Verizon has begun selling one of the dumbest machines I've ever seen, a "DSL modem," (their term), wireless router and cordless phone combination dubbed Verizon One.

Essentially this ties together the obsolete telephone network with the Internet Verizon is actually selling and tells customers it's the same thing. It pushes fancy PBX capabilities on residential customers who don't need them. (Just to make things a little better, it locks them into its cellular service, too.)

The FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) can be easily seen in the phrase "DSL modem." DSL is a digital service. It doesn't need modulation or demodulation to trick an analog line into taking a digital connection, which is what a modem does. It is an oxymoron.

Dave Burstein wrote in to say this is a Westell device. Westell has a long history of making things on-demand for phone companies, so Verizon gets all the "credit" for this piece of nonsense.

What's ironic is I happen to know Verizon was talking to Netopia two years ago about a massive contract for DSL gateways that would have been far superior to this piece of nonsense. (Here's a 2001 press release, delivered in the early days of the relationship.) I have one of these gateways in my house now, a review unit. What would have made them powerful was a promised co-branded service providing full security to home users, saving them as much as $200/year on "security suites" from various software vendors. (There are currently no Netopia press releases, going back to 2002, referencing Verizon.)

More on what a truly clued-in person feels after the break.

Bob Frankston calls this part of Verizon's IOBI initiative, an attempt to sell mobile, fixed, and Internet service from the same device. It ties three unrelated, complex networks into one "simple" bundle, to which consumers are henceforth bound.

Frankston continues (and I concur):

This is the kind of FUD that makes it so hard to have a rational telecom policy.

The term "residential gateway" used to be an ATM cage (not to be confused with ATM machine but confusion, like fear, is policy) in the basement. Today this has been replaced by labeling the NAT/Router as the residential gateway and pretending that overpriced bundles make sense and that you need the phone company to infest your computer with stupid-ware (software written by people who break your machine by locking it down to their confused model of networking -- a major frustration for me after I'd simplified home networking only to find carriers bringing back old problems!)

To get a supposed price reduction I let RCN install their phone service but I got the installer to just tag the wire so I didn't waste time on inside installation. Carriers rolling trucks because it's their only reality. It's a lot more expensive than just giving me VoIP but that would destroy the illusion.

Just like pretending video bits are special seems like nothing more than an
accounting scam (as I pointed out in a recent post).

An even cleverer scam would be to use a single frequency detector and then
create the illusion that a "frequency" must be "owned" in order to avoid confusing that detector. It's hard to figure out a better way to control the marketplace and speech. Would anyone be so foolish as to fall for the scam? Naaah .. well, maybe ... especially if you say it's the way your grandfather did it. In those days you needed real guns but today kids do it with software and that's so much worse ...

Let me be clear. You don't need iobi. You don't need a "triple-play" that makes you dependent on one huge supplier for all your communication needs. That puts you under the vendor's control.

Even if it costs you more, it's vital that you as a consumer use multiple vendors for telecommunications. This is the only way you can have power, playing vendors off against one another.

Today's telecommunications competition isn't between vendors, but between consumers and vendors. Don't disarm yourself. And don't let yourself be disarmed by claims of savings.