http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Verizon-Tells-Employees-to-Ignore-Bad-Press-on-FiOS-Failures-135426
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The only Fiber being deployed has not been for Fios. The Wireless Criminals have hi-jacked all Wireline fiber for their FTTC 4G LTE projects. At the Public's expense maybe ??? 80% of ALL Cellular calls are delivered over the PSTN.
This is what I find most interesting about the union conundrum: Unions collect money from union members, promising that in the event of a strike they'll get "something" back and go to bat for them, which is hardly nothing considering unions are a business and that same money collected from members is used to buy advertisement / propaganda, slamming the very company that pays the union member's salaries. ----so the company pays the employee, which pays the union, which pays the ad agencies to run negative ads against the company, hurting sales, forcing the company to spend more money countering the negative ads, in an attempt to save off losses. Net / Net, the company loses money, union members lose jobs, non union members lose jobs. Winner: Verizon competition.
Verizon has been taking a lot of heat lately for failing to live up to its FiOS deployment promises. Just in the last month both New York City and Pittsburgh have threatened to file suit against the telco for failing to live up to deployment promises, and 14 Mayors sent the telco a terse letter saying the company has a long history of taking subsidies and tax breaks in exchange for FiOS deployment that's either only partially delivered, or not delivered at all.
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Apparently hoping to calm employees who pay attention to the news, Verizon has been circulating a talking point sheet dubbed "trust the facts" that effectively informs NYC staff that every single media outlet reporting on this issue is wrong, and Verizon met all of its obligations.
"Recently, there have been inaccurate statements in the press about our Fios build," states the memo. "The information below will help you understand the reality of our success and ongoing commitment to Fios."
After throwing out a few random investment stats, the memo claims that Verizon "passed all prems, in all five boroughs of NYC," and that criticism of the company is unfounded. But as we've noted a few times, Verizon intentionally didn't define the term "passed" in the agreement, allowing it last week to tell attendees of a NYC hearing on the issue that just getting fiber somewhere near a home is the same thing as serving that home.
"We consider it to be passed if we're within the realm of substantial fiber placement," a Verizon spokesman told attendees.
Long-standing telco accounting critic Bruce Kushnick does a good job deconstructing Verizon's claims, noting that not only did Verizon rely on an undefined definition of the word "passed," it also wiggled around obligations by fiddling with the definitions of terms like "households," and "residential housing (dwelling) units." He also notes that Verizon rose DSL and POTS rates on many residents claiming it was for FiOS upgrades -- which were then never delivered:
quote:
In 2006, Verizon cut a deal with the NY State Public Service Commission to raise local phone rates, and this was repeated multiple times. By late 2009, local phone customers had been hit with 84 percent rate increases to fund a "massive deployment of fiber optics".
These increases on just basic phone service added about $760 per line, (including taxes, fees and surcharges) in New York City if the customer had service since 2006, or a fraction of this excess as everyone who had service during 2006-2015 got hit with these rate increases. Also, each add-on service, from inside wire maintenance to nonpublished numbers, all had increases of 100-300 percent, adding hundred of dollars extra per additional service.
In short Verizon lawyers wrote most of these FiOS franchise agreements with all manner of loopholes to ensure they never actually had to engage in full FiOS deployments. The problem is that most of the cities complaining should have bothered to read the contracts before they were signed (or held transparent, open hearings on the negotiations). Trying to hold Verizon accountable after the fact historically hasn't accomplished all that much.