NY State Agency Gives Low Marks to Verizon Copper Service
Verizon resisted service-quality regulations proposed in the New York Public Service Commission probe of reliability of the company’s copper network. The carrier responded to the New York Department of Public Service, which in Friday testimony (docket 16-00424) said Verizon isn’t spending enough to address problems. The Communications Workers of America testified that the telco allowed copper to crumble (see 1703240044). Hearings start in the New York PSC probe June 26. The company has come under fire for copper network reliability in other states.
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DPS staff seek “a giant backward step into the heavy-handed regulatory regime of the 1970s, when telephone service was a monopoly,” a Verizon spokesman emailed Monday. “We are disappointed. Even though Verizon’s regulated wireline operations have been consistently losing money in New York, we continue to invest billions of dollars in our network infrastructure in the State to insure high-quality services to all of our customers. We could not maintain those levels of investment if the Commission were to accept the recommendation to impose these substantial new regulatory burdens.” The spokesman confirmed this number includes infrastructure expenditures for all Verizon services, including wireless, in the state.
A DPS panel on service quality rated Verizon as poor and recommended changes to the carrier’s service quality improvement plan (SQIP), which was adopted in 2010 after the commission gave it low marks for timeliness-of-repair performance. "Based on data made available by Verizon, the Company’s service quality for non-Core customers is not meeting the Commission’s service quality standards, has not improved, and in some cases has gotten worse since the Commission implemented the SQIP in 2010,” said the panel’s testimony. "We recommend that certain modifications to the SQIP are warranted in light of Verizon’s continuing loss of regulated access lines." Non-core customers are Verizon’s regulated access-line customers.
The service-quality panel recommended an array of changes to metrics used by the PSC. The commission should stop differentiating between core and non-core customers in the SQIP, it said. The commission should require Verizon to distinguish between FTTP [fiber to the premises] and copper customers, report SQ metrics for VoIP customers, and implement a new “Targeted Customer Trouble Report Rate Remediation Plan,” the panel said. And the PSC should require more granular data on mean time to repair so the agency can decide whether it should set a maximum, it said.
A separate DPS panel on accounting confirmed the carrier’s “general claims with respect to investment in its network and overall regulated revenue losses.” In testimony, the panel raised red flags about Verizon’s accounting processes and said the company doesn’t seem to be dedicating enough resources to copper service quality in the state: “We recommend that the Commission, at a minimum, require Verizon to provide additional information in its Annual Reports and require Verizon to conduct a comprehensive study of its accounting for employee pension and other post-employment benefit (OPEB) costs going forward so the Commission has a better understanding of Verizon’s financial situation when it determines what additional investments in service quality are warranted for the Company to meet the Commission’s service quality standards for all customers taking regulated services.”
The telco also faces copper reliability probes in other states and a New York City lawsuit about Fios deployment (see 1703140043). A Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission investigation is paused until April 7 while the company talks settlement with Communications Workers of America (see 1703020040). The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities announced a Verizon probe in December (see 1612140066). CWA asked for a probe in Maryland, but the PSC hasn’t opened a formal investigation.