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I hate to say it but this article reeks of Neo-Luddism. Fiber is the future and it it here to stay. In trying to hold on to the old tech, these Verizon custome

by erikig 12y ago

I hate to say it but this article reeks of Neo-Luddism. Fiber is the future and it it here to stay. In trying to hold on to the old tech, these Verizon customers are forcing Verizon to stagger their support between two technologies for much longer than they would otherwise - leading to diminished customer service and perceived reliability for both.

ZenoArrow 12y ago
Imagine this was an article about a web server provider... the customers want to stay with their current server with 99% uptime, the provider wants to switch them to a faster server with 90% uptime. In a properly regulated market the customer gets to choose the option that suits them best, but as everyone knows the situation with US ISPs is bananas, far too much power in the hands of too few companies.
- javert 12y ago
  > In a properly regulated market We have a regulated market. Time Warner, Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon are the ones who have captured it. Slowly becoming like government bureaus. There is no such thing as a proper regulated market. That's like proper communism. If you want regulated telecom, this is what you get.
  - AnthonyMouse 12y ago
    > There is no such thing as a proper regulated market. There is a distinction between the absence and presence of regulatory capture. Preventing regulatory capture is obviously a hard problem but that's hardly any reason to countenance its presence.
  - Retric 12y ago
    Water is a fairly well regulated market in the US. It works because the actual cost of water is low and the external costs of things like water born diseases are vary high. There are many other examples where a cheap good's price is significantly increased but few people care because the regulations don't impact them and it's still cheap.
    - rayiner 12y ago
      Water is a disaster in much of the U.S. A good example is the western states that don't have many natural resources. The government decided that water was a human right, built a ton of irrigation in the desert, and now you have populous states like Arizona, Nevada, and much of Southern California that shouldn't exist and cannot sustainably exist.
      - Retric 12y ago
        There is plenty of water for people in those areas, not enough for plants. For comparison the 800 mile Alasca pipeline moves 10times as much oil per day as all of the worlds declination plays put together. Or the equivent of about 1 million peoples daily water use. Scaling it up and arizona could import 100% of it's water usage for less than 1% of it's GDP. It's not free but less than the heating costs in many northern states. In the end it's just a question of how many thousandth of a cent your willing to pay per gallon and you can have water anywhere you want. Agriculture happens to need a fucktun of the stuff but food is easy to move and land in those areas is cheap. So, it actually is reasonable for people to build on cheap land out there simply because it's not useful for anything else. PS: Shure, we are rapidly draining a few aquifers but there is little point in leaving the water there in the first place.
        rayiner 12y ago
        Looking at the price of importing water is misleading because its not priced properly anywhere in the U.S. And training those aquifers is precisely why places like Arizona aren't sustainable.
- Zombieball 12y ago
  What does properly regulated mean? There are vast infrastructure requirements to operate as an ISP. Perhaps the government should treat fiber as a utility and rent out usage to ISPs?
- briandh 12y ago
  For some definitions of "properly". Personally, I don't think regulations forcing a company to maintain outmoded infrastructure at the behest of a small portion of consumers would be proper.
  - mbreese 12y ago
    They are a monopoly carrier. If you want a government backed monopoly, you have to accept a certain level of regulation. This is the cost of being in that business. If they'd rather not be in that business, that's another issue.
- davmre 12y ago
  A better analogy would be: you shared a web server with 99 other users, splitting the cost 100 ways. Then the provider installed a new, faster server (with marginally smaller uptime -- easily worked around by buying a backup battery), to which all 99 of your fellow customers migrated. You refuse to migrate and want to stay on the old server. In a free market, the provider would say something like "that's fine, we'll keep maintaining the old server as long as you're willing to pay the costs", where said costs are now 100x of what they previously were, since you're no longer sharing the upkeep. You could then decide yourself if this were really the best use of your resources. In Verizon's case, though, prices on copper POTS service are regulated and can't be raised to reflect upkeep costs. So when most customers switch to fiber, the money coming in from the few remaining copper customers doesn't actually cover maintenance costs. That means maintenance of the copper network is being subsidized by FiOS customers. Whatever Verizon's other evils (and I agree with you that there are many), a government-mandated transfer of wealth from fiber adopters to copper-clinging Luddites is not good policy.
  - JohnTHaller 12y ago
    That's not a good analogy. Home phone pots is reliable and regulated. VoIP information services are not. I can choose between two bad providers here in NYC (time warner cable and Verizon dsl), both of which suffer from regular outtages, often lasting a day or longer.
