New Yorker cable television subscribers will have another
option beginning with Monday when Verizon is due to
start selling programming, taking on companies such as Cablevision and Time
Warner Cable.
Verizon Communications, New York City’s most important phone company,
will start connecting customers to cable television in parts of 108 vicinities
all over the five boroughs. On July 16, state regulators signed a 12-year
license for the company to sell cable television.
As stipulated in the agreement, Verizon must provide its
services to all of the city’s 3.1 million households not later than 2014,
contrasting to Cablevision and Time Warner Cable, which sell video, Internet
and phone services in different sections. Cablevision and Time Warner Cable are not
expected to make a claim for citywide franchises when their present contracts
expire.
The launch of Verizon’s television services may be affected
if the company does not come to an agreement with two unions, the Communications
Workers of America and the International
Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, which represent approximately 65,000 Verizon
workers from Maine to Virginia. Several thousand workers joined the unions’
gatherings in Lower Manhattan on Saturday, saying
that they would strike in order to receive higher wages.
Verizon has already prepared fiber lines, which provide
phone, Internet and television services that could reach about 300,000
households.
Almost every house in Staten Island
can now benefit from Verizon’s phone and Internet services and beginning with
Monday they will be able to subscribe to cable television service also, known
as FiOS.
Among the neighborhoods Verizon aims to hook up first are:
Eastchester, Norwood and Woodlawn in the Bronx;
Canarsie, Gravesend and Midwood in Brooklyn; Battery
Park City,
Chelsea and East Harlem in Manhattan;
Bayside, Douglaston and Rosedale in Queens; and Great Kills, St. George and
Stapleton on Staten Island, as reported by the New York Times.
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