penny of it, and the telcos got free eminent domain seizures for running it over private property, something rather valuable in today's world. They've also gotten billions of dollars to maintain it, with those frakking service fees you see on your bill that they asked for and received.
The copper built this nations telecommunications and cutting it is at a minimum consumer unfriendly and is destroying quite decent backup that is already there and works. They could like, just leave it the fuck alone when they install the fiber in case the customer wants to use it for something else or have a backup connection, perhaps from another company. And if verizon doesn't want that copper, it should be taken away from them with no recompensation whatsoever, just like any other abandoned property on the street, and given to someone else who would actually use it after being held and auctioned off by the local marshals or sheriffs, just like they do with abandoned cars or abandoned buildings.
Because Verizon is getting OUT of the copper network business. (Have you looked at the price os copper lately?)
Oh, and those "Reasonable Rates" that the smaller companies insist are necessary if they are going to provide competition? Those are actually LOWER than what it costs Verizon to provide the service to them. Damn straight the rates go up when they lease service over fiber, now they are getting the service at cost. (No profit for Verizon, but not a loss anymore, either.)
This message was sent using 100% recycled electrons.
I work for a small cable company and its basically a 50/50 situation. Either the customer completely forgets what is disclosed to them, or the CSR flat out never mentions it. Often in sales, its the promotional rate the customer is never informed about, they assume that 30$ is what everyone charges for 8mb connections. So they switch to another company, get hooked up on a promo rate for 6-12 months and when it ends they come back to us, wash, rinse, repeat.
When new homes are wired up, it can take 4-6 weeks to have the trench buried (mostly for locate purposes). You explain this to the customer, but if you check the notes on the account, you'll see them calling several times a week wanting an ETA on when someone is going to bury the coax line. You connect them to the field ops manager who repeats exactly what the CSR says, they feel better, but a week later its back to the same routine.
I am neither a fan or opponent of Verizon (technically my company competes with them in certain areas for phone), but its very possible that alot of customers are indeed informed about the loss of copper, they either don't remember, don't care or are so technically retarded they don't even understand the basic premise of copper vs fiber.
I don't mean to belittle customers, most companies get a strong following of loyal customers who both enjoy and understand the service with very few problems (My Qwest DSL has been going strong for years now). Anyone who's worked in a call center for a few years will understand this. I've had some calls where I've had to repeat the same thing over and over again and in the end, I got the feeling they didn't understand one word I said.
I've said it before. Your service related issues (for this instance precisely) are due to the consumers lack of knowledge. Is Verizon required to tell you this information. Yes. Do they? Yes. You sign the paper that proves they told you, and I know you did because Verizon keeps those records to protect thier asses. Yet you expect the service provider to do you a favor and tell you verbally. The industry is only required to provide a contract that you sign at time of service delivery, that says all of this. It's the service work agreement order. They don't have to tell you over the phone, they do as a courtesy to you. They don't have to veerbally tell you at installation, they do it as a courtesy to you. You as a consumer are required to read the contract, fine print, between the lines and everything else. If you don't that's your fault. Countless people complain that the reason they haven't paid their bill is because they didn't recieve one. The MINUTE you sign the contract or installation paperwork, you are agreeing to pay a reoccuring bill. The bill that's mailed to you, is mailed as a courtesy and is not required. Stop complianing and do the work you need to do, and stop expecting everyone in the world to spoon feed it to you. It's all there in the fine print. You just have to open your eyes.
This is Slashdot! Give me the latest gadget, bug, or OS project! This ain't english class so don't confuse the two!
Keeping copper buried in the ground can't be cost effective. It's also 100 year old technology.
So Verizon is fixing that, and it seems a bit whiny to complain about it.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
So what? This is like people saying "Oh no, when they installed the new indoor plumbing, they carted off the outhouse. What if the sewer clogs? Now were trapped into higher cost sewer service."
Get with the program people. The copper network is a dinosaur and cutting it off slowly as people willingly convert is the least disruptive way to let it die. Sooner or later everyone will have to convert. Don't like your FIOS, there are plenty of other options for everyone involved.
your gravity fails and negativity don't pull you through
What do they have to gain? What every good editor wants, eyeballs. The more eyeballs the more they can charge for ads. To do that, editors post what people will read. The Slashdot readers hate Verizon, so they want to read articles giving them even more justification for hating Verizon.
Also, though, I think they keep posting articles about how crappy Verizon is because there's no such article about good things Verizon has done. The editors "motive" for hating Verizon is probably for the same reason as the rest of us, they've dealt with Verizon.
From personal experience I will say that Verizon is worse than the IRS. A couple years ago I had to deal with both the IRS and Verizon at the same time. I forgot to send in a worksheet with my taxes, so I had to spend time on the phone trying to get that worksheet to the right location so they could give me my credit. Don't get me wrong, the IRS is a pain and the left hand doesn't know what the right hand was doing. But everyone was nice and did everything they personally had power to do. We finally got my taxes straightened out.
At the same time, I was moving and signed up with Verizon for telephone and internet service. I signed up about a month ahead of time and asked them to activate my land line phone service and DSL the same day I moved in. That was a nightmare. First, the phone service connection was a couple days late. Then, when I went to hook up to the internet I discovered they had never actually set up the DSL. I found the email with the confirmation number and called about the problem. The service rep asked me for my phone number and then told me there was no record of ordering DSL. When I asked her about my confirmation number, can she try looking up my order through that, I was told that she couldn't look up anything with the confirmation number. Basically, the confirmation number does NOTHING except make me feel good, until I call and try to use it to prove confirmation. So I spoke to higher-ups about the problem and was told, "Oh, we're sorry, we'll have it set up in a couple days." A couple days go by and still no DSL. I call again and am told there was a communication problem and it will be just a few more days. Still no DSL! The last person I talk to says, "What? It's impossible to get DSL set up that fast. The last person you spoke with lied to you [yes, he really said "lied"]. It takes about two weeks to set up DSL." So, I finally got DSL about a month after the originally "confirmed" installation date.
Then, to finish it off, when I moved from my apartment after I year I had them disconnect the phone line. Well, the line got disconnected (I tried it, I couldn't make a phone call) but the next month I got a bill for DSL. For the month AFTER the phone line was disconnected! It actually took some time to convince the service rep that I couldn't have DSL after my phone line was disconnected, but FINALLY, they agreed to "refund" us. Yes, after all that, we still had to pay the stupid bill and wait for them to send us a reimbursement check!
I have sworn off Verizon for good. THAT is why people hate Verizon.
I got FIOS installed a few days ago. We decided we didn't want cable TV service and 20/6Mbit for $45 is so much cheaper then the 6/2Mbit we were getting from Comcast for $57/month. From my experiences there seems to be a lot of disinformation about the Verizon install.
