The fiber started going in back in 2008 but many areas of the city are still not hooked up
Tension has been brewing between New York City residents and political leaders who feel Verizon Communications hasn’t held up its promise to blanket the city with a high-speed fiber optic network.
And amid a tense contract negotiation between Verizon and some 39,000 unionized employees, members of the Communications Workers of America claim Verizon is intentionally shifting resources from fixed-line systems to its lucrative wireless business unit.
The New York Times reported this week that, since initially rolling out the service in 2008, many would-be customers are feeling frustrated that seven years has passed and the service isn’t available.
The news outlet interviewed Bedford-Stuyvesant resident Stephanie Brooks: “Why aren’t we getting the opportunity to get service and have a choice?” she said. “They built around us.”
Verizon, for its part, said it is working in earnest to install fiber optic infrastructure.
In March 2014, Verizon claimed it could not deliver on the service because landlords were blocking access to buildings, but some landlords dismissed the carrier’s claims.
“They never came back to fix the holes that were drilled, fix the boxes they installed and put molding on their respective wires,” Hamdi Nezaj, who owns buildings in the Bronx said at the time.
The June 30 deadline only covered the main trunks of the system that run through city streets, but the agreement also said that once fiber was laid in an area, if a household requests FiOS service, Verizon would have to deliver within six months.
Kevin Service, Verizon SVP for network operations, told the Times, “I hope we’re not headed to litigation. We’ve invested an enormous amount of money. It’s absolutely in our interest to get it to as many subscribers as possible.”
He gave the example of wiring a building at 118th Street in Manhattan: “To get to the 10th floor in the middle of the block, we’ve got to talk to not only that building, but the three buildings on one side and the four buildings on the other side.”
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has made high-speed Internet access a high-level priority of his term.
