Verizon Wireless’ answer for rural America’s broadband troubles goes live across the country today, offering the broadband deprived the opportunity of getting wireless service at almost twice the price of conventional DSL, with a 10GB monthly usage allowance.

HomeFusion Broadband uses Verizon’s LTE network to deliver service to homes and businesses within range of Verizon’s 4G network.  For rural America, the speeds Verizon is capable of delivering offer a significant improvement over rural DSL.  Verizon promises 5-12Mbps down and 2-5Mbps up, depending on how many users are sharing the cell tower and how strong a signal one receives.

“HomeFusion Broadband is another example of Verizon Wireless’ commitment to providing our customers with the most innovative products and services,” said Tami Erwin, vice president and chief marketing officer, Verizon Wireless. “With HomeFusion Broadband, customers across the United States, in towns large and small, will have the chance to link devices to the Internet and take advantage of the speed, coverage and connectivity offered by our 4G LTE network.”

Whether they can afford it may be another matter.

Verizon Wireless charges a one-time equipment fee of $199.99, which includes professional installation of the required cylindrical outdoor antenna and router that allows customers to share the wireless connection with other devices inside the home.

Monthly service fees start at $60 a month and include 10GB of monthly usage. If you need more data, you will pay a significant amount to get it — up to $120 a month for 30GB of usage.  As a tease, customers get 50 percent more data allowance for the first two full billing cycles of service.  If you become accustomed to using that extra allowance, it could be very costly once the first two months are up.  Overlimit fees run $10/GB.

Verizon claims two-thirds of the country is now covered by their 4G LTE network, including the regions Verizon sold off to companies like FairPoint and Frontier Communications.  Those independent phone companies will soon have Verizon as a broadband competitor in states like West Virginia, Vermont, Ohio, and Maine. If customers value speed over everything else, Verizon could be a formidable competitor over traditional rural DSL, which often operates at speeds of 1-3Mbps, as long as customers steer clear of allowance-eating online video.

Verizon has positioned HomeFusion as a rural broadband solution, and earlier pricing and policy changes make it clear Verizon is downplaying its traditional DSL service.  In April, Verizon announced it would no longer sell standalone DSL service to customers without voice phone lines, or to those who live in areas also wired for the company’s fiber optic network FiOS.

Joe Roget has one word for South Carolina’s Broadband Availability Map: “nuts.”

The 72 year old resident of a small town in South Carolina was excited to read a new statewide broadband availability map showed his street was currently getting DSL service from one of South Carolina’s largest phone companies.  But that was news to AT&T, who provides landline phone service.

“They said they had no idea what I was talking about and that whatever map data I was looking at was totally wrong,” Roget reports to Stop the Cap! “The operator was frank with me, saying it was highly unlikely I would ever receive DSL from AT&T and the company was really not expanding DSL access any longer.”

Karen, a Stop the Cap! reader near Denmark, S.C., reported a similar story.

“The broadband map Connect South Carolina has gotten a government grant to produce is total fiction in my area and is little more than cable and phone company wishful thinking,” Karen reports.

Karen says not only does her street show DSL as readily available, but cable broadband as well.  Karen and her neighbors can get neither.

“‘Never have, never will’ seems to be the attitude unless we pay $20,000 to the cable company to extend wiring down the street,” Karen says. “The phone company doesn’t have time to even consider that, but their call center is nowhere near South Carolina so those people don’t care.”

Roget wonders exactly how Connect South Carolina, a chapter of the industry-connected Connected Nation group, got their data.

The answer: it largely collects it from the data providers volunteer themselves.

“Did anyone ever bother to use some of the millions of taxpayer dollars this group got to actually verify what the cable and phone companies handed out to make sure it was real?” Roget asks.

Darryl Coffey, an engineering consultant for the group, says he spends countless hours trying to verify the data providers submit to the group.

In South Carolina, I verify each of these platforms by going out into the field with tools, test equipment and data.  We refer to this process as “provider validation.”

Provider validation involves driving hundreds of miles following telephone and cable lines, or testing wireless signals in neighborhoods as well as in remote areas.

“I have basic phone service at my home, and I don’t know how Mr. Coffey can follow a phone line to determine if it also can provide me with DSL,” Roget says. “I could tell him, or anyone else at Connected South Carolina, it most certainly does not — had they asked.”

Roget is also upset that South Carolina’s legislature is interested in preventing local communities from deploying their own broadband networks to fill in the gaps where large telecommunications companies refuse to provide service. Only he wonders exactly how legislators will know there is a broadband gap if the group drawing the maps, based on what providers tell them, shows there isn’t a problem.

