Say It Ain't So, Verizon!

Back in the day when there was only one telephone company (a monopoly, I'll grant you that) the Bell System developed an infrastructure of lines throughout the hurricane-prone areas of the country, then carried that development to the rest of the eastern seaboard. When hurricanes hit anywhere the single communication link one could rely on was the land-line telephone. Everyone I know in NOLA, for example, may have a cell phone and a cordless phone in the home for convenience, but look in any closet and you will find an old fashioned wired phone for emergencies.  BTW, I still have one in the closet. An old "trimline" number. It came in handy during Sandy last year.

During a big storm, the electric power can be out for days or weeks, cordless phones (run on batteries even though the base is connected to the land-line) are useless, as are cellphones when the towers go down (electricity, again) leaving people stranded with no connection to the outside world. This is when those old phones come out, get plugged in, and will work 99% of the time. After a major hurricane I was able to reach most everyone because they had these old phones. 

Now, Verizon wants to change all that.  Thinking of higher profits rather than customer service and safety, they want to do away with the copper wire, high maintenance system and force everyone into the wireless market.  They're starting small, as you will read below, but the plans are in the works for the rest of the country. To my mind, Voice Link is an unreliable alternative.

Southern friends should take particular note of this.

MANTOLOKING, N.J. — Hurricane Sandy devastated this barrier island community of multimillion-dollar homes, but in Peter Flihan’s view, Verizon Communications has delivered a second blow: the telecommunications giant did not rebuild the landlines destroyed in the storm, and traditional telephone service here has now gone the way of the telegraph. 

“Verizon decides then and there to step on us,” said Mr. Flihan, 75, a retired toy designer and marketer. Verizon said it was too expensive to replace Mantoloking’s traditional copper-line phone network — the kind that has connected America for more than a century — and instead installed Voice Link, a wireless service it insisted was better. 

Verizon’s move on this sliver of land is a look into the not-too-distant future, a foreshadowing of nearly all telephone service across the United States. The traditional landline is not expected to last the decade in a country where nearly 40 percent of households use only wireless phones. Even now, less than 10 percent of households have only a landline phone, according to government data that counts cable-based phone service in that category. 

The changing landscape has Verizon, AT&T and other phone companies itching to rid themselves of the cost of maintaining their vast copper-wire networks and instead offer wireless and fiber-optic lines like FiOS and U-verse, even though the new services often fail during a blackout. 

“The vision I have is we are going into the copper plant areas and every place we have FiOS, we are going to kill the copper,” Lowell C. McAdam, Verizon’s chairman and chief executive, said last year. Robert W. Quinn Jr., AT&T’s senior vice president for federal regulatory issues, said the death of the old network was inevitable. “We’re scavenging for replacement parts to be able to fix the stuff when it breaks,” he said at an industry conference in Maryland last week. “That’s why it’s going to happen.” 

The Federal Communications Commission has long agreed. In its National Broadband Plan, published in 2010, the F.C.C. said that requiring certain carriers to maintain plain old telephone service “is not sustainable” and could siphon investments away from new networks. 

“The challenge for the country,” the F.C.C. said, is to ensure “a smooth transition for Americans who use traditional phone service and for the businesses that provide it.” 

But as far as Mr. Flihan and others in New Jersey are concerned, that transition from a reliable service — one that has given them a sense of security all their lives — is not smooth at all. An array of state-sanctioned consumer advocacy groups, as well as AARP, have petitioned regulators to disallow the replacement of Mantoloking’s copper lines with Voice Link. 

Not only will Voice Link not work if the power fails — a backup battery provides two hours of talking time, hardly reassuring to people battered by Sandy — but Verizon warns Voice Link users that calls to 911 under normal conditions might not go through because of network congestion. Medical devices that require periodic tests over phone lines, like many pacemakers, cannot transmit over Voice Link. Fax machines do not work over most wireless phone networks, including Voice Link. Neither do many home security systems, which depend on a copper phone line to connect to a response center. 

“They told us this was the greatest thing in the world,” Mr. Flihan said. But he estimates that roughly 25 percent of the calls he makes through the Verizon Voice Link service do not go through the first time he dials, or sometimes the second or third. Occasionally, the call is interrupted by clicking sounds, and sometimes a third party’s voice can be heard on the line, Mr. Flihan said.

The Gray Lady has the story HERE.

And so it goes.

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