Bruce Kushnick of Teletruth News is one of the most lucid and knowledgeable analysts today regarding telecommunications issues. Here he dissects the fraudulent nature of Verizon’s advertising claims, and reveals how this corporation has been receiving billions in public money for services never rendered.

Economic growth, advanced telecommunications networks, education and entertainment would flourish. Sound familiar?

Think of it as — A Company is paid billions from state residents in the form of higher rates/taxes to upgrade the roads to a new super highway. Instead, the Company supplies inferior dirt roads but continues to collect the fees. Then it says, “We’ll start rolling out new stuff — but we own it and we decide which cars can be on it. Keep paying and shut up or we’ll just stop building anything. In the meantime, we’ll charge you more for the current roads.”

The dirt roads in this case were ADSL, Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line, which was rolled out around 1998 as an afterthought. It allows the customer to use their phone line for faster Internet service. It was considered an inferior technology in 1992, as it is carried over the old copper wiring, not upgraded fiber optic cables. It can’t handle delivering high quality video services and so instead of a Ferrari on the Information Superhighway, New York and the rest of the country got a skate-board on dirt roads.

Verizon’s FiOS, if built, is now defined as an ‘interstate information service’ by the FCC, not a ‘telecommunications service’. By this decision, Verizon does not have to open their new networks to competition of any sort and is essentially being funded through the upgrading construction budgets for local phone service. Verizon used to be a telecommunications utility which was funded through local rates. It had obligations to the public and based on the Telecom Act of 1996, the incumbent was supposed to be open to competition and have ubiquitous deployments What we have now is a ‘free market’ company who can now build the new networks with our funding and then keep it with no obligations and negotiate whether areas get built at all.

Read the rest of this highly informative and insightful post Here, which includes a complete timeline of the history of Verizon’s scamming of the public trough.