Prospective FCC chair on defining underserved areas

A key task assigned to the Federal Communications Commission in the broadband infrastructure buildout subsidies in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is to define what constitutes "unserved" and "underserved" areas of the nation for the purpose of allocating funding.

There tends to be general agreement when it comes to defining unserved: locations stuck in 1993 and still relegated to dial up or at the tender mercies of substandard satellite Internet providers who charge a lot of money for usage capped, high latency connections better described as molasses net.

However, when it comes to underserved, there's less consensus and the debate tends to center on the level of throughput that defines broadband. Last year, the FCC set a low standard of 768 Kbs in one direction that's already too slow and outmoded.

Julius Genachowski, President Barack Obama's nominee to chair the FCC, offered a broader definition of underserved to the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee at his confirmation hearing Tuesday.

Underserved could be defined not only as substandard throughput speed, according to this IDG News Service report at Yahoo!Tech on Genachowski's testimony. It could also mean those areas where broadband adoption is low or where there are pockets of unserved areas in places that generally have broadband, Genachowski told the committee.

Under the latter "pockets" definition, much of the United States would be deemed underserved because of the incomplete, helter skelter deployment of broadband infrastructure over the past decade. In fact, these pockets are so numerous that accurate mapping of broadband availability wouldn't produce a usable map but rather something that looks more like a display of the moon's surface with the countless craters representing various sized broadband black spots. Or a disorganized "hodge podge" as the Communication Workers of America has described the nation's telecommunications infrastructure.

Underpowered DSL signals peter out and can't reliably provide service. Cable company cable runs suddenly and arbitrarily stop. Consequently, one premises may enjoy broadband access -- sometimes from both telco DSL and cable -- while another just down the street or road or even next door does not. For years, visitors to this blog have come to it after performing searches that go along the lines of "My neighbor can get broadband and I can't/why not."

The danger of attempting to define what "underserved" means is that the exercise lends itself to subjective, self serving interpretations that can further delay broadband infrastructure deployment that should have been in place years ago for many more years. Instead of defining the broadband deficits, the goal should be to define and focus on the nation's desired broadband assets. President Obama has done that by calling for ubiquitous broadband access. We should work backward from that goal.

Microtrenching gets increased attention as lower cost fiber deployment technique

As U.S. broadband infrastructure projects gear up for their share of the $7.2 billion set aside for them in the federal economic stimulus package, a relatively new and lower cost method of burying fiber optic cable in the middle and last miles called microtrenching is generating some buzz.

Here's a good article outlining the pros and cons of microtrenching. It's far less time consuming than conventional trenching since the trenches are more like discrete slots in the pavement near the curb instead of the wider and deeper trenches traditionally used for buried fiber runs.

Not only is the methodology of burying fiber improving, so is the fiber itself, according to the article. It mentions that LiteAccess Technologies is out with fiber that's placed in water and airtight microducts that are less likely to have to be dug up later due to water seepage or other contamination and require less signal attenuation-inducing splices.

Another article from New Zealand however raises questions regarding whether the technique is a suitable alternative to aerial fiber deployment in more rural areas where road surfaces are thinner, often chip sealed and resurfaced frequently.

California PUC proposes supplementing US broadband stimulus funds

The California Public Utilities Commission has issued a proposed order that would allow it to supplement federal economic stimulus funds for broadband telecommunications infrastructure construction in unserved and underserved areas of the Golden State. Specifically, the proposed order would supplement $4.7 billion of the $7.2 billion broadband infrastructure stimulus funding to be distributed by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration's Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP).

In an apparent bid to leverage the BTOP funds, the CPUC would supplement the 80 percent BTOP grant subsidy with 10 percent of the total project cost -- amounting to half of the 20 percent funding match for BTOP grant recipients. That means 90 percent of the cost of approved projects would be subsidized by the combined 80 percent BTOP grant and 10 percent CPUC funding under the proposed order.

The CPUC funding would be allocated out of the regulatory agency's California Advanced Services Fund (CASF). Created in 2007, the $100 million CASF is funded by a surcharge on intrastate long distance calls. As much as $80 million of CASF funding remains unrewarded, according to the proposed order. A likely reason according to proceeding documents filed by CPUC staff late last year, is applicants balked at the requirement they put up 60 percent of project costs, complaining the CASF 40 percent subsidy is inadequate.