1. They didn't cut the existing copper to the house. The installer said they don't do that if there is more then one family or if the customer asks them not to. But even if they had I could still get phone only service over fiber for the same price as over copper. It doesn't matter much as we don't have a LAN lane, only cell phones.
2. They install a battery backup with the fiber that will keep it alive for 6+ hours if the power goes out. But honestly, most people have cordless phones and other phones that require 120v AC so they lose phone when the power goes out anyway. True, if you power goes out frequently and you need to use the phone then FIOS isn't for you. But most places like that are rural areas where FIOS isn't being installed anyway.
3. The worst part of FIOS is that we now need to pay for the 15 watts the transformer uses. This really does piss me off but even with the $30 a year it will cost me it is still a much better deal then Comcast. Oh, and I can still use Comcast for Internet/TV/Phone if I so I have not lost my choice of connections. I would need two separate coax runs if I wanted both at the same time though. The installer asked me if I wanted him to run new coax in the house which I declined.
I'm not overly impressed with the actual speed of FIOS now that we have it but it still is a better deal then Comcast. When Comcast becomes cheaper, I'll probably switch again. We have more competition now then we ever had in the past and it is saving us money.
I think I said that, and it is the consumers-the publics-copper after all. If verizon doesn't want it, it should be taken away from them then and someone else can use it. In fact, I'd go as far as saying all the damn copper should be reseized from the telcos so they can't pull any bogus additional fee nonsense on the public. They keep saying it is "their" wire,pure horse hockey, they just sort of gradually assumed ownership of it, it's always been the publics wire with a limited granted monopoly to maintain it. If they cease maintaining it, they have given up any claims to control over it and should leave it alone.
No maintenance means they have abandoned it, back to my original point, the sheriffs take it and auction it off and their workers stop touching the stuff.
As to the wireless everything, I'll believe it when I see it. At best wireless today is half assed and half working and still pretty insecure and flaky. How long have we been waiting for wimax for instance?
Until then, they shouldn't deliberately destroy that which is still working, at least leave it intact for backup purposes.
Are all the people bitching about this in any way related to the people who bitch about how the US has the most primitive broadband infrastructure?
Just curious.
-Styopa
It's a trap!
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
Data services don't count as common carriers anymore.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
Because Verizon sucks.
I had to pay $3/month to have my number not listed the phone book and be "unpublished". I also had to pay $5/month to block long distance calls. I could pay $2/month to not a have long distance carrier instead but it never failed that some person in my house or myself would make a long distance call and I would pay about $3/minute. Don't dial long distance calls you say? Well I live in a suburb next to a big city but I'm in a different calling "zone" so calls outside of my county are long distance even though it is only a few miles away and you do NOT have to dial a "1" first for these areas so unless you knew all of the three digit exchanges in the area, you would not know if it was long distance or not.
So... I had to pay an extra $8/month for that lack of services on a monthly basis for every single month I had Verizon phone service so I could remain off of calling lists [1](unlisted and unpublished) and prevent being slammed with excessive long distance charges.
[1] being unlisted and unpublished almost eliminates unsolicited calls. You phone number never ends up on lists because it is not published. The national DNC registry may work but from experience I can tell you that unlisted and unpublished works much better. I pay nothing to be unlisted/unpublished now because I canned Verizon for VOIP.
The Verizon website has a page where you can check the availability of fios. After entering my address it just loops back to the same page without any indication of success or failure. At first I thought it was because they were idiots and used Internet Exploder specific extensions, but IE does the same.
I also wanted to know about their Terms Of Use and to see if they have a "business class" package. I insist on running my own server and don't want them blocking or redirecting any ports. I was unable to locate any kind of TOU page. Pay attention Verizon. I'm willing to pay for a damn fast connection, but it's going to be on MY terms. You will NOT tell me how I can use my connection (although I have no problem with you forbidding spam).
-- Will program for bandwidth
The Outside Plant guys at Verizon will tell you that Verizon is trying to get rid of the copper infrastructure. But so far there aren't any buyers.
If they do get rid of it all those OSP guys go with it. I don't think they realize that.
And maybe everyone will forget you invented the rules in the first place...
1996 "Let's make everyone pay each other for calls from their network to another network..." rule to keep CLECs from being a viable business (oh wait dialup ISPs are all inbound calls, D'OH!) followed by the
1999 "The Internet is not the telephone call so we don't have to pay those competitors the BILLIONS of reciprocal compensation for all our customers dialling up to d/l pr0n" rule which made
2004 "Packet based voice not subject to the same regulations as POTS" rule
Which means that now Verizon is rolling out a pure packet switched network that they don't have to share... Oh yeah and practicing a scorched-earth policy it seems.
How do you explain the existence of contract lawyers? You know; people highly trained and well paid to spend their days understanding how to read and write small print. --If every working Joe was fully trained in the reading and understanding of deliberately deceptive small print in deliberately confusing contractual agreements, then why, oh, why do we have contract lawyers and schools dedicated to teaching contract lawyers?
Some people who sign contracts are not the same as you; they might be, say for example, overwrought working parents who may not have the same time and ability to focus their attention that you enjoy. Some people didn't have the proper nutrition or the same educational opportunities while growing up that you did, and so have fewer skills with regard to understanding the technical minutia in contractual agreements. Or are you suggesting the people who are not like you should be punished in some kind of 'Survival of the Fittest' line of myopic thinking? Should people who are not the same as you be fed to the sharks? I disagree, especially when 'Fittest' actually means, 'born to parents who happened to grow up in the right place and the right time with the right skin colour.'
I've met sharp-witted poor people who are among some of the hardest working humans on the planet, and I've met dull as doorknob rich people who are not, so 'lazy' and 'unfit' are piss-poor generalizations against people who aren't as advantaged as you. --That's a pre-emptive, "Don't even go there," in case you were wondering.
There is more than one kind of person on this planet; and thank goodness for that! Otherwise we'd have a world filled with tight-ass conservatives. The world would be missing good sex, 95% of the creative arts, spicy food and automobiles which come, "in any colour we want so long as it's black". In other words, the world would run like a Swiss watch, but there would be little appeal in actually being alive there.
Which is to say. . , some people spend their time developing skills other than the understanding of legal fine print and technology. Thank goodness!
Corporations which go to lengths to exploit people, and even create weakness in people which can then later be exploited, should not be held blameless while those they harm are sneered at for not being white and rich and mono-cultured enough.
-FL
When I was switching to AT&T from Verizon I was getting nothing but "omg - AT&T"!
