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Telecom & Wireless

Were Verizon’s (VZ) Fiber TV Subscriptions Inflated?

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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In a suit filed in U.S. District Court, an advertising agency has charged Verizon (VZ) with inflating the number of FiOS fiber-to-the-home subscriptions that it has by adding "pending" customers to the count.

According to The Wall Street Journal "Digital Art Services Inc., an advertising company based in Great River, New York, charged Verizon with fraud."

Verizon is in the process of spending $23 billion to put its fiber network so it will pass 18 million homes. The company is gambling much of its future on being able to compete with cable companies for voice, broadband, and TV service. In June, the company added its one-millionth FiOS subscriber. A senior official at Comcast (CMCSA) recently noted the competition with the big telecom was heating up.

Verizon does not need to be viewed as having fuzzy subscription numbers. It has too much on the line. No pun intended.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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