Fight With Verizon Over Ending Landline Service Has New Front: Catskills

The battle between Verizon and its unionized workers over a new device that turns a standard home phone into a kind of tethered cellphone shifted from Fire Island to the Catskills.

On June 25, the New York State attorney general’s office asked utilities regulators to prevent Verizon from “illegally installing” the device, known as Voice Link. The company has been pressing customers to switch to the new service instead of having their traditional phone lines fixed. In May, the company received permission from state regulators to offer Voice Link as the only option for home phone service in parts of Fire Island, the vacation area east of New York City. Hurricane Sandy destroyed many of the wires that carried phone calls out to the western end of the island. But state regulators postponed a decision for a few months on Verizon’s request to be granted the authority to decide where else in New York State it might want to substitute Voice Link for what it calls “plain old telephone service.” Members of the union that represents Verizon’s technicians, the Communications Workers of America, sounded an alarm when they saw “a pallet-load of Voice Link devices” being delivered to Verizon’s installation center in Monticello in the Catskills region. Keith H. Gordon, an assistant attorney general, said that some Verizon customers in that area had reported that Voice Link was presented to them as their only option. “Only if a customer repeatedly insists and says, ‘No, I don’t want wireless,’ are they fixing the line,” Mr. Gordon said.