Verizon's proposed plan of a $2.7 billion transfer of local access lines to FairPoint Communications -- a small, largely nonunion North Carolina firm -- is part of a nationwide trend toward rural telecom redlining.Northern New England is just emerging from its annual "mud season" -- long the bane of back-road drivers throughout the region. Nevertheless, residents of Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire are now worried about getting stuck in a different way. That's because their local phone company, the corporate giant Verizon, wants to ditch them as customers.
Labor and consumer activists, joined by some public officials, are organizing against this move, in a high-stakes regulatory and political battle with consequences for the future of telecommunications in all of rural America.
Verizon's proposed $2.7 billion transfer of local access lines to FairPoint Communications -- a small, largely nonunion North Carolina firm -- is part of a nationwide trend toward rural telecom redlining. Everywhere it can, Verizon is trying to abandon "low-value" landline customers and is focusing instead on building its wireless customer base and investing billions of dollars in a new "FIOS" service. FIOS provides voice, video and high-speed broadband connections on a single fiber-optic cable network, now being extended directly to homes and businesses in big cities and affluent suburbs.
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