Now this will be interesting - Verizon and landlines

Looks like Verizon is getting out of the landline business. From the New York Times:

Verizon Boss Hangs Up on Landline Phone Business
Roll over in your grave, Alexander Graham Bell.

That was in effect what Ivan Seidenberg, the chief executive of Verizon Communications -� one of the largest descendants of the old Bell System � declared this morning.

Speaking to a Goldman Sachs investor conference, Mr. Seidenberg said Verizon was simply no longer concerned with telephones that are connected with wires.

All traditional phone companies are suffering because many customers are canceling their landlines in order to use phone service from their cable companies or simply to rely on their cellphones. Speaking earlier at the Goldman conference, Randall Stephenson, chief executive of AT&T, and Ed Mueller, head of Qwest Communications, both talked about seeing a day when their landline businesses would stop shrinking.

Mr. Seidenberg said that his �thinking has matured� and that trying to predict when the company would stop losing voice landlines �is like the dog chasing the bus.�

In other words, that snipping sound you hear around copper phone lines is just going to get louder.

This prospect, however, doesn�t rattle him.

Not only does Verizon control the largest mobile phone company in the country, it has also largely moved away from copper wires. Verizon is selling off most of its operations in rural areas and is spending billions to wire most of the rest of its territory with its fiber optic network, or FiOS.

Emphasis mine. Oh. Joy. So we get saddled with a third-tier telco that charges us more $$$ than Verizon ever did and who doesn't give a @#$% about maintaining the equipment. They are just interested in squeezing out that last dime. We are close enough to the switch that we could have DSL if they wanted to spend $30K on a DSLAM and the leasing fee for the T1 -- I know a lot of people that would sign up (myself included). I don't want to become a CLEC but that could be an interesting route...