Those seeking the CASF funding must act quickly. Priority will be given to project applications received by July 17 -- about two weeks after the NTIA is to publish its own rules for allocating the federal broadband stimulus funding. According to the proposed order, the CPUC will make those awards in September. Applications for a second round of funding will be accepted from July 18 to August 14 with funds awarded in October. As per current CASF rules, priority will be given to unserved areas lacking broadband access.

Current CASF rules restrict funding to registered wireline and wireless providers. Whether others such as local government entities, nonprofits and cooperatives would be eligible for the CASF funding depends on the enactment of authorizing legislation, AB 1012, currently pending in the California Senate after breezing out of the Assembly May 28 on a 78-0 vote. If enacted, the urgency measure would take effect immediately. If it is, under the proposed order the CPUC would require these other entities to meet the same application requirements as wireline and wireless providers including maps of areas to be served and financial and technical information.

Why telcos drag their feet on residential broadband

In the fall of 2007, Ralph de la Vega, AT&T's group president for regional telecommunications and entertainment made a pronouncement with profound implications that were largely overlooked in the mainsream media.

de la Vega told Investor's Business Daily that AT&T would ultimately shut down its existing voice network and replace it with a VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) system in metro areas where U-Verse is being deployed.

Since U-Verse deployment has been delayed and scaled back, it calls into question the future of AT&T's wireline residential market segment. Essentially de la Vega pronounced the beginning of the end of the Publicly Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) and its replacement by the Internet with Next Generation Telephony.

That also means telcos' proprietary central office switches are on a fast track to obsolesence, destined to be replaced with Internet servers and field-based fiber optic distribution equipment. Industry observers like Bob Frankston are right to accuse telcos of foot dragging by creating artificial bandwidth scarcity and restricting broadband access in order to live in the copper-bound PSTN world for as long as possible. This is the unspoken subtext to the larger Strum und Drang on this blog and elsewhere over the pathetically poor state of broadband availability in much of the United States. It's typically explained as a simple return on investment problem, but there's more to it than that.

As the Internet wreaks massive disruption in mass media, it also threatens an end to the days of Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) delivered over twisted copper. Just as people are canceling their newspaper subscriptions, they are also ditching their residential land lines. And who can blame them when all they can get over them is POTS and perhaps DSL (an acronym that should mean Doesn't Serve Lots)?

It also explains why first tier telcos like AT&T are redefining the residential wireline segment as "personal wireless" services since this segment can remain proprietary if residential wireline moves out of the old proprietary, closed system scheme and into one where last and some middle mile infrastructure is owned and operated by small local providers, local governmental entities and telecom cooperatives.

Private market failure limits U.S. broadband reach

Market failure has constrained the ability of America's privately owned telecom infrastructure to deliver universally accessible broadband-based services, requiring government to fill the gap, said Jim Kohlenberger, chief of staff for the White House’s Office of Science and Technology at this week's Broadband Stimulus National Town Hall held in Washington. Kohlenberger's remarks were reported by BroabandCensus.com in a story posted today.

“Today’s broadband networks are far from ubiquitous,” Kohlenberger is quoted as saying, noting only 57 percent of Americans have broadband at home, "and even that isn’t homogenous.” The nation, he said, is "at a juncture where we can and must do more to bridge this opportunity gap.”

More signs of trouble for AT&T's U-Verse

AT&T continues to emphasize wireless as its future while deemphasizing the wire line market segment. As evidence, gigaom cites a June 4 report by UBS Research analyst John Hodulik that the big telco has slowed by nearly half deployment of its premier wire line product, U-Verse.

Hodulik projects AT&T's U-Verse buildout to reach an additional 4 to 5 million premises this year, down from 9 million new premises passed by the service -- which offers Internet connectivity, IPTV, and VOIP -- in 2008.

As predicted last September, I continue to expect AT&T to pull the plug on U-Verse sometime in the first half of 2010 as part of a general retreat out of residential wire line service in favor of more profitable wireless service. The Dallas-based company will likely blame unanticipated cost, technological and competitive market challenges for the move. In the residential and small business wire line segment, AT&T's future role will be a middle mile and particularly a long haul provider.

How to acheive a true digital economy

The Associated Press has issued a weekend thumb sucker largely based on Richard Florida's piece in the March issue of Atlantic Monthly titled How the Crash Will Reshape America.

Summed up, the AP article posits America has undergone a boom and bust cycle in the Sunbelt, creating "an obsolescent model of economic life" based on cheap real estate that encouraged low-density sprawl and created a work force 'stuck in place' and tied to homes cannot be profitably sold.

