Verizon-FairPoint deal forgets the fiber

The Phoenix, a New England-based newspaper, recently published a thorough examination of the proposed sale of Verizon's 1.3 million landlines in northern New England to FairPoint Communications.

Verizon and FairPoint defend the deal by claiming it will bring DSL service to residents of rural parts of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. FairPoint says it will invest $40 million to expand DSL service in those states.

Those claims are suspicious, considering FairPoint's troubled financial state. Moreover, it's unlikely that the $40 million investment would actually be enough to expand DSL service. As The Phoenix reports,

“Publius,” a pseudonymous Verizon employee who started the VerizonVsFairPoint.com Web site to distribute information about the sale, says FairPoint is dreaming if they think it will be relatively cheap to improve service in northern New England.

“There is absolutely no way” that the installation of the equipment FairPoint is talking about would, on its own, bring broadband to the rural masses, says Publius, who withholds his real name for fear of losing his job.

The wires are in terrible condition, he says, many having been in place for decades and repeatedly spliced back together after wind or trees or car crashes knocked them down.

An even greater concern about the Verizon-FairPoint deal is that it makes extremely unlikely the building in rural New England of fiber optic networks, which are the future of telecommunications service. As the Phoenix article states,

The trouble with this debate is that DSL is the wrong topic. We should be talking about fiber-optics technology, which transfers data over laser beams through glass wires. Because fiber-optic lines are capable of handling telephone, Internet, television, and other communications of the future, fiber optics is widely accepted as the immediate future of high-speed Internet connections…Whether the $2.7-billion Verizon-FairPoint deal goes through or not, the problem is that our state officials haven’t noticed that DSL is the wave of the past.

According to the Fiber to the Home Council, within 15 years, 80% of homes in the U.S. will be wired with fiber optic cable. But right now very few homes in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont have fiber connections, and if the Verizon and FairPoint deal goes through, that won't change anytime soon.

Internet Disconnect (The Phoenix)

Morgan Stanley issues warning about FairPoint (Speed Matters)

Verizon Versus FairPoint