Verizon Won’t Expand FiOS Beyond Current Franchise Obligations, CFO Tells Investors | Stop the Cap!

Verizon Won’t Expand FiOS Beyond Current Franchise Obligations, CFO Tells Investors | Stop the Cap!

This development makes it eminently clear that for those communities in Verizon's wireline service area that don't now have its FiOS fiber to the premises service, they will have to build their own community owned infrastructure.  Verizon is getting a better ROI on wireless, but wireless can't provide the bandwidth and headroom homes and businesses require.

Public utility district Internet as alternative to Google fiber

Most rural communities lag in the type of broadband Internet service available in urban areas. But northeast of Spokane, in Newport and the surrounding hills and valleys, around 5,000 homes and businesses have the chance to connect soon to a fiber-optic system with lightning-fast speed.


The network being built by the Pend Oreille Public Utility District will allow users to download and upload data all the way up to 1,000 megabits, or 1 gigabit, per second - far faster than the 10 to 20 megabits that is a popular consumer choice today.


It will rival the Google Fiber system rolling out in the Kansas City area and is fast enough to download a movie in seconds, conduct video conferencing at home, and watch multiple high-definition TV programs simultaneously online.


“We believe it’s kind of the footprint for the future of rural communities,” said Joe Onley, manager of the Community Network System for the Pend Oreille PUD

I expect PUDs like this one and consumer cooperatives will take the lead in building out fiber. The key reason is the time to return on investment is too long for private sector players, whether they be AT&T, Verizon, or Google.  And that applies in all areas -- not just rural locations.

Large WISP bites the dust; Satellites swarm for former customers

Main Street Broadband shuts down | JCFLORIDAN

According its LinkedIn profile, Atlanta-based Main Street Broadband, LLC is a privately held wireless broadband service provider "committed to bringing affordable high speed internet access and digital phone service to the un-served and underserved markets in the southeast" using "the latest in wireless broadband technology for both residential and business services."

The reason for the shutdown of the WISP according to the linked newspaper story is loan funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Rural Utilities Service was terminated.

Fixed wireless premise service like Main Street's plays an important interim role until communities and alternative business models emerge to construct fiber to the premises infrastructure needed for today and tomorrow's Internet protocol-based services.

Now satellite Internet providers are swarming to scoop up the defunct WISP's former customers.  Unfortunately for them, they now like all too many Americans face the lousy choice of sucking a satellite and its punitive bandwidth caps and poor connection quality or turning back the calendar to 1992 and dialugging over obsolete legacy telco copper cable.  But it doesn't have to be that way.  Communities can and should invest the necessary time, money and energy to build their own fiber infrastructure and operate it prudently and sustainably as a community and economic development asset.

AT&T and Verizon’s Deteriorating Legacy Landline Networks

Phillip Dampier has posted an excellent piece summing up the current dreary state of commercial premises telecommunications service in the United States. Dampier depicts telcos as caught between the old world of central office switched plain old telephone service (POTS) and its aging and increasingly obsolete copper cable and today's world where fiber optic infrastructure delivers voice, video and data over the Internet.

Telcos can't afford to make the change over from the old world to the new. So they're trying to limit their losses by keeping their old copper POTS cable plants functioning with bubble gum, bailing wire and trash bags while boosting their bottom lines with smartphone services delivered over more lucrative mobile wireless networks that don't have the carrying capacity to substitute for fiber to the premises infrastructure.

Dampier's post makes a powerful case for community owned fiber networks. There's simply not enough money in the fiber to the premise architecture to support an investor ownership model even for large corporations and their favorable economies of scale. Without community fiber networks, much of the U.S. will remain disconnected from the Internet for the foreseeable.

Obama administration should focus on community-run open access fiber, not 4G wireless

The Obama administration's recent announcement of its National Wireless Initiative to subsidize the build out of 4th generation (4G) wireless Internet to make it available to least 98 percent of Americans appears based on the assumption that cutting edge wireless telecommunications technology can play a central role in the nation's telecom infrastructure.

