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FCC Fines Verizon For Failing To Investigate Rural Phone Problems
WheezyJoe writes Verizon agreed to a $5 million settlement after admitting that it failed to investigate whether its rural customers were able to receive long distance and wireless phone calls. The settlement is related to the FCC's efforts to address what is known as the rural call completion problem. Over an eight-month period during 2013, low call answer rates in 39 rural areas should have triggered an investigation, the FCC said. The FCC asked Verizon what steps it took, and Verizon said in April 2014 that it investigated or fixed problems in 13 of the 39 areas, but did nothing in the other 26.
"Rural call completion problems have significant and immediate public interest ramifications," the FCC said in its order on the Verizon settlement today. "They cause rural businesses to lose customers, impede medical professionals from reaching patients in rural areas, cut families off from their relatives, and create the potential for dangerous delays in public safety communications." Verizon has been accused of letting its copper landline network decay while it shifts its focus to fiber and cellular service. The FCC is working a plan to protect customers as old copper networks are retired.
"Rural call completion problems have significant and immediate public interest ramifications," the FCC said in its order on the Verizon settlement today. "They cause rural businesses to lose customers, impede medical professionals from reaching patients in rural areas, cut families off from their relatives, and create the potential for dangerous delays in public safety communications." Verizon has been accused of letting its copper landline network decay while it shifts its focus to fiber and cellular service. The FCC is working a plan to protect customers as old copper networks are retired.
"Grandpa, what are those things called, again?"
Does Verizon feel that these fines obviate their responsibility to act? Is it cheaper to pay the fines than fix the problem?
So Verizon accepted a fine of $5,000,000. For Verizon, I call that a success. Given their size nothing at all is going to cost them less than 5 million. There is no way in hell that investigations into rural phone problems would have cost less.
This is just the cost of doing business, and it's certainly more profitable to break the law and pay the fine than it is to do what they are supposed to do.
Until the fines are set to a level to remove all profit and THEN put a punishment on top, large business will continue to flout the law because it's more profitable.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Because I had to call them every year for 15 years to fix corroded connections at the pole tap. Always the same problem and a runaround for them to check the pole tap. "It must be your house wiring, we need to check that first" was their textbook response.
The FCC knows who wears the pants in Washington.
And to pay this fine, the execs have their coffee ladies sweep the corners of the executive lounge for dropped money...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
At my home, I'm about 9 miles from anywhere I can get cell reception. The simple truth is that Verizon doesn't care about investing in low population density areas, whether it's cellular or wired connectivity. Why would they? It costs the same to put up a tower in rural areas (neglecting real estate cost), and they recover far fewer customers to offset the cost. The bottom line: Deer don't use 4G. It leaves some of us out in the cold, but the business model makes sense.
The Universal Service Fee (i.e. Tax) that is on everyone's phone bill is supposed to cover the cost of doing this. Unfortunately, it has become just added profit as the phone companies (Verizon, AT&T, etc.) do not use it to subsidize rural phone service. If this was a Libertarian Paradise, you probably would pay $500 dollars a month for landline service while someone in a densely populated urban area would pay $5 a month. Cell phone service would have a greater disparity in price.
Ouch! Can anybody spot me?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
it's been 3 or 4 years since several telcos petitioned the FCC to set out the guidelines for making VoIP replace copper, and take care of all the legal aspects in the separate states. until that happens, NostrilDrippus Predicts! (tm) there will be precious little formal abandonment of wireline cables and service. it's still possible to make a buck on the copper, but increasingly the way that works is to cut the ranks of the techs who repair it.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Tough shit..
Something like $100 per customer per day it goes unresolved.
Apparently going through the FCC is the only way to get anyone to fix anything.
https://support.t-mobile.com/t...
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
I live in an area that is serviced by AT&T (Southwestern Bell doing business as). This is a rural area in North Texas near Fort Worth that has smaller holdings counted in acres or tens of acres and not generally hundreds of acres. This location is maybe 12 miles from the central office that services my land lines. Almost every time there are heavy rains or even ice or snow (remember, Texas) the phone lines go down. It takes nearly a week to get them repaired. But come the next weather event down they go. And cell phone service is not good. I can walk ten feet within my house and lose the connection with the cell tower.
AT&T expressed their disdain of Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) (analog telephone over copper pairs) about 4 years ago when they filed a request for rule making with the FCC to outlaw POTS. They compared POTS to analog television and used the reasoning that if the FCC could force the switch to digital television and relegate analog television to the garbage bin of history, the FCC could do the same for POTS. I believe it was discussed here on Slashdot. This must have been their marketing department because AT&T didn't realize the technical impact this could have in densely populated areas that have extremely high telephone usage such as skyscrapers with a few thousand people that were constantly on the phone for business. It may be that VOIP would negate the problem but they actually focused on cell phone usage.
The big telephone companies keep dreaming of having everything go over to cell or other services that have MUCH higher profit margins than POTS. If the biggies make the service bad enough they hope they can drive people off of it.
How much of this, though, is due to abusive practices like traffic pumping?
There were hearings and talk of reform. Did anything every happen?
Is it possible that the reasons that long-distance calls (in or out) don't complete because they've been too greedy abusively-routing 900-calls and the like through these areas?
Save/make $10 million.
Pay $5 million fine.
$5 million profit.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
"Verizon has been accused of letting its copper landline network decay ..."
In our area, Verizon simply sold the landline network to another carrier.
News flash! It's not just phone service we can't get in rural areas. Even though Time-Warner ran a cable to serve a gated community a few miles from us, they don't want to branch off and serve the local area. I asked.
