I hate to say it but this article reeks of Neo-Luddism.
Fiber is the future and it it here to stay. In trying to hold on to the old tech, these Verizon customers are forcing Verizon to stagger their support between two technologies for much longer than they would otherwise - leading to diminished customer service and perceived reliability for both.
Right. Forget about that whole thing about landline phones being governed by laws that regulate how they are run, how long they're permitted to be down, etc for people's safety and ability to contact emergency services and force everyone to switch to VOIP which is run as an information service with basically no regulation so your home phone line can go down for days at a time and you can't do anything about it.
Unfortunately, you're at the mercy of the end provider for technical expertise, in my case Verizon. I tried DSL from another provider a while back. Of my 30 day trial, it was down for 7 days because a Verizon tech randomly unplugged something in our neighborhood box.
Well not all levels, just the line itself. So you do escape the gimmicky billing / traffic restrictions / artificially-constrained connection rates / horrible support. But yeah, you mainly have to hope things just work and the telco is able to leave the circuit alone. (and that they aren't still petty about having to open up their lines. although if that's a problem, why would you want to encourage it by giving in?)
I've got this problem that seemingly every 4-6 months, lots of line errors/disconnects develop (consistent over days). Call up the ISP, and when they run a test, the line goes back to normal. Last time they even sent an ATT (nee SBC) lineman out anyway, but of course his test looked great too. Apparently you can pay Sis Bell $1k or so for "line conditioning". If it gets worse, my plan is to just get the ISP to provision a second circuit and then cancel the first.
But overall, it's certainly much less stress than dealing with the cable company or telco directly.
What does it matter? "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."
Maybe it's cool to hate on this article for being about 100-year-old tech, but the real problem is that Verizon--a piece of the old AT&T monopoly--is right back up to the old AT&T tricks.
Verizon stopped rolling out fiber.
Verizon isn't investing in their old copper network.
Are they losing customers? Not really. For many customers, Verizon is one of maybe two choices. If the other choice is worse, what do you do?
The article is about those to whom they are trying to roll out fiber, but insist they want copper instead. People who have fiber in their buildings, who just need to have it run upstairs to their apartment, who instead want the copper repaired.
This actually relates to areas where they've already deployed fiber; they don't want to keep maintaining the copper plant in those areas.
Verizon issued a press release a while back saying they'd no longer deploy FiOS in new areas. Fire Island was one of the few exceptions to that, and only because people weren't happy with Verizon trying to give them cellular service in place of the copper network the hurricane ruined.
I don't think it's neo-Luddism. I just think that certain outlets, like Ars, dislike US telecom companies and will seize on most opportunities to criticize them.
Now, US telecom companies aren't very likeable, sure. I'm with them there, as I imagine most people are. But it's not good journalism.
Imagine this was an article about a web server provider... the customers want to stay with their current server with 99% uptime, the provider wants to switch them to a faster server with 90% uptime.
In a properly regulated market the customer gets to choose the option that suits them best, but as everyone knows the situation with US ISPs is bananas, far too much power in the hands of too few companies.
A better analogy would be: you shared a web server with 99 other users, splitting the cost 100 ways. Then the provider installed a new, faster server (with marginally smaller uptime -- easily worked around by buying a backup battery), to which all 99 of your fellow customers migrated. You refuse to migrate and want to stay on the old server.
In a free market, the provider would say something like "that's fine, we'll keep maintaining the old server as long as you're willing to pay the costs", where said costs are now 100x of what they previously were, since you're no longer sharing the upkeep. You could then decide yourself if this were really the best use of your resources.
In Verizon's case, though, prices on copper POTS service are regulated and can't be raised to reflect upkeep costs. So when most customers switch to fiber, the money coming in from the few remaining copper customers doesn't actually cover maintenance costs. That means maintenance of the copper network is being subsidized by FiOS customers. Whatever Verizon's other evils (and I agree with you that there are many), a government-mandated transfer of wealth from fiber adopters to copper-clinging Luddites is not good policy.