“What a scam,” Roget concludes. “An industry-backed group draws maps of data volunteered by the providers themselves that legislators use to prove there is no broadband problem in South Carolina and no need for towns and cities to build their own service.”

Karen has virtually given up on South Carolina officials representing the interests of South Carolina’s citizens.

“They look out for the companies, not the people,” Karen says. “It seems if we want better broadband, we will have to move somewhere else, preferably someplace that isn’t dumb or corrupt enough to let the broadband industry control our broadband future.”

Back in the days of dial-up Internet access, consumers could choose from a dozen or more independent providers selling service from prices ranging from free (for a limited number of hours per month) to $20-25 a month for unlimited dial-in access.  As long as an ISP maintained a local access number, they could set up shop and sell service at competitive prices in virtually any community in the country.

For awhile it seemed that this competition would continue as the days of broadband DSL arrived.  Phone companies like Qwest opened their network to third party competitors who could lease access to company facilities and lines and market their own DSL service.  In states like Minnesota, Qwest customers could choose from several providers, including Qwest itself, and receive service at competitive pricing.  But in 2005, the Federal Communications Commission announced phone companies no longer had to share their phone network with other providers.

It was the beginning of the end for independent service providers in that state and others.  The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports that out of 47 independent ISPs that existed in the Twin Cities area alone in 2005, only about a dozen remain today — and many of those can count customers in the hundreds.  In fact, business has dwindled so badly, many providers no longer actively market DSL services to consumers.

The 2005 FCC policy allows phone companies to cut off the independents as network upgrades are completed. What service can be sold by independents in Minnesota is speed restricted as well — only up to 7Mbps. Even at those increasingly uncompetitive speeds, CenturyLink makes sure customers are notified they can no longer buy DSL service from independent companies once their upgrades are finished.

Today, the march forward for incrementally faster DSL broadband speeds at CenturyLink (which acquired Qwest), continues to force more and more competitors out of the broadband business.  Many of the remaining customers are located in rural or suburban exchanges only now seeing network upgrades.  But some companies are not waiting for the last of their customers to depart.  Implex.net saw the writing on the wall and decided to exit the business, telling the newspaper they could not compete with CenturyLink, much less Comcast.

“It was a dying business because we could only sell old technology,” said Stuart DeVaan, CEO of Implex.net in Minneapolis.

US Internet of Minnetonka also realized selling DSL was not going to be a growth business under current FCC rules.

“If you are a traditional Internet service provider from the mid-’90s that relies on someone else’s network, you’re at a serious disadvantage,” said Travis Carter, technology vice president at US Internet.

CenturyLink denies the FCC policy limits competition, pointing to cable operators, Wi-Fi, and wireless mobile broadband as all viable alternative choices for consumers.

But Bill Kalseim, who lives in rural Stillwater, having received notification he is about to be cut off from his ISP — ipHouse — thinks otherwise.

“I had a choice of DSL providers before, and now I don’t.” Kalseim told the newspaper.

Habsburg Empire Redux: Slovakia achieves leadership in broadband speeds.

Fiber-fast broadband networks, advanced DSL, and the latest cable broadband technology has allowed Bohemian broadband to help kick Canada and the United States into middle place for broadband speeds and web page loading time, according to statistics released by Google.

Google crunched the data from visits to websites all over the world by site owners supporting Google Analytics. Google’s measurement of web page load times gives researchers several clues about how to assess broadband quality. The data combines the speed of the user’s broadband network, how congested that network is, the quality of the service provider’s backbone connection, and the design of the web site visited.

The findings deliver a boost to central Europe where the Czechs and Slovaks are nearly neck and neck for top honors.

Google found the world’s fastest page load times in Slovakia (formerly the eastern half of Czechoslovakia.)

From Bratislava to Košice, Slovaks wait an average of 3.3 seconds for web pages to load on their desktop computers. On mobile devices, the slightly longer wait time of 7.6 seconds still places the country in the top 10.  Americans wait 5.6 seconds for desktop connections, 9.2 seconds for wireless.

South Korea took second place.  Koreans have enjoyed the world’s fastest broadband in speed rankings for years, but Eastern Europe’s enormous investment in fiber broadband and upgrades to legacy telephone and cable networks all make a difference.

