Slashdot Mirror
Verizon Workers Can Now Be Fired If They Fix Copper Phone Lines (arstechnica.com)
Verizon has told its field technicians in Pennsylvania that they can be fired if they try to fix broken copper phone lines. Instead, employees must try to replace copper lines with a device that connects to Verizon Wireless's cell phone network, ArsTechnica reports. From the article:This directive came in a memo from Verizon to workers on September 20. "Failure to follow this directive may result in disciplinary action up to and including dismissal," the memo said. It isn't clear whether this policy has been applied to Verizon workers outside of Pennsylvania. The memo and other documents were made public by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) union, which asked the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission to put a stop to the forced copper-to-wireless conversions. The wireless home phone service, VoiceLink, is not a proper replacement for copper phone lines because it doesn't work with security alarms, fax machines, medical devices such as pacemakers that require telephone monitoring, and other services, the union said.
I left AT&T because they are fucking douche bags
I left Sprint because they were incompetent douche bags
I left T-Mobile because They were worse than AT&T...and they are douche bags
Now I'm with Verizon. Who do I go to next when they start pulling this type of shit on me?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Although this seems to formalize a policy, the reality is that the various telephone companies have been cutting budgets for maintenance of copper phone lines, switching stations, and networks for many years. Ask anybody who has a business need for POTS lines about how hard it is to get any problems with them corrected--it's basically impossible. If you fight with them long enough and ward off enough attempts to be switched to a VoiP service to replace the broken lines, they'll trigger a "truck roll" and then tell you "it's all good" when it's clearly not "all good."
For example, every one of our remote sites we have a POTS line for the times when (not if, when) the main internet access is offline, taking the VPN to access that facility from HQ offline as well. I have a POTS line at each that I can dial-up to and remotely administer things. Guess how much fun it is to discover a noisy line with a modem? (Hint: Not fun.) Guess how even much more fun it is to discover you have a noisy line at a site in the middle of the only time of year you ever need to use that POTS line, during the Internet outage at that site? (Hint: Super-not-fun.)
Who did what now?
Apparently it's not enough to getfederal subsidies for copper telecom.
No, they want to destroy the infrastructure they're getting federal subsidies to maintain.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Technicians can fix the copper line “if the customer does not qualify” for wireless service. In those cases, the tech must document the reason the customer didn’t qualify for VoiceLink.
“It is a requirement that migration to VoiceLink be your first option when the customer qualifies and the trouble is in Verizon's network,” the memo says.
So it looks like if a tech is called to a site where all they have is voice over copper, and they're having issues with said VOC, then the techs are to simply test to see if the wireless service will work there, and if so, switch them to it. If not, then fix the copper line.
I'm not defending Verizon, but the headline here is misleading.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
I'm sure your cable TV provider could provide you with a land line. Hmm ... maybe you need to become more tolerant of douche bags? ;-)
Basically, not only is Verizon abandoning the copper cable plant that they built and were expected to maintain because they accepted government money to build it and maintain it in the first place, but they are also involuntarily switching customers from a Public Utility Commission regulated utility to an unregulated one that lacks features of the land line service. I'm absolutely sure that the obvious illegality of this has been appropriately muted by well applied lobbying and campaign dollars to the appropriate local and state politicians right?
Greed: Don't fix the copper wire infrastructure we get paid to maintain.
Control: If you're moved off of copper wire POTS, then in an emergency or power outage you cannot effectively call for help. Wireless systems get overrun with numbers of calls if the emergency is large enough (hurricane, tornado, flood, etc) and your call will not get through. Or you won't have power (wireless), whereas copper is designed to (almost) always have power and JUST WORK.
Power: See above. Put on your tin foil hat, but this is one step in a wave to disrupt and control communication when a "state of emergency" or "martial law" is declared. Just wait.
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
If it's not powered by the central office, then it's not telephone service, and the frauds at Verizon should be completely liable for all problems incurred by their false advertising.
We must all freak out even though the article itself says there is an exception form to fill out if the copper line is required. For 99% of people who are out of a FIOS area this is a good thing as it gets their foot in the door for providing some form of wireless internet that will far exceed what they can offer via DSL. The
The vast majority of customers could care less about copper or wireless or whether they are getting money to maintain copper. Presumably the wireless system has a battery ups like cable to maintain service during short outages. Does everyone here have parents that work in a copper mine or something?
