It looks like Verizon can break any agreement with any government or government agency and suffer no consequences.
The big agreement that Verizon is shirking is its New York City cable franchise agreement, but (bear with me) I'd like to first explain how Verizon is breaking a promise it made to the state regulator, the Department of Public Service (DPS).
Last year, I filed a public comment with the DPS, explaining that Verizon was in breach of several promises to DPS.
The Voice Link Deception
Verizon has for years failed to provide reliable service to the poor and the elderly, who are especially vulnerable to being cut off completely from telecommunications (yes, even in the USA). When Verizon cut off phone service to one elderly couple for three weeks, their daughter switched them to cable phone service.
The union plays a critical role in calling out Verizon. As the article notes, "Union workers . . . charge that Verizon has been neglecting its traditional copper lines in favor of its FiOS fiber-optic cables, which allows the company to charge more for Internet, phone and television bundles."
Verizon wants to cancel wireline phone service in poor areas, and has already done so in several parts of New York State. When Verizon replaces copper phone lines with inferior (possibly analog) wireless service, it cuts off life alert services, fax machines, alarm systems, and point of sale terminals for local businesses. Then, Verizon lies and says that the phone service is working. One shopowner in Lower Manhattan complained to public radio, "They send you a message that everything is resolved. And nothing is resolved."
Verizon knows that nobody wants Voice Link. That's why the company resorts to force (and also, likely, to deception). As my friend Bruce Kushnick wrote in Huffington Post:
You walk over to your neighbor's house and their services are also out. You call the phone company and they ask you to 'leave a message'. You keep calling and they tell you that they are not going to fix any of your services; they offer to give you a wireless replacement called Voice Link.
Then they inform you that it can't do DSL, the burglar alarm won't be fixed and they are not liable if your E911 service doesn't work.
Voice Link has
numerous flaws that make it inferior to copper line service and also inferior to most cell phones. It prevents users from using calling card minutes, receiving collect calls, or using most alternative long distance providers. It requires a separate calling plan in order to make any international calls. 911 calls may not work with it. As mentioned above, it cuts off numerous services that require a copper phone line, including alarm services.
Alarm services over copper lines would function in a blackout, as long as the phone company had power. In contrast, the alarm service that Verizon provides to FiOS users only works for the first four hours of a blackout (or for less time if the battery fails faster).
So when, after Sandy, Verizon applied for permission to install Voice Link on Fire Island and elsewhere, the DPS gave Verizon permission to install Voice Link only on part of Fire Island and not elsewhere. Verizon proceeded to deploy Voice Link widely. It deployed Voice Link in Lower Manhattan. It deployed Voice Link on Fire Island. It deployed Voice Link in Monticello, NY after purposely allowing the copper infrastructure to degrade by simply not paying for maintenance, according to Chris Shelton, Vice President of the Communications Workers of America, a union.
Part of the transition to Voice Link is anti-union. Most of Verizon's unionized workers are employed by the copper network. FiOS and cellular are un-unionized. According to one union activist, 97,000 of Verizon's 97,350 unionized workers were employed maintaining the copper networks in 2007. As Verizon sells off copper networks in rural states such as Vermont, New Hampshire, and Hawaii, it sheds unionized workers.
The union blew the whistle on Verizon's Voice Link deployment in Manhattan. According to the CWA letter (the same as the one linked above):
Verizon dispatched employees to install VoiceLink as replacement service to all 81 units of a building at 308 E. 8th St. in lower Manhattan, but the elderly residents of the building insisted that VoiceLink not be installed after learning that it would not support their LifeAlert health monitoring equipment. To CWA's knowledge, the building remains without phone service at the present time.
Verizon's plan to saddle poor people with inferior service and only deploy FiOS to rich people is no secret. Don't expect Verizon to tell the truth to regulators. Verizon always lies to regulators. To find out what Verizon's really doing, look at what the company says to investors. In 2012, Verizon CEO Lowell MacAdam
told investors:
But the vision that I have is we are going into the copper plant areas and every place we have FiOS, we are going to kill the copper. We are going to just take it out of service and we are going to move those services onto FiOS. We have got parallel networks in way too many places now, so that is a pot of gold in my view.
And then in other areas that are more rural and more sparsely populated, we have got LTE built that will handle all of those services and so we are going to cut the copper off there. We are going to do it over wireless.
It's no secret that Verizon wants to switch all the poor people to wireless, but doing so violates Verizon's franchise agreement with New York City, which is the second part of this article.
Verizon Violates its Franchise Agreement With New York City
This is the issue that de Blasio has chosen to fight Verizon on. In the past, cable companies paid cities for the right to use city streets, put utility boxes on sidewalks, and deliver service to customers. The franchise agreement is a pair of massive files, each over 10 MB (part 1) (part 2). Page 893 of part 2 of the file shows the deployment schedules, and Verizon is late in every borough (SFU refers to single family homes and MFU refers to mutliple family homes, such as apartment buildings -- Verizon gets more time to connect the apartment buildings).
The agreement allows the city to revoke the franchise agreement, but I argue that the city should be able to revoke part of the agreement. In any area where Verizon does not intend to deploy FiOS, Verizon should lose its cable franchise. Revoking the entire agreement -- forbidding Verizon to provide cable service in areas where it has already deployed FiOS -- would harm the economy. Verizon's services are too critical in those neighborhoods where it has built fiber internet. If the power company, Con Ed, violated a city agreement, the city would not consider requiring Con Ed to stop providing power to neighborhoods because people would die. Similarly, people would be unsafe if the internet they rely on were suddenly turned off.
I hope that de Blasio continues this fight. It's David against Verizon.