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Will All New Yorkers Have Access To Verizon FiOS By Summer 2014 As Promised?
By
Rebecca Fishbein
Published Oct 11, 2013
Modified Oct 11, 2013
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By
Rebecca Fishbein
Published Oct 11, 2013
Modified Oct 11, 2013
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We've been holding out for Verizon FiOS to strip the power from the evil cable overlords at Time Warner and Cablevision, with their contractual promise to wire the whole city for fiber optics by summer 2014. But though that date is approaching soon-ish, apparently not everyone's getting access to the super-fast service as promised, and some New Yorkers are wondering if they're going to be left behind.
The Verge reported yesterday that though Verizon says fiber optics are accessible to 75 percent of New Yorkers, many people are having difficulty signing up for the service. One Williamsburg resident was only able to get hooked up with FiOS when he complained about it on a radio program; a Verizon press rep immediately sent crews to his apartment to wire it. "Apparently the best thing to do was to make a stink on public media," Mike Caprio, a coder who had been trying to get FiOS since 2009, said. "It just seems to underscore the fact that no one is getting service. It’s extremely arbitrary if the actions of just one guy made all this happen for me."
Caprio's not the only one who's complained about FiOS' inaccessibility. In April, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio found that though Verizon's contract with the city mandated the service be available to three quarters of the population by the end of 2012, it was only available to 51 percent of New Yorkers, with lower-income neighborhoods getting left behind. Even a cursory scan of Gothamist staffers' addresses in the Verizon FiOS "Community Locator" yielded mixed results: some neighborhoods, like the Upper East and West Sides, had lots of hotspots, while neighborhoods like Brooklyn Heights, Bushwick and South Williamsburg had far more scattered coverage.
Both the Bloomberg administration and Verizon said de Blasio's numbers were erroneous, and today we spoke with Verizon press rep John Bonomo, who swore the company was on track, and were ahead of schedule for the end of 2012. "We committed, we said we'll do the whole city, we'll do everything. And we're doing it with fiber," he told us.
But they are hitting some snags. "It's getting into the buildings and getting access to the buildings that's the issue," he said, noting that the company often needed to go through backyards and get permission from property owners before they could implement the service. "If Verizon says, 'We're going to install something here,' those are dollar signs the landlord wants to know about. It's their bread and butter."
Verizon's had trouble with landlords before, when they were allegedly challenging Verizon's rewiring of Lower Manhattan with fiber optics after Hurricane Sandy. Though Caprio told The Verge his landlord hadn't made any effort to impede any FiOS installation (and even asked Caprio for help obtaining the service), Bonomo says it was a special case. "Just because someone can't get FiOS in their building does not mean the fiber cable is not outside on the street passing that building," he said. "The challenge we have in a city as large as NYC, is negotiating with a building's ownership to bring FiOS into the building." Bonomo adds that Verizon is meeting with landlords and property owners every day; meanwhile, the rest of us wait as the deadline harkens, anxiously watching our pirated episodes of American Horror Story buffer, buffer, buffer...
Tagged
fiber optics
the verge
verizon
verizon fios
Rebecca Fishbein
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