The false analogy of comparing analog telephone service to Internet

Clinton pushing broadband growth as big part of $275 billion infrastructure plan - Watchdog.org: Brent Skorup, who studies broadband issues for the Mercatus Center in Fairfax, Virginia, told Watchdog the goal of 100 percent broadband usage is unrealistic because some people — largely skewing older — have no interest in internet access.
“It’s been 100 years and there’s still not 100 percent penetration of the phone market,” he noted.

This furthers the falsehood propagated by the incumbent legacy telephone and cable companies that Internet protocol-based telecommunications is solely about getting a "broadband" connection to a desktop or laptop computer. If people don't use a computer much, the so-called "digital adoption" logic goes, then they don't need "broadband" and can get along fine with 1990s-era dialup or first generation ADSL. Ergo, they certainly don't require a fiber to the premise (FTTP) connection and the current infrastructure will suit them fine for the foreseeable.

This is nothing more than a concocted justification for not modernizing telecommunications infrastructure from the metallic cable put in place decades ago to carry phone calls and cable TV signals to FTTP. The telephone was the first form of telecommunications to serve people in their homes, businesses and institutions. It broke new ground and had longer path toward universal acceptance and daily use.

Nowadays, telecommunications technology is widely adopted and used by nearly every address. IP is a multimedia platform that supports not only data but also voice and video. IP over FTTP is an evolutionary shift and not a fundamentally revolutionary development as was the telephone. The analogy fails.

NYT op-ed complaining of low Internet subscribership undermines author's credibility

No Country for Slow Broadband - NYTimes.com: The major causes for low subscribership, as extensive survey research shows, are low interest in the Internet and minimal digital literacy. And too many American households lack the money or interest to buy a computer. As a result, more Americans subscribe to cable TV and cellphones than to Internet service. Our broadband subscription rate is 70 percent, but could easily surpass 90 percent if computer ownership and digital literacy were widespread.

So argues Richard Bennett, senior fellow at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.  There is a big hole in this argument.  Information and communications services are universally verging toward employing Internet Protocol (IP) to deliver them.  People are increasingly viewing video content delivered over the Internet to making voice calls using Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP). 

In segmenting discrete services and citing just one type of Internet-enabled service (personal computing), one has to question why someone with Bennett's level of knowledge would even make this point, undermining his credibility and suggesting a hidden agenda.

IP may be in the "telephone" system, but many premises still only served by POTS

How the Humble Telephone Is About to Bring Internet to the Masses (Again) - NationalJournal.com: You aren’t going to wake up one morning and find every home connected to Verizon FiOS. In fact, even after the IP transition, many houses are still going to be connected to their local switch by copper.

Indeed they are.  The last mile (or more properly the first mile) often lacks the infrastructure to deliver IP-based services, leaving many American homes to Plain Old Telephone Services (POTS) that has been around for decades.  And two percent/6 million Americans involuntarily left off the Internet grid?  That seems an awfully low number given a 2012 U.S. Federal Communications Commission estimate putting the number at nearly 20 million Americans.

Blair Levin perpetuates false distinction among IP-based services

Blair Levin, in another recent interview looking back on the U.S. National Broadband Plan he lead authored for the Federal Communications Commission before becoming an Aspen Institute fellow this summer, perpetuates a false distinction among Internet Protocol (IP)-based telecommunications services. IP-based services include Internet applications such as web browsing, email and e-commerce as well as Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) and video, also known as Internet Protocol TV (IPTV).

In an interview with Marguerite Reardon of cnet news, Levin does so by differentiating VOIP and IPTV from Internet applications. Levin -- as do many incumbent legacy phone and cable companies -- continues to describe the latter as "broadband." That term was appropriate in the mid-1990s when "broadband" denoted a premium service offered by telephone companies over their single purpose, proprietary copper cable plants. But as fiber optic cable technology increasingly obsoletes metal wire for delivering multiple IP-based services, the term is no longer relevant.

Levin reinforces this artificial split by talking about "broadband adoption." That too was relevant in the 1990s when broadband was being offered as a premium service, requiring customers to sign up for or "adopt" it. Today, it no longer is when Internet applications, voice and video can be delivered to consumers over a single fiber "pipe."

Further reinforcing the bogus notion of "broadband adoption," Levin elaborates that "broadband" requires consumers to be literate whereas voice and video do not. Therefore, Levin implies, we first need to improve the literacy of Americans to drive "broadband adoption" before the nation revamps its outmoded telecom infrastructure with fiber. Here's what he told Reardon:

Even though there are a lot of low-income people who may not be able to afford multi-channel video (cable TV), there is still a high proportion of people subscribing to the service. And people are not leaving in huge numbers. The big difference between TV and broadband is that to watch TV, you don't have to be literate. The same is true of phone service. You don't need to be literate to use a cell phone, so penetration of those services is higher. But to use broadband for things, such as getting access to public services, health care, job training, etc., a basic level of literacy is necessary. It requires a skill set. And teaching people those skills is a serious effort. So price is a piece of it, but literacy and relevance are also aspects too.