> Whatever Verizon's other evils (and I agree with you that there are many), a government-mandated transfer of wealth from fiber adopters to copper-clinging Luddites is not good policy.
Most of what people perceive as Verizon's evils are the result of government-mandated transfer of wealth.[1]
The way most markets work is that new technology is introduced in the premium segment, and trickles down to everyone else once the fixed costs are amortized. In almost every city, Verizon is legally prevented from doing this. If they want to wire up a city with FiOS, they can't start with the rich neighborhoods and expand to poorer neighborhoods as it makes sense to do so. They have to commit to wiring up the whole city in one go. Because that's an unattractive proposition in most places, they've halted new FiOS deployment.
The same thing is true of the existing copper network. Many of the places that are currently wired shouldn't be wired. In a free market, they wouldn't be wired. It makes no sense to wire them, for remoteness or density reasons. The reason they're wired is that the government taxed certain of Verizon's customers to subsidize the customers that it doesn't make sense to build out to.
[1] I'm not against such programs as a principle, but when you try to implement it "by the back door" instead of through direct subsidy, as the government has done in the telecom sector, you get exactly the sort of dysfunction that we see now.
You're absolutely right. Rural America and poor people shouldn't have access to the internet or phone service. It is a horrible tragedy that we have a universal service fund that helped to give everyone in the country a basic level of service.
If we want to give these people/regions services then we should be clear about what we are doing and explicitly subsidize them, and fund it by explicitly taxing others. Instead, these policies implicitly subsidize them by implicitly taxing others.
Why should we subsidize peoples' housing choices? And if we do, we should do it directly, instead of creating a regime that makes it unattractive for companies to invest in telecom infrastructure.
That's not a good analogy. Home phone pots is reliable and regulated. VoIP information services are not. I can choose between two bad providers here in NYC (time warner cable and Verizon dsl), both of which suffer from regular outtages, often lasting a day or longer.
Except that Verizon's phone service over fiber is priced and regulated in exactly the same way as their copper service. It is still effectively the same landline service.
Forcing Verizon to maintain copper means slower rollout of fiber and slower internet. It isn't reasonable for people (Ars) to want faster better internet service, and also to complain when copper is removed.
"Call Restrictions: You cannot receive Collect or third Party Calls, and you cannot place 900 calls using FiOS Digital Voice"
"Battery Back Up In case of a power outage, FiOS Digital Voice will operate on battery back up for approximately 8 hours if an active battery is inserted in the Battery Backup Unit"
That is not the same quality of service that I expect from my copper POTS service.
Verizon's POTS over fiber product is nearly impossible to get. It's unavailable online. Calling in they claim they've never heard of it according to multiple people who have tried.
It doesn't matter if you force Verizon to maintain copper or not, Verizon cancelled all new FiOS rollouts back in 2010. Unless you're in an area already serviced by FiOS and under an agreement, you won't get fiber from Verizon. Note that they will finish the few bits of neighborhoods where they have an agreement and most of the fiber laid... eventually... unless they decide to renege on their promises, of course. Verizon agreed to set FiOS up for all of NYC by 2014 and has been trying to weasel out of that agreement for over 2 years. My neighborhood has no fiber service yet.
It's hard to get except in the exact situation the original article is talking about. They will give you FIOS pots when they are just trying to get rid of copper.
They stopped rolling out fiber because they needed to improve adoption in areas where they already deployed. Supporting copper is slowing the whole thing down.
They stopped the rollout in 2010 and laid the majority of the staff working on it off. Verizon has already stated they have no plan to ever roll out to the remaining areas not already under agreement.
In theory, sure. You can get POTS service over fiber - and Verizon used to install it all the time, but now they try very aggressively to steer you towards their digital voice product.
I'm not in Verizon territory, but I did try ordering the Verizon Freedom Package earlier today from their website (POTS + unlimited LD, an asston of features) just for the purposes of arguing in Manhattan, an area where FiOS service is offered.