Now you know the dark side of the force. I'll take my chances with the NSA thank you very much. Oh and Verizon? My iphone links to my computer out of the box. I didn't have to hack it to enable OBEX assclowns!
http://www.newnetworks.com/broadbandscandals.htm
When communities started deploying their own fiber optic cable systems the communications industry was alarmed, even though they had plenty of opportunity to begin laying FOC themselves. They went to congress (lobbied and bribed congressmen) and got a law which forbid local governments from "competing" with free enterprise and paid the companies an advanced "reinbursement" to lay the FOC themselves. The communications companies, including Verizon, took the money but never laid the FOC. By ignoring the companies lack of compliance, even though they took the cash to do so, Congress has given defacto approval to the theft.
What does one expect when "campaign contributions" can be so easily converted to personal use?
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
less onimous than these posts want to make out
Good luck selling your house to someone who just wants plain old phone service, unless Verizon's going to put the copper back in or charge normal phone rates for people not using the internet stuff.
FCC regulations require them to lease the copper to other broadband providers. They have no such obligation with the fiber. Once the copper is gone, you're locked into Verizon broadband (unless you switch to cable). At that point, especially for those households without cable available, Verizon has no reason not to jack up your prices and/or provide shitty service.
It's the same thing we always see from the telcos, and which explains the terrible Internet, cellular, and POTS service we have in the U.S. Instead of competing, they run whining to either Congress or the regulators for special protection. Because there is no way for consumers to counteract well-funded political interests, Congress gives them whatever they want, and they don't have to compete anymore.
This is something all nerds would love, unlimited bandwidth to the home but the only article I see are about how they're cutting copper off and replacing it with fiber? Who cares?
The next tenants/home owners who move in. While a nerd/geek may be happy paying tens of dollars each month for cable/broadband/telephone service, the next tenants may resent being forced to pay for a whole load of services they don't want. This might even affect the rental/property price of the location in question.
Having freedom of choice is far better than having no choice at all.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
they started fios in "green zones", where there was no pre-existing copper. this gave them the work around where they didn't have to share their lines w/ other telcos. its only a logical conclusion to land lock the customer back into their territories by cutting the coper. if you are going to spend the billions in infrastructure and lines then you might as well block all others from access.
I've had similar experiences with Comcast.
I don't know how the telcos can argue with a straight face that they're engaging in ordinary market competition when they are providing worse service than the one entity that by definition doesn't have to compete.
We should have built latest-generation network infrastructure publicly, and then allowed any network service provider to provide service over it. Then the problem of enormous capital costs, which is the one semi-cogent argument Verizon has to justify its noncompetitive behavior, would have been a non-issue. And telco service might even be as good as... airline service. (I'm not asking for much, here...)
Actually in seriousness, I did the research and was sort of informed that my copper would be shut off. I told them that I didn't want the service unless they left my copper lines alone. The Verizon folks agreed. However, to them copper left alone, meant converting my phone lines to fibre anyway and taking the phone company box with them!!! I called and complained and they said my copper lines were still there. Yes, soft of true. I was extremely pissed off to say the least.
There are 2 problems with having your copper lines switch to fibre. Aside from the obvious vendor lock-in, fiber telephone service isn't going to stay on for too long if your power goes out (they don't run their own generators to keep it going unlike with copper). (We have terrible power here near Washington, DC.) My wife and I work at home. With two of us using the phone, the batter backup on their router won't stay going for long. Plus batteries age!
So if you want reliable phone service do what we did, change local service on (at least one) of your phone lines to another company. It took months to get a Verizon guy to actually come over and rehook one of the lines up and a ton of bitching. So my advice is DO THIS STEP BEFORE GETTING FIOS! However, I don't know if it can be Sprint anymore (that's what we used) since Verizon bought Sprint. If you use another local carrier they have to work via copper.
If you have another local carrier, you can still get Fios. Apparently, they then have to bill your credit card. There really should be some class action suit about this stuff. It is nuts. However, Fios is still pretty darn good Internet.
How is the average customer trapped by Verizon cutting the last mile of copper? Many customers are already too far from the CO to qualify for the theoretical 3.0m/768k "broadband" service offered via Verizon DSL. Unless you are a U-Verse customer, you can't get TV over copper. As for basic home telephone service, FiOS Telephone is as federally regulated as POTS, with one exception--Verizon does not have to wholesale elements in its FTTP network with competing telcos, although it does allow them to resell lines. You pay taxes & tariffs (the "USF") and can apply Lifeline ("welfare telephone") credits to FiOS Telephone service. Many new landline only installs are FiOS now, because they are more reliable, easier to manage and cheaper to maintain then POTS. Although FiOS Telephone is limited by ~6 hrs of backup power, it is more reliable overall, especially in rural areas. As for telephony, almost everyone nowadays has a cell phone. Wireless telephone reliability & QoS is rapidly approaching that of POTS. During emergencies, When the cell stations fail, service providers like Verizon dispatch cells-on-wheels http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/09/06/HNrestor eneworleans_1.html/ to keep the lifelines open.
Broadband enthusiasts have been begging for Fiber To The Premises for years. At last, one provider has taken the plunge and bet the farm on fiber, wiring 1 million customers at ~$1000 apiece, and you bitch when they pave over the dirt roads? Besides, there is far more wholesaling going on right now in POTS then actual cuts in the network. Verizon would much rather sell off the copper plant at a loss than destroy it--check out the Fairpoint Communications deal. Most of these last mile cuts were done in areas where FiOS, cable, and other services are available to consumers and POTS/DSL is simply not attractive at any price.
If you insist on keeping your dirt road intact when upgrading to FiOS, tell the billing/orders rep that you require it for emergency use, such as a Lifealert type system. She will be more than happy to oblige ;)
It seems to me the FCC needs to recognize that policy makes them destroy the copper and adjust regulations in a manner to obtain the effect that they also have to lease any fiber, if the copper was removed or is no longer being maintained, in a similar way.
Do you think there's some special reason it won't happen, when fiber to consumer premises becomes more widespread?
But I'm very sad to hear this about Verizon. This is the final nail in the coffin of the ultra-reliable count-on-it-in-emergencies service that Theodore Vail, AT&T, and the Western Electric engineers brought into being. Through pure self-interest, and I know that the days of Ma Bell had their downside, but it was one of the wonders of the world. The phones always worked and in the extremely rare occasions when they didn't, the phone company acted as if they had a responsibility to make them work.
Now we're slowly getting pushed back into cheap service that works except when you really need it. Because it's easy to evaluate what your phone costs, and it's easy to look at the list of spiffy features, but it's very hard for Joe Consumer to know how reliable the service is... so the free market can't put a proper value on reliability.
Six months ago, the company I work for installed spiffy VOIP telephones. Because of some issue or another, they kept the old I-know-it's-not-Centrex-but-whaddaya-call-it system connected for a while. And there were also about three individual plain old lines for some fax machines.
A few months ago there was a power outage that started around 9 a.m. and lasted into the early afternoon.
