Do American Telcos Owe You $2,000?

When should we receive our checks?

I think we should take this information and file a class action lawsuit against the telco's. Then maybe they will get their priorities straight

I agree, but it won't do any good. Telcos are above the law.

Lawyers = $2 trillion
Customer = coupon for $200 discount on hardware.

$200 discount for hardware?

Naa, probably a $100 credit towards your DSL service.

Of course, after they collect a truckload of phony government fees, your credit will be worth about $25....

Yup.

As long as they work out 2,000 back to each consumer + lawyer fees, then we get our money and the lawyers would get paid independent from the settlement.

Never happen, the lawyers will share 99.9% and the suckerscustomers will get 0.5%

ANY Lawyers here.... what are you wating for?

(signs petition)

Maybe they thought the money was to be used to fight fiber deployments?

LOL, I didn't think about that! The gov't must not have been clear enough when they sealed the deal.

Why would they fight their own deployments? That statement would make more sense if we were talking about Cable Co's wouldn't it?

He probably means muni fiber, not telco fiber.

Probably right after we get our rebate checks for the Spanish American War tax being collected on cell phones

I would rather have the 45MB symmetrical fiber!

We won't get either.......

True and true.

spent BILLIONS of dollar in fiberoptic cable rollouts while ZERO to thousand of dollars spent only on Electric wires for HI-SPEED COMMUNICATIONS that were already in our homes and Offices... !!!

WHY SPENT BILLIONS if there`s a new technology that could offer the same COMMUNICATIONS for TRIPLE-PLAY plus creating a Smart grid !!!

Man, if you are talking about BPL, that's an idea that never should have been thought up. The economics of that plan never pencil out. Costs of the deployed hardware, against the low speeds (versus other technologies available) plus the significant interference with other licensed radio services including aviation, amateur radio and various commercial services (BPL is a radio transmission over the power lines) makes it a mess. Many of the test deployments end up being cut short and shut down either by the FCC, or by the utility (because the costs were so high for the projected revenue).

The only hardware that I have seen that doesn't have the interference problems to the same extent as the rest is the Motorola hardware. Even so, the economics don't pencil out.

Even if they did, fiber has way more bandwidth and capacity than BPL. That alone makes it a worthwhile infrastructure upgrade. The Speakeasy guy I spoke to yesterday (that came over from Verizon last year) was telling me about the fiber rollouts. He said that Verizon plans to have it's PNW footprint covered in fiber within two years (though I have been hearing the same thing- 2 years- for the last year, so doesn't that make it three years?)

A sales guy was telling me that it has gone so well in Manhattan that he can't sell much of anything there anymore.

Sounds to me like fiber is a good thing where it has been installed. BPL has pretty much been a failed performer wherever it has been installed.

Someone should tell Verizon that fiber to the RT doesn't count the same as FTTH. Especially when the RT doesn't even have a DSLAM in it. Is it even worth arguing over any more? Here in PA they were already left off the hook and only have to provide 1.5 MPS service. That is a far cry from 45 MPS symmetrical.

Your money and the politicians who gave it away are likely gone at this point.

Let's put it in perspective for all the pro-company and anti muni readers in here (I am a staunch Republican by the way, but I can also think for myself):
Verizon accepts billions to build a fiber network to ALL CONSUMERS (not those cherry picked communities)
Verizon doesn't do anything for 10 years with it until 2004
Verizon then cries foul and has the speed reduced to 1.5 MPS but also insists on the ability to block Muni Wifi
Verizon then cherry picks communities but attempts to block any muni wifi plan out there.
Verizon now plans to sell off 3-6 million rural telephone lines

Get the picture why rural folks are upset???? We all paid for it, didn't matter if you lived in Philadelphia or Wampum. Millions of Rural residents will NEVER see this service, think Verizon will give their money back???

Before the rush of how cheap it is in the "sticks", until this December I had to pay $85-110 for POTS! No freedom packages here, and forget about VOIP.

Geez man, you were getting raped. There is no way that POTS should cost that much.

Why not?

I'd be going cellular for those costs

There were no Freedom packages, and everything was an add on cost. The only long distance package was 500 minutes. We easily exceeded that since everyone we knew was considered long distance from here.

I just dropped my POTS to $39.99 a month for the same service I had before for $85-110 by picking up the Freedom package that didn't exsist before for us.

Shouldn't be long before we get the "don't like it, move" posts. Doesn't matter that PA residents got screwed by both Verizon and the politicans.

Agreed.

