FCC looks into rural call completion problems - The Hill's Hillicon Valley

FCC looks into rural call completion problems - The Hill's Hillicon Valley: In a statement, Chairman Julius Genachowksi said the evidence of rural call completion problems is overwhelming.

"In too many towns across the country, the basic ability of all Americans to reliably receive phone calls — a bedrock of America’s communication policy — has come into doubt," he said. "This has serious economic, safety and other consequences."

The United States faces serious telecommunications service problems with 20 million Americans disconnected from premises Internet service and now voice phone service becoming spotty in rural areas.

In his State of Union address one year ago, President Obama pointed to the nation's "incomplete high-speed broadband network," calling on Congress to fund telecom and other critical infrastructure.  Let's see if the President revisits this continuing problem in this week's 2013 State of the Union address.

Recommended reading: "Breaking the Broadband Monopoly"

Just as bringing electric power to homes and farms was America's great infrastructure challenge in the early decades of the 20th century, building out telecommunications infrastructure is the challenge of the early 21st as FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has observed.

Christopher Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance has issued a call for Americans rise to this new challenge just as they did in the 1930s with the Rural Electrification Administration and local utility cooperatives. While noting that every generation believes it bears a bigger burden than those before it, Mitchell asserts building out telecom infrastructure while difficult can be done just as it was with electric power lines.

Mitchell like author Jack Lessinger suggests this build out like electrification of nearly a century ago will help fuel an economic boom. (Building telecom infrastructure publicly and cooperatively also fits into Lessinger's emerging socioeconomic paradigm where "what's in it for me" is being supplanted by a new ethic of "what's in it for us.")

I strongly recommend reading Mitchell's latest white paper, Breaking the Broadband Monopoly. It's a comprehensive and very current treatise on and making the case for locally owned and operated telecom infrastructure. The paper is loaded with examples of community projects, examples of how legacy incumbent carriers fighting the future have attempted to stymie them, and tips and traps to avoid for community activists and local governments looking to take control of their telecommunications destiny and build their own local networks.

Will FCC enforce USF build out requirement?

It remains to be seen to what extent this week's decision by U.S. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski to subject Internet protocol-based telecommunications to some but not all requirements of Title II of the Communications Act of 1934 will achieve his goal of bringing a badly needed upgrade to the U.S. telecommunications infrastructure.

Genachowski has described the challenge of replacing infrastructure designed many years ago to provide voice telephone service to an IP-based system that serves all Americans no matter where they make their homes and businesses as the "critical infrastructure challenge of our generation." That infrastructure challenge is greatest at the local level -- the so-called "last mile" of the system that connects to customer premises.

As explained by FCC General Counsel Austin Schlick, Genachowski's decision to apply Section 254 of Title II of the Act would support the FCC's plans to retask the Universal Service Fund (USF) that subsidizes service in high cost areas from POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) to IP. As amended by the Communications Act of 1996, Section 254 requires the FCC to pursue policies to achieve access to advanced telecommunications and information services in all regions of the nation including those in rural and high cost areas that are "reasonably comparable" to services and rates offered in urban areas.

It's unknown at this point to what extent the FCC will as part of its plan to revamp the Universal Service Fund to help achieve ubiquitous access will enforce (or alternatively grant forbearance from) another provision of the Act designed to put teeth in the USF via a build out requirement. Title II Section 214(e)(3) empowers the FCC to "determine which common carrier or carriers are best able to provide such service to the requesting unserved community or portion thereof and shall order such carrier or carriers to provide such service for that unserved community or portion thereof." Notably, Section 214(e)(3) is absent from Schlick's explanation of the evolving FCC policy.

Paradigm shift in telecommunications underway

As the legacy publicly switched telephone network (PSTN) becomes increasingly obsolete (it's in a "death spiral" according a pre-Christmas 2009 Federal Communications Commission filing by AT&T), regulators like the FCC are grappling with a paradigm shift in telecommunications.

The FCC's current regulatory framework is more oriented toward PSTN than the Internet that is rapidly replacing it. It too is growing outmoded, leaving regulators struggling to devise a successor.

And as FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has noted, the FCC also faces a major challenge in figuring out how to best address market failure that has left at least seven million U.S. households offline according to the FCC's own estimates. At a time when the PSTN is replaced by the Internet, if you don't have an "always on" terrestrial Internet connection, you don't have modern telecommunications service. As PSTN becomes obsolete, so does the PSTN means of Internet connectivity: dialup access that was state of the art nearly two decades ago.

This is truly a time of major transition in telecommunications. As with any major shift, there will be a tension between those who want to hang on to the old paradigm -- in this case the legacy single purpose "telephone" and "cable" companies whose business models are based on billing for incremental services delivered over closed, proprietary networks -- and those who want speed the shift toward alternative business models based on open access IP-based networks.

FCC chief: Formulating U.S. broadband deployment policy "really hard"

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski offered some perspective this week on why the FCC has asked Congress for another month to complete its policy recommendations on expanding advanced telecommunications infrastructure to all Americans.