The Czech Republic won third place.  That’s not surprising, considering Spanish owned Telefónica O2 Czech Republic has been in a hurry to completely overhaul the former state-owned Český Telecom.  While Americans fight for 1-3Mbps DSL from suburban and rural phone companies, O2 provides most Czechs ADSL2+ or VDSL service in non-cable TV areas at speeds up to 25Mbps.  In larger Czech cities cable companies like UPC offer budget speeds of 2Mbps or lightning fast service up to 120Mbps for those who want it.

The lighter the color, the faster the speed.

The top scores for broadband speed were achieved in Europe or Asia.  Farther down the list are the United States and Canada.  Canada scored slightly higher than the United States.

Most of the countries stuck at the bottom are in Latin America, Africa, and poorer Asian nations.

Google refused to release the raw data, but Bloomberg News did a lot of the work identifying broadband winners and losers.

Examine the rankings below the page jump:

… Continue Reading

Maggie Wilderotter's "High Speed" Fantasies

Frontier Communications CEO Maggie Wilderotter wrote this week the company’s network improvements and expanded broadband has moved West Virginia from the bottom five states in the country to the top five.

In an Op-Ed editorial published in the Charleston Gazette Tuesday, Wilderotter likened Frontier’s broadband improvement to the 1960s moon program.  Customers in West Virginia living with Frontier broadband can relate — to the 1960s anyway.

Where did Wilderotter get her information?  Perhaps from Frontier’s own Dan Waldo, who made the same claim last summer in an interview with MetroNews Talkline.  At the time he said it, West Virginia was ranked 47th in the country for broadband access.  It now ranks even lower today — 53rd by the federal government’s national broadband map (the federal government also ranks U.S. territories and possessions.)  In fact, West Virginia is in dead last place among U.S. states.  Only Guam, American Samoa, and the U.S. Virgin Islands are worse.

This chart ranks the percentage of customers within a state receiving a minimum of 3Mbps download speeds and upload rates of at least 768kbps. (Source: National Broadband Speed Map/National Telecommunications and Information Administration and the Federal Communications Commission )

The Center for Public Integrity is slightly more generous.  It ranked West Virginia 46th in broadband subscriptions.

Even Ookla, which analyzes millions of speed tests, tanked West Virginia, noting the average download speed is among the lowest of all 50 states at just 8Mbps, and that number seems high because it includes the state’s largest cable operators — the providers that actually deliver substantial broadband speeds.

Frontier’s contribution to West Virginia’s broadband improvement effort is measurable and noteworthy, at least for rural residents who can’t get broadband service any other way.  But many customers living with Frontier sure wish they could.

The company is expanding slow speed DSL service (1-3Mbps) to an increasing number of rural homes, but it does not come cheap.  On a megabit by megabit basis, all of the state’s cable providers deliver better value — more speed for the buck, when examining the actual “out the door price” that includes taxes, modem rental fees, and surcharges.  Frontier charges all of the above.

While Frontier delivers an average speed of 2.41Mbps in West Virginia, Comcast delivers more than 13Mbps.  Among wired providers, Frontier remains in last place.  Ookla shows some minor improvements in broadband speed, perhaps attributable to the network upgrades Wilderotter wrote about, but every other wired provider in the state performs better than Frontier’s DSL.  Who did worse?  Sprint’s 3G/4G wireless network and Wildblue, a satellite Internet Service Provider.

Average download speed performance of ISPs within West Virginia. (Source: Ookla; Graph Period: October 2009 - April 2012)

Wilderotter:

Broadband connectivity throughout all of America can be the thread that unites us all and helps pull our nation up again. Over the past two years in West Virginia, Frontier has worked with the state to bring broadband to thousands of residents and businesses. We have invested in a fiber backbone infrastructure that connects cities, libraries, schools, hospitals and government service facilities. The network improvements and the access to broadband have moved West Virginia from the bottom five states in the country to the top five. Economic development has picked up, and entrepreneurship is alive and well. Frontier is focused on taking this model to the other rural areas we serve throughout the United States.

Frontier’s efforts to expand broadband in a state its predecessor Verizon underserved for years is admirable and the company has indeed expanded service to areas that never had access before.  But as broadband rankings illustrate, Frontier’s incremental efforts are being overshadowed by more dramatic service and technology improvements in other states — the primary reason West Virginia is actually ranking worse than ever.  Frontier is not fooling anyone promoting its institutional fiber broadband networks ordinary West Virginians cannot access from their homes or businesses.  Our own readers tell us the company has repeatedly missed deployment schedules, broken promises, reduced speeds, and suffers from a woefully oversold network that slows to an intolerable crawl during peak usage periods.

