Legacy incumbent phone companies propaganda canard: Describing a duopoly as "intensely competitive"

Broadband Deployment & Competition Growing: Dedicated Federal Funding Needed to Close Digital Divide | USTelecom: U.S. Broadband Deployment Is Intensely Competitive. Our analysis also examines broadband deployment from the perspective of competition, which is not a focal area for the FCC’s legislatively mandated deployment analysis. U.S. providers have been deploying broadband infrastructure using a range of technologies for more than two decades. As a result, basic underlying competitive infrastructure from multiple providers is available in the vast majority of the country. On top of this foundational infrastructure, broadband providers invest tens of billions of dollars annually to upgrade networks with enhanced technologies, driving a competitive process of ever-expanding network capabilities The data indicate that competitive deployment is strong and growing, even at higher speeds. As of year-end 2016, 97 percent of Americans had at least one wired broadband network platform available to them and 86 percent had at least two wired options. Competitive availability – defined narrowly as at least two wired providers – at 25 megabits per second (mbps) download (DL) and 3 mbps upload (UL) was 50 percent at year-end 2016, up from 31 percent at year-end 2014 and 25 percent at year-end 2012. (Emphasis added).

Claiming that having a choice among two sellers constitutes an "intensely competitive market" is ludicrous. But that assertion is not to be taken literally on its face. The true intent of this propaganda from legacy incumbent telephone companies is to drive a perception that the line delivering telecommunications service to customer premises is somehow fundamentally different from the line that delivered voice telephone service decades before. True, advanced digital telecommunications can deliver data and video as well as voice. But that capability does not fundamentally alter the fact that a single line of fiber can deliver them all just as a copper one did for voice as well as optional custom calling services that came later.

The real goal of this cynical propaganda is to deceive public policymakers into thinking America's telecommunications infrastructure deficiencies can be solved by market forces. That may be true in a competitive market defined as one with many sellers and buyers with relatively equal access to quality and costs. It's certainly not the case for telecommunications infrastructure. Moreover, if market forces truly operated in telecommunications infrastructure, they would drive down deployment costs, making it more widely available on favorable terms to the millions of customers who use it and eliminate persistent infrastructure deficits.