Verizon Accellerates Exit from Land Lines

The writing's been on the wall a long time.  Verizon is exiting the POTS (wired phone line) business.


However, they are doing it without grace nor responsibility.  Instead, they are unceremoniously delaying repairs, cancelling upgrades and replacements, dropping services like "distinctive ring", allowing DSL to wither, and fostering degradations of service to entice customers to switch to other products like Voice Link which uses wireless to connect home phones. Ka-ching!

Their CEO, Lowell McAdam, came out on all this in 2012 when he publicly admitted they were dropping their rural land lines; a direction that was proven out with their recent sale of their northern New England services to FairPoint Communications.

The sad part is it's another step in their descent of decreasing value and quality to the public in favor of the bottom line.  Rather than upgrading their entire population they were entrusted to serve, Verizon is removing copper service and refusing to complete its optical fiber expansion.

It is hard to fathom how the FCC can allow such a Golden Child anointed with the seal of the public trust be allowed to, in effect, drop their higher cost customers in favor of keeping the richer, more cost effective ones. That's not public service.  It's POG (plain old greed).  How much more Machiavellian can it get?  Oh.  Yeah. The brothers Koch and the corruption of the Supreme Court!

They've already backed out of New Hampshire and Vermont in favor of wireless because, obviously, wireless is a cash cow.  One cell tower can service 1,000's of customers with only 1 back-haul cable running the the next higher level of their cabling infrastructure.

That, in effect, significantly lowers the quality of communications.  If we rate POTS for quality, consistency, and reliability, it easily ranks 8 out of 10.  Wireless varies between a 2 or 3, unintelligible many times in one call, doesn't even work sometimes, is seldom full duplex, and is entirely dependent on a patchwork quilt of secondary and tertiary cell tower providers and carriers.  Wireless benefits are: it's mobile.  It's negatives are: Very low quality; very expensive; very insecure; cannot be relied upon in an emergency; phones batteries only last a day or two; and they require frequent monitoring and user intervention.  In short: A terrible product.  Fiber is 10/10.  It is very reliable, studio quality audio, very high bandwidth, and can carry voice, video, data, and a lot more.

So unless you are lucky enough to already have a fiber connection - something they have stopped building out, then you're pretty well screwed until we can get the FCC to force all carriers to switch to fiber and server their entire area as part of their mandate to operate as a public utility and then put an end to the monopolies of service districts.  Now, most areas are allowed only one provider of communication lines even though others can resell the same lines making it look like a choice.

This isn't rocket science, people!  It's just a matter of the public standing up and forcing their representative to stop calling public service "socialism" like it's a dirty word and to lock up the influence peddlers like the Koch bothers, eliminate all private campaign financing, and force public companies to serve the public before themselves or lose their license.  It's that simple!!