Help! Verizon owns my neighborhood

[jaymiltonboerne]

This is a bit of a long story, but I have run out of options and hope someone has some insight.

I live in a semi-rural town (Boerne, TX) about 30 minutes outside of San Antonio.  I live in an older neighborhood that has probably about 20 homes in it and we all have between 1 and 10 acres of land, so it is not your typical suburban neighborhood - it is a little spread out.  Verizon "owns" our neighborhood and so they provide our residential phone service and our bang-up 56k, dial-up internet.  I have lived here for five years and the situation hasn't changed.  Believe me, I check about every three months.  Most likely never will change because I am sure Verizon doesn't think it is worth the money to do what ever it is they need to do to bring Broadband to a neighborhood.

The homes just across the highway from my neighborhood (within football throwing distance of my home) are serviced by a local telephone co-op called GVTC, a great locally run company with the phone, cable and 80 Mbps internet service.  Clearly, they have found that it was worth it to install the lines to other rural neighborhoods like mine.

When I contact GVTC (and I do about every six months in a hopeful way), they tell me that Verizon owns my neighborhood and there is nothing they can do about bringing service here.

How do I get Verizon to give this neighborhood up?  Is that even possible?  I thought phones/internet/cable had been deregulated and no one could own a specific neighborhood, or even the transmission lines....?

Anyone have any thoughts on how I might be able to move this forward?

[smith6612]

This would honestly sound like an issue to bring up with your town rather than to fight Verizon about it. The town after all, is the one that makes all the agreements between companies, and they can by the way keep certain providers from entering. One of the reasons FiOS isn't where I am yet is due to the cable company having a franchise agreement with our town. If Verizon enters the area, they have to receive a lesser agreement as per the existing contract and Verizon can only receive so many subscribers before the Cable company pulls funding.