BTW, if telcos never made money from residential service, how did they pay my dividends for so many years, including 2008?
Residential service is a drop in the revenue bucket (one that is getting smaller by the day, by the way). A maintenance or installation truck roll costs virtually the same whether it's a $6.00 a month Lifeline subscriber or a $400 a month DS1 subscriber (prices aren't exact and vary by applicable tariff, which I don't have in front of me at the moment).
It may be true that it is less expensive to provide basic dialtone in a metropolitan area as opposed to somewhere more rural. That is usually reflected in state tariffs, but the difference is often less than you may expect. I never worked in residential service provisioning, though, but I do know business rates. In Pennsylvania, a state I know well, it's currently $50 to hook up a new line no matter whether it's in Center City Philly or as in a job I managed a few weeks ago--west of Pittsburgh in a place that was too out of the way to have a unique name, a brand new industrial park carved out of a field, let's call it Yasgur's Farm. $50 a line. No cable in place, nothing. And of course a rush job in sub freezing temperatures, tying up three linemen, two trucks, an engineer, a foreman, and a technician for a week, give or take. I estimate we'll turn a profit on that job, maybe in 2015 if the customer makes a LOT of phone calls. But you can't say no, that's regulated universal service. But we also ran in a DS1 at the same time and provisioned fiber conduit. When they're ready we'll be ready. We make little if anything on dialtone. We DO make money on higher level enterprise optical services, backbone transport, and anything deregulated or unregulated that we can price at market rate. And we do infrastructure better and faster than anybody in telecom. That is where your dividends come from.
I'd like to see figures that indicate a loss for dial tone service in metro areas.
Proprietary, but check your annual report. ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