It doesn't matter where you live in PA, we're all getting the screw. Every year, the damn school taxes go up. My friend is paying $8500 a year, just for the privilege of having the mortgage on his house. Most of it goes to the school district.

I know most other states are as, or if not more, corrupt, but PA is getting B-A-D. The legislature is full of incompetent boobs who have the nerve to give themselves whopping raises at 1 in the morning, but can't give us meaningful property tax reform.

Those are the same boobs that let verizon "brokeback" us right up the caboose. I say vote 'em all out in November..

Sorry to go off topic...

In northern NH where there is no competition and shotty cellular service, you have to pay $55 for the umlimited Verizon plan. In Central Mass it is $35. The people out in the country who are most likely making less money has to pay more!

I hope their is a lawsuit. After the morons in Pa government let Verizon get away with theft I hope someone files a major lawsuit to get some money back.

Not just for PA residents but for residents of every state effected by the Telcos underhanded way of stealing tax payers money.

I hate that I live in the 3rd largest city in Massachusetts but can only get Verizon or Charter, need more choices! When I lived in Japan about 7 yrs ago I had the same choices, now they have lots more with higher speeds and lower prices!

Just more proof of the US lagging way behind our overseas neighbors when it comes to telecommunication services.

Unless you live in some alternate universe you only have the choose between your local telephone monopoly (at&t/sbc, verizon, bellsouth, qwest, etc) or your local cable monopoly (time warner, comcast, etc.).

Ever wonder why these companies don't really compete with each other? Why does Verizon not to FIOS deployments in at&t territory to tack their customers, or why at&t doesn't launch lightspeed in verizon territory.

Why doesn't time warner billed into comcast areas and offer their digital phone and cable where comcast is lagging behind?

The answer? Collusion.

Wikipedia definitions of collusion:
In the study of economics, collusion takes place within an industry when rival companies cooperate for their mutual benefit. Collusion most often takes place within the market form of oligopoly, where the decision of a few firms to collude can significantly impact the market as a whole.

»hotcarl.diaryland.com

This is a big undertaking that takes years to engineer and deploy, dsl is in place to quench the thirst in the time being, Korea[lol] [japan] lol I would think if the united states was the size of Korea or should we say the size of the state of Georgia we would have terabytes speeds here now, but no we are a huge country with lots people. Is anyone here from Korea or japan that uses these services on a regular basis or who has even ever been there and seen this service first hand in action? That's what I thought. So that said 2 things need to be understood here first you will get your fiber to house or something that's as good or better, second this proves what I have said in the past about the phone and power company's infrastructures are paid for by the tax payer yet there are people on here that work for these company's that say that is hog wash.

The end.

You complain the government wont do anything about it. Then replace that government with one that will.

If you have a computer and a internet connection you're about 3 clicks from writing your representatvies. Do it.

And if my rep is on the take can I shoot'em?

Agreed but unless you can include a large sum of cash with that email, you might as well send the nastygram to /dev/nul

Troll!

Kushnick goes from the flawed assumption that a tax cut is lost money for the government, kinda like how the RIAA assumes each media download is a lost sale. If the telcos didn't pay money to the government that they did not need to pay then how do they owe anyone anything?

Under this logic, we would all be owing some HUGE tax bills right about now.

$200 billion is more than AT&T and Verizons entire revenues for a year. Without knowing the details (someone buy the book, only $20 lol), it's pretty clear IF this were true, it would bankrupt them and you wouldn't get squat anyway.

Boy that was a catchy title!

Any blame to be can rest on the shoulders of the city, county, state, and federal level, and all of which voters allowed into office, stay in office, and probably live better while in office than you or I.

So, I share some of the blame, but only 1/Sum(eligible voters). LOL

And for my portion of any blame, I've already paid the fine.

... or my fiber

Everyone keeps saying Korea and Japan gov funds their broadband for low cost, high speed internet access. Well, we seems to have lots of tax cuts and incentives for the telcos too. Where's my $19/month for 100Mbit broadband??

I've had FTTP available since December... it's going in. What, they expect a wand to wave and a multi-billion dollar system build to be done in three months?

... and I could get basic telephone, here, for around $25, taxes and surcharges included, and that's with local unlimited, I think there's a lower level with measured local service available, too.

Your "POTS bill" isn't the sum of long distance, intra-LATA tolls, ISP services, and so forth. Your "POTS bill's" what you pay for monthly POTS, including taxes and all, period. I actually pay a bit over thirty dollars, net... but I have literally every call-processing bell and whistle, with a few exceptions, you can get. My gross bill is closer to 75-80 bucks, but that includes DSL and all.

