"Verizon has agreed to fix failing copper networks and boost fiber deployment in New York, two years after state officials began investigating the quality of Verizon landline phone and broadband service.
A settlement with Verizon "will require the company to repair 54 central offices across the state, replace bad cable, defective equipment, faulty back-up batteries, and to take down 64,000 double telephone poles," the Communications Workers of America (CWA) union said last week. "The agreement also includes increased broadband buildout to major apartment buildings in New York City and more than 30,000 homes across the state."
Verizon reached the proposed settlement with the union, staff at the New York State Department of Public Service, and the Public Utility Law Project of New York. The four-party settlement is still subject to approval by the state Public Service Commission (PSC)."
On a related note, Consolidated Communications (formerly Fairpoint, Verizon, Bell Atlantic, etc) seems to be finally doing some construction and rehab work around these parts. Really nice to see double poles go away. I always thought they were tacky looking.
I wonder if this will trickle down to other Verizon territories. VA, DC and MD also have horrible plant and facility issues. At one point, they abandoned so much in favor of FiOS, but now that it's not the golden egg that they expected, they need to do something.
I have heard about this, I know 2 people who all of a sudden when their western electric 554 suddenly stopped working and had worked before, I was wondering if this did not have something to do with this.
Thats not what Verizon is telling us on Long Island.
They sent out notices that Copper POTS service will be discontuned end of 2018.
Our local Fire Dept that I used to work for and my son still does is required to move their Dispatch Center off POTS and go to FIOS
Their is a meeting set for next week with the Network Engineers to see how they are going to pull this off without interrupting the public access to emergency services during the cut over.
Funny you should mention this as I was going to update this
Fios was installed end of last year, the dispatch center that had 22 POTS circuits got 4 ONTS that could handle 8 circuits each. The install went OK but the final programing had a few hitches. They had problems programing the roll over on busy and transfer on no answer on the alarm lines, they said that those features did not exist or went to other numbers on the previous POTS system even though the FD tested the features weekly and they always worked properly.
Once they worked out the programing bugs (took 2 days) it worked fine for over a month.
2 weeks ago all 22 lines went down and were repaired within 2 hours, the explanation was the PON in the Central Office went down and took most of the Fios lines from that CO down. To Verizons credit they did transfer the Alarm phones to cell phones and as far as we know no calls were missed. They made it sound like all Fios lines from the CO went down with us so how many calls could we miss Lol
I guess time will tell how this works out, it's a shame that the 1 thing you could always rely on was good POTS service and repairs were done properly and promptly.
The Cell world has gotten the public so used to dropped calls and static (has gotten better with digital) that they have come to accept the same from POTS and Verizon obliges by declining levels of service since it seems to be the accepted normal.
We had FiOS installed at the house shortly after Verizon began selling the service in our town.
The service has been quite good over the years. I think we had 1 interruption in telephone service that required a DPO to resolve. Other than that, the backup battery charging unit has been replaced a couple of times.
The copper OSP in our area has deteriorated to the point where Verizon automatically migrates customers to fiber when static becomes a problem.
The company does maintain copper for customers who are in those infamous "dark zones". I just wish that Verizon would bite the bullet, provide 100% availability and stop the cherry picking. I guess they want to ensure that there will be a market for OTA delivery of services once things are finalized and antennas installed.
