CWA Local 1170

The Ohio Public Service Commission has put its stamp of approval on Frontier Communications Corp.’s acquisition of Verizon Communications Inc. access lines in the Buckeye State.

Frontier and Verizon inked a deal in May for Frontier to acquire Verizon’s regulated local exchange and landline business in 14 states. Verizon shareholders are to get an undetermined number of Frontier shares in return.

The acquisition would make Frontier the country’s largest rural telecommunications carrier with some 4 million access lines. Ohio is the fourth state to OK the deal.

Verizon would be shedding what has been a shrinking line of business as landline customers continue to migrate to wireless service.

Frontier chairman and CEO Maggie Wilderotter has touted the acquisition as a boost for Frontier, stating Frontier expects to add customers by providing broadband and video to regions where Verizon has not offered those alternatives.

(c) 2010 Rochester Business Journal.

Click here to read the Rochester D&C article.

Although it is only a trial, Google is seeing the need for better and more bandwidth to the masses. We in the United States lag far behind many other countries in the world for speed of broadband, not to mention the lack of availability to many in this country to even get broadband services. A good portion of them are in our own territories.

This industry needs a wake up call. Technology is changing as is the way we receive and consume media. Because of this, bandwidth is the future.

A general manager stated in the above linked article “most users in Rochester don’t need ultra-fast Internet access”.  My question would have to be, who are they to make that judgement for me? I for one could and would use it and I don’t need someone else making that decision for me. We should have the right to choose for ourselves and that is what Google is trying to do. Make this work to give people the choice.

I’m sure a lot of you have seen or at least heard of watching television on the internet. Whether it is HULU.com, boxee.tv or any of the major network’s own websites. Just in the last year alone there has been a spike in hits to these site. You only need to look so far as to what Apple is doing with iTunes and tv show episodes not to mention movie rentals or Netflicks with streaming movies. Look at the new televisions from the likes of VISIO or the new blue ray players. These come with internet connectivity to youtube, netflicks, amazon and a whole host of websites that offer media not to mention social networking and photo sharing sites like flickr and Google’s own picasa.

All I am saying is that “the times they are a changing”. All the statistics you need are out there and to have someone make the decision for me that I don’t need all that bandwidth is absurd and shows no forward thinking for the future or for customer’s needs.

I am not a betting man but I would take that bet as to say that television as we know it today will change dramatically with-in the next five years. Stop and ask yourself why do the big cable companies want to put a cap on your internet usage and charge you a higher rate for the more bandwidth you use? Because … they see the writing in the wall that more and more people are watching tv on the internet and not through their own cable t.v. , thus less revenue for them, they have to make it up somewhere.

Look at the cell phone industry. Sure they have lowered the rates across the board for the phone service. Yeah! But … what nobody has noticed is that recently all the data plans are slowing rising higher and higher and they are making it a requirement for most “smart phones” to have minimum data plans. Why is this? the statistics show that people are making less phone calls. They are texting more, they are sending more emails, they are using more apps on the phones that take what do you call it? Oh yah! BANDWIDTH. This is why the Verizon’s and the AT&T’s are beefing up the cell site with more BANDWIDTH to support the growing need.

These statistics are the same in the home. It may sound odd to you or more like a luxury but more and more people are connecting pc’s to the family television to get more content from the internet. Look at youtube, they are now offering FULL HD videos. Do you know what FULL HD videos need? Yup. BANDWIDTH, and lots of it! Don’t even get me started talking about cloud computing. If you use your browser to get email from the likes of gmail or yahoo then you my friend have used cloud computing and that is just the tip of the iceberg. What about podcasts, video podcasts, online training, screen casts, heavy rich media laden websites? Brick and morter stores are closing left and right. Yes it’s sad but it’s because more and more people shop ONLINE. Want to see how something works before you buy it? Want to sample a book before you purchase it? It’s all online, from video’s to sample .pdf files of books. You only have to go so far as Amazon.com to see any of this. The list goes on and on. This is where it is at and where it is going. It’s not going to go back to the way it was when all we needed was a dial modem connection. Why do you think no one uses them anymore?

You have to be blind, ignorant or just don’t care enough not to see it.

I will concede to the fact that there are still a very few that all they need is a dial up modem. There are also a few who only want or need a rotary phone.

