By Charlie Meyer:

"Yes, but ..."

“If the phone doesn’t ring,it’s me.”  - Jimmy Buffett

I did find myself buying a complicated wireless phone just after Christmas. I felt my “Crackberrying” sisters in New Yawk made my plain flip phone seem like the “Jed Clampett Beverly Hillbillies Cell Phone.” One would think I had it in a road-kill raccoon fur and tree bark case. Sadly, it was “only” a cellphone. Never mind the frustration of doing the all-thumbs act of texting...am I alone feeling that what takes a couple of minutes to type into the BlackBerry could have been solved in about ten seconds by actually talking? There must be a lot of marriage counselors who once made a good living trying to help couples talk, wondering what to do. Are they now counting BBQ chicken wings in Petersburg? Alas, time waits for no one, and I guess talking on the telephone is so 1969.

My sisters work for New York’s largest employer. In other states, that would involve working around yellow smiley faces, wearing blue vests; in New York, the largest employer in the state is the state, methinks. 

If you can’t beat the BlackBerries, I figured I’d join them.

I remember when Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) broadband came to our town several years ago. Moving to a small Appalachian town had me fearing being on pokey dial-up forever; waiting for the knock on the door from the Governor’s West Virginia State Police Task Force on Bandwidth Hogging SWAT team. Back then, one had to buy land line telephone service to get DSL broadband service. At least Verizon didn’t offer the telemarketing calls as a “benefit” of a land line phone.

OK, Frontier Communications is a rural carrier. That’s what the expatriate New Yorker in me would call “the sticks.” In all fairness, residents of Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island call where I was born Upstate: “the sticks.” Just more Starbucks baristas in the New York “sticks.” I must agree with County Commission President Dr. Wayne Spiggle that most of us want to preserve the desirable “rural” aspects of our community, while pursuing the positives of technology. Is Verizon, which was born as one of the “baby Bells” when Ma Bell, aka AT&T, aka the Star Wars Death Star logoed phone monopoly, was broken up decades ago, bailing out on West Virginia landline for greener urban wireless pastures? Is Frontier capable of maintaining and modernizing our landline telephone service? Even if it’s run by a CEO named Maggie, a Jersey girl who went to Holy Cross? (“Hiss” goes the Notre Dame fan side of this columnist’s noggin.) I learned never to underestimate Jersey girls.

I sometimes miss a “land line” at home, but I get more than enough calls from telemarketers and business spies from Bangalore, India at

work: “My name is Jerry Garcia...” Why was it that my wiseguy mind tried to visualize a pudgy, bearded, tie-dyed guitar player with a red dot on her forehead? “Hey, Jerry, I’m glad you didn’t die in 1996.” I empathize with his job being offshored as millions of other American jobs were. Ask him to play “Sugar Magnolia” or to tell him to “Let Phil (Lesh) sing!” Times change when my now octogenarian Dad, who didn’t get enough calls from me in my early twenties, asks me to ring his cell phone, as the telemarketers make answering the “home” phone we were nagged about not tying up in our teens, a daily annoyance. 

What ever happened to the “Do Not Call” list? (Or to those with southern Asian accents: “I don’t know if you even have a local word for “privacy” in the teeming billions masses of a Third World country like India...” India and China resent the “Third World” tag, but building nuclear weapons stockpiles and blue water navies while billions of your own people live in abject poverty is NOT “First World”. Not by a long shot.) I guess when I get a phone call to a land line phone from the Metro Atlanta area code, I’ll keep assuming it’s from an Indian call center. Bangalore calling... My rich Uncle Sam did provide me ample opportunities to wear Navy blue on both sides of the Atlantic, thus I am fluent in both English and “Merkin” dialects. 

Watch too much Monty Python, and do your best faux Brit accent parody. 

Works every time. I really don’t miss my land line, after all.

The joke I had for friends in New York and D.C. was that I had two 

cell phones; one for each side of the mountain, whichever had signal.  

High frequency radio propagation and our Appalachian topography often don’t go well together, even if the “Fiends of Coal” want to continue wholesale mountaintop removal mining. In my travels around our state, I tend to stick to the interstates, or roads not named for politicians who went to jail. Look at your cellular provider’s service map. Forget many of those winding, curvy, dog-puking “country roads.” Even if Verizon’s line from the pole to my cottage hangs forlornly unused because I no longer needed it, land line telephone service still connects to most of our homes and businesses.