This is in large part because the Sunbelt migration boom of the 1980s and 1990s has ended and Americans are moving far less frequently than in the past. That's hardly surprising given the mega demographic group of the Baby Boomers is aging and less inclined to move every 6 to 8 years.

To replace this obsolete economic model, the AP article quotes Florida as proposing a "digital age" alternative in which jobs will cluster in what some have called super metro regions such as the Boston-New York-Washington and Los Angeles-Orange-San Diego corridors. Florida argues that these areas will concentrate highly educated professionals and creative thinkers who can drive future economic growth.

I appreciate Florida's view that these creative processes flourish best when these creative types interact and collaborate. But Florida's digital age sounds more to me like a throwback to the industrial age that saw people migrate from the countryside and concentrate in cities that in turn became today's metro areas.

In a true digital economy, population and information-based work would be more evenly distributed, mitigating the need for people to concentrate in congested, high cost metro areas. Moreover, socio-economist Jack Lessinger predicted in his 1990 book Penturbia that Americans will opt out of these areas in search of slower paced, less crowded and improved quality of life in less populated regions of the nation. And true community instead of the shallow, enforced faux community of privately governed homeowner associations that have proliferated in the Sunbelt states over the past two decades. I believe Lessinger will ultimately be proven prescient.

To achieve a true digitally-based (and incidentally, less petroleum-based) economy, the United States must ensure the near universal deployment of fiber optic telecommunications infrastructure capable of supporting symmetric, business class Internet-protocol-based applications including video conferencing. This is the best way to avoid future real estate bust and boom cycles of the kind Florida describes. As some have simply put it, move bytes, not bodies.

BBC study finds broadband "not spots" not confined to rural areas

People tend to stereotype broadband black holes as a rural issue both in the U.S. and elsewhere. The assumption is often inaccurate and apparently so in the U.K, according to a study commissioned by the BBC:

The research revealed that so-called notspots are not limited to rural communities, with many in suburban areas and even streets in major towns.

The government has pledged a range of technologies to fill the gaps.

"We had assumed that these notspots were in remote parts of the countryside. That may be where the most vocal campaigners are but there is a high incidence of them in commuter belts," said Alex Salter, co-founder of broadband website SamKnows.

Maryland local governments team up for broadband stimulus funding

Several Maryland local government entities are pooling their efforts to get "shovel ready" to get dibs on about $100 million of the $7.2 billion earmarked for broadband telecommunications infrastructure buildout in the federal economic stimulus package, the Baltimore Sun reports:

One team, the One Maryland Broadband Plan, has been working at this for over a year. It includes Baltimore, Carroll, Frederick, Howard, Anne Arundel, Prince George's and Montgomery counties, plus Baltimore City and Annapolis

Another group of rural counties covering the Eastern Shore, Southern and Western Maryland is also preparing to apply for money through the Salisbury-based Maryland Broadband Co-operative, a private nonprofit created three years ago by the Maryland General Assembly and funded by state and federal funds.

"I personally feel we're one of the few states in the country shovel-ready," said Patrick Mitchell, the co-op's president and CEO, who said he hopes for 250 miles of cable in rural areas where companies like Verizon are loath to go.

Obama official: Half full broadband glass "will guarantee economic stagnation and decline."

This quote is from Susan Crawford, a member of President Barack Obama's National Economic Council, via internetnews.com:

"I assure you that the administration at the highest levels really is interested in broadband and cares about this national broadband plan," Crawford said.

"It's true that access to broadband doesn't guarantee economic success, but lack of access to broadband will guarantee economic stagnation and decline."

Tim Nulty attacks conventional thinking on rural fiber, broadband mapping

Here are two reports on a panel discussion held last week in Washington DC hosted by the Benton Foundation.

In both accounts, Tim Nulty -- who's making fiber to the premises a reality in Vermont -- stands out. Nulty trashes as "nonsense" conventional wisdom that there's little demand for fiber in less densely populated areas of the U.S. and that a business case can't be made for it in this dispatch by ars technica's Matthew Lasar:

"The standard traditional wisdom is 'Oh no you can't do that; impossible,'" Nulty noted. "'Can't make fiber work in rural areas. You've got to use some half-baked technology like WiFi or something like that." Au contraire, he told the audience. "It's actually significantly easier and cheaper to do fiber today than it was to do copper when our forefathers did it in the thirties."

