Congratulations on completely misrepresenting the article. Did you even read it?
said by ITALIAN926:So, obviously, you believe that the telco's have 200billion in a vault somewhere. Or was any monies in question used to provide for EXISTING SERVICES at the time.
"Over the decade from 1994-2004 the major telephone companies profited from higher phone rates paid by all of us, accelerated depreciation on their networks, and direct tax credits an average of $2,000 per subscriber for which the companies delivered precisely nothing in terms of service to customers. That's $200 billion with nothing to be shown for it."
That money isn't sitting in a vault anywhere. It was used to record record profits and to re-consolidate the Baby Bells back into less than a handful of companies. Two in particular, AT&T and Verizon, are much larger than the rest.
They were originally supposed to use that money to roll out "video dial tone, which referred in the mid-1990s to the provision of video-on-demand and cable TV-equivalent service by U.S. telephone companies at (bidirectional!) speeds up to 45 megabits per second over fiber and hybrid fiber-coax networks." They got that dumbed that down even further in the final bill to ADSL, and then they gamed the states' public utilities commissions so that they could basically reap all of the benefits but roll out minimal service.
Need I also remind you that this was originally supposed to be 45M SYMMETRICAL service. U-Verse tops out at 24m down and 3M up...if you can even get it. Hell, I can't even get AT&T DSL and I live in the Bay Area.
said by ITALIAN926:... and besides all that, Verizon FiOS and AT&T Uverse has passed many more homes than the article states. There are over 4 million FiOS customers alone.
"In a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) report from 1994 there were requests from U.S. telephone companies to provide video dial-tone service at unprecedented levels. Bell Atlantic (now part of Verizon) wanted to install service to 3.5 million homes in its service area. Nynex (now also a part of Verizon) requested permission to install service to 400,000 homes. Pacific Bell (now part of AT&T) wanted to install service to 1.3 million homes. Ameritech (now part of AT&T) wanted to install service to 1.2 million homes. GTE (now part of Verizon) wanted to install service to 1.1 million homes."
Adding up the numbers for Bell Atlantic, Nynex, and GTE yields 5M...in 1994. Fios has hit 4.6M as of Q3 2011. Not bad, until you realize that the US population has grown by 50M people and 17M households since then, of which I'm sure Verizon has its fair share.
Basically, we got totally screwed.