Nothing I tried would let me order that; I'd always, inevitably be redirected back to the digital voice order page.
> There is no such thing as a proper regulated market.
There is a distinction between the absence and presence of regulatory capture. Preventing regulatory capture is obviously a hard problem but that's hardly any reason to countenance its presence.
Water is a fairly well regulated market in the US. It works because the actual cost of water is low and the external costs of things like water born diseases are vary high.
There are many other examples where a cheap good's price is significantly increased but few people care because the regulations don't impact them and it's still cheap.
A good example is the western states that don't have many natural resources. The government decided that water was a human right, built a ton of irrigation in the desert, and now you have populous states like Arizona, Nevada, and much of Southern California that shouldn't exist and cannot sustainably exist.
There is plenty of water for people in those areas, not enough for plants. For comparison the 800 mile Alasca pipeline moves 10times as much oil per day as all of the worlds declination plays put together. Or the equivent of about 1 million peoples daily water use. Scaling it up and arizona could import 100% of it's water usage for less than 1% of it's GDP. It's not free but less than the heating costs in many northern states.
In the end it's just a question of how many thousandth of a cent your willing to pay per gallon and you can have water anywhere you want. Agriculture happens to need a fucktun of the stuff but food is easy to move and land in those areas is cheap. So, it actually is reasonable for people to build on cheap land out there simply because it's not useful for anything else.
PS: Shure, we are rapidly draining a few aquifers but there is little point in leaving the water there in the first place.
Looking at the price of importing water is misleading because its not priced properly anywhere in the U.S. And training those aquifers is precisely why places like Arizona aren't sustainable.
What does properly regulated mean? There are vast infrastructure requirements to operate as an ISP. Perhaps the government should treat fiber as a utility and rent out usage to ISPs?
For some definitions of "properly". Personally, I don't think regulations forcing a company to maintain outmoded infrastructure at the behest of a small portion of consumers would be proper.
They are a monopoly carrier. If you want a government backed monopoly, you have to accept a certain level of regulation. This is the cost of being in that business. If they'd rather not be in that business, that's another issue.
> A fiber line that carries POTS traffic is still subject to utility regulations.
A person at Public Knowledge told me that VZ is supposed to offer a POTS (well, TDMA) fully-tariffed-and-regulated voice service over FIOS.
That doesn't appear on their web pages, so I called to see if I could order it. Nobody in their call centers knows of such a product. Then I used a web-chat, and, surprise, the existence of such a thing was flatly denied.
I'm in VZ FIOS territory, but I'm not interested in being their customer.
No. If you live in a FIOS-served neighborhood and do not have existing copper, this product is unavailable. Instead you'll be offered an unregulated FIOS voice product.
It makes me sad that the FCC may put the brakes on fiber rollout because a few people are upset that their phones won't work during long blackouts. It must be a small population; I can't even name a single person under 50 that has a landline.
At some point telcos stopped supporting the telegraph too.
As someone in their twenties with a landline, I have to ask if you went around to every person you conceivably could and asked if they had a home phone. Utilities aren't exactly a source of frequent conversation.
That being said though, regardless of your preference, the point of the article is that there's advantages to copper that nobody is trying to replicate with fiber-based last mile delivery; all people are asking for is that there be no significant drawbacks for them if they're to be given something seen as an upgrade.
Think of it this way - what would you say if the gigabit fiber offerings we're seeing only gave 750 kbps of upload bandwidth?
I'm closing in on 50 and I dropped my landline years ago. I had a VOIP service at home for a while because cellular signals is very poor at my house, but dropped that when I switched to Republic Wireless. Now my phone uses WiFi at home and Sprint's network when I'm mobile.
Yes, I'm now subject to failures of my home internet service (Comcast), my cable modem, and my wireless router, and if I lose power it all goes offline. But so far it hasn't been enough of a problem that I want to go back to the expense of a separate POTS service.
Note that what you think of as a landline and what is counted (for regulation purposes) as a landline are two entirely different things. It's entire possible that you didnt have a regulated landline service, even though it appeared to be one.
Verizon cares only about ensuring that their phone service doesn't fall under the regulations of phone service
Perhaps I'm too sensitive but I feel the current Ars runs a lot of techno-sensationalist stories that often are inconsistent from one week to the next. Next week I expect to see Ars run a story chastising the US for its remaining high percentage of users still on slow copper internet whereas Europe and Korea have much faster internet speeds.
It's not just Verizon - Comcast and AT&T are also trying to kill copper, because that would allow them the same unregulated control over phone service that they already enjoy over the Internet.
Of course, the natural response to regulation is to find a way around it. That's why so many of our regulations simply result in non-value-added overhead and higher costs for everyone.
Every article I've read about Verizon suggests they're run by dickheads, I'm sure there would be plenty of people willing to switch to an alternative provider, why is LLU not popular in the US? To make it clear, LLU means you can lease the same copper or fibre lines to run your own ISP as long as you install your own routing gear in the exchange. I know it's very popular in the UK.
Under the current regulatory guidance from the FCC, LLU is only viable in the US for customers connected directly to a Central Office. For customers connected to a remote terminal, there is insufficient space to install 3rd party gear, and the incumbent carrier gets to be a monopoly on data services.
LLU has a much clearer remit in places like Europe where all the copper was laid by government owned telecoms - thus, the copper is clearly public property. As part of privatizing these telcos, LLU was introduced to avoid creating a private monopoly on telecommunication.
In the US, the situation might charitably be described as a bit more complicated - the copper was laid by private actors, although under protection from the state. It is, at least, a lot less obvious that the copper isn't some sort of private property.
It was popular. IMHO cable company advertising, webcrapps, and needlessly-streaming video tricked people into thinking they need super high bandwidth, which can only be provided over coax. Since cable TV has traditionally been seen as a luxury service, its lobbyists had a much easier time avoiding being seen as a monopoly.
Not only is this incredibly sleazy, it's a sign of things to come; it's incredibly clear that Verizon has ceased to give anything reminiscent of a fuck about their networks. How do you think that bodes for the longevity of LTE? Or FiOS for that matter?
Regardless of either, the PSTN is a great tool, and an incredible, self sustaining network. The fact that Verizon would shrug it off in favor of running off with the money Netflix gave them to resolve their peering dispute or what have you instead of trying to innovate illustrates their future in telecommunications.
Though I think by now, it's incredibly obvious it isn't a bright one for consumers. With any luck, a company like Frontier who gives something beyond a negative fuck in regards to the wireline network will end up buying it up and smashing Verizon with it.
Source? As far as I was aware, it was around 40% that didn't, and the decline has slowed pretty drastically in recent years. Not to mention it's hardly a rarity in businesses.
In any event though, you're really missing the point here; the problem isn't abandoning copper. It's not providing an equivalent grade of service to one we've had for decades now.
Verizon has long supported regulated POTS service over FiOS. They're now trying to push people towards a form of phone service that's no longer regulated for quality or price, among other things such as the requirement to share the outside plant with competitive carriers. You know how the push for net neutrality is gearing towards Title II classification for internet? That's precisely what they're trying to steer clear of; they still want to offer phone service, but offer it as an unregulated Title I service - much like the internet is classified right now.
As for the issue of local instead of common battery, the POTS standard requires 50 milliamps of power. I'd be absolutely shocked if there was no way to reliably deliver that over fiber.
tl;dr, this is really more a regulatory issue then a technology one. It's actually very similar to the debate going on about the internet right now. Technology is just the excuse being given to getting around Verizon's obligations as a common carrier.
40% don't have access and a bunch more never use it. And that is including people who use VOIP and services like cable company voice services.
>In any event though, you're really missing the point here; the problem isn't abandoning copper. It's not providing an equivalent grade of service to one we've had for decades now.
We aren't owed a super reliable voice backup service. Especially if its not economical.
