This is a long article, but well worth reading.arstechnica.com wrote:The shift from copper landlines to fiber-based voice networks is continuing apace, and no one wants it to happen faster than Verizon.
Internet users nationwide are clamoring for fiber, as well, hoping it can free them from slower DSL service or the dreaded cable companies. But not everyone wants fiber, because, when it comes to voice calls, the newer technology doesn’t have all the benefits of the old copper phone network. In particular, fiber doesn’t conduct electricity, where copper does. That means when your power goes out, copper landlines might keep working for days or weeks by drawing electricity over the lines, while a phone that relies on fiber will only last as long as its battery. That's up to eight hours for Verizon’s most widely available backup system.
Thus, while many customers practically beg for fiber, others—particularly those who have suffered through long power outages—want Verizon to keep maintaining the old copper lines. But Verizon continues pressuring customers to switch, and it’s getting harder to say no.
“Verizon's efforts to force people off copper in my area of Rhode Island rise to the level of harassment,” Verizon customer Karen Anne Kolling of North Kingstown, Rhode Island, told Ars.
Kolling is one of numerous Verizon customers who got in touch with Ars in response to articles on the in-progress shutoff of the traditional telephone network. “They have contacted me at least 10 to 20 times in the last year, including showing up unannounced on my doorstep to tell me they were switching me to FiOS," Kolling said. "So far I have managed to save my landline in this area, which is subject to power failures from hurricanes.”
Verizon spokesperson John Bonomo told Ars in an e-mail, "We do not 'show up unannounced' to people’s homes. We have to install equipment in customers’ homes, and then very likely we need to do additional work inside the home."
Verizon has 4.9 million residential landline customers still on copper networks, with 5.5 million getting voice service over fiber. Public interest groups and consumers have accused Verizon of letting copper networks deteriorate and using their degraded status to push fiber upgrades. Verizon made $31.5 billion in revenue last quarter along with $4.3 billion in profit. But its wireline business has struggled, with the fiber-based FiOS products propping it up. Total wireline revenue in Q2 2014 was $9.8 billion, up 0.3 percent, the first year-over-year increase in more than seven years. FiOS was the main driver of growth, with revenue increasing 14 percent over the previous year, hitting $3.1 billion.
Verizon cut investment in its wireline business—it had 80,600 wireline employees as of June 30, 2014, down from 84,700 in 2013, 88,600 in 2012, and 93,200 in 2011. Verizon also reduced capital expenditures from $2.95 billion in the six months ending June 30, 2013 to $2.73 billion in the six months ending June 30, 2014.
“They told me if my copper-based landline needs repair, they will not repair it. So I'll have no choice but to switch to FIOS or Cox, both of which have limited time battery backup in the event of power failures,” said Kolling, a longtime software engineer who worked for Xerox PARC, Digital, and Adobe.
Despite Verizon’s warnings, Kolling’s copper lines have continued to work. “I probably have received at least 15 phone calls over the past year or so, and usually they start out with some statement like, ‘due to many problems with your phone service, we are switching you to FIOS,’” Kolling said. “I asked one of these callers what all these problems were, and she found one: eight years ago, in 2006, an outside wire came down and needed to be reattached.”
Kolling said she went up the food chain and was promised by a Verizon executive that residents will receive 30 days' notice if Verizon decides to completely turn off copper-based landline service where she lives. “I hope this is correct, so I have been ignoring them ever since,” she said.
Kolling’s story is nearly identical to ones told by Verizon customers from the East Coast to California. Besides the ones who spoke with Ars, others have registered their frustrations in official government proceedings. In May, Public Knowledge and 11 other public interest groups asked the FCC to investigate these complaints and consider enforcement actions. (The groups' letter described complaints about AT&T and Frontier, but the large majority of complaints were directed at Verizon.) The FCC hasn't taken any action in response.
David Berg of Bethesda, Maryland, has managed to keep his copper landlines, though not without hassle. "Verizon appears to be trying hard to get rid of land lines in my area," he told Ars. "They most recently let our landline stay broken for roughly a month while they claimed to be working on an 'area problem.' Actually, the problem with our line was inside the house. Surprise! They also claimed to have fixed it when I called them repeatedly (from my cell phone) to tell them it still wasn’t working properly."
