Our local POTS company (VERY local: two exchanges which were charged “long distance” charges for calls between the two, up until the company figured it’d net more by charging everyone a monthly fee, a couple of years ago) has such excellent service. [sarc /off]
Ten months after the cabling was installed for a fiber connection, the company finally got around to installing the electronics enabling a fiber connection. A month and a half later a crew came by to remove the old copper. What did the crew do? It cut the copper at the pole and left. Period. That’s it. Telco copper cabling draped across our back yard. THAT was “removing surplused Telco equipment.”
Of course, the local Telco’s owners live sumptuously, have recently almost taken over “downtown” in the county seat with a huge, palatial new office building, etc., but improve service to match? Notsomuch. Sure, one can now obtain (very) low-speed DSL via fiber for substantially more $ than (a much hated) cable company’s Internet connection that is an order of magnitude faster.