The spiffy VOIP phones went dead immediately.
The old company phones kept working for about an hour.
Apparently the local cell towers don't have much in the way of battery backup because a few hours later nobody's cell phone could get a signal.
But the three plain old phones were still working six hours later, and based on past experience I believe they would have worked for a couple of days.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Already done, the FCC ruled 2 years ago that all fiber services (video, telephone, data) are not subject to common carrier regulations. They aren't required to lease their lines. Verizon, SBC (at&t), et al when confronted by the FCC about "why are we so far behind these other countries in broadband" the carriers argued that it was because they couldn't invest in fiber because of the requirement to lease the lines. They said they wouldn't be able to recoup their investment. So the FCC said "Ok, if you install fiber, its yours you don't have to allow access to it"
[quote]...but I haven't been able to figure out the motive for hating Verizon yet...[quote]
.02 about their customers?
perhaps because they are a large conglomerate that doesn't give two shits or
I have my own horror story of losing www.piinkfloyyd.net solely because of Verizon..likely a story for another post (or perhaps here if anyone would care to hear it, but it isn't relative to TFA). In any event, they only care about money- not how they get it, or who they trample over to get it. Seems like a pretty good reason to run this story to me.
the significance of a signature is insignificant
No there isn't, for huge areas of the nation. They aren't "rolling out" fiber optics everywhere, they haven't even "rolled out" good enough copper to even get crappy DSL in huge areas and for millions of people. Millions, a huge number, and over vast distances of the nation, and I mean even in the much more populated eastern half of the nation, not out in east bison dropping montana either. There are tons of areas just outside a local switch box but are quite suburban really they have NO broadband and none of these telco bozos are providing ANYTHING. Obviously not you, you have choises so you ass-sume everyone else does automatically, but I guess you don't give a crap as long as you got yours, huh? Screw everyone else, you have "choice", that's your opinion? Well a hearty FU to you too sport! Where I live, you have a choice of dialup, that's it. No DSL, cable or fiber. And even when they had a chance they didn't do it, when they installed my phone they "rolled out" crap copper, not good enough for DSL, on purpose! I asked, right when they were doing it a few years ago, because I wanted broadband. The tech said they would NEVER have good enough service here unless they were ordered by the government to do so. I'm one mile too far according to their specs. Decent two lane tarred road, plenty of people on the street, just they don't feel like it and don't have to, because they are a local monopoly.
They broke up one jerk monopoly to make half a dozen smaller and equally jerk off monopolies, that's all that has happened and all of them are only interested in servicing the most populated dense areas and *that's it*.
I remember hearing phone companies were required to provide 911 availability even to non-customers, and the phone system reliability had follow the 5 nines rule, 99.999% availability. Though the Conservative De-Regulation Movement might have rewritten the rules. Didn't Vonage get in trouble recently for a flawed 911 system? People who had their lines cut should plug in a real phone and let their legislators know they no longer have 911 service in case of emergency.
As much as I understand that regulation is sometimes necessary to keep a level playing field, it's no myth that regulation is also a barrier to free markets and the general principle of Capitalism.
Which is why any heavy regulations of Fiber at this point in time would almost certainly have the effect of stunting growth of fiber networks. These companies are spending billions. To invest that kind of cash you need to see a tempting ROI, which just won't happen if you saddle it with regulations.
If we want Fiber networks to be public infrastructure, then we need to pay for it with public monies. Regulate it, fine, but give them gigantic tax incentives to actually run the stuff.
I'll probably be modded down, or have some slashdotter call me a faciest right winger who is trying to protect TheEnemy. I don't care. In all honesty I'm probably one of the biggest supporters of Liberalism and the democratic party you've ever spoken to. But I also have a BS in Economics and this is economics 101.
The phone still works in a power outage is not as important as it used to be*. A lot of people with POTS are still up a creek because they have cordless phones which don't all work so well when the AC is gone. Also, with the advent of Cell Phones, people don't really need the copper to still work when there's a blackout.
--Mike
* I will agree with the parent that it was, at some time, REALLY REALLY REALLY important that the phone still worked during periods of blackout.
You mean MCI? Verizon doesn't own Sprint....
Apparently, they then have to bill your credit cardThis is probably just a misinformed CSR. I was able to get invoice billing for dry-loop DSL. Don't see why FiOS would be any different. Of course I dropped their DSL and went back to Time Warner after they raised my price $10/mo and informed me that I had to have dial-tone service to get the best deals. Yeah, like I'm going to play for a landline that I'll never use (cell only here) just to save a few bucks on DSL.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
However, Fios is still pretty darn good Internet.
Damn right it is! You got your 1310, your 1490, and your 1550. Light so clean, it's 20dB hot. True QAM!
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Yes, but most people with a clue also have a wired phone for backup. So POTS is still valid here.
Also, with the advent of Cell Phones, people don't really need the copper to still work when there's a blackoutGranted, if the cell site that serves your house has batteries or a generator. Most large rural sites do but in many urban areas they lean towards smaller micro and pico cells that may or may not have a provision for backup power. And when the micro and pico cells go down you can count on the macro cells (i.e: the ones large enough to justify generators) being too overloaded to use.
As a healthy person in my 20s I feel that being cell-only isn't that big of a risk. Odds are that if the power goes out (which doesn't happen too often here) my cell service keeps working. If it stops working I can probably drive somewhere with power/service if I really need to make a call. But an older person who might have medical problems should really consider keeping copper based POTS service for extended power outages. You never know.....
* I will agree with the parent that it was, at some time, REALLY REALLY REALLY important that the phone still worked during periods of blackout.What's sad and annoying is that as technology advances people seem willing to accept less and less quality from it. A properly designed copper POTS system has six nines of reliability. Can you say that about FiOS, VoIP or your cell phone? I wish these new technologies would be held to the same expectations as the old.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Econ 101 should have also taught you that regulation of public goods is necessary to prohibit their being abused by whatever private interest has the most power.
Because of the extreme expense of installing telco infrastructure, it makes essentially no business sense for a company to install infrastructure to compete with existing infrastructure unless the new installation is a big technological step forward. For the duration of each technological step, then, if we don't treat the infrastructure as a public good, we are essentially granting whoever built it a monopoly until new technology comes along.
Intellectual honesty would then seem to demand that the public pay for building the infrastructure. But that won't ever happen. So what we need is a regulatory middle ground that will prevent monopolies but allow the builders to recover their investments. For all its flaws, that was essentially what we had with POTS/DSL infrastructure. Now, with the fiber, we're just conceding the monopoly. Doing that in the name of capitalism is pretty ironic.
As far as I know, all the important gear in the IT room is on battery-backup units. Not my department, but I'm pretty sure it is. It's the same department that takes care of all the desktops in the cubicles, and all of those are on battery backup. When the power goes out the entire building is filled with the eerie wail of dozens of battery-backup units whining in misery, slowly tapering down as people shut down their PCs and turn off the backup units.
