Verizon wants to sell 'antiquated' copper assets, stick to wireless for voice Verizon's copper networks are now so old it says wireless is a better option for voice and low-speed data services. Chairman and CEO Lowell McAdam told a Citi briefing that along with looking for opportunities to offload some of its copper assets, part of the company's strategy to retire its copper is wireless. “We're moving …
a better option.... for customers (where voice calls over copper are still, in many cases, local, untimed and unbilled?) or for verizon (where customers are billed twice, once for making the call, and a second time to receive the call, and both are a per minute charge)... just asking
Oh, it's definitely for Verizon. The execs loathe the union employees, mostly because they refused to take proactive pay cuts a few years back and won the strike -- they are highly skilled, generally, and necessary for the copper line operations.
They want everything non-union and unregulated. Look at your bill and you can see why.
Where do they get this malarkey? ``Better'' if you want text messaging, talking in your car, tons of buttons and icons....
If, on the other hand, if you want crystal-clear communications, connections that last untll one of you hangs up, and simple operation (what concepts!), you can only use a landline. We have a cell-phone-only friend whom it typically takes two or three connections to complete a conversation, and another who, when she calls on her cell, we usually end up calling her landline.
You'll get my copper away from me when you &c.
[Edit: To say nothing of the fact that so long as the wires are up, we have service, courtesy of huge banks of batteries in the CO, and probably backup generators. Up here, where blackouts are more than annual events, that counts for a lot.]
> “We're moving a lot of customers off copper onto wireless, especially for voice services and lower speed DSL”, McAdam said, adding that it delivers “frankly better” services than “antiquated copper”.
Bollocks.
As the gentleman above commented, they want to shove their landline customers onto services that they can charge more for, and divest themselves of the overheads of maintaining the copper and any statutory responsibilities that copper imposes on them.
I gather that the statutory responsibilities are the main reason they're pushing this. When they're no longer required to provide a service they can tell the customer to get stuffed. And the customer can't go elsewhere, because they've had their tame politicians pass laws forbidding municipality-run wireless networks.
Much of this push is based on accounting - line-lines are seen as a fixed investment that require a maintenance budget, where as cell towers are a service in most cases. The carriers rent them from a third party and account for the costs very differently.
The customers service experience is mostly irrelevant.
Well, for the revenue stream it is. Having a nice flat rate line with unlimited data (at the speed my DSL line provides) is VERY nice thank you.
Moving to wireless will probably take these data and voice limits away, and when I trip over a limit (wireless bandwidth, being a shared resource) it will cost me dearly. Yes, I do like to download those Linux install disks, and maybe go back a revision. Just one of them will chew up a bunch of data. Now add in the updates that I do on a regular basis (and Microsoft does on an irregular basis) and you run into data limits and the cash register (till) just keeps ringing up the big bucks.
No thanks.
The only reason copper is a problem is because they simply stopped putting any money into maintenance and improvement (and force retired all the old I & M people who were top craft pay who actually did that work (along with dumping all the construction crews and now outsourcing that work).
FOAD
It is no surprise that VZ wants to get rid of the copper, and move people customers wallets to be emptied onto wireless. And for all of the reasons specified by other posters.
I am so glad that 22 months ago, I told Verizon to FOAD, after seeing another price increase.
For me, considering my limited phone use, a cheap PAYG cell made more sense, both in a practical one as well as an economic one.
Good fucking riddance Verizon.
They did install their FiOS lines in our neighborhood, but, considering their tendency to screw people over with their pricing lies; I chose to pass on them.
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