San Jose's Google Fiber rollout is delayed while tech giant explores alternatives - Mercury News

San Jose's Google Fiber rollout is delayed while tech giant explores alternatives - Mercury News: SAN JOSE -- Google has told at least two Silicon Valley cities that it is putting plans to provide lightning-fast fiber internet service on hold while the company explores a cheaper alternative. The news comes nearly three months after San Jose officials approved a major construction plan to bring Google Fiber to the city. Mountain View and Palo Alto also were working with Google to get fiber internet service but said Monday that the company told them the project has been delayed.

The economics of selling monthly subscriptions to one customer premise at a time -- the business model employed by the vertically integrated legacy telephone and cable companies Google is challenging -- are difficult. That's why it has produced widespread market failure and disparate access. And when the incumbents throw up legal speed bumps to slow deployment like making access to utility poles difficult, the business case for infrastructure ROI becomes even more difficult.

It's no surprise Google Fiber is reconnoitering. Using the investor owned, vertically integrated, subscription-based closed access business model favored by the incumbents to finance and construct advanced telecommunications infrastructure is like building roads based on the number of occupied garages -- preferably housing BMWs, Lexus and Mercedes. Google Fiber's problem is it's insufficiently disruptive. It's taking on the legacy telcos and cablecos with their own business model -- one that favors established incumbents and not new entrants like Google Fiber -- without any major cost or marketing advantage.

Public-private parterships for telecom infrastructure modernization hamstrung by subscription-based business model of incumbents

Citywide broadband service could cost over $200 million, study says | Local News | host.madison.com: In the report, CTC recommended that the city pursue an approach in which the city would build and own the fiber network. Private businesses would then provide internet service and build lines connecting individual users to the network.

This of course assumes those "private businesses" are willing. This is a major downside of applying an end user subscription-based model employed by legacy incumbent telephone and cable companies that has produced widespread cherry picking, redlining and market failure in the United States. Using the same business model isn't going to result in a rapid project that builds out to serve all Madison, Wisconsin homes, businesses and institutions. The private partners will run the numbers and likely conclude that simply doesn't pencil.

Soglin said covering the cost for the project would be a challenge, but said the move would foster competition among internet service providers and force them to improve their services.

Perhaps among the service providers. But certainly not among infrastructure builders since telecom infrastructure tends toward a natural monopoly due to high costs to play in the market.

"It will be a fight, politically and economically, with the companies that would rather have monopoly kind of control," Orton said.

That would be Barry Orton, chairman of the Citywide Broadband Subcommittee and a professor emeritus at UW-Madison. And he's right. The subscription-based, sell and own the customer business model favored by legacy telcos and cablecos promotes a winner take all mentality that along with the aforementioned microeconomic realities foster a monopoly market.

Market failure, not lack of competition drives telecom infrastructure deficiencies, disparate access

Charter, Comcast, AT&T Really Want To Stall Chance Of Competition From Google Fiber – Consumerist: As we’ve seen over and over again, high-speed broadband competition is hard to come by in huge swaths of the country. And one reason for that is because incumbent companies, especially AT&T, have a habit of throwing their weight around when competition does finally (try to) come to town. Meanwhile, though, it remains the best chance for consumers: both Comcast and AT&T charge less for their service in cities with Google’s super-speedy competition.

"Lack of competition" continues to be proffered as the primary rationale for America's telecommunications infrastructure deficiencies and disparate access. But that's the wrong analysis for the simply microeconomic fact that telecommunications infrastructure connecting customer premises is not and will never be a competitive market with many sellers and many buyers. The cost barriers to entry for would be competitors are too high. That's why one doesn't typically see multiple natural gas, water or power lines serving a given premise. It would be ridiculously wasteful and make it even harder for the builder of that second or third connection to achieve a return on their investment in a reasonable time frame.

The real reason the United States suffers from less than world class infrastructure connecting all homes, businesses and public institutions is excess reliance on investor-owned infrastructure providers overly prone to market failure. Since the microeconomics don't work, they can't meet the buyer side demand for affordable access even as it grows exponentially. They simply cannot make a decent return on investment, so they naturally don't invest in infrastructure. Not because they "refuse" to as many analysts claim. Because they simply can't afford to, whether it be AT&T, Comcast, or Google Fiber.

Nearly 80 Community-based Providers Delivering Gigabit Broadband to Rural Communities | 2016 Press Releases | ABOUT NTCA

Nearly 80 Community-based Providers Delivering Gigabit Broadband to Rural Communities | 2016 Press Releases | ABOUT NTCA

The bulk of these are located in the Midwest and upper Midwest -- areas of the United States that formed telephone cooperatives in the early 20th century to provide phone service to areas not served by investor-owned providers. In these areas, it's a natural migration from voice telephone service to Internet-based multimedia telecommunications.

A big challenge today is unlike the 1920s and 1930s when entire rural regions had little or no telecommunications infrastructure, the current state of modernizing telecom infrastructure in the Internet era doesn't neatly fall along rural demarcation lines.

Legacy, investor-owned telephone and cable companies have plenty of infrastructure in rural areas. It's just not even distributed. One group of premises will have landline service. But go down the road a mile or two, over the hill or around the bend and there's another group that does not. Consequently, it's hard to band together consumers to form telecom cooperatives in nominally rural areas other than those with a history of consumer utility cooperatives when those who have service don't perceive the need for one. Even if they aren't all that crazy about their current Internet service provider. 

Yet another silly "broadband mapping" project

FCC Plans to Map Broadband Access to Aid Chronic Disease Care: The new mapping tool aims to continue this mission by identifying gaps in connectivity at the neighborhood level, highlighting opportunities for improvement, and giving community coalitions the data they need to form new partnerships and tailor their activities to their unique needs. (Emphasis added).

Yet another useless, going though the motions "broadband mapping" project. The United States would have had fiber connecting every home, business and institution in place by 2010 had it done the proper planning and construction starting a generation ago. Today, very few areas of the nation are fully fibered. The opportunity for improvement is most everywhere. A map isn't needed to illustrate that.

Political talking points can't trump the microeconomics of residential telecom market

Tennessee Study Shows State Remains A Broadband Backwater Thanks To AT&T Lobbyists, Clueless Politicians, And Protectionist State Law | Techdirt: "Norris, who said he remains wary about municipal broadband based on the failure of Networx in his district near Memphis, said he hopes the push for more broadband is not an excuse for bigger government. Sen. Mark Green, R-Clarksville, vice chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, also expressed concern about allowing government-owned utilities like EPB to compete with private firms such as AT&T or Comcast. "We want to look closely at this study, but in general, I am not for government and business competing in the marketplace," he said.

Carrying the water of the legacy telephone companies, Green is painting a false dichotomy that went by the wayside in 2015. That's when the U.S. Federal Communications Commission adopted its Open Internet rulemaking classifying Internet as a common carrier utility under Title II of the Communications Act.

Those rules implicitly recognize residential premise telecommunications service due to the high cost of building and maintaining infrastructure tends towards a monopoly market. By definition, competitive market forces are absent in such a market. It's another example of a politician trying in vain to trump microeconomic fundamentals with political talking points.