    - NoPiece 12y ago
      Except that Verizon's phone service over fiber is priced and regulated in exactly the same way as their copper service. It is still effectively the same landline service. Forcing Verizon to maintain copper means slower rollout of fiber and slower internet. It isn't reasonable for people (Ars) to want faster better internet service, and also to complain when copper is removed.
      - selectodude 12y ago
        >Except that Verizon's phone service over fiber is priced Yes. >and regulated in exactly the same way as their copper service Sort of. It's required to support number portability and E911, but there's no uptime requirement. >It is still effectively the same landline service. Also, no. http://www.verizon.com/support/residential/phone/homephone/general+support/fios+voice+service/fvs/121150.htm http://www.verizon.com/support/residential/phone/homephone/g... "Call Restrictions: You cannot receive Collect or third Party Calls, and you cannot place 900 calls using FiOS Digital Voice" "Battery Back Up In case of a power outage, FiOS Digital Voice will operate on battery back up for approximately 8 hours if an active battery is inserted in the Battery Backup Unit" That is not the same quality of service that I expect from my copper POTS service.
briandh 12y ago
I don't think it's neo-Luddism. I just think that certain outlets, like Ars, dislike US telecom companies and will seize on most opportunities to criticize them. Now, US telecom companies aren't very likeable, sure. I'm with them there, as I imagine most people are. But it's not good journalism.
- mbreese 12y ago
  Just because the site has an opinion doesn't mean that it's not good journalism.
sounds 12y ago
What does it matter? "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss." Maybe it's cool to hate on this article for being about 100-year-old tech, but the real problem is that Verizon--a piece of the old AT&T monopoly--is right back up to the old AT&T tricks. Verizon stopped rolling out fiber. Verizon isn't investing in their old copper network. Are they losing customers? Not really. For many customers, Verizon is one of maybe two choices. If the other choice is worse, what do you do? Here's a link about Comcast but it applies: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140602/05510527434/john-oliver-stop-calling-it-net-neutrality-its-preventing-cable-company-fkery.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140602/05510527434/john-...
- cowsandmilk 12y ago
  > Verizon stopped rolling out fiber. The article is about those to whom they are trying to roll out fiber, but insist they want copper instead. People who have fiber in their buildings, who just need to have it run upstairs to their apartment, who instead want the copper repaired.
  - doctorshady 12y ago
    This actually relates to areas where they've already deployed fiber; they don't want to keep maintaining the copper plant in those areas. Verizon issued a press release a while back saying they'd no longer deploy FiOS in new areas. Fire Island was one of the few exceptions to that, and only because people weren't happy with Verizon trying to give them cellular service in place of the copper network the hurricane ruined.
JohnTHaller 12y ago
Right. Forget about that whole thing about landline phones being governed by laws that regulate how they are run, how long they're permitted to be down, etc for people's safety and ability to contact emergency services and force everyone to switch to VOIP which is run as an information service with basically no regulation so your home phone line can go down for days at a time and you can't do anything about it.
- mindslight 12y ago
  And don't forget unbundling. CLEC provided DSL is one of the few remaining competitive options. - happy customer of Omsoft/Sonic.net
  - JohnTHaller 12y ago
    Unfortunately, you're at the mercy of the end provider for technical expertise, in my case Verizon. I tried DSL from another provider a while back. Of my 30 day trial, it was down for 7 days because a Verizon tech randomly unplugged something in our neighborhood box.
    - mindslight 12y ago
      Well not all levels, just the line itself. So you do escape the gimmicky billing / traffic restrictions / artificially-constrained connection rates / horrible support. But yeah, you mainly have to hope things just work and the telco is able to leave the circuit alone. (and that they aren't still petty about having to open up their lines. although if that's a problem, why would you want to encourage it by giving in?) I've got this problem that seemingly every 4-6 months, lots of line errors/disconnects develop (consistent over days). Call up the ISP, and when they run a test, the line goes back to normal. Last time they even sent an ATT (nee SBC) lineman out anyway, but of course his test looked great too. Apparently you can pay Sis Bell $1k or so for "line conditioning". If it gets worse, my plan is to just get the ISP to provision a second circuit and then cancel the first. But overall, it's certainly much less stress than dealing with the cable company or telco directly.
- deleted 12y ago

by erikig 12y ago

ZenoArrow 12y ago

Imagine this was an article about a web server provider... the customers want to stay with their current server with 99% uptime, the provider wants to switch them to a faster server with 90% uptime. In a properly regulated market the customer gets to choose the option that suits them best, but as everyone knows the situation with US ISPs is bananas, far too much power in the hands of too few companies.

