After Billions in Subsidies, The Final Verizon FiOS Map Is Bleak as Hell

As Verizon inches towards the end of its long-promised FiOS expansion, we can finally get a look at all the places these heavily trumpeted fiber cables have actually ended up. Behold the final(ish) Verizon FiOS Fiber map. It's bleak as hell.

The map itself comes from Fiber For All (you can see the full interactive version here), since Verizon doesn't offer a FiOS coverage map of its own, for now-obvious reasons. Although in all fairness, the few places that do have access to the fiber service are generally in the country's more high-density areas. But according to Fiber For All, the number of people with access to FiOS still only hits about 12 percent of the total population.

Which isn't a lot, sure, but hey, that's still about a tenth of the population, you might say. But the problem here is twofold. First, Verizon has been trumpeting this thing as the second coming ever since its announcement in 2003. Not only has it been slow on fulfilling the promises it had already made, when it actually did get around to installing FiOS in a city, the coverage was shoddy and not entirely sensical. For instance, after the FiOS NYC buildout, the service would "[skip] buildings, floors, and blocks without clear explanation."

The other issue is the significant tax subsidies allotted to Verizon specifically for the fact that it was supposedly upgrading to fiber cables in the first place. Subsidies that Verizon did some wildly sketchy legal footwork to make damn sure it got. By supposedly upgrading its copper-based phone cables to FiOS fiber, it was eligible for the government subsidies that are supposed to help offset construction costs. Except, as TechDirt uncovered last year, Verizon didn't actually have any increased construction costs. Most likely due to the fact that while its been coughing up the money for its shaky fiber service, it's been neglecting its coper-based phone service almost entirely.

Of course, it isn't all bad news for the fiber-starved masses. Google is still trucking on its Fiber network, as are quite a few other smaller companies. But at least in Verizon's case, this map just proves what we already knew to be true: Verizon's big promises of fiber-for-all didn't deliver the coverage we were hoping for. Just big, fat government subsidies to Verizon's pockets. [TechDirt]

from Gizmodo http://gizmodo.com/after-billions-in-subsidies-the-final-verizon-fios-map-1682854728