[Spktyr]

Not really sure what to make of this. Verizon, who started in Texas as GTE, is now exiting Texas.

[Erik Latranyi]

Landlines are dying fast and little money to be made.

[A. Morgan]

Result of Obama policies .... the great wrecking ball!

[deweyfrank]

I believe Verizon started in the North East by combining Bell Atlantic and Nynex. It later bought GTE.

[bigbob]

I thought Frontier had already bought all the Verizon wireline biz.

[Bruce Kurtz]

Verizon, shed some of it’s landlines in Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire to a company named FairPoint Communications in 2008. In 2009, Fairpoint filed for bankruptcy protection. The copper land lines up here in NY have been around for many many years. Some have paper insulation, when we have rain, we may loose dial tone, or have excessive noise injected in the line.

There is good reason Verizon wants to shed its copper lines, it costs too much to maintain, and they will not invest any money in upgrading the copper cable. I am surprised that Verizon is selling some of its Fios assets in Texas. They have state franchises for the cable TV part, I thought they were making money on this part.

[ElkGroveDan]

The wireline operation sale hands control of a tri-state area to Frontier Communications

NOOOOOOOO! I don't want Frontier to get bigger. I want them to go bankrupt and be acquired by a real telecom company. For the past six years they have been our only option for Internet service. Over that time we have improved from 800K to 3 Megs -- on a good day. On weeknights when everyone using our dead-end hub is at home and using their computers it's easier for me to mail large files to people than to try and upload them. I love living out in the country, but what I wouldn't give for a decent Internet connection.

[Starboard]

Thanks for posting this. Although Verizon will continue to serve its customers from the masts, cell towers are expensive and increasingly problematic for it and other carriers. Consequently, towers are being supplemented by the deployment of access nodes that use small cell technology. These low powered devices are highly mobile, relatively inexpensive, and can be easily set up nearly anywhere for special events or in high density population areas to expand/improve coverage. It is well known that Verizon Wireless is deploying small cells as part of a “balanced approach” to network capacity so cashing out on its tower investments may make sense.

[dila813]

Maneuvering in advance of the FCC Vote, their assets are at risk.

[__rvx86]

Continental Telephone came before—Gen Tel didn’t get here until the 80s. (There are still cable markers labelled CONTEL in my hometown)

[tubebender]

I use Verizon wireless for my cell phones...