javert 12y ago
> In a properly regulated market We have a regulated market. Time Warner, Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon are the ones who have captured it. Slowly becoming like government bureaus. There is no such thing as a proper regulated market. That's like proper communism. If you want regulated telecom, this is what you get.
- AnthonyMouse 12y ago
  > There is no such thing as a proper regulated market. There is a distinction between the absence and presence of regulatory capture. Preventing regulatory capture is obviously a hard problem but that's hardly any reason to countenance its presence.
- Retric 12y ago
  Water is a fairly well regulated market in the US. It works because the actual cost of water is low and the external costs of things like water born diseases are vary high. There are many other examples where a cheap good's price is significantly increased but few people care because the regulations don't impact them and it's still cheap.
  - rayiner 12y ago
    Water is a disaster in much of the U.S. A good example is the western states that don't have many natural resources. The government decided that water was a human right, built a ton of irrigation in the desert, and now you have populous states like Arizona, Nevada, and much of Southern California that shouldn't exist and cannot sustainably exist.
    - Retric 12y ago
      There is plenty of water for people in those areas, not enough for plants. For comparison the 800 mile Alasca pipeline moves 10times as much oil per day as all of the worlds declination plays put together. Or the equivent of about 1 million peoples daily water use. Scaling it up and arizona could import 100% of it's water usage for less than 1% of it's GDP. It's not free but less than the heating costs in many northern states. In the end it's just a question of how many thousandth of a cent your willing to pay per gallon and you can have water anywhere you want. Agriculture happens to need a fucktun of the stuff but food is easy to move and land in those areas is cheap. So, it actually is reasonable for people to build on cheap land out there simply because it's not useful for anything else. PS: Shure, we are rapidly draining a few aquifers but there is little point in leaving the water there in the first place.
      - rayiner 12y ago
        Looking at the price of importing water is misleading because its not priced properly anywhere in the U.S. And training those aquifers is precisely why places like Arizona aren't sustainable.
Zombieball 12y ago
What does properly regulated mean? There are vast infrastructure requirements to operate as an ISP. Perhaps the government should treat fiber as a utility and rent out usage to ISPs?
briandh 12y ago
For some definitions of "properly". Personally, I don't think regulations forcing a company to maintain outmoded infrastructure at the behest of a small portion of consumers would be proper.
- mbreese 12y ago
  They are a monopoly carrier. If you want a government backed monopoly, you have to accept a certain level of regulation. This is the cost of being in that business. If they'd rather not be in that business, that's another issue.
davmre 12y ago
A better analogy would be: you shared a web server with 99 other users, splitting the cost 100 ways. Then the provider installed a new, faster server (with marginally smaller uptime -- easily worked around by buying a backup battery), to which all 99 of your fellow customers migrated. You refuse to migrate and want to stay on the old server. In a free market, the provider would say something like "that's fine, we'll keep maintaining the old server as long as you're willing to pay the costs", where said costs are now 100x of what they previously were, since you're no longer sharing the upkeep. You could then decide yourself if this were really the best use of your resources. In Verizon's case, though, prices on copper POTS service are regulated and can't be raised to reflect upkeep costs. So when most customers switch to fiber, the money coming in from the few remaining copper customers doesn't actually cover maintenance costs. That means maintenance of the copper network is being subsidized by FiOS customers. Whatever Verizon's other evils (and I agree with you that there are many), a government-mandated transfer of wealth from fiber adopters to copper-clinging Luddites is not good policy.
- JohnTHaller 12y ago
  That's not a good analogy. Home phone pots is reliable and regulated. VoIP information services are not. I can choose between two bad providers here in NYC (time warner cable and Verizon dsl), both of which suffer from regular outtages, often lasting a day or longer.
  - NoPiece 12y ago
    Except that Verizon's phone service over fiber is priced and regulated in exactly the same way as their copper service. It is still effectively the same landline service. Forcing Verizon to maintain copper means slower rollout of fiber and slower internet. It isn't reasonable for people (Ars) to want faster better internet service, and also to complain when copper is removed.
    - selectodude 12y ago
      >Except that Verizon's phone service over fiber is priced Yes. >and regulated in exactly the same way as their copper service Sort of. It's required to support number portability and E911, but there's no uptime requirement. >It is still effectively the same landline service. Also, no. http://www.verizon.com/support/residential/phone/homephone/general+support/fios+voice+service/fvs/121150.htm http://www.verizon.com/support/residential/phone/homephone/g... "Call Restrictions: You cannot receive Collect or third Party Calls, and you cannot place 900 calls using FiOS Digital Voice" "Battery Back Up In case of a power outage, FiOS Digital Voice will operate on battery back up for approximately 8 hours if an active battery is inserted in the Battery Backup Unit" That is not the same quality of service that I expect from my copper POTS service.

