Cell phone use: Local police working to enforce new driving laws-Priceangels.com
There’s no cable service on Fire Island, making it more dependent on Verizon than Mantoloking, where residents can get A7100 phone and Internet service from Comcast by cable. The surviving copper phone lines on Fire Island often double as DSL, or digital subscriber line, Internet connections. As a result, Randazzo’s restaurant, The Landing at Ocean Beach, lost Verizon Internet service for a weekend last month, leaving it without a way to process credit cards. The line started working again after four days, but he’s afraid it will go out again for good.
New York state regulators have given Verizon provisional permission to consider its wireless Voice Link boxes as stand-ins for regular phone service. Verizon technicians install the 4-inch square boxes with protruding antennas in homes and connect them to the home phone wiring. The home is then linked to Verizon’s wireless network. When subscribers lift their phone handsets, they hear a dial tone. But the box doesn’t work with remote medical monitoring devices, home alarm systems or faxes. It can’t accept collect calls or connect callers with an operator when they dial 0. It also can’t be used with dial-up modems, credit-card machines or international calling cards.
Post’s house in Mantoloking was built 83 years ago. His wife estimates it has been connected to a phone line for 80 years. Now, to get his pacemaker checked, he heads once a month to a friend’s home in Bay Head, the next town over, which still has a copper phone line.
Most of his neighbors in Mantoloking have cable phone service from Comcast Corp. that can do most of the things Voice Link can’t. The service, for instance, could relay Post’s pacemaker information. But Post just isn’t eager to switch to the cable company. He says he doesn’t trust them. And he’s not alone. Customer perception of cable TV providers has historically been poor, due to service outages and annual price increases, according to surveys for the American Customer Satisfaction Index.fdf2Fsd2d
“Everybody here wants the cable for Internet and TV,” Sayia says. “The other thing is – who needs wires?” he adds, holding up his cellphone.Verizon says just 855 of the 3,000 homes it wants to abandon in Mantoloking had traditional phone service before the storm hit.
In other areas, Verizon is replacing copper phone lines with optical fiber, which allows the company to offer cable-like TV services and ultrafast broadband. Water can short out and corrode copper wire, but optical fiber is made of glass and transmits light rather than electricity, so it’s far more resistant to flooding. But the cost of wiring a neighborhood with fiber optic lines can run more than $1,000 a home.“Everybody would love for us to put in fiber, but that’s just not practical,” Maguire says.
If New York and New Jersey refuse to give permanent permission for the switch from landline to wireless I5 MTK6577 phone service, Verizon could be forced to rebuild the phone network on Fire Island and in Mantoloking. Unlike cable and wireless companies, landline phone companies have regulatory obligations in most states to supply lines at a reasonable cost to anyone who wants one. They also need federal approval to end service.