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.
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.
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.
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/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.
I'm not in Verizon territory, but I did try ordering the Verizon Freedom Package earlier today from their website (POTS + unlimited LD, an asston of features) just for the purposes of arguing in Manhattan, an area where FiOS service is offered.
Nothing I tried would let me order that; I'd always, inevitably be redirected back to the digital voice order page.
It doesn't matter if you force Verizon to maintain copper or not, Verizon cancelled all new FiOS rollouts back in 2010. Unless you're in an area already serviced by FiOS and under an agreement, you won't get fiber from Verizon. Note that they will finish the few bits of neighborhoods where they have an agreement and most of the fiber laid... eventually... unless they decide to renege on their promises, of course. Verizon agreed to set FiOS up for all of NYC by 2014 and has been trying to weasel out of that agreement for over 2 years. My neighborhood has no fiber service yet.
They stopped rolling out fiber because they needed to improve adoption in areas where they already deployed. Supporting copper is slowing the whole thing down.
Most of what people perceive as Verizon's evils are the result of government-mandated transfer of wealth.[1]
The way most markets work is that new technology is introduced in the premium segment, and trickles down to everyone else once the fixed costs are amortized. In almost every city, Verizon is legally prevented from doing this. If they want to wire up a city with FiOS, they can't start with the rich neighborhoods and expand to poorer neighborhoods as it makes sense to do so. They have to commit to wiring up the whole city in one go. Because that's an unattractive proposition in most places, they've halted new FiOS deployment.
The same thing is true of the existing copper network. Many of the places that are currently wired shouldn't be wired. In a free market, they wouldn't be wired. It makes no sense to wire them, for remoteness or density reasons. The reason they're wired is that the government taxed certain of Verizon's customers to subsidize the customers that it doesn't make sense to build out to.
[1] I'm not against such programs as a principle, but when you try to implement it "by the back door" instead of through direct subsidy, as the government has done in the telecom sector, you get exactly the sort of dysfunction that we see now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.