"I can't tell you that we've figured out the solution completely and I can't tell you that we'll figure out the solution to this perfectly by the time we do the National Broadband Plan," he told GigaOM, according to this Reuters dispatch. "This is really hard."

Indeed it is, because this isn't about simply tweaking the existing, incomplete infrastructure -- or "ecosystem" as some federal officials have termed it -- that leaves lots of Americans reliant on the outdated copper-based infrastructure put in place decades ago to deliver plain old telephone service (POTS).

As AT&T noted in a recent FCC filing, that system is on the verge of obsolescence. The United States now needs a new infrastructure for a new Internet-protocol based range of telecom services that go far beyond standard voice service. Genachowski has described it as "the critical infrastructure challenge of our generation."

Getting there won't be a natural extension of the old infrastructure but instead a radical overhaul calling for new business models, particularly among the last and middle mile segments. It's as much of a business model challenge as an infrastructure challenge. That scope forces the FCC to engage in original, outside the box thinking -- which as Genachowski aptly noted is hard -- but necessary -- work.

Promises, promises: FCC building record to rebut telco broadband deployment claims

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski is ramping up his agency's work on a national broadband deployment plan due six months from now as required by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

As the plan is developed, the FCC will be heavily lobbied by telcos and given assurances the companies will be building out advanced telecommunications infrastructure and turning up service pronto, as one failed AT&T deployment scheme that turned out not to be such was dubbed. Therefore, the pitch will go, the best national plan is no plan. Just leave it to us and we'll get 'er done.

But such platitudes aren't satisfactory to FCC officials, who have publicly complained they have received too much empty rhetoric and not enough substantive input in response to the agency's call for industry and public comment on what a broadband plan for the United States should include.

Being a careful, methodical lawyer, Genachowski is already building the record to rebut industry puffery with facts. Multichannel News reports the FCC has retained the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information (CITI) at Columbia's Business School in New York, to fact check previous broadband deployment capital expenditure claims of telecom companies.

"CITI will provide an analysis of the public statements of companies as to their future plans to deploy and upgrade broadband networks," Multichannel News quoted the FCC as saying, "as well as an historical evaluation of the relationship between previous such announcements and actual deployment."

New FCC chair must consider alternative business models for telecom infrastructure

Newly minted Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski has kicked off a major initiative to get the United States' telecommunications infrastructure upgraded so that it can deliver broadband to all Americans.

In meetings with newspaper editorial boards, Genachowski noted 40 percent of U.S. households don't subscribe to broadband. "That's not where you want to be on something that we think is a core infrastructure for the United States," he told reporters and editors of the San Jose Mercury News this week. "And I think it is. Broadband will be our platform for commerce, for democratic engagement, and for addressing a whole series of vital national priorities."

To accomplish his goal of full build out of advanced telecommunications infrastructure, Genachowski, who is to present a plan to Congress in February to make it happen, will clearly have to consider alternative business models. The current model in which most telecom infrastructure is held by large publicly traded corporations cannot because it lacks sufficient patient capital to make the necessary investment. These companies can play an important role in providing long haul Internet backbone and much of the middle mile infrastructure. But to ensure last mile access, nonprofit telecommunications cooperatives, small local providers and local governments will have to play the same role they did in the early part of the 20th century where they provided electrical, water and telecommunications infrastructure where shareholder-held companies could not profitably do so.

Genachowski should also recommend Congress put in place incentives to help bridge the last mile gap such as tax breaks allowing property owners to deduct initial costs they would pay to join telecom cooperatives offering fiber connections to their properties.

U.S. government formally recognizes broadband "underserved"

One of the notable aspects of the U.S. government's changing policy vis broadband is the formal recognition that much of the nation is served by incomplete telecommunications infrastructure, incapable of delivering advanced telecommunications services.

We're not necessarily talking about remote or deep rural areas of the nation where population density is very low. Rather, it's large areas of the U.S. that can be found in metropolitan areas where service from existing wireline providers goes only so far into a community or down a street or road, creating highly arbitrary pools of broadband winners and losers. Exhibit A: Lots of folks have stumbled across this blog via online searches looking to solve the vexing riddle of why they can't order service while a nearby neighbor can.

The rules governing the disbursement of $7.2 billion in economic stimulus funding to build out broadband infrastructure to unserved and "underserved" areas issued by the federal govenment this week embody the formal recognition of this sad state of affairs:

"The term 'underserved' is not a common term in telecommunications, although it is commonly applied in other fields, such as healthcare, education, social services and retail, to denote populations lacking access to critical services," the rules note.

Newly installed Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski also referred to the problem of the broadband "underserved" before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee at his confirmation hearing. The term, he testified, encompasses areas where there are pockets of unserved areas in places that generally have broadband (such as where one neighbor has service while another doesn't).

That's a tacit recognition of the incomplete nature of the nation's telecommunications infrastructure that in too many places is like a half built highway or bridge or at best, a rutted dirt road. Bringing America's telecommunications infrastructure to where it should have been a decade ago and where it needs to be in the future requires a clear recognition that broadband black holes aren't confined to rural areas. Unfortunately, they are comprised largely of Genachowski's "pockets" that are scattered all across the nation and can be found most anywhere and not just in rural areas.