So I don't know exactly what it was that failed, but it probably wasn't the gear in the building.
I don't really know. I'm just reporting what actually happened.
I didn't think cell phone towers were supposed to die that quickly, either.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
We bought our house just under a year ago and it had FiOS already (our town was supposedly an early test market) and no copper line. We had just 2 weeks between close of the sale and move-in, and we needed phone service pronto. To get a regular copper line put in and provisioned was going to take "several weeks" and "several dollars" from what little I can remember.
In the end we signed on for the FiOS, and indeed their Internet service was cheaper than the Comcast.
The point is, the decision was effectively made for me before I bought the place, and I never had any opportunity to request the copper be left in place.
So what are the odds that down the road there will be petitions for competitors to gain access to the fiber?
When I got FIOS, I explicitly told the Verizon installer not to touch the copper. And they didn't. Too bad for those that didn't think of it ahead of time: I guess they'll have to pay for another installation if they decide to move back to copper.
[ home ]
I'm not completely convinced that this is a bad thing. Leasing the copper doesn't really provide competition unless the lease prices are really well regulated. You're still buying the same product, just from slightly different middlemen. Without this, they are clearly a monopoly, and can't hide behind the 'no, look, we have to compete with our resellers' defence.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
That's odd. I work for Verizon as a lineman and do lots of FiOS installs in the Boston area.
My foreman told us a month ago to stop taking down the copper just to improve our install times. Maybe at the CEO level there's a big conspiracy to eliminate common carrier lines but the 1st and 2nd level managers certainly don't care about it. And I know for sure the linemen don't.
I know when I install I only remove the copper in a few circumstances:
1. The customer specifically asks me to (usually for aesthetic reasons, they don't care for all the wires running over their lawn).
2. They have underground conduit so I have to use the old copper line to pull the new fiber through it.
3. The drops to their house go through thick foliage and rather than try to weave the fiber through a bazillion branches I'll tape it to the old copper line and just pull it through.
Other than that? Why would I spend 30 minutes cutting the old line, getting dirty gathering it up and then finding a place to dispose of it when I'm all done? I'm not going to do extra work for no reason. Particularly if there's good reason not to do that work. I say just wait for the next hurricane to knock it down for you. Then we can take it away.
Basically I think it's going to go one of two ways in the future.
1. Consumer complaints over price and service will ultimately lead to making the fiber network common carrier in a decade or so.
or
2. WiMAX, BPL, Cable, Cellular and Satellite will provide enough options for consumers that the number of people calling for the fiber to be made common carrier just won't reach a critical mass because most people will be satisfied with the existing communications options.
Your scenario's a little strange. I don't know why those guys would risk losing a new customer over something as silly as that. In the Boston area anyway they seem to bend over backwards to save an install.
Seriously, six nines costs a lot of money -- is it really necessary? We have a lot of redundant technology that we didn't have before. If my land phone is out, I have a cell phone. If the land phone goes to 4 nines, and I have a 2 nines cell phone (disclaimer: numbers are rectal extractions for illustration purposes only), as a system, that would be 6 nines (.0001 x .01 for double outage). Would it be OK for the phone company to charge extra for the 6 nines POTS and let those happy with 4 pay less? Verizon is competing with companies that don't offer six nines to a public that doesn't want (or perhaps doesn't know they want) six nines. They are offering a product at the same level (arguably better) of service as their competitors.
We apologize for the preceding message. All those responsible have been sacked.
but this also put the telcos in the position of competing with CONTENT providers. This is the core of the whole Net Neturality issue. When the telcos had to lease their lines on RAND terms, anybody could connect as a service, and anybody could connect their home to the internet.. the key is that the telco beurocracy could not cut off any service provider or any customer from the network.. and therefore the internet for very long. Without this direct access to high-speed lines, there would be no Google, no Yahoo, no Slashdot. Now that they can charge a "toll" to anybody legally, the whole thing gets nasty quickly with how low they can go.
in your idea of intellectual honesty, the public has already paid hundreds of millions of dollars in "upgrade" taxes and "tax rebates" to help them out. Technically there's no reason to allow any concessions, but the Corporate heads are like little kids begging one more cookie from daddy after mommy told them no more before dinner. And these people are the one that claim US workers are so "underqualified".
They never once told me that my copper would be permanently disabled until the tech walked out to the end of the driveway with wire cutters. He also assured me that it could be reconnected if I ever canceled FIOS. If this is not true, I am certainly miffed.
When I installed FIOS, Verizon cut my copper - after telling me they would. When I discontinued Verizon's internet service for a variety of reasons, my POTS line remained at the same price it was while on copper. Granted, it doesn't have the power-out reliability, but there is no forcing to pay for a whole load of services I don't want.
Econ 101 also says that monopoly pricing is always ridiculously high, and in no way encourages efficiencies in the market. Which is to say, even if the monopoly is legitimately earned (and cutting off public-funded copper does not sound legitimate), it is very likely to cause major disruptions in fair market value.
The ______ Agenda
Assuming they didn't, how many people are going not want to buy a house because they can't get a land line? Alarm systems work with FIOS, and the modems come with 8 hour batteries? If I was moving into a new house, I would not go out of my way to get a land line.
This is a big problem in principal, and has some negative implications, but house resale is not one of them.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
Why not just force them to share their Fiber lines like the Copper lines?
as for the battery life, couldn't you just plug the transformer into a UPS/generator?
As a Verizon FIOS Customer who very recently upgraded to FIOS. I can say I was told three times that the old line would be "disabled" and that once the conversion to FIOS was complete the old copper wouldn't work anymore. Talking with the technician who did the install .. the big motivation (from his point of view) was getting off the old / aging copper including the DC loading systems that add (according to him) a big demand on maintenance and space in the central office.
Obviously if they jack the rates up really high .. I would need to switch to Cable (currently and 6Mbps down).
As for the "Destruction of the last mile) .. all that they are doing is removing the jumper inside your local box (where your house wiring connects to their wiring). The wire under the ground is still there .. and I doubt their going to go removing what's been laid.
Also remember that if they get too greedy .. then the local PUCs that regulate their fees / requirements will be pressured to enforce more customer friendly options.
With the fiber to the home .. your more likely to see pricing pressure / new service options from them.
As internet becomes considered "required infrastructure" to the masses .. I expect more .. not less regulation over it.
Anyone with a cordless phone and no working cellphone who doesn't have a cheap $10 regular phone to use in case of AC failure is a fucking moron with a death wish.
And test the regular phone regularly to make sure one of th kids didn't find it and use it for a mace.