Look, whether google can make a go at this or even make it work still has to be seen but at least they see what needs to be done in this country so that we might have another choice or for some even “a” choice. Also maybe they will wake up the other internet providers in this county and make them take their blinders off and force them to start offering services that people want and need for the future. Verizon has started with FiOS. Ask any FiOS customer how they like it? I bet you will be hard pressed to find one who doesn’t.

Thanks for taking the time to read this lengthy diatribe.

For an in site of what other countries offer and a darn good read click here. You would be surprised.

Follow link below for all the info. Hope Frontier isn’t next.

Click to read

Below is a great link to a website by a guy who lives and works in Japan and basically gives photo tours of life in Japan.

The link shows an installation of him getting fiber to the home and how it is installed by Japan telco and him setting things up.

A Very interesting read, this is standard operating procedure over there. Pretty much everyone has or can get fiber to the home with bandwidth up to 100meg. This is where it is at and for the most part the rest of the world knows this as does Verizon with it’s FiOS system. Basing your income and being dependent on POTS phone service only is an antiquated ideal on an antiquated system and shows no forward thinking or vision for the future.

Click Here and enjoy the article.

The column notes that Verizon executive Peter Thonis said: ‘These asset sales made sense for the acquiring companies at the time they were bought and have proven to add significant value for Verizon shareholders since then.’
Column: The Two Sides of Verizon’s Deal Making
Dennis K. Berman
591 words
Tue Aug 11, 12:00 AM ET
The Wall Street Journal
Verizon Communications Inc. boss Ivan Seidenberg may be one of the best deal makers of his time, or one of the worst. Today, three of Verizon’s most significant divestitures are either in bankruptcy or near it. As they say on Wall Street, it all depends on what side of the trade you’re on. Verizon’s former yellow-pages unit, which goes by the ungainly name of Idearc, sought court refuge from creditors in May; Verizon’s former Hawaiian telecom franchise, purchased by Carlyle Group, filed for bankruptcy in December, and FairPoint Communications, which absorbed landlines from Verizon in a complicated divestment, is close to going under, the company said in a July securities filing.

In all, these companies have lost upward of $13 billion in value and counting.

This should make Mr. Seidenberg a hero to Verizon investors. Not only did he bail out of the assets at the right moment, he extracted prices that literally sucked the life out of the buyers.

If only it were that simple. In the case of Idearc and FairPoint, their buyers happened to include Verizon shareholders themselves. They received controlling interests in the newly formed companies.

That is a good thing for those who sold out early. Those who didn’t are now sitting on Idearc and FairPoint stock trading at three cents and 54 cents a share, down from around $28 and $10, respectively, when the spinoffs began.

How did Idearc go from birth to bankruptcy in under 900 days? Back in 2006, private-equity firms were scrambling to buy directories companies, reasoning that their steady cash flows could support very high levels of debt.

Verizon’s tax-free spinoff was in essence a do-it-yourself leveraged buyout, with the company’s own shareholders the buyers of a highly indebted company, eagerly financed by banks and high-yield bond buyers. Verizon was taking what the market gave it.

It took too much. The incursions of Internet advertising and the decaying U.S. economy soon overwhelmed Idearc, whose revenue fell nearly 9% over the past year. Once worth $5 billion in equity and $9.2 billion in debt, its bankruptcy advisers now peg its value at around $3 billion.

“It was a victim of a time when people’s perception of risk and reward were shaped by the environment,” said one person who worked on the original transaction.

Verizon officials say they are proud of their deals. “These asset sales made sense for the acquiring companies at the time they were bought and have proven to add significant value for Verizon shareholders since then,” said Verizon spokesman Peter Thonis.

There are nonetheless consequences for a deal-making machine like Verizon — with at least 18 transactions in the past seven years — to leave a string of busted companies in its wake.

These things matter greatly to how state and federal regulators perceive the company. Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and Hawaii each are in an uproar over the FairPoint divestiture, with much of the ire directed at Verizon. “It was a great deal for Verizon,” said New Hampshire’s public consumer advocate, Meredith Hatfield. “Whether it was a great deal for New Hampshire consumers is a different question.”

It matters to market perceptions, too. “Could you be the next FairPoint?” barked CNBC’s Jim Cramer in an interview with the chief executive of Frontier Communications Inc., which bought five million rural landlines from Verizon in May.

But perhaps being a good deal maker means not worrying about the past. Mr. Seidenberg is today focused on Verizon’s fiber-optic service FiOS, which was funded in part by the three divestitures. He hasn’t uttered the word “Idearc” in public in two and a half years.