I'm an old guy, and for most of my life, POTS was iron-reliable. I picked up my phone, and it worked through rain, snow, sleet, hail, and even when the power was out.
Lately, my mom was having trouble with her landline. It started going out everytime it rained. I think it went out once when it just got humid! AT&T did "fix" it, but they must have just done a quick patch, because it started doing it again soon. They sent someone again, and did a better job of fixing it, but who knows when it will go out again.
The good thing is, it did encourage her to get a cellphone, which I'd been trying to nudge her to for awhile.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
When asked about raising the data limits on wireless, they cry about how overloaded their wireless is.
There was a running joke in my hometown, people like me that had a TON of fax machines to service, that one of the main trunk cables running down one of our major streets, would flake out every time it rained. It got so bad, they PERMANENTLY attached a large tank of liquid nitrogen to freeze out the water. In the summer, you could see frost on that cable for about 3 blocks. In the last 6 months they have removed it and you can see a brand spanking new digital box sitting at the base of the pole. If thieves knew most of the copper lines weren't being used, they'd be ripping them down in droves!
The native New Hampshire people want you to fucking quit polluting their state with stupid.
I don't think Verizon knows what the word discussion really means. No matter how hard that tech yells at that paper, at no point is it going to consider saying anything other than what is printed on it. >_>
I'd be pretty upset if I called my vet to come see why my horse is sick and they simply shot my horse and gave me a bicycle.
What problem does the giant walkie talkie setup solve?
There's more than one use for that copper. Replacing it with cellular is not moving forward and usually a downgrade if you're remote. Replacing it with fiber would be reasonable.
Most modern landline phones are powered with wall current.
In the US, at least, POTS lines power the phone using DC current over the POTS (copper) line -- for normal phone usage -- no house power is needed for ring, dial tone and calls in/out. VoIP modems provide this power to the phones from either house current or their battery backup. Extra features the phone may have, like voice mail, are usually powered by house current and unavailable during a power outage.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
The cordless phones and phones like that need power from the outlet in order to work. That's why one should keep an extremely cheap, no-frills phone on hand in case there's an emergency so that there is something that will work with the landline if nothing else does.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
A vote for Hillary, well any Democrats on the ballot, is rewarding the tactics of the DNC. They don't care if people bitch and moan. They only care if people vote Democrat. Bitching and moaning and then voting Dem makes all your complaints irrelevant. Things will not change, a party will not reform, until they lose the votes of otherwise loyal voters. Your only power is your vote, not a letter nor an email nor a text nor a post nor a tweet.
Because corporations are more sophisticated now. They realize they can take government subsidies for rolling out internet infrastructure and, when they don't actually deliver, there are no consequences.
You don't really want that. If you did, you would move to any number of countries with no effective government. Somalia, for example.
What you are asking for is to be fucked over by the wealthy, with no government to protect you. Good luck!
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You are right, this is not Captialism = death
Bohpal, however...
This again? Stein supports vaccination, but has a problem with the way business is conducted by the FDA.
http://www.snopes.com/is-green...
For the nuke comments, sadly, I have to give you that one.
https://twitter.com/DrJillStei...
Think I'm doing a write-in for my cat this term.
When you live in a sick society, just about everything you do is wrong.
Money, basically.
Running cables means putting up poles, which is expensive. In urban and most suburban areas it also means digging trenches in the road, putting cable down and filling them in - which is horrifically expensive. That's why wired telecommunications is a natural monopoly. Rural electrification and universal telephone were only possible because the government run a subsidy program - they paid for the installation of cables out of tax money to cover those areas where it would otherwise not be economical.
Verizon wants everyone to go wireless because it's a lot cheaper to both install and maintain. If there's a fault you can just send an engineer to pull a unit from a rack and stick a new one in - you never need to close down a road for half a day and dig it up to find an underground fault, or trace through five different junction boxes from exchange to customer to figure out where the cable has corroded through.
You know, like backup generators, contracted fuel deliveries, etc.
For their "switching" offices. Not for the neighborhood "hubs". Once it's battery runs down, my secondary, non-POTS, phone service is off line no matter how much back-up power I still have. The only time my primary, POTS, phone service went off line was when a tree branch fell and took down the line from the pole to my house. Otherwise, it has always worked - even during the "Big Blackout" of 2003.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
If there is no violence, actual threat, coercion, or fraud there should be no crime
If there is no crime, there should be no crime. Excellent tautology there.
