At the June 21, 2012 Guggenheim Securities Symposium, the CEO of Verizon laid out aggressive plans to move customers off of copper phone lines and into Fios service and not necessarily voluntarily.

Regulatory schemes like SB 1161 are perfectly designed to allow Verizon to increasingly escape from any regulation at all as they morph from a telecommunications company to an Internet services provider.

Here are some excerpts from his speech. The full transcript is below.

“We have got some work to do in New York and New Jersey there that are frankly pretty backward compared to the rest of those states, so we have got some work to do there. But the vision I have is we are going into the copper plant areas and every place we have FiOS, we are going to kill the copper. We are just going to take it out of service and we are going to move those services onto FiOs. We have got parallel networks in way too many places now, so that is a pot of gold in my view.

And then in other areas that are more rural and more sparsely populated, we’ve got LTE built that will handle all of those services  and so we are going to cut the copper off there. We are going to do it over wireless. So I am going to be really shrinking the amount of copper we have out there and then I can focus the investment on that to improve the performance of it. So there are lots of opportunities there and FiOS is continuing to do very well so we can grow the top line through FiOS and we can leverage the cost efficiencies on the network side. So margins can improve”

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