I am a happy Verizon FIOS fiber-to-the-home customer in Connecticut, I admire the long view Verizon took to build its FIOS infrastructure, and I appreciate the substantial punishment that Verizon took from Wall Street until it became obvious that FIOS would be a huge success.

But Verizon is not building FIOS in all of its territories!

Verizon is unloading land lines in eighteen states because they don’t want to keep building FIOS there. It would be a huge commitment of Verizon’s money and time to give these states FIOS. In fact—and this, I believe, is THE key issue—the financial benefits of deploying FIOS in these states probably would not accrue until after the current crop of senior Verizon executives retire. Almost certainly, Verizon bean counters have calculated that their books—and, most importantly, senior management bonuses—would look better in the short term if they spun out states that are harder to fiber up.

In other words, Verizon is sacrificing the long-term interests of their customers, the best interests of eighteen of our United States, and the long-term interests of their shareholders on the altar of the quick buck.

The first Verizon spin-outs are already deep in doo-doo trouble. Hawaii Tel is bankrupt. FairPoint Communications, which acquired Verizon land lines in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont was just hauled before an unprecedented joint meeting of the ME, NH and VT PUCs for non-performance only seven months after their Verizon deal closed. The FairPoint CEO is talking Chapter 11 only seven months after the deal closed. (Note: Seven months is a picosecond in telco planning time. In other words, anybody who had looked when the deal closed would have known exactly what the situation would be in seven months. I wonder who told what to who . . . and in return for what?)

A recent article on the Maine-New Hampshire-Vermont joint PUC hearing on FairPoint’s problems cited

. . . widespread e-mail problems in February and March, and continuing regionwide service problems such as bills issued after service was canceled and months-long waits to get new phone lines . . .

FairPoint’s operational problems even affected customers trying to complain to Vermont regulators. According to John Burke of the Vermont Public Service Board,

“For the first three business hours of the day today, if anybody tried to call the Public Service Board, they got the following message: ‘You have dialed a nonworking number, please check this number and try it again.’ “

Here’s another article on the ME_NH_VT joint PUC hearing.

There’s an $8.6 B deal in the works to spin Verizon landline assets to Frontier in some 14 states; Arizona, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, South Carolina, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin, plus some California assets. But this deal is stalled in Ohio because regulators see what’s happened in Hawaii, Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire.

This situation has only been reported regionally.

The State Journal (WV), in a recent, quite comprehensive article, explains the big picture like this:

. . . the payoff for Verizon is it cannot only make money selling off its assets, but it can take advantage of a federal tax loophole that allows tax-free mergers between companies. The smaller companies are left saddled with debt and, as a result, can’t make the necessary upgrades to existing infrastructure, turning off customers and ultimately leading to work force reductions as dissatisfied customers turn somewhere else.

The State Journal quotes Keith Fulton, president of Verizon West Virginia saying that the land line business . . .

. . . is a declining business for many.

Another ‘paper, the Dayton (OH) Daily News, reports Phone merger of Frontier, Verizon should be rejected, counsel says. The article says that the Ohio Consumers’ Council cites

. . . the lack of consumer benefits and potential pitfalls . . .

of the merger, and says

The lack of specific benefits for consumers fails to make this merger in the public interest.

A current Google News search returns regional stories but ZERO significant national coverage of Verizon’s “throw rural America under the train” strategy.

This video is another good piece: