Verizon willfully driving DSL users into the arms of cable

[Commentary] Back in April, you may recall that Verizon stopped selling standalone DSL, taking us back to the stone age of broadband when users were forced to bundle a costly landline they might no longer want. That move was just one part of a broader tactical shift by Verizon aimed at completely re-configuring the American broadband landscape—potentially for the worse.

With FiOS expansion frozen and most of the company's focus on fixed and mobile LTE services with sky-high overages, Verizon has all but declared that the 35-45 percent of their entire customer footprint that will be left on DSL is essentially expendable. Those users are consciously being driven to LTE and cable competitors as part of one of the largest shifts in power and technology this industry has ever seen. Verizon has numerous reasons for wanting its DSL services to die off, including the fact that newer LTE technology is cheaper to deploy in rural areas and easier to keep upgraded. But one of the driving forces is that Verizon is eager to eliminate unions from the equation, given that Verizon Wireless is non-union. None of this is theory; in fact, it has been made very clear by Verizon executives. "Every place we have FiOS, we are going to kill the copper," Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam recently told attendees of an investor conference. "We are going to just take it out of service. Areas that are more rural and more sparsely populated, we have got LTE built that will handle all of those services and so we are going to cut the copper off there."