For that month in late spring, Berg said his landline "worked with varying degrees of noise and diminished sound quality. Most of the time, you couldn’t really hear over the hum and other noises and had to give up until later."
Verizon tried to convince him to switch to fiber, but Berg refused. "They finally sent a technician to fix it," he said. "He knocked on the door to say that it was working perfectly well. I invited him in to see that it was not. He worked on it for a couple of hours inside the house and finally got it working without a strong hum, pops, and hisses."
The fix was just in time, because "we’ve had at least three [power] outages this summer, and the copper-based landline worked through them all," Berg said.
Mike Keys of Huntington, New York, has similarly resisted Verizon’s attempts to push him onto fiber. Keys uses FiOS for Internet and TV, but also has three traditional landlines on the copper network, in part because he runs a small computer consulting business and provides phone support to customers from his home. When Keys had FiOS installed, he insisted that Verizon let him also keep the copper phone lines.
“I have two sick people in the house,” Keys said. “Going through Hurricane Sandy, I had no power for 12 days, and I was the only one on the block who had phone service. Everyone else switched to the cable company or FiOS. At the beginning of my block, a tree fell on the lines, and this is interesting, it took out the electricity, it took out cable TV, it took out FiOS, but it did not bring down the copper cable.”
A year or so ago, Keys came home to find that two of his phone lines had been shut off, he said. "Calling them was a total waste of time. No one there knew anything about what happened," he said. He was able to get his service turned back on after about a week, but said he continues to get phone messages from Verizon that say, “they're discontinuing their old copper network, and they want to switch me to the new digital telephone service."
Keys delivers a consistent response: “I told them that I never want my copper to be removed, ever."
But the FCC is on course to let Verizon, AT&T, and other phone companies stop maintaining the old Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) by around 2020, eventually moving everyone to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone service. This shift could come with a loss of consumer protection rules such as price caps and "carrier of last resort" obligations to provide wireline phone service to anyone who asks for it. AT&T wants to substitute wireless for wired access in about 25 percent of its territory.
Verizon is getting a head start on the transition by retiring copper networks in favor of fiber ones. Customers moving from copper to fiber aren’t necessarily disconnected from the PSTN, because fiber can handle both the traditional circuit-switched phone network (also known as POTS, for Plain Old Telephone Service) and the new, largely unregulated VoIP phones.
Many customers do not understand that Verizon sells both regulated and unregulated phone service over fiber. Verizon insists that it is careful to explain the difference between POTS over fiber and VoIP.
"When we approach customers about switching to fiber for their telephone service, they often jump to the incorrect impression that we are trying to force them to FiOS," Bonomo said. "That is our responsibility that we communicate this clearly, and we want to make sure they understand they can get POTS over fiber, without necessarily getting our FiOS products. We are conscious about this, and we strive to make sure our customers understand the difference."
Customers who get VoIP over fiber today are not protected by the government-regulated prices that apply to traditional landlines, and they are not protected by rules that guarantee quality of service and prohibit slamming and cramming, Public Knowledge Senior Staff Attorney Jodie Griffin told Ars. Consumers' ability to petition state utility commissions for help in disputes against the phone companies is also limited if they have switched from a traditional landline to VoIP.
The FCC has issued some rules governing VoIP service, such as 911 requirements, but it hasn’t yet decided whether VoIP should be regulated as a utility after the traditional phone network is completely shut off. States also hold power over phone companies, but AT&T and Verizon have successfully lobbied many of them to restrict state oversight and eliminate universal service guarantees—despite Verizon relying on utility status to gain government perks in the building of its fiber network.
A fiber line that carries POTS traffic is still subject to utility regulations. But whether a fiber line carries POTS or VoIP traffic, it does not provide electricity to phones during outages.
Besides trying to convince individual customers like Kolling to switch to fiber, Verizon has asked the FCC for permission to discontinue copper entirely in some areas.
