Ars Technica

Verizon sues Rochester to avoid paying 5G fees, says the FCC has its back

Verizon has sued the City of Rochester (NY) in order to avoid paying fees for deploying 5G equipment and fiber lines. Verizon's lawsuit, filed in US District Court for the Western District of New York on Aug 8, claims that the fees are higher than those allowed by federal law. As proof, Verizon points to a Federal Communications Commission preemption order from 2018 that attempts to limit the fees and aesthetic requirements cities and towns impose on carrier deployments. Rochester imposed its new fees in February.

Frontier network outages get worse in NY, triggering state investigation

Frontier Communications customers are reporting more outages and longer repair times, and state government officials have decided to investigate.

Verizon demands $880 from rural library for just 0.44GB of roaming data

A small library that lends out mobile hotspots is facing a tough budget decision because one of its borrowers accidentally ran up $880 in roaming fees, and Verizon refuses to waive or reduce the charges. The Tully (NY) Free Library has an "unlimited" data plan for the hotspots, but Verizon says it has to pay the $880 to cover less than half a gigabyte of data usage that happened across the border with Canada. Generally, the library pays $40 a month for each of the three hotspots, for a total of $120 a month.