Verizon Buckles, Will Run FiOS to Fire Island, NY

Wonder what the timeline is... FiOS is taking forever to deploy in DC...

Sure Verizon will run it...but you can expect to see the cost of running it passed on to all Verizon customers, or at the very least, those 600 people on Fire Island. One of the two.

Verizon was likely to face fines in the range of $2000 per line per day.. so it just becomes more economically viable to get the job done rather than break the PSC state law. Jury is still out on some lower Manhattan and NJ locations though... any progress on those?

...Now everybody is going to want a disaster in their town.

Thats awfully nice of them to want to install FiOS.

However there are some questions regarding it. Cablevision for years has wanted to run their digital service to this community, but haven't been allowed to because the state will not allow them to run a line along the Robert Moses Causeway Bridge and it is too expensive to run a 2 mile underground line for 600 homes where the majority are only occupied in the summer. Is Verizon getting an unfair exception to run a line across the bridge or will they be spending the huge amount of money to run a line under the bay that will never recoup its full cost?

For its part Cablevision does offer analog TV service in the community, but the signal is beamed across the bay by microwave to a receiver. There is roughly only about 50 analog channel available due to limited microwave bandwidth. This is an example of Cablevision being forced to offer service due to their franchise agreement even though they lose money on this seasonal community.

Can Cablevision/Optimum not lease some fibers from Verizon to get to the island, and then set up their own equipment at the CO? Or does CV not see it as profitable to lease fiber from a competitor?

I bet there are places VZ leases fiber from CV for Cell Towers...

I thought ILECs had to be allowed to lease space at the COs to competitors?

If you don't have it now, you will never have it.

Investors don't like companies investing themselves. Only raking in profits.

Clearly.

Not necessarily...

Source: »www.bizjournals.com/wash ··· y35.html (June 2010)

The 15-year franchise agreement between Verizon and the D.C. Office of Cable Television, adopted in 2008, requires that FiOS be available District-wide within nine years, with an optional 12-month extension.
By next year, FiOS should be available in most of Ward 4 and all of Ward 3 in Northwest %u2014 including Friendship Heights %u2014 as well as in Barry Farm and historic Anacostia in Southeast and in Deanwood and eastern Capitol Hill in Northeast.
Verizon will add the Southwest Waterfront and Buzzard Point, most of Ward 1, Dupont and Logan circles, and Shaw within six years.
The final three-year phase will bring FiOS to Brookland, Congress Heights, downtown, Georgetown, midtown and Lincoln Heights.

Yeah, outside of fulfilling city franchise obligations already signed (DC, NYC, Philly), FiOS expansion really is done. And I think a lot of those cities where they promised 100% coverage aren't going to be anywhere close. THe big money is simply in wireless. Fixed is profitable, just not profitable enough.

More likely is that Verizon will not be interested in leasing capacity over its newly installed fiber to a competitor such as Cablevision.

The ILECs obligations for leasing colocation and UNE do not apply to newly wired fiber.

You're absolutely right about the fines being what pushed them. Fire Island also has nicer homes and wealthier residents, of course, than many other Sandy-impacted areas. I updated the story with a quote from them making it clear Fire Island will be the exception, and other similarly-impacted areas won't be so lucky.

I assumed at least VZ, if not others, have at least fiber from the rest of the world going to the CO that is existing fiber that has been there for years

I am not referring to any new fiber that would be pulled from the CO out to customers - CV would have to run its own fiber from the CO to their own Head End and then run their own fiber to their Nodes, if not all the way to the premises

Is there any basis to force Verizon to install FiOS in towns they don't already have a signed FiOS franchise in? It seems they made a business decision not to, and as much as any of us don't like that why should Verizon be forced to install new high speed wiring any more than Frontier, CenturyLink, Embarq and every other American telephone company should be forced to do so throughout their territory?

If ILEC copper sharing requirements can be lifted in exchange for FTTP builds, expansion could be restarted, and many other telcos would be interested in such changes. How can Verizon be expected to maintain both a copper and fiber infrastructure for the rest of eternity? Copper is dead, let it die and let the ILECs bring real broadband, and competition to the cable industry.

ILECs are only required by the FCC to give wholesale access to copper networks, not fiber networks. If ILECs were required to give wholesale access to fiber networks, we wouldn't pay $50-60 for 15-25 mbps. We would pay $30 for 100+ mbps.

And VZ has the money to run their fiber, so they wouldn't need to lease CV's fiber.

That's a different argument and discussion (how do we get people wired) than what's happening here. In this case we're talking about regulated POTS infrastructure that has been heavily subsidized and is facing potential disruption, and what to do about it.

That may be all that is required, but there is a large business that the Telcos and Cablecos are in leasing out fiber access, whether they have to or not

But the responses I am seeing here, I guess this would not be something VZ and CV would be interested in doing at all

I could see why a company would not jumping at the chance to service the community if a lot of the residents are seasonal.
The cost to Verizon to get across the water may not be as much if the conduit the copper cable runs in is still intact. They can just pull the copper cable out and replace it with fiber. That would be harder before the storm without knocking out service if the are no spare conduits.
With all the reconstruction it should be almost like placing fiber in a new community.

I'm seeing some contractors running fiber through mixed commercial/residential neighborhoods here in Springfield MA. It could be signs of a future FiOS deployment or something else.

I know a cell tower just went online just a few blocks away from my house at a solar power farm as I have full bars on my cell phone and my iPads.

A huge improvement for Verizon as they used to have horrible coverage when I first moved here in 2002.

Don't count on that. We have a well-placed source in Albany telling Stop the Cap! Verizon will almost certainly have its tariff proposal to extend Voice Link as the sole landline offering rejected in NY State because the service has failed to meet the PSC's expectations for voice grade basic telephone service. There has been enormous political pressure in both Albany and Washington being placed on the PSC to keep Verizon from abandoning landline service in favor of wireless. Our source predicted Verizon was not stupid, so that may have a lot to do with today's remarkable 180 on fiber. Verizon won't comment on our story on this today.

How did it all go wrong?

1) Have an executive preview to investors the company intends to abandon landline service even before Sandy provided a convenient excuse... to abandon landline service.

2) Imagine what happens when a Fire Island constituent or two of a certain U.S. senator makes a pre-arranged call to that senator using Voice Link and having it drop the call and sound worse than a cell phone.

650+ comments (every last one negative) from the public decrying Voice Link is something the NY PSC can't ignore, especially when the governor's office and two U.S. senators and a couple of loud mouthed Long Island House members are watching.

Fixed it for you.

There I agree the ILECs should be forced to maintain their legacy POTS/PSTN infrastracture. They were granted a monopoly for over a century, allowing them to tear up streets and install wiring above public property -- and allowing no other telecom firm to duplicate their franchise. In return they promised to service the entire geographic region. If a natural or other disaster interrupts that service they must be required to repair it to the equivalent of the guaranteed service they offered prior.

Two ignorant statements. Fiber will be deployed, eventually. And investors do like companies investing in business operations that will return profits to the owners. Investors don't like companies throwing money into projects that have little, to no ROI.

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There I agree the ILECs should be forced to maintain their legacy POTS/PSTN infrastracture

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Maintaining a network of useless, unprofitable wires, great idea.

Of course. How else would you propose a business pay for O&M?

You think Verizon has thousands of acres of money trees?

Well, that can also be true.

Why isn't there a cable company? Or are all of the houses seasonal anyways?