Unfortunately history has shown repeatedly over and over that there's always someone out to benefit themselves by hurting others. You want to be rid of government _and_ shitty corporations. How do you expect that's going to work? Do you think the next Standard Oil just say to themselves "you know, we're too big and concentrating too much power lets break ourselves up let competition reduce our profit margins!" That's not a choice any company ever has made. Maybe you just think you can get the entire country to boycott such practices? Stop driving and heating their homes for several months or years out of pure libertarian idealism while their children freeze around them?
You say you have the highest rate of BitCoin acceptance anywhere. Well good for you. What are you going to do about it in your magic world where neither large governments nor large companies exist? You might get someone to start a local ISP and roll out cabling to the richest parts of your town, but who would you convince to drop hundreds of millions of dollars to link up with England or Brazil or India? Or even the tens of millions of dollars to link to the next county? And if there is an entity large enough to spend that kind of money, would they not then fall into your "shitty corporation" category? Not to mention someone to generate all the electricity to run your computers and the ISP and everything else. Or do you have a cool billion sitting around to build your own power plant? And the land to build it on? And where's the motivation to keep your plant from polluting the environment? After all the crap you pump in the river only affects the town downstream you and your friends a perfectly fine! And what's your motivation to provide timely and cheap access to your electricity? Competition? How many power plants do you think the population (never mind the environment) could sustain? And just building lots of smaller plants doesn't really work either since bigger is just flat out better in almost all power plant designs (in terms of lower cost per watt.) Perhaps just assume everyone will go solar? That's at least space and environmentally efficient. Who's going to spend the time and money on research to improve solar technology is another question though (and there's definitely no reason to believe we've reached the peak of solar yet! Unless we stop trying.) Maybe get a lucky tinkerer in his back yard have a eureka moment eventually but dedicated research also costs huge amounts of money -- the scale of which is usually only available to governments and large corporations.
The problem with all these libertarian dreams is that they only work if a majority of people don't follow them, at least if you scale them up past the size of a small town or so where people are close enough to have significant and direct influence on each other. Beyond that, it almost always breaks down into "we want everything the world has to offer but don't want to accept responsibility for our part in it." Its just not a winning formula.
Government exists for a reason. Sure they have a habit of stepping into areas they really shouldn't be (marriage is a good example) but what you need is checks against that, not complete elimination. And even the libertarians who grudgingly accept a small government still don't want to pay taxes as if governments can magically pull money out of thin air (well technically they can just print it, but that only leads to mass inflation. So yay you get to keep your $1000 this year but its only worth $10 in next year's money and pennies the year after. Savings! Then again a lot of you want to return to the gold standard so back to pulling money out of thin air.)
Ok so I've definitely ranted far too long already but the TL;DR is this: Libertarian idealism is simply impractical on any sort of large
Because, as the article states, fax transmission fails on cellular networks. My home state's means testing process for health insurance assistance requires applicants to mail or fax documents supporting my eligibility, including the applicant's birth certificate, most recent tax return, and the last 30 days of pay stubs. The instructions specifically state that a fax is more likely to be received by the deadline than mailed printed documents.
Because someone has to pay for it and nobody likes paying for things anymore. Companies don't like investing when it negatively affects the next quarterly report, even if they'd see a return in 5 years. And homeowners aren't going to pay for a line that does exactly what their current line does (if they could even afford it in the first place.)
I mean none of that should be taken as absolutes -- obviously companies occasionally manage to think beyond 3 months and there's obviously some homeowners who get enough benefit from fiber over copper to drop the cash on it when their phone company refuses to do so, but neither of those are the common case.
Back in the day when the copper was being deployed originally, this was of course still true but the government stepped in and made sure the wires were run, either directly or through major incentives to local providers.
There was some effort to do that again with fiber but the government also doesn't want to spend anything anymore and we're culturally super against corporate oversight these days to boot leading to more than one fiasco where companies took the incentives and then just didn't bother following through (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060131/2021240.shtml.) That puts a fast damper on the attempts to incentivize companies and we're all left in a world where widespread fiber is a far-future, if ever, dream instead of a modern reality.
I live deep in the woods in central Oregon. My phone line has ~35 repair tube things on it (big pringles-sized black cans) between the main pole and the 5 miles to my house. Falling trees break it almost every year. Verizon and AT&T provide land line access, and CenturyLink provides my 0.6MBps DSL (I know, ugh).
Who -owns- the line? And wouldn't switching to a cell access point fuck everyone's DSL? I know so little about phone lines....
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested