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Variously, a film/video editor, programmer, author, teacher, musician, artist, wage slave

26 July 2010

Why Verizon Sucks Big-Time

Verizon is a large, heartless media monopoly designed to pump money from its captive customers into its corporate coffers while nominally providing telephone and internet service. Why does it suck? Let me count the ways...

A while after I had FIOS installed, a power shutdown over a weekend revealed that Verizon, in stealth mode, had altered my land-line telephone service. It seems that Verizon uses FIOS as bait to change telephone service to its liking, as it will not install FIOS unless you sign something that empowers them to make these changes. OK, so I signed something when they installed FIOS, which could have been a work order or any number of other things, so how was I to suspect that installing a fiber optic internet service would involve an arbitrary change to my basic telephone service that benefits no one except Verizon. (Answer: By reading pages of microscope legalese while the hard-working installer drums his fingers impatiently.)

What they did was rip out the copper line that had powered telephone service for the past century from the telephone exchange and replace it with a crummy system that shifts the burden of powering telephone service onto the customer. When power is unavailable, as during an outage, a lead-acid battery they supply and will replace only once, powers the telephone for up to 6 hours. Why a simple lead-acid battery should only last for 6 hours beats me, but that is Verizon's own outside estimate for the time it takes to discharge the battery. After that, you are on your own. And, the battery tends to last only about a year, so after replacing it once on their dime, another year has passed and now I am expected to run down to a Radio Shack and happily shell out $20+ for another crappy battery. Et cetera and so forth.

What's wrong with this picture? Verizon, which will not provide DSL internet service in areas where their more expensive FIOS is available, by taking out the copper line, not only gets to sell the copper bought at public expense to provide telephone service with no remuneration to the public, but assures that no one will ever be able to provide DSL service, either Verizon or a competitive company leasing Verizon's wire to provide competitive ISP service. So taking out the copper line is deeply anti-competitive, and this change will pertain to subsequent owners of a FIOS-enabled house.

Verizon could care less that after 6 hours land-line service is all but guaranteed to fail and with it any 911 emergency telephone service, because, I have been assured by a Verizon representative that they have their corporate rears covered against legal liability just fine, thank you.

By electing to remove the copper wire, Verizon has created a whole lot of new costs, external to itself, that could easily have been avoided. The most obvious is the cost to customers of buying new batteries, which have a short lifetime. Second is the small amount of electrical power that each customer now has to pay for service. At least as important are costs of diverting resources to make the batteries and the costs of disposing them, for they must be recycled responsibly as they contain poisonous lead and acid. The fact that many batteries will not be recycled properly will put an avoidable stress on the environment wherever they ultimately land. But, hey, this is not Verizon's problem. It is so much not their problem that Verizon does not even offer to recycle the toxic trash mandated by their corporate grand designs.

This all adds up to one huge boondoggle, with Verizon in a position to dictate to anyone desiring fiber optic internet service, albeit choked down to a fraction of its potential speed, as Verizon conditions its customers to virtual spoonfuls of data for real money, that they must agree to egregious changes in their land-line telephone service, costing customers and the environment alike untold billions of avoidable expense, in the aggregate.

I contacted the FCC, which I considered the only responsible thing to do, given that this idiotic change in basic telephone service makes emergency communications far less robust in an era when national security is being threatened on all sides.

Before I heard anything back from the FCC, I was first greeted at my door by two Verizon "representatives" whom I turned away, thinking they were high-pressure sales types. Then, I got a call from an oily-voiced Verizon "representative" who wanted to "answer questions" I might have about my Verizon service. Only when I asked did same "representative" say that Yes, he was calling me because the FCC had contacted Verizon with my complaints. It turns out that the FCC does not at first investigate your complains on their face value but has a knee-jerk reaction of notifying the company the complaint is about to reach some sort of understanding with their aggrieved customer directly. The "representative" did his best to put a happy face on what I would, after all, just have to accept because these were the terms of Verizon's service...

Further contact with the FCC were even more bleak: they claimed to have no authority to do anything but, if I wanted to pay something like $140, I could file a so-called formal complaint. I was advised that 911 issues were a state issue (which I find amazing, on the face of it).

Now, in the early 1970's I had a Bell Telephone "representative" burst into my office door to see that I had (gasp!) an answering machine hooked directly to the telephone line. At the time, Bell was trying to extort $60/month for their Codaphone answering machine (maybe $500/month in today's money), claiming that any alternatives risked the lives of telephone employees. (Seriously!) Needless to say, I complained to the FCC and the Pennsylvania PUC. At that time, I got a two page letter from the FCC, explaining what they were doing about my complaint, which echoed that of many other people. From the PUC I got nothing but a number to refer to if I ever wrote about it again. The egregious behavior by Bell was rewarded by its breakup. I can only hope that a similar fate awaits Verizon.

Having written this, I now think that the Department of Homeland Security and the Environmental Protection Agency might be interested in this idiotic move by Verizon even if the FCC doesn't feel they have jurisdiction. We shall see.

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