Verizon has come under fire in the past for attempting to shove consumers off of copper wire and on to either FiOS or its expensive wireless Voice Link service but the blowback to-date hasn't dissuaded the company. Now, consumer advocacy groups and consumers themselves are both amping up the pressure, asking the government to investigate Verizon's poor behavior and testifying that the company is actively trying to shove people off existing copper deployments.
I realize that for IT enthusiasts, this is likely to raise eyebrows, especially if you live in an area where FiOS isn't normally available. Why would anyone want to have plain old copper landlines when they could have FiOS instead? There are multiple reasons -- and some misconceptions we need to clear up first.
When Verizon announced that it intended to create a high-speed fiber network, the general understanding was that the company would deploy 100-megabit-or-higher connections across the United States. There are a handful of markets where you can get those speeds, but Verizon has a "FiOS" brand that extends down to 15/5Mbps down/up for $50 per month. Second, there are some services for which FiOS simply isn't an acceptable replacement. If you have an active alarm on your home, a copper line is required -- the signal pulses down the copper wire. If you live in an area that's subject to frequent power outages, the eight-hour batteries on the FiOS unit may not be sufficient to maintain service.
Beyond these practical considerations, there's a growing mountain of evidence that Verizon has acted in profound bad faith. A little Googling shows a persistent pattern going back years: Verizon sends scary letters to customers telling them they need to convert to FiOS, or else they risk losing service. Verizon refusing to reconnect someone's copper service so they can install an active alarm system in their home, even when the customer kept the copper wire from the original deployment.
These kinds of reports are anecdotal, but they serve to reinforce the allegations made by the Utility Reform Network in its recent filing with the California Public Utilities Commission(Opens in a new window). The complaint presents evidence that Verizon has taken weeks to repair service to copper-wire customers, actively pushed these customers towards FiOS, and told other customers that they have no choice but to switch to wireless Voice Link telephony (at ruinous data access rates if they pair it with Verizon Wireless via HomeFusion Plans).
Ironically, Verizon has actively talked up its own plans of this sort. In 2012, Verizon's Chief Financial officer, Fran Shammo, told the Oppenheimer Holdings Technology, Internet, and Communications Conference that "we are really proactively going after these copper customers in the FiOS footprint and moving them to FiOS. So if you are a voice copper customer and you call in that says you are having trouble on your line, when we go out to repair that we are actually moving you to the FiOS product. We are not repairing the copper anymore."
Next page: Why does Verizon want to shove people off copper?Why does Verizon want to shove people off copper?
Because copper service is regulated in a way that voice-over IP services aren't. By shoving people off copper and locking them into fiber deployments when it's the only fiber carrier in town, Verizon avoids its regulatory requirement to provide service to all citizens. It avoids the regulatory requirement to provide interoperability with other service providers. Plain old telephone service (POTS) is mandated to work with fax machines, credit card readers, alarm systems, and other forms of embedded technology, whereas new IP-provided services aren't.
To date, the FCC has refused to regulate Verizon and AT&T's data networks and IP-based services as though they were common carriers, but as the URN complaint makes clear, Verizon's efforts to deliberately degrade telephone service are multifaceted and in some cases may be illegal. The company has aggressively downsized the number of techs it had that were trained on repairing copper lines, hired workers that were only trained to build out fiber deployments, then told customers that it took so long to repair copper lines because they were unreliable, and that users should migrate to fiber.
It's easy to forget how bad the competitive situation was before Google Fiber came along -- but Google Fiber isn't everywhere
Verizon has also allegedly ceased performing regular inspections on copper-line infrastructure and, when customers call in to complain about outages, are told that it could take weeks to repair a copper outage, but that FiOS is available "right away." As Ars Technica discusses, a Verizon customer service representative testified to the California Senate(Opens in a new window) that Verizon rules forbid her from telling irate customers that they had the option to complain to the Public Utilities Commission.
As we've covered before, these anti-competitive, anti-consumer moves aren't unique to California. Google "Verizon force copper" and there's a wealth of unconnected stories, complaints and concerns being raised by consumers all over the country.
It's fair to say that the copper network is on its way out in the long term as we transition to more effective means of handling the same services -- but Verizon's actions show nothing but contempt for the consumers it supposedly serves. Instead of overseeing an orderly long-term transition from copper to fiber, Verizon is throwing customers off at every opportunity, using it as an excuse to escape regulatory oversight, and then claiming that copper networks are "no longer in demand."
Readers who want a full accounting of Verizon's decade of broken promises around FiOS, including a discussion of how the company may have illegally used telephone universal access fees to pay for FiOS buildouts to a handful of cities should read HuffPo's excellent discussion of the topic(Opens in a new window). From effective monopolies to sky-high costs per GB, the entire state of US infrastructure and consumer protection are increasingly a joke -- a joke we pay at great expense.
