In 2012, Verizon Chairman and CEO Lowell McAdam stated his vision: “We are going into the copper plant areas and every place we have FiOS, we are going to kill the copper.... And then in other areas that are more rural and more sparsely populated, we have got LTE built that will handle all of those services and so we are going to cut the copper off there. We are going to do it over wireless. So I am going to be really shrinking the amount of copper we have out there...” (Verizon at Guggenheim Securities Symposium, June 21, 2012. http://www.verizon.com/about/investors/guggenheim-securities-2012-tmt-symposium ).

Over the last several years, Verizon has been delivering on the first part of this vision in some urban areas, retiring copper phone service in densely populated areas (see the many Copper Retirement notices for Massachusetts communities at http://www.verizon.com/about/terms-conditions/network-disclosures). Meanwhile, people moving to Plainfield have discovered that Verizon no longer offers DSL service to any new customers. In 2017, the FCC proposed a draft rulemaking that would make it easier for Verizon to end DSL and landline phone service entirely in areas like Plainfield, “where alternative voice services are available to consumers in the affected service area” (https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-344161A1.txt, quoted at http://stopthecap.com/2017/04/12/fcc-considering-making-easier-telcos-kill-landlinedsl-service/ ).