I don't think so. They pretty much scream this in the product literature, and it's become just something people are generally aware of. If you don't know they're snipping your copper, you probably also aren't really bothering to check if a used car you are interested in has an accident history, or reviewing a home inspection report before buying a house. Or picking up bottles at random to drink out of without checking if they contain bleach.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
I keep waiting for something big and heavy to fall on that child.
"The small guys have tried to fight this re-monopolization of the network infrastructure."
Allow me to finish the statement....
"The small guys have tried to fight this re-monopolization of the network infrastructure, network infrastructure that they did not build or invest capital to build."
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Sure, if you can park in your own garage or driveway. If you can't, or if you're six floors up, you're pretty much screwed. Try running a 120V extension cord across the sidewalk and guess how much someone's lawyers will take from you.
Without regulation, specifically the breakup of AT&T, we would not have the internet (as we now know it) and all of its economic and social benefits.
I'll explain if anyone bothers to read this and wants me to.
This space available.
Here in Taiwan, since the beginning of DSL service, there are always 2 seperate charges for DSL services. One is the circuit fee you paid to the phone company (which is monopoly), and the ISP fee for you paid to your ISP. You can choose the phone company as your ISP, or you can choose other ISPs. but the circuit charge is always paid to your phone company.
Maybe it was MCI. Whatever. ;)
http://www.macintouch.com/iphone/faq.html
And there's no hack (well, at least not yet) to turn it on.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I expect that Verizon, assuming that it retains its status as the ILEC in a given territory, is still obligated to supply residential POTS service to anyone who applies for it at tariffed rates regardless of the technology they use to deliver that service. There has never been any provision that I know of in a telephone tariff that specified the technology through which basic residential service had to be delivered.
higher bills??? i live in a fios area in bedford nh. comcast is $65 a month for 3m down and 600k up, which is actually around 1.5m - 2m down and (if you are lucky) 200k up with horrible latency. in my area fios is $40 for 5m down and 2m up which performs (no joke) and around 10m down and 5m up. i have a friend that gets 20m down and 7m up. maybe someone could tell me how the math was done that says verizon is ripping anyone off. and they don't shut your service down by "accident" and send 4 techs out over 3 weeks so that they can just leave a tag on your door saying "sorry we missed you" when they knew that you weren't and didn't have to be home. then after 3 weeks of no service, you manage to get a contractor to fix your problem in around 4 minutes. now i see why my comcast truck had 3 bullet holes in it in florida.
all media lines will be fiber soon anyway. copper is the reason cable companies are going under anyway. by the time they build a new system, it is obsolete. they added fiber backbones like 10 years too late to really be profitable. comcast is like the underwear gnomes. step one, build crappy system. step two.... step three, profit!!! i have worked for at&t, comcast, media one, tci, and falcon. as everything from a field tech, csr and r&d. at least verizon is thinking ahead.
It's time to break up the phone company (again). They did it the wrong way the first time. And look what happened anyway ... the pieces are coming back together like the liquid terminator.
The correct way to break up the phone company is to split it at the point between physical infrastructure (wires and dark fiber) and all services (in classic terms: "dial tone"). One company would be the monopoly company owning all that "last mile" infrastructure (which in major part was financed by taxpayers and rate payers in the past, including development of most of the right of ways they are laying fiber in now). This company would be regulated and tariffs would specify the rates for providing wire and fiber connectivity. The rates would guarantee a return on investment at reasonable percentage. Owning stock in this company would then be a low-risk investement but not a big money maker.
The other company from the split would be required to pay the same going rates as any other company to lease the wires or fiber on behalf of the customer they will be serving (and most go through the same provisioning process). This company would be serving "dial tone" in classic terms, or "IP routing" in more recent terms (or TV or whatever else might happen). The competition would be in this arena, and it would be made to be a level playing field, including audits to be sure everyone gets to lease the infrastructure at the same rates.
The telcos wanted to be sure they are getting a return on their fiber investment, which in theory should be a big benefit to us all. Well, with this kind of split and a single regulated monopoly owning that fiber, and getting a guaranteed return on that investment through something like a 5% markup over the cost of the fiber, then they will be getting their return on investment.
These rules should also allow any business or individual to lease the wires or fiber running to their premise and connect it with another going elsewhere with a standard cost for the install and lease of the "last mile" as well as the cross connect (a fraction of last mile cost). Then you can power or light the circuit yourself (like the old "alarm circuit" provisions).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
While I cannot speak to FiOS in particular, and it may vary by jurisdiction, too, I can say that it is not that simple. In many cases, the law recognizes that tenants have certain rights, and those rights may trump the property owner's rights. For example, a property owner has to provide a safe dwelling. The law may also require the property owner to grant access to public utilities. In cases where specific law doesn't apply, the utility will often require the property owner to sign an agreement granting the utility a right-of-way to each and every tenant. Since it's hard to rent out a property which cannot get electricity or water, the property owner has to have those agreements.
As a practical example, when we wanted to get Comcast Internet installed at work, we had to sign one of those multi-tenant agreements, because we owned the building, and it was easily large enough to be sublet in the future.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
The responsibility of Connecting LEC (local exchange carrier) wires falls on the new carrier. To hook up the wires should a change be made, the wires are still in place just not tied to the terminals.
Small ISPs are anti-major news sources. Legislate for big ISP big media...
It doesn't have to be. But there's this little thing called marketing, so they can do any goddamned thing they want to.
They try to entice you away from paper bills to CC, online or EFT payments, but in this case, they can just force their preferred method on you.
Never give anyone an automatic pipeline into your checking account. If something doesn't get in there on time, all the payments will be made without your intervention. So all your checks can bounce at once. Combine that with the ass-fucking "universal default interest rate" being implemented by the CC motherfuckers and you can get screwed beyond repair.
This is a bit sleazy, but the places where they are laying fiber are also places where there are PLENTY of other options via cable, wireless, or even satellite.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
I was specifically told that my copper would not be cut until a month after FIOS was installed. Not true. Verizon installed my FIOS on a rainy Tuesday night during a thunderstorm. The tech forgot to ground the outside box. Ten minutes after he left, I lost voice and data and I work from home. The service worked intermittently for two days and three calls from me from my cellphone. I called again on Thursday and told Verizon to put me back on copper and they refused. Two people on the phone and two visiting technicians told me that the copper was cut off at the Central Office, not at the splice block. They also told me that Verizon would not reinstall the copper. The outside box was finally replaced on Friday and everything has worked well since. I looked at the old outside box and the main jack was melted.
About this time last year, Verizon was sending their reps through the area going door to door trying to advertise FIOS and to get people to switch over. At the time I had DSL and I was very happy with it as it was cheap and provided what I needed (an always on connection that could be used while the phone was being used).