Getting West Virginia among the top-five broadband states will require:

• Major investments in fiber optics into neighborhoods and homes.  All of the highest ranked states receive fiber to the home and/or fiber to the neighborhood service in larger cities, and faster DSL than what Frontier routinely sells West Virginians;
• An upgrade of the state’s broadband backbone to better manage increasing Internet usage during peak usage periods;
• Additional penetration of competing technologies into more rural areas.  Cable and fiber broadband deliver the fastest speeds, but most rural areas are bypassed.  Frontier will need to deploy faster and better service to dramatically improve the state’s broadband ranking.

The home of Atlantic Canada’s largest hot air balloon festival is getting more than hot air from broadband providers promising better broadband in New Brunswick.  Bell Aliant announced this month it will spend $2 million to expand its FibreOp fiber to the home service to 3,000 homes and businesses in the town of Sussex.

“Access to the FibreOP network represents a tremendous growth opportunity for Sussex, and has huge potential to connect businesses and families,” said Andre LeBlanc, vice president of Residential Products for Bell Aliant. “We are excited to continue our expansion in New Brunswick, and to offer the best TV and Internet to our customers in the Sussex area.”

Bell Aliant’s FibreOp delivers broadband speeds up to 250/30Mbps and is marketed without data caps — a rarity from large providers in Canada.

The company was the first in Canada to cover an entire city with fiber-to-the-home and by the end of 2012, will have invested approximately half a billion dollars to extend it to approximately 650,000 homes and businesses in its territory. FibreOP builds are complete in Greater Saint John including Quispamsis, Rothesay, Grand Bay/Westfield, as well as Bathurst, Fredericton, Miramichi, and Moncton, including Riverview, Dieppe and Shediac. Customers in parts of Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland & Labrador also enjoy fiber to the home service.

While Bell Canada owns a controlling stake in Bell Aliant, it allows the Atlantic Canada phone company to operate under its own branding and supports their aggressive fiber upgrade project across the relatively rural eastern provinces.  Even more remarkably, while Bell is one of Canada’s strongest proponents for usage-based billing and caps on broadband usage by its customers, Bell Aliant competes with cable operators by advertising the fact it delivers unlimited, flat rate service.  Bell Aliant is aggressively expanding fiber to the home service in Atlantic Canada while Bell relies on its less-advanced fiber to the neighborhood service Fibe TV in more populated and prosperous cities in Ontario and Quebec.

That is counter-intuitive to other providers who eschew fiber upgrades in rural communities, suggesting the cost to wire smaller towns is too high for the proportionately lower number of potential customers.  That does not seem to bother Bell Aliant, who considers fiber to the home its best weapon to confront landline cord-cutters.

Bell Aliant introduces Atlantic Canada to its FibreOp fiber to the home service, delivering unlimited fiber-fast broadband.  No Internet Overcharging schemes here.  (2 minutes)

Comcast’s national low-income Internet service, Internet Essentials, is getting an upgrade.

Out of more than 14 million Comcast broadband customers, fewer than 50,000 families managed to qualify and successfully obtain the $9.95/mo low-speed Internet service. On Tuesday, Comcast announced it was relaxing some of the program’s requirements to include more families and has also doubled the service’s speeds to 3Mbps for downloads and 768kbps for uploads.

Susan Jin Davis, vice president of Comcast’s Strategic Services explained the changes on the company’s blog:

[...] When we first started out, Internet Essentials was offered to families with children eligible to receive “free” school lunches under the National School Lunch Program (NSLP). Today, we have officially extended the program to include families with children eligible to receive “reduced” price lunches too. This change adds about 300,000 households in our service area who can now apply for the program — bringing our estimated total to about 2.3 million eligible families.

[...] Second, we doubled the speed of the broadband connection provided with Internet Essentials. It now comes with up to 3 Mbps downstream and up to 768 Kbps upstream, which makes the online experience even better than it was before. The increase is available now and we notified customers by email that the only thing they need to do is reboot their modems in order to immediately get the new speeds.

Third, as we announced in January, we have streamlined the application process by providing an instant approval process for all students attending schools with the highest percentage of NSLP participation, including Provision 2 schools.

Comcast’s Internet Essentials program was launched as part of an agreement with the Federal Communications Commission to win approval of the cable operator’s merger with NBC-Universal.  Comcast also committed to an expansion of its broadband service in rural areas.  The company says it expanded its service area by 199,876 additional homes in 33 rural communities.