And Nulty's right on the money when he suggests broadband mapping is nothing but a time wasting paper chase charade that makes incumbent telecommunications providers appear to be doing something instead of actually getting fiber on and in the ground. Nulty said this at the Benton event according to Blandin on Broadband:

Sometimes these maps are used to postpone action. A map of 200K access is not that helpful. In Vermont we had towns that were officially served – but ask people if they are served and they say no. The maps help get the incumbents off the hook. Access to info is good – but not if it distracts from promoting activity.

Regional alliance encompassing 3 states eyes U.S. broadband stimulus funding

Broadband access has moved beyond a metropolitan issue to one of regional importance among officials of three states representing 15 counties in northern Illinois, southern Wisconsin and eastern Iowa, BusinessRockford.com reports.

The Tri-State Alliance was initially formed to address asphalt and concrete highway issues and has now broadened its focus to the information highway that is broadband telecommunications. It's interested in tapping into some of the $7.2 billion set aside in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to subsidize broadband infrastructure.

It takes a village to build fiber

This item out of the UK reinforces my belief that fiber optic telecom upgrades for many won't come about absent local action to make them happen.

The same principle applies in the U.S., where the $7.2 billion in broadband infrastructure subsidies in the recently enacted federal economic stimulus package makes it much easier to accomplish.

Amended legislation would put CPUC in charge of broadband stimulus funding

As the Sacramento Bee reported Tuesday, California -- embarrassed by its extensive patchwork of broadband black holes in a state that prides itself as an information technology leader and the home of Silicon Valley -- is angling for $1 billion of the $7.2 billion in broadband infrastructure subsidies in the federal economic stimulus package.

Undecided however is which California entity would be in charge of doling out the money -- assuming the two federal agencies administering the funds ultimately decide by next month to channel it through the states rather than accepting funding applications directly.

Would it be Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's chief information officer as the governor initially suggested? The California Public Utilities Commission? Or the California Emerging Technologies Fund, a nonprofit to increase broadband deployment and adoption formed and funded as a condition of recent telco M&A activity?

Legislation pending in the California Assembly was amended May 5 reflecting the recommendation of the state Legislative Analyst that the CPUC be in charge of the stimulus funding. You can link to the measure, AB 1012, here.

California seeks $1 billion in broadband stimulus funding

Here's a story in today's Sacramento Bee on California's desire to get $1 billion of the $7.2 billion earmarked for broadband infrastructure build out in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act signed into law in February.

Your blogger -- walking his talk in urging local empowerment and action to fill in broadband black holes -- is quoted. Sunne Wright McPeak, president and CEO of the nonprofit California Emerging Technology Fund, is also quoted.

NC county opposes broadband black hole preservation act

The notion held by big telcos that their service areas are proprietary, exclusive franchises isn't sitting well with the Rockingham County, North Carolina Board of Commissioners. The board voted unanimously last week to oppose state legislation that would prohibit local governments from providing communications services to areas that private companies don’t serve.

More power to them. A telco's service territory is not a franchise. Telcos can't have it both ways, claiming they can't serve certain areas with advanced digital services because they are unprofitable but at the same time looking to state legislatures to lock up these areas with these broadband black hole preservation acts.

They're patently unfair to those mired in them: Residents and small businesses that needed high speed Internet access yesterday, last year and five years ago. They should not have to suffer the consequences of private market failure. Local governments and nonprofit telecom cooperatives should be permitted to step in where the private sector fails and provide the urgently needed solutions to bridge the digital divide unhindered by these audicious telco power grabs.

Feds should prioritize broadband stimulus funding for local telecom cooperatives

Google's got a spot on solution to remedy the existing flawed and incomplete U.S. telecommunications infrastructure model that cannot deliver advanced communication services over much of the so-called "last mile." Decades ago, local property owners built their own telecom cooperatives when basic phone service -- like high speed Internet today -- wasn't available to them, notes Google policy analyst Derek Slater in this April 30 Gizmodo video. They can now adopt the same concept to bring fiber to their neighborhoods, he says. Slater's presentation follows on a white paper he co-authored Homes with Tails What If You Could Own Your Internet Connection that was issued last November.

The federal agencies responsible for disbursing $7.2 in economic stimulus funding to build advanced telecommunications infrastructure should give telecom cooperatives and other local entities funding priority to help make this a reality. America's telecom future isn't with the failed top down strategies of the past. The way to go is bottom up empowerment of communities that have been left on the wrong side of the digital divide for years. Policymakers should also adopt Google's call for state and federal tax income tax credits to provide incentive for homeowners to invest in their own fiber connections.