But when the Verizon salespeople came through, they said that they could give us FIOS at no increase in cost. We asked them repeatedly whether this was accurate and they repeated just as many times that this was the case and that our bill would remain the same as part of the upgrade plan (and that we'd get a free month in addition). Fantastic we all thought and while I'm not the person on the phone bill at my home, I was definitely one of the primary contributors to the decision to switch over. Unfortunately, they required a contract and it was signed based on what the reps said and not what they actually planned. A week later, they stripped out my copper and we were sailing with FIOS and we were very happy with it.
2 months later, we got the bill and said, "Gee, our bill's doubled. This must be some mistake." But Verizon maintained that it was not and that there was nothing they could do. So we told them that we wanted our DSL back. They said, "Sorry, we can't do that." After some badgering, they told me I could get on a list to petition to get our copper back and I'd know in a week if it was going to happen. A week passed and I got no word from them so I started going through Verizon calling chains. I'd get transferred up about 3 levels each day before they'd tell me they'd get someone to call me back (and nobody ever would).
Eventually, they called me back while I was at work (though I'm not the name on the account) and told me that they'd decided that they wouldn't be giving back our copper. I asked them to explain why and they told me they didn't think that they needed to. I told them to tell that to the primary account holders and they told me they'd leave a message, but if they weren't home (and I knew they wouldn't be) that would be the end of it.
So here I am a year later looking for a cheap alternative to Verizon as they steadily raise the price on their phone service (as their contract only locks in an internet price). I really don't like Cablevision. I think they're a bunch of crooks, but at this point, I'm about ready to go over to them just to take some business away from Verizon. Every so often a Verizon rep still shows up at my door and I usually rant at them for a little and then tell them to get off my porch.
Moral of the story: Read your contracts. Read them three times over when dealing with Verizon. Oh. And avoid Verizon whenever you can.
"If the good lord had intended us to walk, he wouldn't have invented roller skates." -Willy Wonka
1. Public-Funded copper? Huh? The copper wasn't run with public money. It was run by Verizon and its corporate ancestors. It was, however, heavily regulated as public infrastructure, and rightly so, but that regulation didn't occur until well AFTER the hundreds of millions (billions?) spent running the stuff.
2. Monopoly pricing is not "always ridiculously high." You're wrong about that. It CAN BE, but it's not "always." Such a statement is silly to even try to make. You have to prove that every monopoly price-gouges for your statement to be correct. I only have to demonstrate a single one that doesn't to prove you wrong. Here you go: USPS. It's a public company, and it still has a monopoly on letter carrying. DHL/FedEx/Etc cannot compete in that segment. Here's another: Amtrak.
3. Your stupidity about this astounds me. It's just this simple: If we put copper-esque regs on Fiber at this point, NO FIBER WILL BE RUN. It would be a disservice to the shareholders of Verizon to spend BILLIONS to roll out fiber networks that its competitors can immediately use "against" them. This would be the stupidest move imaginable for a corporation. You either need a gov't subsidy to build the network, or you need to give Verizon say 5, 10 years to run the network exclusively to recoup their costs, much like the patent period on a new drug.
And about that -- I'm not a fan of the effects of pharma patents, but the same business case is true: For a company to invest that kind of $ it needs some incentive. I'm a fan of the John Edwards proposal to eliminate pharma patents and, in their place, give companies a cash reward for new drugs.
It's really simple, folks: If you want PRIVATE CORPORATIONS to develop for the PUBLIC DOMAIN, you need to either give them fair financial incentives. This can come in the form of exclusivity or a public "bounty" or whatever. But it's JUST NOT RIGHT to ask a PRIVATE ENTITY to spend its own money only to have their PRIVATE ASSETS socialized for the benefit of the people. This is EXACTLY THE SAME as the government forcing you to open your home to, say, quartered troops, or forcing you to feed any homeless people in your neighborhood or forcing you to let the poor couple down the street borrow your new car for a couple hours a week. A corporation is a private entity, just like you and your household. It's easy to demonize corporations--ESPECIALLY VERIZON--but you can't just make laws that apply to "bad" corps and not "good" corps.
This is about private property rights.
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
From the reports I've seen, reconnecting the copper is about a 5 minute job. They "cut" your access to the primary network and plug the Fiber based system into it so your telephone signal is isolated, similar to unplugging one ethernet cable to plug in another. And realistically, even if they charged $250 to reconnect the copper (Universal Access means they have to be able to reconnect), how big a factor is that when buying a $500,000+ house?
When I signed up ,about a year ago, they were very upfront about cutting the copper. Since I was already using voip for a couple years it didn't matter much to me.
Since I already had a voip provider I didn't sign up for their phone service. Wonder if that means my copper is still intact?
You're almost right - we actually paid billions for a fiber network we never received. Not only that, but it can be argued that the telco's don't actually own any of the wires/cables/fiber, as it was all subsidized by the people (taxes) one way or the other. The same can be said for cable companies.
While I'm not one to liek government interference in business, this really does appear to be a utility function that should be owned by the public, much the same as other municipality owned services.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
There are two major concerns here. Telephone or backup service, and competition for internet access. As far as telephone service goes, most people I know don't even use the copper lines that may (or may not) come into their house. I haven't had a land line in years. Every household usually has at least two mobile phones, which more and more people are using for their primary telephone service anyway. Copper-based phone service is dying anyway, and frankly I don't see much reason to save it. As far as competition goes, there are so many other ways to get internet access (not the least of which is leeching from your neighbor, and other wireless solutions) that I hardly see this as a monopoly. This seems like a lot of hullaboo about nothing. So verizon wants to pay to put in infrastructure for a cool new technology? And you bitch, because that little wire that used to provide you with unreliable and dial-up is being cut? So what? There won't even be any technologies that use it in a few years.
A few years ago my folks wanted to get rid of the aerial telephone line running from the utility pole next to the street. They had previously gotten the power company (Dominion/VaPower) to bury the electricity feed and the cable company (Cox) to bury the cable feed.
Verizon would not bury the telephone feed which needed repaired anyway as it had become detached from the house during hurricane Isabel. So my parents had been hearing the Cox commercials about the digital phone service. At first I was rather apprehensive as the hard land line came in pretty useful post-hurricane since I was able to strip the ends off of the aerial and attach a normal phone jack to it to keep our phone service going.
Cox's original plan was to put the converter on the utility pole and use the existing aerial, with Verizon having to repair the aerial (because it is "theirs"). After the guy came out he realized that the buried cable line was RG-11 (fairly fat for a residence) and that he could do the box right on the side of the house. So now my parents have no last-mile copper telephone to their house because we eventually convinced Verizon to take the damn aerial down.
One interesting thing about the cable phone service is that the box has a notice on it warning of 90 VDC. Apparently, the RG-11 line caries cable signals plus 90VDC power to the converter outside which splits it into phone service and regular (non-powered) cable. What a great idea! So it never goes out and no batteries are required.
