Verizon Wiring Up 500K Homes With FiOS To Settle Lawsuit (arstechnica.com) 25
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Verizon has agreed to bring FiOS fiber-to-the-home service to another 500,000 households in New York City by July 2023, settling a lawsuit over Verizon's failure to wire up the entire city as required in a franchise agreement. "Today's settlement will ensure that 500,000 households that previously lacked Verizon broadband access because of a corporate failure to invest in the necessary infrastructure will have the option of fiber broadband and create critical cost competition in areas where today only one provider exists," NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio's office said in an announcement last week. The settlement's full text is available here.
New York City sued Verizon in March 2017, saying the company failed to complete a citywide fiber rollout by 2014 as required in its cable-TV franchise agreement. At the time the lawsuit was filed, Verizon said it had brought its fiber network to 2.2 million of NYC's 3.1 million households. The settlement will cover many but not all of the remaining residential housing units where FiOS is currently not available. As of July 2019, Verizon had brought FiOS to 2.7 million households, a number that will rise to 3.2 million households once Verizon complies with the settlement, de Blasio's office told Ars today. The city estimates there are now 3.45 million households, so about 250,000 will be left without FiOS. With the settlement providing coverage of over 90 percent of households, "this is part of our overall strategy to increase competition in the market," a de Blasio spokesperson told Ars.
New York City sued Verizon in March 2017, saying the company failed to complete a citywide fiber rollout by 2014 as required in its cable-TV franchise agreement. At the time the lawsuit was filed, Verizon said it had brought its fiber network to 2.2 million of NYC's 3.1 million households. The settlement will cover many but not all of the remaining residential housing units where FiOS is currently not available. As of July 2019, Verizon had brought FiOS to 2.7 million households, a number that will rise to 3.2 million households once Verizon complies with the settlement, de Blasio's office told Ars today. The city estimates there are now 3.45 million households, so about 250,000 will be left without FiOS. With the settlement providing coverage of over 90 percent of households, "this is part of our overall strategy to increase competition in the market," a de Blasio spokesperson told Ars.
That's unfair to poor families (Score:2)
What about families whose house is worth less than 500k? And in NYC, if your home is worth less than that, then you're definitely poor, on food stamps and without access to basic health care.
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I'm pretty sure that you missed the joke, which was that Verizon likes to wire up only wealthy neighborhoods, because they can make more profit that way, so when Verizon says that they're wiring up 500K homes, they probably mean that they're wiring up homes that are worth 500K. :-D
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Then you didn't misread the headline like OP and myself. It took 3 readings of the headline and part of the summary to realize it was the number of homes and not their value.
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You're assuming that if a joke needs to be explained to you, it needs to be explained to everyone.
Complaining about jokes you don't get is a special case of what I call "The Dimwit's Veto": attacking things you don't personally understand as worthless nonsense (e.g., science).
Now if you *do* get a joke and don't find it funny, that's a serious critique.
Why not (Score:5, Interesting)
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They could do that. All they need to do is find an ISP who is looking to spend a ton of money to get in a race to the bottom with Verizon. Should be easy.
Verizon would love it if they did that. It would effectively hand Verizon the monopoly without Verizon having to agree to any conditions.
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All they need to do is find an ISP who is looking to spend a ton of money to get in a race to the bottom with Verizon.
That could be New York City.
The way that public utilities are often created is to void the franchise of the incumbent private company. Depending on local laws, this gives them 24 hours to remove all of their physical assets from the public right-of-ways. Any newcomer would have to apply for and receive a franchise within this 24 hour period. Not likely. The only remaining contender is the city itself. Who would offer Verizon $1 for their assets.
Re: True Competition (Score:2)
> Let them face true competition.
I'm no fan of Verizon in general, but they do face competition in NYC from Spectrum (which has been inundating me with junk mail). Perhaps coincidentally, Verizon provides far better connectivity than I got during decades in Silicon Valley. I misread my first ping results, as I'd never seen a single-digit latency.
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Not just low latency, but *consistent* low latency. For all the things Verizon does wrong (and there are plenty) - they get some things very, very right.
root@nbvb-gw:~ # ping -q -c 30 www.google.com
PING www.google.com (172.217.10.228): 56 data bytes
--- www.google.com ping statistics ---
30 packets transmitted, 30 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 3.163/3.321/3.912/0.185 ms
Re: True Competition (Score:1)
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AT&T Gigafiber in Los Angeles is not quite as consistent.
$ ping -q -c 30 www.google.com
PING www.google.com (142.250.68.36): 56 data bytes
--- www.google.com ping statistics ---
30 packets transmitted, 30 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 2.897/3.537/6.581/0.750 ms
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Meanwhile, on the monopoly provider Centurylink in Tucson:
ping www.google.com
PING www.google.com (142.250.68.36): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 142.250.68.36: icmp_seq=0 ttl=118 time=39.348 ms
--- www.google.com ping statistics ---
8 packets transmitted, 8 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 38.441/42.327/52.603/4.094 ms
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I'll add my own anecdote.
I have a choice! Hooray!
The choice is CenturyLink or Comcast. Boo!
Maybe it's just my area, but Comcast had no end to problems when I was a customer. It constantly slowed down and sometimes just went completely out and I got tired of them telling me "There are no reported outages in your area" and replying "I'm reporting one now!" Often this would be very late at night or early in the morning when most people in my neighborhood are asleep.
Not that CLink's customer service is much
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I'll just be interested to see what percentage of those 500,000 homes are actually wired by the end of 2023. If I were a betting man I'd lay stakes that it will be under 60%.
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> If I were a betting man I'd lay stakes that it will be under 60%.
25% would be a pleasant surprise!
If the contract has no enforcement teeth, it's not an actual contract. They should have to live up to the contract AND pay penalties.
Odds are whoever wrote the contract "forgot" to include penalties and also got a very nice new boat.
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The reason Verizon hasn't followed through is the cost of deploying the network. It's why FIOS hasn't continued to expand, despite being a really excellent service for consumers and there definitely being a market for it with Comcast's complete inability to act like a company run by adults.
The best way forward for the city is likely to force the issue with Verizon. I suppose it's possible that another company could come along, buy the network, and find a way to make deploying it to those other addresses f
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Like in Oregon. First Frontier purchased the network from Verizon. Then Ziply brought the network from the bleeding husk of Frontier. Frontier were good in terms of service initially until they started going bust. Verizon and Ziply are not.
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"Void the franchise agreement"
There have been no franchise agreements in the USA since 1996.
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Void the franchise agreement for Version failing to keep their end of the bargain. Let them face true competition.
How the hell is this getting voted up?
If you void Verizon's franchise agreement, everyone loses access to their service. Verizon would be legally prohibited from selling service.
The entire point of the agreement was to bring in Verizon as competition to the incumbent provider.
Forcing Verizon to live up to their end of the deal is the right thing to do. They don't want to spend money on infrastructure in neighborhoods where it might take a while to recoup costs---but that's too bad since they agreed to it.
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Verizon realized they wouldn't achieve profits for FiOS for more than a decade longer than they predicted.
Remember, they sold off a few FiOS plants to Frontier Communications several years ago?
Fiber-to-the-home is super expensive and Verizon found this out far too late, so fighting the New York City lawsuit made perfect sense for them. It's bad for Verizon that they lost, but good for the consumer, I guess.