"In recent months, Verizon has filed notices with the Commission that it seeks to retire its copper network in six wire centers: Belle Harbor, NY; Orchard Park, NY; Farmingdale, NJ; Hummelstown, PA; Lynnfield, MA; and Ocean View, VA," an FCC spokesperson told Ars. "In addition, Verizon has filed other copper retirement notices for network changes that do not encompass an entire wire center." Carriers don't have to file notices when they plan to move small groups of customers from copper to fiber.
The National Association of State Utility Consumer Advocates (NASUCA) asked the FCC to delay copper retirements in Belle Harbor and Ocean View until the FCC performs the investigation requested by Public Knowledge. NASUCA also wants the retirements to wait until after the completion of trial runs of all-IP phone networks. The FCC is expected to oversee the first such trials as early as next year in the AT&T wire centers of Kings Point, Florida, and Carbon Hill, Alabama.
Verizon says it doesn't want to wait, because that process could take years. "Customers in these two wire centers—which cover more than 15,000 homes [in Belle Harbor and Ocean View]—have already overwhelmingly made the decision to move to either Verizon’s fiber-based services or to competitors," Verizon argued in an FCC filing. Verizon touts fiber networks as being more reliable than copper ones, saying customers can “receive the same traditional POTS service over fiber on the same terms and conditions and at the same or better price as they received over copper.”
Copper isn't immune to outages, Verizon notes. After all, the storms that take down power lines can also damage copper phone lines.
“From the perspective of reliability, fiber is immune to many environmental factors that affect copper cable, including electrometric interference and radio-frequency interference,” Verizon wrote. “It is less susceptible to temperature fluctuations or weather conditions, meaning fiber is less likely to experience outages during weather events, homeland security incidents, or other public safety emergencies. Fiber lines are generally more durable, do not corrode, have a much longer lifespan, and require fewer repairs than copper lines.”
Using light instead of electrical signals to deliver data, fiber delivers data at higher speeds and over longer distances and is more energy-efficient than copper, Verizon noted.
"Fiber is a more reliable, resilient, and efficient technology," Bonomo told Ars. "It supports the services our customers want and the quality they expect. We would not be a quality provider of telecom, Internet, and TV services if we relied on—and provided to our customers—1920s technology. And it would be irresponsible for us to not offer a better technology to our customers."
Verizon's FCC filing described its program "to encourage customers experiencing repeated service issues with copper facilities to migrate to fiber," saying this has resulted in "one million fewer repair or trouble-shooting dispatches than would have been required had these customers remained on copper facilities. This equates to one million instances in which customers have not experienced an outage or other problem with their service."
As of June 30, 2013, US households and businesses combined for 89.8 million traditional landlines, with 82.5 million of those still delivered over copper, according to an FCC report. The bulk of the remaining 7.3 million POTS lines are fiber-based. There were 45.3 million "interconnected VoIP" subscriptions, the IP-based replacements for landlines. These include products like Verizon's FiOS Digital Voice and phone services from cable companies.
Verizon has 20.4 million total voice connections, about half of which are residential, according to its latest earnings report. In the residential category there are 4.4 million VoIP subscribers, up from 3.8 million a year ago, and six million traditional POTS landline customers, down from 7.2 million a year ago. About 1.1 million of the POTS customers get their service over fiber, with the remaining 4.9 million still on copper, Verizon told Ars.
In a blog post, Verizon VP David Young wrote that "consumers overwhelmingly prefer fiber and the benefits it provides."
"Not only do fiber cables better withstand storms in the first place, repairs to damaged fiber take less time than fixing damaged copper wire, so services can be restored much more quickly during an emergency," he wrote.
Although Verizon has downplayed copper's ability to power phones during electric outages, Young acknowledged that copper networks can sometimes work when fiber ones do not. "In some cases, so long as the wire itself has not been damaged, copper lines continue to work during a commercial power outage, while fiber-based systems may, including those where the final connection to a customer’s house may be copper, need backup power such as a battery or generator to continue to provide voice service," he wrote.
For that reason, Verizon is planning to offer a new backup system that can work for up to 30 hours during power outages.