briandh 12y ago

I don't think it's neo-Luddism. I just think that certain outlets, like Ars, dislike US telecom companies and will seize on most opportunities to criticize them. Now, US telecom companies aren't very likeable, sure. I'm with them there, as I imagine most people are. But it's not good journalism.

mbreese 12y ago
Just because the site has an opinion doesn't mean that it's not good journalism.

sounds 12y ago

What does it matter? "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss." Maybe it's cool to hate on this article for being about 100-year-old tech, but the real problem is that Verizon--a piece of the old AT&T monopoly--is right back up to the old AT&T tricks. Verizon stopped rolling out fiber. Verizon isn't investing in their old copper network. Are they losing customers? Not really. For many customers, Verizon is one of maybe two choices. If the other choice is worse, what do you do? Here's a link about Comcast but it applies: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140602/05510527434/john-oliver-stop-calling-it-net-neutrality-its-preventing-cable-company-fkery.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140602/05510527434/john-...

cowsandmilk 12y ago
> Verizon stopped rolling out fiber. The article is about those to whom they are trying to roll out fiber, but insist they want copper instead. People who have fiber in their buildings, who just need to have it run upstairs to their apartment, who instead want the copper repaired.
- doctorshady 12y ago
  This actually relates to areas where they've already deployed fiber; they don't want to keep maintaining the copper plant in those areas. Verizon issued a press release a while back saying they'd no longer deploy FiOS in new areas. Fire Island was one of the few exceptions to that, and only because people weren't happy with Verizon trying to give them cellular service in place of the copper network the hurricane ruined.

JohnTHaller 12y ago

Right. Forget about that whole thing about landline phones being governed by laws that regulate how they are run, how long they're permitted to be down, etc for people's safety and ability to contact emergency services and force everyone to switch to VOIP which is run as an information service with basically no regulation so your home phone line can go down for days at a time and you can't do anything about it.

mindslight 12y ago
And don't forget unbundling. CLEC provided DSL is one of the few remaining competitive options. - happy customer of Omsoft/Sonic.net
- JohnTHaller 12y ago
  Unfortunately, you're at the mercy of the end provider for technical expertise, in my case Verizon. I tried DSL from another provider a while back. Of my 30 day trial, it was down for 7 days because a Verizon tech randomly unplugged something in our neighborhood box.
  - mindslight 12y ago
    Well not all levels, just the line itself. So you do escape the gimmicky billing / traffic restrictions / artificially-constrained connection rates / horrible support. But yeah, you mainly have to hope things just work and the telco is able to leave the circuit alone. (and that they aren't still petty about having to open up their lines. although if that's a problem, why would you want to encourage it by giving in?) I've got this problem that seemingly every 4-6 months, lots of line errors/disconnects develop (consistent over days). Call up the ISP, and when they run a test, the line goes back to normal. Last time they even sent an ATT (nee SBC) lineman out anyway, but of course his test looked great too. Apparently you can pay Sis Bell $1k or so for "line conditioning". If it gets worse, my plan is to just get the ISP to provision a second circuit and then cancel the first. But overall, it's certainly much less stress than dealing with the cable company or telco directly.
deleted 12y ago