That works out to about $.10/customer.
I am sure Verizon is laughing at the FCC for this one.
Anyone who would defend even the concept of an HOA is a greedy fascist. "Let's control every facet of the neighbor's lives, lest they devalue our precious property values by a few percentage points!!"
They need a new way doing fines!! $5 million is the fine and then for every $1 you take in the fine you take another $20 on deposit until the issue is fixed!! Once fixed, they get the money back!! So, for this situation - there would be a $5 million fine and a $100 million deposit!! Once the issue is fixed, the $100 million gets returned - if it is not fixed in a timely manor, that $100 million would be the rest of the fine!! That way, there is an incentive to actually fix issues and not let them happen in the first place!!
I say let the free market decide. Those rural customers don't want Obama's cronies in the FCC's interfering in their business, they don't want FCC regulations, so I think the Fed should just ignore them and leave them to deal with Verizon on their own.
"They cause rural businesses to lose customers"
This is the argument I don't hear enough about network neutrality. If everyone's one traffic isn't treated with some equality then we essentially let telco companies choose the winners and losers in a whole lot of businesses, not just Internet related businesses. If companies want monopoly protects they should be hit and hit hard when they refuse to treat rural or any other customers the same. Verizon shouldn't only be fined, the should lose their entire business in these areas.
I'm glad you feel that way. It means my HOA is successful because it keeps people like you out of my neighborhood.
We've already run off 2 libertarians, neither of them seemed to want to maintain their property. And another has rented his place out. Turns out those property taxes he's so against, you know the ones that pay for schools? Weren't providing very good schools in the area and he couldn't afford to send his child to a nice private school. So he had to move his tax dodging libertarian, "I shouldn't have to pay for anybody else's kids to attend school!" , ass to school district with better schools, and higher taxes. So now he gets to pay for somebody else's higher taxes via rent which isn't deductible!
Speaking of pocket change, the fine is hitting the wrong pockets, since it's a cost that the company will simply pass onto its customers.
Company fines need to impact the executives directly, since it is they who are responsible for the problem and it is they who are the only party able to make the required changes.
VoIP still requires some form of service to the house, and that's almost always copper in rural areas.
Why would that be so bad?
People that want rural living should pay for rural living and should not force urbanites to subsidize their quiet, peaceful life on the farm away from the noise of the city.
The US government has spent the past 50+ years using subsidies and regulations encourage people to get out of the cities.
What has it accomplished except to gut cities and spread asphalt everywhere?
is calls that don't go through because the rural company expects 5, 10 or more cents to connect and the other side only pays 1 or 2.
If a booster won't cut it for you, you have to kick it up a notch and buy a cell phone repeater with directional antenna. These have MUCH higher power levels but they start at around $3k. So now you have to ask yourself if that price is worth it.
This couldn't be more wrong. In a Libertarian Paradise, the phone company would charge more for moderately populated areas because that's where they will make the most money, and the rural people won't have any service because no one would bother with such a small population even with a large profit margin, because it will bring in a fraction of the revenue a moderately populated area will. Oh, and the densely packed urban area... well only if the infrastructure doesn't cost too much to install. It takes forever to wire up New York City with new fiber because of the construction hassles.
> densely populated urban area would pay $5 a month.
No. Here in Seattle, the phone service is horrific because the city does not allow CenturyLink to make upgrades or repairs. It is much cheaper to pay hourly employees to install cabling than it is to hire teams of lawyers to fight a wealthy city. There's a reason it is so hard to get a good working phone line here.
POTS must die. die. die. Just like Flash. Darn shame that old copper wires don't work as well as they used to. Did the article say something about replacing the copper with fiber. Like, what's up with that?
I think you're on to something. Could be that the f***ing FCC isn't the knight in shining armor here but a bunch of busybodies with no clue how to encourage competition and innovation (much less raise capital) but plenty of political agendas, an incestuous relationship with the companies they seek to regulated, and a total contempt for the first amendment. Kill the FCC.
If you can't get good POTS over your copper wires, then you're not going to get a reliable xDSL connection. If the phone service is suffering from "neglect", then it seems to me that the DSL service would as well. But who in their right mind would go with DSL if fiber was available?
I was more or less forced into HughesNet almost ten years ago because Bellsouth (now AT&T) couldn't be bothered to diagnose and repair my ridiculously noisy rural copper land-line. When they installed a DSLAM just three miles from our home I thought we might have found a solution. No such luck, the copper was too noisy for DSL. Finally, after years of back and forth with them, and having technicians come out twice a month (I couldn't even maintain a dial-up connection) I simply threw in the towel and gave up.
Woosh. The FCC mandates that they do exactly that- provide the same basic service to rural customers. It's the law. They aren't doing that, hence they are in violation of the law to the tune of $5,000,000. Same requirements apply to many other services, including roads.
Your city-centric biases don't change that fact.
Living is large cities is a relatively new concept, in the grand scheme of things. You should try to get out a little. We have very low noise, great air quality, no traffic, no light pollution, no noisy neighbors, lower crime, etc. I still can't see why anyone would want to live in a city.
No one, but the point being that if you need to get your internet over copper, then most likely fiber isn't available to you. Like it isn't available to a very large portion of the country. Rural service is almost always over copper.
In these places you can't even get cable, so fiber's just a pipe dream at that point. Only other possibility is satellite, which last I tried it blew fat chunks, though I hear they've improved it quite a lot in the past few years.
Just exercising my rights. Because if you don't exercise them you lose them.
It's that the Republican, Libertarian, Open Carry, NRA mantra?