But copper phone lines have been known to last for weeks even when customers lose electricity. After Hurricane Sandy hit Fire Island in New York in October 2012, “my family was without power for three weeks,” Verizon customer Tara McBride told Ars. “Had we not had copper lines at the time, we would not have been able to live at home safely, nor would my husband and two other volunteer firemen been able to stay here to make the island safe for other year-round residents and seasonal property owners.”
Verizon is shifting all of western Fire Island from copper to fiber, which is an improvement over Verizon’s initial stance that it would only provide wireless service in areas where copper was damaged beyond repair. Verizon dropped its wireless-only plan in the face of protest from residents and government regulators.
Although McBride’s phone service survived Sandy, it eventually stopped working. She says she discontinued one of her copper lines in July of this year “because Verizon refused to fix it,” and she's now using Verizon’s POTS over fiber service. That came with its own headaches—McBride said she had to get refunds from Verizon because the company overcharged her. She has one remaining copper line, "but it is on vacation suspension until September, at which time I will again ask Verizon to repair and maintain," she said.
Verizon told Ars, "We have had ongoing discussions with Ms. McBride on dozens of occasions on the many issues she has brought to us," but the company had nothing further to say on her case.
While Verizon argues that most customers who switched to fiber have done so willingly, some say their objections weren't taken seriously.
"After 12 years without a single problem—including during a powerless week post-Sandy—my landline recently died," Manhattan resident Jennifer Robinson told Ars. "Verizon came in and installed [fiber], though I objected. The company simply insisted that this is what it does now when the copper lines go and 'oh yes, it will be just as reliable—more so, in fact.' But without power, the battery backup in the closet gives me only a few more hours, so how can that be? The 'emergency' aspect of the landline and the spotty cell service in my huge apartment complex were the main reasons I’d maintained it all these years. I actually felt sad about losing the copper line and wasn’t convinced of the 'progress.' But what choice did I have?"
Joe Brancatelli, a longtime resident of Cold Spring in Putnam County, New York, is another customer who says Verizon drags its feet in repairing copper lines. “Every guy they've ever sent out here, the actual guys working the equipment, tell me the same story. Verizon will do nothing to maintain these lines,” Brancatelli told Ars.
Brancatelli had problems with DSL and phone service starting about 15 years ago. “I realized that every time it rained, the phones wouldn't work properly,” he said. “About four years ago, it became intractable.”
Wires were corroded, and Verizon technicians covered a vulnerable junction box with a garbage bag to keep it dry, he said. “When you called to complain, they sent someone out to change the garbage bag,” Brancatelli said.
Brancatelli said this went on for "years," but Verizon told Ars that use of the "plastic sheath" is just a "temporary measure."
The sheath is "placed over an open splice or section of cable that is probably wet. The drape is typically open on the bottom to allow the water to drain out," Verizon said.
At one point, Brancatelli's phone service went out for 10 days or so. Fed up, he switched to VoIP service that relies on cable Internet about 18 months ago.
Verizon told Ars that Brancatelli "would have been a perfect candidate for a fiber conversion, thereby alleviating his repeated telephone problems."
But Verizon's fiber isn't available where Brancatelli lives—the best Verizon could offer was a deal on cellular service, he said.
Verizon's fiber rollouts have stalled in some areas, but where Verizon has deployed fiber, the company is able to offer fiber service faster than it can fix copper lines. On March 13, The New York Daily News reported:
This problem was the result of a "major copper cable failure on Park Avenue between 101st and 103rd streets," caused by water and road salt runoff that "over time corroded the sheathing and ultimately the copper itself," Bonomo told Ars. It has since been fixed.Verizon customers in East Harlem who have been without telephone service since early February say the mega-company is trying to force them to dump their outdated traditional copper-cable landlines for the new fiber-optic lines and fancy features.
“They said, ‘You must take FiOS in order to get your phone back,’” said Sylvia Velazquez, 74, whose landline has been down for 42 days. “That’s unfair. We shouldn’t be pressured into taking it.”
Velazquez, who lives in the DeWitt Clinton Houses on Park Ave. near 110th St., is one of at least 150 Verizon customers who have been complaining about dead phone lines for more than a month.
