Cable emerges as dominant commercial ISP

As the Internet becomes the all purpose global telecommunications medium delivering voice, video, the web and email, cable companies have emerged as the dominant Internet Service Provider (ISP).

As Susan P. Crawford explains in this Harvard Law & Policy Review article The Communications Crisis in America, compared to incumbent telcos and wireless and satellite ISPs, only cable offers sufficiently robust bandwidth and headroom going forward. Telcos can't keep up since they would incur unabsorbable costs to replace their obsolete copper cable plants with fiber -- costs that would also make their generous stock dividends obsolete.

That's not likely to change despite the Federal Communications Commission's recent reforming of the Universal Service Fund (USF) from subsidizing plain old telephone service (POTS) in high cost areas to Internet. The Connect America Fund (CAF) requires telcos merely provide first generation DSL-level connectivity of 4Mbs for downloads and 1Mbs up and allocates only $4.5 billion a year -- hardly enough to meaningfully offset the cost of changing out decades-old copper plant for fiber.

In the wireless realm, the physics of radio spectrum hamstring wireless ISPs while satellite Internet -- on the verge of obsolescence from the day it was introduced -- has clearly reached its expiration date.

With cable now the dominant commercial Internet provider for most Americans, Crawford argues for increased government scrutiny of its monopoly market power. Crawford's position may draw support from community networks that have gone up against cable companies that pull out all the political stops to preserve their monopolies. The cable guys don't always win as Longmont, Colorado showed this week and as reported by Christopher Mitchell of Community Broadband Networks. Community networks also have a technological carrying capacity edge over the hybrid coax/fiber cable plant employed by cable companies since they typically deploy full fiber to the premises networks.

On death bed, aged copper POTS plant dials 911

In a late December filing with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, AT&T pronounced its residential wireline segment in a "death spiral."

While the big telco was figuratively referring to the business prospects of the segment, the aged POTS copper cable plant is literally dying in parts of California and calling the paramedics.

Old lines no longer in active service are generating electronic farts that produce phantom 911 calls according to this Capitol Weekly article that reports on efforts in the California Legislature to fix to the problem. (Good luck with that).

Legacy telco regulatory concerns overblown as Internet replaces PSTN

The United States is moving from an era of the highly regulated, proprietary publicly switched telephone network (PSTN) to a new telecommunications paradigm in which the Internet is replacing the PSTN and the "plain old telephone service" (POTS) it delivered.

Both of America's biggest investor-owned telcos, AT&T and Verizon, have heralded the death of PSTN/POTS. Verizon is adopting Internet protocol-based next generation technology in its place. AT&T went so far as to declare its legacy, copper-based wireline infrastructure in a "death spiral" in a filing with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission just before last Christmas. That business, AT&T wrote, cannot be sustained as more and more residential customers drop their land line phone service for wireless PCS devices or use their Internet connections to make voice calls.

As the nation adopts this new Internet-based telecom infrastructure, the legacy carriers are worried that the FCC will attempt to overregulate it. Those concerns are overblown. There will be no need for increased regulation at a time when the telecom infrastructure is changing and alternative business models -- most notably locally owned open access fiber infrastructure -- are emerging.

Strict regulatory oversight is only needed in a monopolistic market. New business models such as municipal and cooperative-owned open access fiber networks dilute the monopolistic market power of the legacy carriers and thus the need for enhanced regulation. If enhanced regulation does come about, it will likely be aimed at penalizing legacy telcos that stand in the way of federal policy to expand advanced telecommunications infrastructure and Internet access with uncompetitive market practices.

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.

USF reform alone won't achieve universal U.S. broadband

Just as the U.S. Federal Communications Commission set a date for the end of analog broadcast television earlier this year as TV signals went digital, it should also establish a sunset date for the legacy Publicly Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), AT&T asserted in a December 21 filing with the FCC.

The business model for the PSTN -- a proprietary network comprised of central office switches, amplifiers and copper cable plant designed to deliver what's known as plain old telephone service -- POTS -- is in a death spiral as the number of people shutting off their landline voice service in favor of wireless and Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) services has accelerated in recent years, AT&T notes. In the meantime, the telco stated, the FCC should modernize its regulations to ensure an orderly transition from the PSTN to an Internet Protocol (IP) based system, taking full regulatory control and ending state oversight authority originally established for regulating POTS.

However, legacy PSTN/POTS isn't alone in suffering from serious business model problems. So does the IP-based model that is the future of telecommunications. The reason: what AT&T describes as the "enormous" amount of capital necessary to complete the build out of required infrastructure to ensure all Americans have access to IP-based services just as basic telephone service is nearly universal. In its filing, AT&T concedes eight to ten percent of American households lack access to broadband, although another estimate released in October placed the figure higher at 12 percent, including even spotty access in major metropolitan areas.

In order to allow telcos to direct more capital investment to building out broadband infrastructure, AT&T proposes the FCC scrap rules requiring telcos to provide POTS so they can redirect funds to upgraded infrastructure capable of delivering IP-based services. "The legacy PSTN network – which is rapidly hemorrhaging customers and revenue – is now diverting much needed funds from investments in broadband networks," AT&T states in its filing.

AT&T also wants the Universal Service Fund (USF) -- created to subsidize the cost of providing POTS in high cost areas -- retasked to do the same for IP-based services. Doing so would help achieve the Obama administration's goal of broadband access for all Americans, according to AT&T.

But there's a difference between USF subsidies for voice telephone service and IP-based services. Deployment and adoption of basic phone service played out over decades. By contrast, there's a huge reservoir of pent up demand for broadband AT&T and other big telcos assured would be offered to all U.S. households when the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was enacted providing telcos tax breaks and other incentives intended to pave the way for them to universally deploy fiber-delivered telecommunications services by 2006. Didn't happen, obviously.

The FCC and other policymakers should keep this history and differences in demand between POTS and IP-based services in mind. Reforming the USF isn't likely to be the sole solution to remedy market failure for IP-based services. They must also encourage alternative business models such as open access fiber networks owned by local governments and telecom cooperatives through subsidies, low cost loans and tax incentives.

Verizon abandons PSTN, commits to next generation IP-based services

Verizon has become the first big telco to fully commit to next generation Internet Protocol-based service delivered over fiber in which the Internet replaces the publicly switched telephone network (PSTN) designed for plain old telephone service (POTS) delivered over twisted pair copper wire.

“We don’t look any different than Google,” Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg told a Goldman Sachs investor conference last week. “We can begin to look at eliminating central offices, call centers and garages.” Seidenberg's remarks were reported in Saul Hansell's Bits column in The New York Times.

That means a much smaller, shrinking wireline footprint for Verizon as the company sells off its old copper plant and deploys its FiOS fiber to the premises plant. In effect, Verizon is starting almost from scratch to build a new wireline plant. And just as with the early copper cable plant, urban areas will see it many years before those living outside them will. That sets the stage for history to repeat the cycle of the early copper POTS deployments of a century ago in which less densely populated areas established telecom cooperatives in the meantime. Only this time the coops will be putting up fiber instead of metal.

In contrast to Verizon, the dominant American telco, AT&T, is trying to keep one foot in its PSTN past by attempting to pound the square peg of ever increasing IP-based bandwidth demand -- particularly for video -- into the round hole of copper POTS with its Project Lightspeed/U-Verse FTTN architecture. This gambit leaves AT&T far less strategic headroom and could ultimately lead to the company getting out of residential wireline altogether in the first part of 2010.