33 Years of the Digest ... founded August 21, 1981
Copyright © 2015 E. William Horne. All Rights Reserved.

The Telecom Digest for Aug 19, 2015
Volume 34 : Issue 153 : "text" Format
Messages in this Issue:
Centurylink to shed 1,000 jobs (Bill Horne)
Sprint to Drop Two-Year Contracts (Bill Horne)
Re: Still no Verizon FiOS for Boston (David Clayton)
Verizon backs off throttling unlimited customers, after it no longer matters (Bill Horne)
AT&T making it even harder to protect your privacy (Bill Horne)
Neighbors, Schumer demand Verizon clean up abandoned building in Syracuse suburb (Bill Horne)
Re: Verizon kills off service contracts, smartphone subsidies (HAncock4)

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
H.L. Mencken

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Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2015 12:26:16 -0400 From: Bill Horne <bill@horneQRM.net> To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Centurylink to shed 1,000 jobs Message-ID: <mqvm84$gr3$1@dont-email.me> Telecom company employs 5,100 in metro Denver and 44,000 companywide By Alicia Wallace and Tamara Chuang The Denver Post CenturyLink is laying off about 1,000 workers companywide, officials for the Monroe, La.-based telecommunications company confirmed Friday. The company declined to say how many of its more than 5,000 employees in Colorado would be affected. "CenturyLink, as all businesses, continually evaluates its cost structure and business practices and adjusts its operations to meet the needs of the business," Mark Molzen, a company spokesman, wrote in an e-mail to The Denver Post. "After careful consideration, CenturyLink has made the difficult decision to reduce its workforce. This includes current positions as well as not backfilling open positions." http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_28601196/centurylink-confirms-layoff-plans -- Bill Horne (Remove QRM from my address to write to me directly)
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2015 12:38:50 -0400 From: Bill Horne <bill@horneQRM.net> To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Sprint to Drop Two-Year Contracts Message-ID: <mqvmvm$js5$1@dont-email.me> Sprint to Drop Two-Year Contracts, Following T-Mobile and Verizon by Matthew J. Belvedere NBC News Sprint is abandoning two-year smartphone contracts -- and the subsidies that make device purchases cheaper. By the end of the year, customers of the No. 4 wireless company will have to pay full price for their phones or spread the payments out by leasing the device. Sprint introduced that plan as an option last year. http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/mobile/sprint-drops-two-year-contracts-following-t-mobile-verizon-n411751 -- Bill Horne (Remove QRM from my email address to write to me directly)
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2015 09:00:58 +1000 From: David Clayton <dc33box-usenet2@NOSPAM.yahoo.com.au> To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Re: Still no Verizon FiOS for Boston Message-ID: <pan.2015.08.17.23.00.54.490983@NOSPAM.yahoo.com.au> On Sat, 15 Aug 2015 12:35:34 -0500, Doug McIntyre wrote: ......... > Where we need the bandwidth, is where many many users download a lot of > data. Say from Netflix or Youtube. When you have unknown thousands or > 100's of thousands of users, all trying to get Netflix at once, that > becomes quite the traffic fire hose of data. Yep, I cancelled my DSL service recently because at busy times the back-end infrastructure so was overloaded by streaming that I was lucky to get 2Mbps and my ISP could not give me a timeline as to when there was going to be an upgrade to fix this known issue. Earlier this year in Australia numerous local streaming services were launched and a lot are associated with particular Internet providers so it seems that bandwidth has been reserved for these customers so they get a "good experience" and the rest of us have to live with the leftovers. -- Regards, David. David Clayton Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Knowledge is a measure of how many answers you have, intelligence is a measure of how many questions you have.
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2015 12:43:34 -0400 From: Bill Horne <bill@horneQRM.net> To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Verizon backs off throttling unlimited customers, after it no longer matters Message-ID: <mqvn8g$js5$2@dont-email.me> In July of 2011, Verizon announced it would no longer offer its wireless users unlimited data plans, and instead began pushing more expensive and capped shared data plans (complete with shiny $15 per gigabyte overage fees!). While Verizon did grandfather existing unlimited customers, like AT&T, it immediately began waging a quiet war on these users, throttling these purportedly "unlimited" connections to try and drive these users toward pricier metered options. In Verizon's case, the company started by throttling unlimited customers on its 3G network. When Verizon Wireless announced in 2014 it was going to start applying these "network optimization" practices to its LTE 4G network, the company received a surprise wrist slap by FCC boss Tom Wheeler, who warned the company that he saw through its use of congestion to drive revenue: "Reasonable network management" concerns the technical management of your network; it is not a loophole designed to enhance your revenue streams. It is disturbing to me that Verizon Wireless would base its "network management" on distinctions among its customers' data plans, rather than on network architecture or technology." https://www.techdirt.com/blog/wireless/articles/20150814/08521831943/verizon-quietly-backs-off-throttling-unlimited-wireless-customers-only-after-it-no-longer-matters.shtml +--------------------------------------------------------------+ Bill Horne (Remove QRM from my email address to write to me directly) ***** Moderator's Note ***** Rearranging the deck chairs on Bell Titanic department: Why do I get the feeling that Verizon executives are hiding several straw men behind a curtain? It seems that the company, bloated and stagnant after more than a century of monopoly profit and inept management, is serving de facto notice that it intends to keep squeezing everyone that uses "their" wires to get from point a to pointless. Of course, dedicated virtual circuits are already planned for transition to VoIP and "best effort, least cost, highest profit" status AFAICT, but the executives' skyscraper-high salaries will suffer no such degradation. Bill Horne Moderator
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2015 12:33:48 -0400 From: Bill Horne <bill@horneQRM.net> To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: AT&T making it even harder to protect your privacy Message-ID: <mqvmm7$ipd$1@dont-email.me> by David Lazarus Los Angeles Times In completing his company's $49-billion acquisition of DirecTV last month, AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson said it was "all about giving customers more choices." He meant entertainment and service choices, but he could just as easily have been referring to the myriad of decisions customers will encounter if they seek to protect their privacy. http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-lazarus-20150818-column.html -- Bill Horne (Remove QRM from my email address to write to me directly)
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2015 12:48:35 -0400 From: Bill Horne <bill@horneQRM.net> To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Neighbors, Schumer demand Verizon clean up abandoned building in Syracuse suburb Message-ID: <mqvnhv$m68$1@dont-email.me> Camillus, N.Y. - Dave Smith knows the abandoned Verizon property next door to his Camillus home all too well. For 20 years, he cut the grass on the property because Verizon wouldn't. About five years ago, another neighbor took over the task. "It really burns me up," said Smith, who lives with his wife, Donna, at 11 LeRoy St. The abandoned Verizon property is at 1 Green St., where Green Street meets LeRoy Street. Neighbors say the one-story brick building was a switching station for AT&T back in the 1950s and was later used by its successor, Verizon, for storage. http://www.syracuse.com/business-news/index.ssf/2015/08/neighbors_schumer_demand_verizon_clean_up_abandoned_building_in_syracuse_suburb.html --- Bill Horne (Remove QRM from my email address to write to me directly) ***** Moderator's Note ***** Location, location, location - and Verizontal is sitting on a King's ransom of them. The immense property holdings of the former Bell Operating companies - largely holdovers from the days when electromechanical switches and giant battery banks and copper-to-every-building technology necessitated oh-so-desirable downtown real-estate that was puchased in an age when it was still possible to send a telegram - have now become the corporation's largest single asset. Although some showplace locations such as 185 Franklin Street in Boston have been sold to private investors (in a deal I would love to see more details about), most of the land and the buldings which the company no longer needs remain on the rate base. As Verizon's execs plan to serve customers via the Internet and to force all POTS dial-tone into measured, pay-by-the-microsecond cellular connections, it's gargantuan real-estate holdings, most of it badly underused, remains as a large question mark that regulators seem to be clueless about. Bill Horne Moderator
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2015 10:44:03 -0700 (PDT) From: HAncock4 <withheld@invalid.telecom-digest.org> To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Re: Verizon kills off service contracts, smartphone subsidies Message-ID: <8f9a90a0-d903-445a-8216-78fdd3a51482@googlegroups.com> On Sunday, August 9, 2015 at 12:12:22 AM UTC-4, Monty Solomon wrote: > Verizon kills off service contracts, smartphone subsidies > > In a radical shift, the company will only offer new plans that require > customers to pay for their own smartphones. Also, device access fees > and buckets of data remain. An article in the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that existing Verizon customers will still be able to get discounted phones for $100 or $200 by renewing a two-year service contract. As long as you stay with the current plan, you can upgrade at a discount. for full article please see: http://www.philly.com/philly/business/20150811_ap_095387b8d82f46b3a669d7caca8f20a4.html

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