Verizon denies the charges being made by the angry customers. The utility says it has been working to restore their traditional land lines, but acknowledges it would like to move them to fiber optic service.
"The building these residents were in had fiber running into it, and therefore, as a means to get their service back more quickly, we offered to move them to the fiber service," Bonomo said.
Why don't fiber phone lines keep working during power outages?
“The simplest answer is that copper conducts electricity and fiber doesn’t,” telecommunications consultant Fred Goldstein, who has helped carriers with network design and provided expert testimony to state regulatory agencies and the FCC, told Ars. “For over 100 years, phones were always powered from the central office. The central office would have batteries and generators to back up the batteries. Even in the event of a power failure, telephone service would continue to operate. When fiber optics came in, that no longer applied because fiber optics don't conduct electricity.”
There are benefits to fiber, Goldstein noted: besides its superiority in delivering high-speed data, fiber optics are safer because they do not conduct lightning, and you don’t have to worry about crossing fiber wires with electrical wires. Goldstein says the move to fiber is “probably inevitable because fiber is in general a superior medium for communications. It can do more than copper. But you have to take power into account.”
Goldstein attributes the poor maintenance of copper in part to changes in price regulations that occurred in the 1990s. Traditionally, there was rate-of-return regulation, in which “state utility commissions would study companies’ finances and determine what expenditures were allowable and what a proper rate of return was,” he said. That was scrapped in many states for price cap regulation, in which phone companies are “allowed to keep any additional profits they make by improving their efficiency.”
Naturally, laying off technicians and reducing investment in maintaining copper networks helped boost profits and appease shareholders, he said.
“In the case of the copper networks, they've allowed them to deteriorate so they're no longer following best practices," Goldstein claimed. "As far as [Verizon CEO] Lowell McAdam and [AT&T CEO] Randall Stephenson are concerned, the money is in watching cat videos on iPhones. They're putting all their money into wireless subsidiaries and letting wireline subsidiaries rot.”
Beginning more than a century ago, copper telephone wires were insulated with paper and wrapped in lead sheaths. In the 1950s, the phone industry started using plastic-insulated wire, recognizing that it could better withstand water.
But paper-insulated wire was never entirely phased out.
"There was a depreciation schedule. The longest depreciation on copper wire was 40 years. It was expected by the mid-1990s that all the paper cable would be gone," Goldstein said.
"In today’s environment, the majority of telephone distribution cables are plastic insulated conductors (PIC)," Don McCarty, a consultant with decades of experience in the telephone industry, wrote in 2011. "There are still untold thousands of feet of pulp- and paper-insulated feeder cables. They will be in use until every duct leaving a central office is free of copper and filled with fiber."
Air pressure systems are the key to keeping paper-insulated cables dry.
"Major pulp and paper cable disasters have been averted because of good air pressure policies by large operating Telcos," McCarty wrote. "A quality air pressure program mitigates wet pulp cables in conduit runs. Keep in mind that some of those old cables are lead sheath and are susceptible to electrolysis; splices leak, and air pressure is not properly maintained. These pulp cables will get wet, putting countless customers out of service."
Goldstein noted that during Hurricane Sandy, "it turned out that much of lower Manhattan still had paper-insulated cable in use," and they could not withstand the storm, he said.
Verizon says the damage inflicted on its New York City facilities during Sandy was enough to take out any type of copper system, whether paper or plastic.
"We do have cable pressurization systems inside our central offices that force air onto copper cables," Bonomo told Ars. "It does not matter whether the copper is encased and insulated in paper or plastic; the pressurization system is used for both... The air dryers (cable pressurization system) in our West Street central office were sheared off their concrete mounts, and the air piping in our building (and below the streets) was destroyed by a wall of water that came crashing through the front of the building. In addition, our Broad Street CO was essentially under water, as was much of the neighborhood, and indeed lower Manhattan."
Verizon said it does not have figures to show how much of its copper is insulated by paper rather than plastic. "We do not proactively replace paper cable with plastic. Typically, we only do so if the cable is defective/damaged or we need to increase the cable size. Nor do we have any data on the average age of our copper plant, but it’s fair to say that there is some that is decades old, but other parts that are just a few years old," the company said.