They do it to you if you dont even have either, but are eligible for DSL, if you inquire about FIOS, even if it isnt available, they'll disable your high speed permanently, forcing you to wait for fios.
From which I hear, despite the speed gains, you are at verizon's mercy as you have to pay them for each new computer you get so you can use it with their router and only their router, which is either supplied by d-link or actiontec. There goes the home router business.
FIOS is sick and should be seen as an anti-competitive behavior. Sorry, I think I'll either stay with shitty dialup or get shitty cable instead.
A lot of people with POTS are still up a creek because they have cordless phones which don't all work so well when the AC is gone.
I was in Best Buy getting cordless phones. Some guy was looking at the row of identical-looking phones with eyes glazed over. I was looking like I knew what I was looking for. So he asked me what it was that could possibly set one apart from the others. I had a simple answer, "I only buy cordless phones with batteries in the base so that they work when the power is off." His eyes lit up, he joined me in the hunt, and we both left with a phone that will work for hours (of talk time, days of stand-by) in the event of a power outage. Actually, since I have 3 handsets, I can use the base and one phone, then swap batteries and talk for another 6 hours. If I talk for 12 hours straight and the power is still out, I'm SOL. Oh, and that's longer than the batteries on FTTH usually is. I believe the standard is 6 or 8 hours.
Learn to love Alaska
I've had FIOS installed at my house twice at my house (business line and residential line). Both times I asked the tech not to remove the copper. There was no bitching at all. He simply left it in place. The 4 pairs that were originally there are still there and provide dial-tone.
Incidentally, the battery lasts a damned long time, but it doesn't cover the data or video services, only the voice. The power was out for 9 hours last night and the damned ONT for the residential line was beeping once a minute the whole time; and I don't even subscribe to the FIOS voice services. (The business line's ONT is connected to a UPS that could run it for days).
Why would you mod him down? It's not a troll or flamebait. For the umpteenth time... disagreeing with a post, or thinking it uses poor reasoning, is not a reason to mod it down.
Anonymous because 1) blatantly offtopic and 2) this is really a personal reply to you, so I don't care if the score is low.
Here you go: USPS. It's a public company, and it still has a monopoly on letter carrying.
No, it's a quasi-governmental agency. It's only private in that it isn't funded through taxes. It still gets some interesting breaks, especially re: parking tickets and license plates.
It's just this simple: If we put copper-esque regs on Fiber at this point, NO FIBER WILL BE RUN. It would be a disservice to the shareholders of Verizon to spend BILLIONS to roll out fiber networks that its competitors can immediately use "against" them.
Which is why it makes sense for municipalities to run their own last mile networks and rent them out to anyone who wants to use them.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Seriously, six nines costs a lot of money -- is it really necessary?
Sure - ever have a heart attack?
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
It's the same thing we always see from the telcos, and which explains the terrible Internet, cellular, and POTS service we have in the U.S. Instead of competing, they run whining to either Congress or the regulators for special protection. Because there is no way for consumers to counteract well-funded political interests, Congress gives them whatever they want, and they don't have to compete anymore.
...and fellow geeks wonder why I'm against Network Neutrality. Telcos were born and maintained as monopolies because of their regulatory capture with the FCC and municipality rights-of-way, creating a barrier to entry. (Sanctioning the FCC to regulate packet routing also violates the end-to-end principle in the guise of protecting it.)
The solution is to let anyone run a line to your house, allowing for free entry. This could include local co-ops such as a neighborhood LAN sharing a T3.
If we want Fiber networks to be public infrastructure, then we need to pay for it with public monies. Regulate it, fine, but give them gigantic tax incentives to actually run the stuff.
The copper infrastructure they are destroying was paid for with public monies. They should have a duty to continue to provide that infrastructure or an equivalent. Since they are installing fiber in its place, they should be obliged to provide the same access to the fiber, ONLY because they are destroying and/or ceasing to maintain infrastructure paid for with public monies.
The alternative as I see it is to severely penalizing + fining them for destroying publicly funded infrastructure that is needed for their competitors to operate, and using the proceeds of the fines + future public infrastructure subsidize, to subsidize their competitors (instead of them) in building public infrastructure to take the place of what is being destroyed.
Also, to the extent that fiber was subsidized with public funds, it would be only fair that the major providers be obligated to lease certain access to that fiber also.
First off, I responded instead of modding him down, making your chastising of me rather unnecessary, no? I chose to respond specifically because, as I stated, his logic was sound but the premise incorrect, so I sought to correct that premise.
Secondly, it *is* appropriate to mod someone down when they have posted something that is technically incorrect, offers no particular insight because it is incorrect, and has reached a mod level of 4 or 5. This helps to separate the chaff from the wheat in the discussion. Many people browse at 4+ to save time and see what other users have agreed are the better posts in the thread, which means that some users are going to mod posts down as well as up in determining which are "best".
This isn't kindergarten, everyone doesn't get an A, we aren't all right all the time. I agree with you that posts should not be modded down for disagreeing with opinions or for petty reasons. However when a post is factually incorrect and we learn nothing by the poster's misinformation (OTOH sometimes it is useful to leave a bad post up so others can demonstrate why it is wrong) then there's really nothing wrong with modding it down.
If there were a thread discussing physics and someone was just using incorrect math to make their point, should we leave that at +5 insightful?
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
Since your belief is that misinformation should be modded down, then you should be petitioning moderators to knock YOUR post back to 1, shouldn't you?
The congress hasn't given a DIME to telcos to roll-out fiber. Some STATE governments have, but not federally. So if STATES want to regulate how their money is spent, fine, but the Feds should stay out of it unless they want to give a NATIONAL rebate to these companies.
And as for all this "The gov't paid to roll out copper." As far as I know, nobody has been paid taxpayer dollars to roll out copper since THE GREAT DEPRESSION. True, they did roll out some ridiculous amount--like 100,000 miles---but do you think those lines are still in use? (<snicker>maybe by bellsouth</snicker>).
The copper networks were opened up for competition in 1996 but that was a whole different world compared to today. In 1996, for 2-way communication, the copper network was the only game in town. That's just not the case today. Cellular, Wireless and Cable both now compete with the copper networks.
I look forward to your denouncement of your own post!
Cheers!
I was asking in the context of already having a (theoretical) four nines landline and two nines cell phone (actual reliability I don't know). The chance of having a heart attack at the same time as your four nines land line and your two nines landline are both not working is what? I suppose there are some pathological cases, maybe if you're extremely high risk -- but then that's not everyone (not even close). I buy health, auto, and homeowners insurance because it makes statistical sense. I don't think this makes sense. In my opinion, paying for a six nines landline ought to be optional -- you can calculate the risk and pay whatever you want.
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