This let them keep over $2 billion dollars. Verizon never fulfilled those promises which gave them a huge advantage in capital and allowed them to expand their services. Thus they became the monolith that they are and can offer the premium coverage they can provide.
Ya. They have great services which is important and makes it tough not to use their service if one depends on reliability.
But so is honoring your commitment to the govt if you're going to avoid over $2 billion in taxes.
Decades Of Failed Promises From Verizon: It Promises Fiber To Get Tax Breaks... Then Never Delivers
by Mike Masnick
Thu, Oct 17th 2013 9:46am
A decade ago, we wrote about how Verizon had made an agreement in Pennsylvania in 1994 that it would wire up the state with fiber optic cables to every home in exchange for tax breaks equalling $2.1 billion. In exchange for such a massive tax break, Verizon promised that all homes and businesses would have access to 45Mbps symmetrical fiber by 2015. By 2004, the deal was that 50% of all homes were supposed to have that. In reality, 0% did, and some people started asking for their money back.
That never happened, and it appeared that Verizon learned a valuable lesson: it can flat out lie to governments, promise 100% fiber coverage in exchange for subsidies, then not deliver, and no one will do a damn thing about it.
Because here we are about a decade later, and basically the same damn thing has happened in New York City. At least this time, Verizon actually had a fiber service to offer -- the well-known FiOS -- which it "promised" to cover 100% of NYC by 2014. Back when that was announced in 2008, Karl Bode at BroadbandReports correctly warned that you should take that promise with a large grain of salt, both because of Verizon's past failures to live up to promises, as well as the loopholes hidden in the agreement.
It looks like he was right on both accounts. As the account (linked above) at the Verge notes, the language actually is that Verizon just needs to "pass all households," which is interpreted loosely:
There were a lot of caveats in the contract, however. Verizon is only required to "pass all households," a vague term that means the fiber need to extend "to a point from which the building can be connected to the network." Verizon is not obligated to make that connection, however. As a result, the company is now claiming around 75 percent accessibility, even though the number of New Yorkers who can actually sign up for FiOS is probably much lower. A study by public advocate Bill de Blasio concluded that just 51 percent of households in New York have fiber access. The city and Verizon dispute these figures.
Read more:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131012/02124724852/decades-failed-promises-verizon-it-promises-fiber-to-get-tax-breaks-then-never-delivers.shtml
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