Bonomo asked rhetorically, if plastic-insulated cables are "better and more resilient than paper-insulated, then carrying that argument a bit further, shouldn’t we be converting even more of our subscribers to our fiber network?"
Could there be a way to switch to fiber while allowing phones to remain powered on during electricity outages? Power over fiber systems are being developed, but these have distance limitations.
Goldstein says one potential solution is to bring fiber close to buildings and then use copper over the last stretches. An underground terminal could supply electricity to phones in an individual neighborhood.
“You can't go sticking diesel generators in manholes; it isn't practical,” he said. “But if the manhole is in a city with natural gas service, you could use a fuel cell powered by natural gas.”
The phones would then remain powered on for as long as the gas lines work. But fuel cells are expensive, Goldstein noted. He isn’t hopeful that the FCC or state regulatory agencies will force phone companies to provide anything beyond small battery backups for individual customers.
“I expect they'll get away with the 8-hour battery,” he said.
Verizon told Ars that "we have looked at various scenarios and different ways to power the [fiber] network but have found that they are inefficient and would limit the services we would provide over them. They had effects on quality, data speeds and capacity, all of which are the opposite of what our subscribers want."
The new backup unit Verizon developed to replace the eight-hour backup uses D-cell batteries to provide 20 hours of talk time and 30 hours of standby time, and it's being offered in a "handful of markets," the company said.
"We are getting good feedback on the use of it in this limited rollout. We expect to more formally introduce it in the coming months," Verizon said.
Young's blog post pointed out that some customers "rely primarily on their mobile phones, or use cordless phones which themselves don’t work during a power outage."
"When we offer a backup power product to our customers, only a small percentage seem to take it, indicating to us that an alternate power (or backup power) source is not a high priority," Verizon told Ars.
“To me, that's unacceptable,” Keys said of the limited power backups for fiber-based phones. “You're giving me newer technology, but it doesn't even do what the older technology did... what does that do for me when [my power is] out for 12 days?”
The FCC doesn’t yet have to decide exactly how it will regulate phone networks after the PSTN is completely retired. But it isn’t moving quickly to investigate complaints about the existing copper networks.
The letter from 12 consumer advocacy groups asking the FCC to investigate the reported problems did not spur any action. The FCC did publish a blog post a week before that letter to inform customers about the ongoing phone network transition and to remind providers that they have to obtain the FCC’s permission and give customers notice before discontinuing service.
But the FCC has not launched any investigation in response to the consumer advocacy groups’ request. “There has been no official action as of yet,” an FCC spokesperson told Ars.
"Where complaints and evidence call into question whether a carrier is properly maintaining the network for its basic service, or whether a carrier is telling at least some customers they cannot purchase basic voice service, the Commission should initiate enforcement proceedings to ensure carriers continue to fulfill their fundamental obligations as common carriers," Griffin of Public Knowledge wrote in a followup letter to the FCC on August 1.
Keys does not appreciate the delay. "Why isn't the FCC looking out for the public?" he asked. "I don't understand this."
TL;DR: Verizon is eagerly phasing out copper wires with fiber, switching everyone from the normal copper wire networks used in the past, to VoIP setups using fiber.
The fact that fiber doesn't conduct electricity like copper does is a double-edged sword - on the one hand, it's not vulnerable to lightning strikes the way copper is, but on the other hand, it doesn't conduct electricity at all - which means that if there's a power outage, people without power will only be able to make calls for as long as their in-house UPS lasts to power the fiber line, which is typically between 6-8 hours total.
After that point, one's UPS will make a very loud and irritating noise instead of allowing one to make phone calls.
I see the push to switch to fiber nationwide as a way of phasing out and out-competing with cable lines, sure, for several reasons. But until there's a proper way to deal with all the circumstances by which copper is a good thing, I can't agree with phasing out the copper lines until that solution is found.
Unfortunately, profit appears to be trumping accessibility in Verizon's case, which makes the FCC's lukewarm response thus far somewhat disquieting.