Schuyler County

The fastest thing in Schuyler County, N.Y., isn’t broadband — it’s the Watkins Glen International speedway.

County officials hope to change that, voting unanimously this month to approve an agreement with the Southern Tier Network to bring a regional fiber optic system into the county.

The not-for-profit local development corporation established to build and manage the regional fiber network doesn’t sit well with some county residents, however, including one retired Verizon employee who dismissed the project.

Odessa resident Karen Radenberg called fiber optics technology “old school” and said no private company will connect to the fiber network to expand broadband service.

Radenberg urged the county to consider that communications companies have now moved on to using 4G wireless technology instead of fiber.

“That’s ridiculous,” countered Legislature Chairman Dennis Fagan (R-Tyrone).

Fagan

Fagan pointed to nearby Ontario County’s fiber middle-mile and institutional network which has signed companies, including Verizon, as customers.  Verizon reportedly uses the Ontario County network to deliver backhaul connectivity to its cell tower network in the area.  Ontario County is served by several different landline companies including Frontier Communications, Verizon, and Windstream.  Time Warner Cable is the dominant cable provider, but large sections of the county are deemed too rural for cable television service.

Fagan said the new fiber network will improve the chances private companies will expand broadband across the county, but also help deliver an important upgrade to the region’s emergency responder communications system.  The extremely hilly terrain across much of the southern tier creates problems because of signal gaps.  The new fiber network will allow the county to build radio repeaters into areas where the existing network of microwave communications towers cannot reach.

Schuyler County currently has no plans to sell Internet connectivity to the public, but hopes existing private cable and phone companies — including Time Warner Cable and Verizon Communications — will consider utilizing the network to expand service.  Neither company has shown much interest expanding service to new areas recently, most likely because expansion costs will not be recouped fast enough.

If the county network reduces the cost to expand service, more homes and businesses may now fall within a “Return on Investment” formula that could mean the difference between broadband and dial-up.

Downtown Leverett (Courtesy: Town of Leverett)

Life in Leverett, Mass. could get a lot faster as the community considers entering the 21st century by bringing high speed gigabit broadband to town.

For years, residents have had three relatively slow choices for Internet access: dial-up, wireless or satellite-delivered service.  Verizon and cable companies like Comcast and Time Warner Cable, which have systems in western Massachusetts, have largely ignored Leverett’s need for speed.

Now the town is considering building its own fiber-to-the-home network to reach every home in Leverett starting in 2014.  The proposed $3.6 million network will also offer residents cable television and phone service — helpful upgrades in the western half of Massachusetts where Verizon has allowed their landline network to degrade to conditions declared intolerable by the state Department of Telecommunications.  Last year, the state agency ordered Verizon to assess and repair its landline network in almost 100 communities in the western half of the state.

Town officials will introduce their plans for the new municipal broadband network at a public meeting April 28.  The community would borrow the money to construct the network, paying it off over 20 years and outsourcing its construction and maintenance to outside companies.

The town originally planned a fiber-to-the-neighborhood network similar to AT&T U-verse, but quickly decided the benefits of a true fiber-to-the-home network were worth the extra investment.

Unlike some other community-owned networks, Leverett will raise taxes on local residents to cover the cost of the service, but Selectman Peter d’Errico says it will save most residents money if they currently pay a satellite provider for broadband service. Research shows the largest majority of Leverett residents get broadband from satellite providers.

“It will be a little more on their tax bill and a lot less on their Internet bill, so overall they will pay less,” d’Errico told the Daily Hampshire Gazette.

d’Errico added the local community is done waiting for private companies to deliver modern telecommunications services in Leverett.  Those companies have repeatedly told town officials there isn’t enough profit or return on investment to justify expanding broadband in rural communities.

Leverett hopes to serve as a template to more than 40 other western Massachusetts communities who belong to WiredWest, a consortium of similarly-situated towns working together to build a regional broadband network.  Leverett’s network would leverage the Massachusetts Broadband Institute’s 1,300 “middle mile” fiber backbone network that is working its way through 123 western and central Massachusetts towns.

WGGB in Springfield previews Leverett’s efforts for better broadband. Big commercial providers ignore the community so now they want to provide service themselves.  (2 minutes)

As AT&T joins Verizon selling off its Yellow Pages publishing unit and payphones keep disappearing from street corners, the media is writing the landline obituary once again.

