READ: "The Book of Broken Promises" for the details of how we ended up in this mess and what should happen next.
Summary and 1 Pager
1) Verizon NY (VNY) Charged Every Residential Phone Customer about $750.00 Per Line for a Fiber Optic Service, Including Seniors, Low Income Families and Rural Areas, (counting taxes, some of which are also revenues to Verizon).
- In 2006, the NY Public Service Commission granted Verizon NY multiple rate increases (84%) on residential phone service for "massive deployment of fiber optics" and "losses". (VNY also raised business rates multiple times as well.)
- Extra services, including inside wiring or non-published numbers, also got hit with 100%-300% rate increases since 2006. Customers paid an additional $430.00 extra, counting taxes for inside wire maintenance, for example.
- If you have phone service and added features, (though the excess costs vary based on which additional services you have), you paid over $1,000 extra.
2) Verizon New York Lost Billions on Paper -- and Paid No Income Taxes.
- VNY lost $2.58 billion in just 2014, and that is just in New York State.
- VNY lost $12.5 billion over the last five years, 2010-2014, with a $1.28 billion income tax benefit.
- Verizon New York paid no income taxes since 2005.
3) Verizon Stopped FiOS Deployments Leaving Over 50% Incomplete.
- Only 46-59 percent of New York City has been upgraded to fiber optics, even though the franchise calls for 100 percent by July 2014.
- Only 42-51 percent of the rest of New York State has been upgraded.
- 80 percent of NY State municipalities will only be upgraded in parts, or not at all.
4) All Customers Paid for Fiber Upgrades; Over 50% May Never Get It.
- Verizon collected about $5 billion in added fees and rate increases since 2006 and these increases are built into rates and continue today. But the majority of phone customers never got upgraded.
5) Verizon has been Dumping Expenses to Make Local Service and the Wires Look "Unprofitable".
- VNY claims the phone networks are 'uneconomical' to upgrade.
- Verizon has been dumping corporate media relations and lawyer expenses, or possibly executive pay, into Local Service costs.
- Verizon Wireless has diverted some of VNY's utility maintenance construction budgets to pay for the fiber optic wires to the cell towers.
6) Local Service Is Profitable, Regardless of What You Heard.
- The wired phone networks, including Local Service, are profitable when the flows of money are recalculated to remove the expense dumping and other financial games. In fact, Local Service over-paid about $1.7 billion in just one year, 2014.
7)Verizon's Plans to Shut Off the Networks that Aren't Upgraded and are Copper and Force Customers onto More Expensive Wireless.
- While Verizon claims it has no plans to shut off the copper, there are plenty of Verizon's own statements that describe their 'cut the copper' plans.
8)Get Everyone Upgraded -- As far as we can tell, this same thing is occurring in every Verizon and AT&T currently, to varying degrees. Every state should be starting investigations.
NNI is looking for partners to fix what's broken & get everyone upgraded. bruce@newnetworks.com