The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities held a hearing last week in New Jersey, the latest attempt to hold Verizon accountable for its neglect of unwanted DSL and traditional phone customers throughout the state. Last year you'll recall that New Jersey state leaders took a lot of heat for letting Verizon off the hook for a 1993 requirement that provided the company with subsidies and tax cuts -- in exchange for a promise to wire all of the state with 45 Mbps fixed-line broadband by 2010.
Like
similar Verizon promises to Pennsylvania and several cities those deployments never happened, and Verizon has been tap dancing around accountability ever since.
Annoyed by the state's decision to let Verizon's obligations slide (not to mention a latter decision to kill consumer protections at Verizon's behest), 16 municipalities from four counties in South Jersey filed a petition with the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities to prevent Verizon from abandoning its copper POTS and DSL customers in the state.
The end result was last week's hearing, at which 80 annoyed customers repeatedly gave Verizon hell for a rotating crop of spiking problems with the company's neglected copper infrastructure. One customer complained she couldn't run a business on last-generation technology. Another Verizon customer complained that he can only reach 911 -- when it isn't raining. Verizon stuck to the same MO as it has in past years, namely that it's doing absolutely nothing wrong:
quote:
According to Ava-Marie Madeam, vice president for state regulatory affairs for Verizon, the telecommunications company has maintained its lines and is not going against any regulations. Verizon is keeping its copper landlines because of its importance to the infrastructure, she explained, and Verizon has spent $100 million over the past two years to maintain the network. "Verizon strives every day to provide reliable service to our customers," Madeam said. "When we fall short, we work diligently to resolve all issues."
Except Verizon's not "going against any regulations" because it
had them all changed. Verizon's eagerness to walk away from unwanted DSL networks is
well documented. The company's efforts to change state and local law to ensure it's never held accountable for broadband upgrades never delivered also has a
fifteen year paper trail. Unsurprisingly, it's difficult to hold a company accountable when it's literally able to gut all state and local accountable oversight, but this is a pattern we've seen play out
time and
time and
time again when it comes to the telco.Either every one of these states and local communities are engaged in one giant mass hallucination, or Verizon's doing one hell of a job taking taxpayer money, then leaving countless markets on rotting, last-generation broadband infrastructure.
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