A few weeks ago in the consumer column of the Boston Sunday Globe:
-or-
... a reader explained that in response to a repair request on their copper phone line, Verizon was forcing (not encouraging) them to migrate to fiber. The reader asked, "...what consumer protections apply. Has Massachusetts taken a position?"
The reporter started off with the usual note about fiber being different from copper in that during a power outage, you are reliant on a local backup battery, but otherwise it is technically superior.
But then he went on point out that Verizon is offering two different products. One being Fios phone service, and the other being basic fiber optic phone service. As we know, Fios isn't regulated by the state utility regulators, but notably basic fiber optic phone service is. I hadn't heard of that before.
A spokeswoman for the state Department of Telecommunications and Cable (DTC) said, "Because this is a technology upgrade...the department does not have the authority to interfere with this change, so consumers must either switch to fiber or switch carriers."
So I guess you are out of luck if Verizon picks you for a forced upgrade and you want to stick with copper.
The reporter referenced the DTC's advisory on this matter:
A quote from that:
The DTC requires that Verizon make available to all residential customers in Verizon's service territory a regulated landline voice telephone service and Verizon claims its fiber service, where offered, will meet this obligation.
So what changed from the early days of Fios, where Verizon would pull out the copper lines to prevent the consumer from using those lines they were obligated to share with other telcos? Does this mean another telco can demand that Verizon lease the fiber line? And if so, what capabilities are available? Does Verizon use loopholes to argue that only a voice line of bandwidth is available for lease?
Is Verizon implementing this with Fios style dedicated fibers between the CO and the customer, or are they running fiber to neighborhood concentrators, and multiplexing only a low-bandwidth signal onto a shared trunk line?
I'm assuming for simplicity sake they're using a single identical infrastructure for both, plus this way once they have a foot in the door, they can upsell the consumer on their bundled offerings and not have to upgrade the connection.
...you should inform Verizon if you have any home monitoring equipment such as alarm/security systems or medical equipment that relies upon your existing phone line to ensure that it will continue to work after you make the switch.
Digital voice services are also notoriously incompatible with fax machines, due to the way they compress the signal. The DTC advisory implies that there aren't technical differences between the two Verizon voice offerings, only marketing and regulatory differences. So I'm assuming both are using lossy codecs in their ONT. They may support T.38[1], which demodulates the fax at the analog-to-digital conversion point.
- formatting link
-Tom