Let's make sure there's a benchmark when we discuss "basic service" --- "basic POTS" is what my mother has, because it's all she needs, and, since I pay all her bills for her, I can say with absolute certainty she gets POTS with unlimited local for $25 a month, give or take a few cents - NOT counting toll calls or LD calls, of course.

Mine, with no toll calls, is around $75, but that includes 33 bucks for DSL and a far above "basic" level package, though...

PS - I'm actually asking this in complete seriousness, too; have literally any other bells started deploying ANY FTTP, yet? Seems to me, at least a month or two ago, one or two were doing "limited trial" builds here and there, but not a single one besides Verizon was committing to even an area-wide complete buildout, much less a system wide one... but, even if they do, let's be practical, how long does it take to migrate an entire infrastructure, after all? Sure, we want it yesterday, but to get it yesterday we would need a witch, a wand and a spellbook with a bottomless bag of gold dust in her pocket, not a line crew and spools of fiber operating on a budget, wouldn't we?

Verizon has obviously committed a massive crime. This is hardly news--people like me have been warning about this for years, though for some reason many other people feel compelled to defend the multi-billion-dollar corporations.

I don't know how it works elsewhere, or why corporations so often get a pass on lawbreaking, but around here, if you commit a crime, you get punished. Verizon has not only committed a crime, they have the infernal gall to continue with their influence buying and attempts to squash competition.

The simplest way to punish Verizon is this: Compel them to deploy ALL the fiber that they agreed to, at the best possible speed, and those executives complicit in the crime resign and forfit their pay. Otherwise sufficient Verizon assets will be seized and sold at auction to pay their $200 billion dollar fine, and those executives found to be complicit will be tried for larceny. Given that option, I think Verizon would agree to do the fiber.

How about sue their asses ? Where are the congressman taking charge ? Nada !

I don't know about the other states, but in PA, the politicans let them get away with it scot free. Now they have 10 years to provide 1.5 mbps to everyone. Far cry from the 45 mbps we were promised.

Congress is in on this in some way. Very silent.

Well, I expect to get my $2,000 back along the same time I get my 40 acres and a mule* (or whatever the equivalent cash value is nowadays).

Of course I'm not black, a descendant of a slave, born before 1928. But that doesn't matter as the credit doesn't exist. Either way, I'm never going to get my $2,000 back. I'll just have to settle paying Verizon $39.95 every month for 15/2 service instead.

Qwest already spent theirs in Utah.

... and give me fiber. I wouldn't of course, spend $2,000 on fiber, but if I never saw the money it would be a lot easier to part with it.

Yeah, I would much rather randomly get a gibibit pipe to the internet than randomly get $2,000. Oh well.

Hey Folks, If You Live in the Los Angeles Area, Especially inside the City of LA. why don't you redirect your frustration to the City Government who is doing all it can to PREVENT Fiber Build out/Upgrades. Currently, they are preventing or dragging their feet on Telco Upgrades to the Nodes by not allowing necessary Power/Permits. Why not call your councilman/woman and ask where's my Telco Fiber.
Also why don't you work to change the Local laws that tell landlords they are only responsible to provide ONE pair of wires for your telephone service and *NOTHING* for data services.
You can bitch at the telco's all you want but they got this regulations thing to deal with which can prevent or curtail ALL proposed Network upgrades. It's about time we all had Europe's and Asia's Bandwidth.

my company is doing Fiber to the home all through out the state of florida. the problem with fiber is the cost to run it. that is why so many companies avoid it except verizon since they are worth 800 billion dollars. with our fiber service we can provide TV Internet and Phone Services. the exciting thing is this spring we will be able to provide interactive tv service using our fiber and The RG-6 Cable wire in houses. and On demand Movie services using a 3tb Network media server sitting on our fiber network.

ATT here, I want fiber, not the puny $2000. Right now, $2000 can't buy 100 or 1000mbps fiber connections.

One of the posts says "of course he's biased" and of course he exaggerates....

what is the evidence of his bias? what are the criteria?

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There is something other than the value of the tax break they got... its the overpayment for lesser quality and speed all of us have been paying for years...

and so what if it bankrupted these dinosaurs? maybe its a fitting end for them (I doubt it anyway, at least not just yet)

Let it bankrupt them and let us Take their infrastructure... as Susan Crawford blogged, What if we Took it? »scrawford.blogware.com/b ··· 589.html