Verizon Getting in Charter’s Way to Expansion and Build Out

Among all the leading telecom service providers, there prevails a monopoly of one government cell phone service provider or the other. To maintain this monopolist position, the telecom giants often go out of their way to be an impediment in the services of others.

The exact thing happened recently when Verizon was seen coming in Charter’s way. Let’s see what happened.

Verizon Being an Obstacle in Charter’s Expansion

Now, the problem arises with Charter’s move of expansion where the company needs to attach its equipment and wiring to roadside poles in order to provide customers with its services. The expansion is to be carried out in New York State.

The services to be offered by Charter include internet service and TV services offered by the company.

The issue arises because most of these roadside poles are either owned or co-owned by Verizon. Thus, to give Charter a chance to deploy its equipment on these poles, Verizon, the leading government cell phone service provider, has to take its own equipment down from a number of them.

For this, Charter Communications has evidently submitted 822 applications for pole attachments to Verizon. These applications included attachment requests for around 55, 856 poles. Along with the applications, Charter has also paid application fees of $409,296 to Verizon.

Now, besides this, Verizon – that is known for its government cell phone plan – has been giving a hard time to Charter in the approval of the applications.

Out of the 822 applications, only 179 have been approved by Verizon to date. According to a complaint sent to the PSC by Charter, even after receiving the application fees, the government cell phone service provider isn’t taking the desired actions.

It has been seen that after the acquisition of Time Warner cable by Charter Communications, the company is bound to expand to new areas and Verizon is being a great obstacle in its way.

According to Charter, Verizon is doing so for competitive reasons as the company, while being celebrated for its government cell phone plans, also offers TV services through its FiOS cable TV.

This clearly shows that Charter’s TV and Internet services are bound to clash with that of Verizon’s in the capital region and this is evidently dodged by the leading government cell phone service provider – Verizon.

What Verizon Has To Say

While being accused of deliberately delaying its work on pole requests by Charter, Verizon denies the matter completely.  

According to Verizon’s spokesperson Raymond McConville, "We have been more than cooperative and even presented Charter with options to speed up their construction efforts,"

"For them to try to shift blame is puzzling at best. We stand ready to continue to assist them and again provide them with the methods to speed things up”, he added.

In a Nutshell

If Verizon is deliberately getting in Charter’s way, the reasons are pretty loud and clear. However, because of these reasons, the internet users that have opted for Charter’s services might suffer because of Verizon’s level of cooperation.