>You know how the push for net neutrality is gearing towards Title II classification for internet? That's precisely what they're trying to steer clear of; they still want to offer phone service, but offer it as an unregulated Title I service - much like the internet is classified right now.
Verizon is abandoning it and nobody is rushing in to take over. I wonder why? It's an unprofitable business. Are you going to invest your lifesaving's in a POTS service? Of course not.
>Technology is just the excuse being given to getting around Verizon's obligations as a common carrier.
Not get around it, Verizon is seeking to avoid being one. Unless you are willing to regulate the shit out of Apple's facetime, skype, google video, etc. etc, it should be no shock that Verizon wants out.
Buy an old flip phone if you want a back up for a major outage.
> 40% don't have access and a bunch more never use it. And that is including people who use VOIP and services like cable company voice services.
Cable and voip likely have more to do with bundling, and Verizon actively trying to force people to FiOS/off their network then anything else. They clearly aren't competing to modernize their DSL services to compete against cable, and as such, people have switched over to their internet service. Take a look at any thread with 'Comcast' in the subject line. I don't think I have to tell you people feel stuck with their services. Anyway, since bundling has become such a common practice, it's likely much more economical to buy phone service from them instead.
> We aren't owed a super reliable voice backup service. Especially if its not economical.
So let me get this straight - a service that the majority of the country has, and can be found in nearly every business across the country isn't economical? A grade of reliability we've had for decades isn't economical anymore? I suppose unlimited internet plans aren't either.
> Verizon is abandoning it and nobody is rushing in to take over. I wonder why? It's an unprofitable business. Are you going to invest your lifesaving's in a POTS service? Of course not.
Actually, Frontier, Fairpoint, Windstream and Hawaiian Telecom have bought out a ton of states Verizon used to provide service in, but okay. Verizon isn't selling the other states they still service; that's why we're hearing about them refusing to maintain their infrastructure. Not these other companies. Hell, from what I've been hearing, things have gotten better under their ownership.
> Not get around it, Verizon is seeking to avoid being one. Unless you are willing to regulate the shit out of Apple's facetime, skype, google video, etc. etc, it should be no shock that Verizon wants out.
Those are commodity services that operate over other peoples' infrastructure. Let me know the day when any of these services operate dedicated links between peoples' homes, and starts offering 911 services, faxing, circuit switched data transport, interactive voice response services, and the myriad of other things people use the phone network for.
If VoIP actually used the capability to deliver higher call quality, that would be one thing. But these services almost universally sound like vocoder compressed noise in an echo tunnel. They're as bad as cell phones, and have as much latency, which makes conversations very hard. "Could you repeat that" and people talking over each other is much more common now than 20 years ago.
I'm struggling with a couple of VoIP services vs the occasional Skype call. As much as I dislike Skype, the call quality is much higher, especially when I'm using HSPA or similar.
I'm under the impression that the extra redundancy that Bell and co have to maintain power on phone lines during an outage is precisely what makes it so expensive relative to VoIP products.
Would it not make more sense to demand the utilities provide more reliable power in the face of an emergency (even at increased cost)?
I think that depends on the increased cost. Do I want to pay more to avoid a couple of hours without power during a storm? proably not, it's not really a big deal. Do I want to avoid multi-day power outages? Sure, but those are rare and a system that is fully resistant to e.g. major hurricane damage might cost be more than people want to or can afford to pay for.
Fiber? More like to their capped and useless mobile networks. Verizon stopped expanding their fiber optic network long ago except in a few areas where they are bound by contracts, and even there they cheat and don't finish the work. I wish Verizon would offer fiber instead of copper lines. No dice.
So they don't want to deal with the hassle of supporting two kinds of networks at once. Big deal. Either find an alternative, deal with their decision which is driven by other customers (not some sort of imaginary corporate sociopathy), or start your own. Whining helps no one.
Fiber is the future and it it here to stay. In trying to hold on to the old tech, these Verizon customers are forcing Verizon to stagger their support between two technologies for much longer than they would otherwise - leading to diminished customer service and perceived reliability for both.