A Boston lawyer is suing Verizon over a monthly fee it imposed for the privilege of being able to make long-distance phone calls.

In a lawsuit filed yesterday in US District Court, Brian Lenfest says the company should reimburse him and all other businesspeople it charged for the $10 "monthly minimum charge for long distance."

Lenfest says that while his statements say that in months when he makes long-distance phone calls, the
cost of the calls would be deducted from the charge, in fact:

Ed. note: Post updated to clarify that the ruling was only on the poles between 2005 and 2009.

The Massachusetts Appeals Court ruled today that Verizon does not owe Boston $5.3 million in back taxes on its poles and wires over a four-year period.

The court said 150 years of telephone-related legislation in Massachusetts has consistently excluded overhead wiring along public ways from the personal-property tax - even as legislators have let cities and towns tax wiring that snakes under public ways.

The question became moot for future years in 2010, when the law was changed, city officials say.

Verizon Wireless will look to find another way to extract more revenue from customers now that it's won the Bank of America Tin Ear of the Week Award and retracted its planned $2 fee for people who only wanted to pay their bills online one month at a time.

Sounds like some salespeople at the Verizon store in Harvard Square need some training.

I've been a loyal Speakeasy DSL customer since forever. But when I went to the support site to see about increasing the speed on our line, I discovered they've decided to concentrate on business users. While I do use DSL for my business (natch), their rates are way more than I want to pay. So I signed up for Verizon DSL - theoretically, way more bandwidth at less cost than what we're paying Speakeasy now.

As part of signing up, I had an online chat with Online Support Dude, who assured me, twice, that Speakeasy and Verizon service could co-exist on the same line until I was happy with the latter and canceled the former.

IBEW fights with Verizon, Comcast/Xfinity over who gets to work on VoIP installations.

Verizon is winding down its FiOS expansion, and guess which largest city in New England won't be getting any? So now Boston's pinning its hopes on Google to combat Comcast and RCN, only hasn't Google said it's more into the pilot-program sort of thing and wouldn't be wiring up an entire city anyway?

You really have to read the instructions a customer-service rep sent Jessica Lipnack for getting into her small-business account via the Verizon Web site.

The Outraged Liberal details his problems with Verizon getting his busted landline fixed:

It's now been about 24 hours since Verizon called my out-of-service landline to tell me the problem we reported had been fixed the previous afternoon.

Of course, I only found out by calling my voice mail, since the phone didn't ring because the line was still dead. And there was a Verizon tech, the third in three days, in my basement trying to solve the problem two of his colleagues had failed to fix.

Even though they reported that they had. ...