This is so much sophistry. Moreover, even if one accepts Levin's false dichotomy between Internet applications on one hand and voice and video on the other, it would argue for a bigger push to deploy fiber optic telecom infrastructure since video requires the "fat pipe" bandwidth fiber can provide.

Telecom caught at crossroads of change without a sustainable business model

IBM has issued a comprehensive outlook on the future of the telecommunications industry. To summarize, it describes an industry caught at the crossroads of change amid rapid growth of Internet protocol-based telecommunications without a sustainable business model. No surprise there since telecom as an industry -- like the cable industry -- is based on a closed, proprietary system put in place many decades ago to deliver voice or television programming over copper cable plant. It wasn't designed with the Internet in mind and thus doesn't have a cheap, easily executable upgrade path to put it in tech speak.

Moreover, neither telcos nor cable providers have a business model that will allow them to construct next generation, Internet protocol-based fiber to the premises infrastucture that can deliver multiple digital services to most all premises within their service areas. America's biggest telco, AT&T, admitted as much in a statement published in the New York Times yesterday directing customers not served by its wireline plant to its "broadband" satellite service.

Their corporate cultures naturally resist change. That's why they deploy battalions of lawyers, lobbyists, flacks and astroturf groups to defend the status quo and fight the future while preserving their conservative, risk averse business models based on the incremental billing schemes of the past -- even though these schemes are not a good fit with next generation telecom services.

Consequently, I believe we'll see a combination of the "Market Shakeout" and "Survivor Consolidation" scenarios in the IBM forecast come to pass. In fact, it could be aruged the "Market Shakeout" scenario in which "government, municipality and alternative providers extend ultra-fast broadband to gray areas, while private infrastructure investments are limited to densely populated areas" has been already playing out over the past several years.

U.S. fails to define clear policy goal on telecom

Instead of articulating a clear policy to encourage construction of next generation Internet protocol-based telecommunications infrastructure, the U.S. government is trying to figure out how to "regulate broadband."

It's a classic case of failure to clearly and properly define the mission. Over the long run, the consequences will be severe. The nation is already at least a dozen years behind where it should be in making the transition to next generation telecom infrastructure. Unless the course is changed, the U.S. will continue suffer from mission drift and fall further behind other developed nations on upgrading its telecom infrastructure from one designed primarily for standard voice telephone service to a high speed data network.

Meanwhile, it fiddles with arcane network management rules that mean nothing to the occupants of some seven million U.S. homes located outside cable company footprints or who are unable to subscribe to legacy telco DSL due to distance limitations -- or whose connections are so poor they limit what they can do with them. And wastes precious resources on creating useless maps of broadband black holes that only advertise to the world the pathetic state of American telecommunications infrastructure.

Telco layoffs spotlight difficult transition from POTS to IP services

The telecommunications industry is undergoing great upheaval during the transition from POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) to wireless and next generation Internet Protocol-based telecommunications technology, producing mixed and seemingly paradoxical company news.

Case in point: Roseville, Calif.-based SureWest Communications. The fiber to the premises telco announced this week it would lay off seven percent of its work force due to weakness in the POTS side of its business at the same time the IP side of its shop is growing.

An obvious question is why not retrain or shift the downsized POTS workers to accommodate the growth in IP-based services? The answer: while demand for IP-based services is stiff and will only grow stronger, growth prospects in that segment are constrained by the inability of investor-owned telcos like SureWest to build out their IP infrastructures to reach more customer premises. Doing so requires more CAPEX than their business models can accommodate.

SureWest's big counterparts, AT&T and Verizon, have slowed their IP infrastructure buildouts. AT&T began hitting the brakes on its mixed fiber/copper Project Lightspeed/U-Verse buildout as general economic conditions deteriorated in 2008. Just before last Christmas, AT&T went as far as pronouncing its POTS business in a "death spiral." Verizon recently stopped expanding the footprint of its fiber optic FiOS plant and repositioned itself as an urban wireless provider.

The demand for IP services is strong, providing a potential growth industry at a time when jobs and economic activity are greatly needed. (Consider that most residential customers have retained their IP services during the current recession). But the legacy POTS carriers can't ramp up to meet it. That situation requires alternative providers such as local governments and consumer telecom cooperatives step up to meet the need.