CNN Money asks today whether we’re witnessing the death of the landline.

In as little as 20 years, the concept of a wired phone line may become the novelty a rotary-dial phone represents today.  Yes, traditional phone lines will still be found in businesses and in the homes of those uncomfortable dealing with a mobile phone, but America’s largest phone companies are well aware the traditional telephone line is in decline.

The Bell System, as it was known until the 1980s, used to comprise AT&T, Bell Labs, Western Electric, Long Lines, and two dozen local “operating companies” like New York Telephone, Mountain Bell, etc.  This AT&T documentary, from 1976, explores how “the phone company” used to function.  New innovations like “lightwave” are showcased, promising to deliver voice phone calls over glass fibers one day.  

Much of the technology seen in the documentary may be unfamiliar if you are under 30 (and check out how customer records were maintained back then), but those who remember renting telephones in garish colors from your local phone company will recognize the phones that occupied space in your home not that long ago.  The only part of the landline network that hasn’t changed much in the last 40 years is the wiring infrastructure itself, which has been allowed to deteriorate as customers continue to depart.

Why was the company so darn big back then?  Because it had to be, the documentary says, to serve a big America.  Hilariously, the company defends its then-status as a “regulated monopoly” telling viewers “[a] regulated monopoly works well in communications because you don’t duplicate facilities and you produce real economies over the long haul.”  (14 minutes)

CNN reports nearly one-third of all American homes no longer have landline service, double the rate from 2008, triple that of 2007.  Verizon is feeling the heat the most, with revenue down 19% over the last five years.  AT&T has seen their revenue drop 16.5% over the same period.

But things are not all bad for phone companies willing to spend money upgrading their networks.  Verizon’s top-rated FiOS fiber to the home service is a compelling competitor to Comcast and Time Warner Cable.  AT&T’s U-verse has gotten a respectable market share larger midwestern cities and draws customers who like its DVR box and the chance to stick it to the local cable company they’ve hated for years.

But where both companies have decided against investing in upgrades — notably in their rural service areas — the traditional phone line is trapped in time.  Only the network it depends on is changing, and not for the better.

Back in 1993, AT&T produced seven advertisements dubbed the “You Will” series, showcasing future technologies AT&T would “deliver to you.”  Eerily, the vast majority of these predictions came true, but mostly from companies other than AT&T.  While the phone company predicted what would eventually become E-ZPass, Apple’s iPad, Apple’s Siri, the smartphone, Skype, Amazon’s Kindle, the cable industry’s home security apps, video on demand, and GPS navigation, most of those innovations were developed and sold by others.  

AT&T spun away Bell Labs and became preoccupied selling Internet access, cell phones and reassembling itself into its former ‘hugeness’ through mergers and buyouts. With limited investment in innovation, AT&T risks being left as a “dumb pipe” provider, selling the connectivity (among many others) to allow other companies’ devices to communicate. (Alert: Loud Volume at around 2 minutes) (4 minutes)

Verizon decided to ditch its rural service areas to FairPoint Communications in northern New England and Frontier Communications in 14 other states.  The results have not been good for the buyers (and often customers).  FairPoint went bankrupt in 2009, overwhelmed by the debt it incurred buying phone lines in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.  Frontier has watched its sales fall ever since its own landline acquisition, and the company has gotten scores of complaints from ex-Verizon customers about broken promises for improved broadband, billing errors, and poor service.

Analysts predict AT&T will start dumping its rural landline customers in the near future as well, letting the company focus on its U-verse service areas.  But who will buy these cast-offs?  CNN reports nobody knows.  CenturyLink and Windstream, two major independent phone companies, don’t appear to be in the mood to acquire neglected landline facilities they will need to spend millions to repair and upgrade.

One thing is certain — both AT&T and Verizon are tailoring business plans to favor Wall Street approval.  The companies’ decisions to temporarily boost revenue selling pieces of its operations has helped stock prices, but has also made the companies shadows of their former selves.  Nearly 30 years ago, customers still paid the phone company to rent their home telephones, relied extensively on the companies’ lucrative White and Yellow Pages for directory information, and discovered new technology innovations like digital switching thanks to Bell Labs, the research arm of AT&T — today independent and known as Alcatel-Lucent.  Today, people in some cities cannot even find a telephone company-owned payphone.

WJBK in Detroit this week ventured out across Detroit to see if they could find a pay phone that actually works.  That old phone booth on the corner is long gone, and some admit they haven’t touched a pay phone in 20 years.  (2 minutes)