Maggie and her folks at Frontier may yet have the moxie to operate and improve land line service here in West Virginia. On the other hand, Verizon has a history of spinning off service to an upstart that didn’t quite have what it takes. The unions certainly aren’t fond of refighting battles they thought they have won with Verizon. The Public Service Commission needs to weigh the hard facts whether we will be helped or harmed by the sale. They are there to protect us from decisions made only on corporate balance sheets.

By Stephen Smoot:

"No"

Throughout the past year a merger affecting almost every West Virginia household has played out behind the scenes. Last May Verizon decided to sell to Frontier its landlines so it could concentrate its efforts on next-generation communications technologies, such as broadband service. Eleven thousand workers would move from Verizon to 

Frontier. That step represents a break from history for Verizon.  

Back in the old days our bills read C&P Telephone, short for Chesapeake and Potomac. It was part of the Bell System, owned and operated by AT&T. Some may remember calling this conglomerate “Ma Bell” or simply “the phone company.” AT&T decided at some point during the 1980s to get into personal computers. Congress used that as an excuse to break up that corporation’s near monopoly over phone service, although internet and cellular service were about to destroy their market control naturally. The “Baby Bells” emerged; the one covering our neck of the woods was Bell Atlantic, later mystifyingly renamed Verizon. Now Verizon wants to cleanly break from its past to embrace the future. Frontier wants to take over ownership and operation of traditional phone service, especially in rural areas that modern technology still cannot reach (making Frontier a rather appropriate name.)

Opponents charge that Verizon has a poor history of deal making.  

Those who purchased cast offs from Verizon in the recent past, such as their phone book department, have ended up in bankruptcy. Some economists refer to the “curse of the Verizon deal.” The usual suspects, such as the Communications Workers of America, have signed on to the opposition as well. Any whiff of capitalism brings out the hyenas. What is the real issue here? After all, regulators in California, Nevada, and South Carolina already signed off.

West Virginia’s Public Service Commission wants guarantees. Frontier promised to continue upgrading the line system and to use its landlines to expand broadband access into rural areas. The PSC is wary of this and has demanded that Verizon provide the state between $60 and $300 million in funds in case Frontier falters. This ludicrous demand smacks of extortion, but has gotten traction because of the problems from Verizon’s past deals.

According to "The Wall Street Journal," the previously spun-off enterprises accumulated too much debt without cutting costs. In other words they did not set themselves up to profit and the economy tanked, dragging the com panies down with it. Frontier will go into debt to purchase these lines, but will save half a billion dollars per year by removing the administrative overhead costs. Its operations are already more compatible with Verizon’s so there will not be the additional transition costs incurred in some of the prior deals.

Will this benefit customers? The reports of the sale of the lines sparked customer commentary on the unreliability of Verizon when it comes to traditional phone service. Landline customers will likely benefit from their service being transferred from a company that also provides cellular service to one that does not. Why? Landline customers will be served by a company that competes with cell phone service providers. Verizon had no incentive to give their landline customers the best service possible because their main business is now internet and cellular services.  Frontier will compete with cellular service and has a strong incentive to provide a prompt, cost effective, and inexpensive product to customers or risk losing them to the more advanced technologies.

Beyond all this comes the bigger argument. Why should the government interfere with this merger at all, so long as the two companies obey the laws? All too often government interference in the economy comes from the fact that bureaucrats and elected officials need to satisfy an agenda that comes not from economics but politics. We cannot trust that government operates with pure motives here. At least we know what Verizon and Frontier want. At the end of the day they want to make money. They cannot turn a profit unless people purchase their products. When left alone, their incentives lie in trying to get folks to buy what they sell. If they do a good job, they usually profit. If they perform poorly, they lose customers. On the other hand, government intervention usually comes as a knee jerk response to fear or short term problems. The law of unintended consequences almost always follows government economic action. They cannot foresee all the problems that will arise due to their interference, but when issues do come up they will be quick to blame it on corporate greed instead of government shortsightedness.

The free market system works. Government interference usually creates more problems in the economy than it solves; after all, only the government could lose money running a chain of liquor stores (you have to be a certain age to remember that!) Opposing the Verizon/Frontier merger is an economic decision made for political reasons. In a free market system this could have very negative consequences.