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Reviews:
 ·Comcast
| reply to NOVA_Guy
Re: Nicely biased reporting. And what reason benefits the average consumer?
Hate to break it to you, but VZ is right - rural areas with low amounts of customers per mile ARE more expensive to cable (with any sort of cabling) than suburban or urban areas; worse, the lack of customer density makes it difficult, if not impossible, to recoup the investments required to cable those areas. (Ask any electric utility, let alone a cable or telecom company, whether ILEC or CLEC, anywhere.) Most of the area that VZ wants to sell off used to be Ameritech territory, which is mostly rural, with customer densities approaching miles-per-customer than customers per mile.
The Rural Electrification Act was actually designed to deal with this (while the original purview of the REA dealt with power cabling, it expanded to cover cable-TV and other forms of communications; Service Electric is a child of the REA); why haven't Frontier (or FairPoint, come to think of it) applied for Rural Telecommunications Grants for their areas?
While southern Maryland today is becoming more densely populated, it was not the case even twenty years ago; it is served almost entirely for electrical needs by the customer-owned Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative, Inc., and is a true child of the REA (as is Service Electric, as I mentioned). | | |
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| You do realize there are numerous rural fiber providers out there that are profitable, right? The issue has always been the rate of profit, not whether one can actually make a profit. Companies like Verizon are forced by shareholders into considering only extremely short-term gains. | |
Reviews:
 ·Frontier Communi..
1 edit | reply to PGHammer
said by PGHammer: Most of the area that VZ wants to sell off used to be Ameritech territory, which is mostly rural, with customer densities approaching miles-per-customer than customers per mile. Ameritech was one of the AT&T 1984 RBOC's, for the Midwest (IL, IN, Michigan, OH, and WI). In the Midwest, I do not know of any significant ex-Ameritech areas that Verizon holds now. In the Midwest, Verizon's territory is all ex-GTE territory. Verizon was a merger of GTE and Bell Atlantic. The significant old RBOC territory that Verizon has now(and will divest to Frontier), is West Virginia(ex Bell Atlantic).
Population density where I live: 1,800 people per square mile. Other nearby towns are 1,000 to 3,000 per square mile. A major metro nearby(part of this VZ-Frontier deal) has 2,800 to 3,700 people per square mile. | |
Reviews:
·Comcast
| reply to sonicmerlin
said by sonicmerlin:You do realize there are numerous rural fiber providers out there that are profitable, right? The issue has always been the rate of profit, not whether one can actually make a profit. Companies like Verizon are forced by shareholders into considering only extremely short-term gains. And their ownership structure is what? How many of those are shareholder owned, as opposed to either municipal, private, or cooperatives?
In fact, name five RURAL fiber providers that are both shareholder-owned and profitable.
Whether anyone likes it or not, public ownership (through stock and debt, which is how any public corporation normally operates) pretty much limits what the operations of a corporation are geared toward. The original AT&T (Bell System) was a VERY long-term-geared company by design because its mission was straightforward - provide dial-tone-based local phone service throughout the United States. However, in order for a Bell System to be feasible, it could NOT be competed against. (It is why the term *natural monopoly* was coined - the creation of the Bell System was a National Priority.) AT&T, while a public corporation, paid a pittance for a stock dividend (and a similar pittance for interest on senior debt); however, that pittance was as reliable (if not more so) as the sunrise. (AT&T stock and senior debt was the ONLY corporate stock or debt purchased in the early days of the California Personnel Retirement System because of the reliability of those dividends and interest paybacks.) The sort of thinking that permitted that to happen does not exist in corporate America today, largely because that sort of thinking doesn't exist in the government of the United States today, either. (Nowadays, the thinking in the government, especially Congress, is that the ONLY long-term national operations allowable must be owned/operated by the government itself. Yes; that also implies that the 2008 failure of AIG/Lehman Brothers/FNMA/Freddie Mac was planned. Consider that, for all intents and purposes, we have indirectly nationalized the banking and financing system for personal property. How did those entities that are now majority-owned/operated/influenced by Congress get there? Don't JUST *follow the money*; follow the law, too.) | |
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