Customers Cut Cords Because They Don't Find Regulation Important, Says Verizon
“Customers have demonstrated that they do not find important old-school regulation, moving in droves to unregulated VoIP and wireless technologies," Verizon replied Friday in Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission docket 2018-3001391. The carrier and a group of rural phone companies separately…
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urged deregulation, contrary to comments (see 1810040052) by the Office of Consumer Advocate and Coalition for Affordable Utility Services and Energy Efficiency in Pennsylvania (Cause). Advocates want Pennsylvania “to regulate like it is 1985,” Verizon said. Landlines are less than 15 percent of voice connections in Pennsylvania and dropping, it said. Cause wrongly assumes the poor and seniors rely disproportionately on regulated landlines, Verizon said: the Centers for Disease Control reports 68 percent of poor adults live in wireless-only households and 9 percent live in mostly wireless households. Regulating only landlines makes no sense, said RLECs like Armstrong Telephone, Consolidated Communications, Frontier Communications, TDS and Windstream. They said that would mean "the vast majority of telecommunications providers are free to operate under what essentially amounts to open market conditions.”