I'm not convinced. 4G wireless is only just emerging and remains unproven in terms of whether it can deliver sufficient bandwidth at the same time bandwidth demand is increasing exponentially. It's primarily designed for mobile use and portable devices such as smart phones and IPads that are gobbling bandwidth at such a prodigious rate that providers have a difficult time meeting the demand. That's why they ration bandwidth and penalize wireless customers who use more than 5 GB per month. The rationing is due to a more basic telecom infrastructure problem: the lack of adequate wire line infrastructure to "backhaul" or feed the distribution system that supports that huge and growing universe of wireless devices.

The administration's wireless initiative seems to suggest that people can "cut the cord" for Internet access just as they have done for wire line voice service, which requires far less bandwidth. 4G wireless, the administration apparently believes, can provide access to medical tests, online courses and applications that have not yet been invented.

That remains to be seen. What is certain now is wire line fiber optic connections to American households and businesses can deliver more than enough bandwidth for today's needs without the need for rationing plus plenty of additional capacity for those yet to be invented applications. The administration's telecom infrastructure efforts should focus on bringing it to the 24 million Americans that Federal Communications Chairman Julius Genachowski said remain disconnected from the Internet. "The infrastructure simply isn’t there," Genachowski explained.

The reason: It's simply not sufficiently profitable for investor owned providers to build it. Alternative, lower cost methods are urgently needed. The best and most rapid way to bring about these alternatives is to focus at the local level and provide local governments and consumer telecom cooperatives technical assistance grants and low cost loans to build open access fiber networks to serve their communities.

The administration's health care reform legislation allocates $5 billion in technical assistance grants to for new health insurance cooperatives to pool risk and purchase health coverage for their members. The administration should provide a similar amount of technical assistance funding for local governments and telecom cooperatives to help them plan and design open access fiber optic telecom networks.

The Economist: Why LTE can't substitute for fiber

Some believe the Internet will become untethered over the last mile and point to cutting edge wireless transmission technology known as LTE or 4G. The two biggest telcos in the U.S., Verizon and AT&T, are rolling it out (or are about to in the case of AT&T.)

But it won't be able to replace the nation's aging copper cable infrastructure that has grown increasingly difficult and costly to operate reliably. Nor is it likely to provide sufficient capacity for future growth in bandwidth demand -- something that Verizon and AT&T are acutely aware having faced growth pains and capacity constraints with their current generation of 3G wireless.

The Economist explains why:

Already LTE has shown itself good for at least 5Mbps—impressive for a mobile technology still in its infancy (see “Generational change”, December 3rd, 2010). But with peak speeds of 1Gbps theoretically possible, LTE’s next iteration should make downloads of 100Mbps over the airwaves a matter of routine. Developments beyond that could lead to near-gigabit speeds.

Of the two, though, a fixed link like fibre remains the better bet. Sooner or later, even a 4G wireless protocol such as LTE or its country-cousin WiMAX will become overwhelmed by the exponential growth of mobile traffic. By contrast, an optical link to the home could use a multitude of different wavelengths to boost throughput almost indefinitely.

Network World also weighs in:

So the next question about wireless broadband as a substitute. Recall that according to the U.S. Government Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 1 in 4 homes has cut the legacy wireline phone cord in favor of wireless-only voice. Could we see wireless substitution rates that high for broadband access? We think not because radio spectrum is a limited resource, and unlike wireless voice networks that have plenty of spectrum to manage voice calls, if 25% of broadband users shifted from wireline access, the demand for wireless broadband would likely exceed available spectrum given today's technology.

National Broadband Plan overly reliant on wireline, author says

Blair Levin, the Aspen Institute fellow who served as lead author of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's National Broadband Plan before leaving the FCC this summer, told PCWorld last week the plan is flawed because it places too much emphasis on making landline Internet protocol-based telecommunications service accessible to all Americans.

"One of the problems we were running up against and that we should've been clearer about is that the conventional wisdom says the primary metric for measuring the validity or power of a national broadband plan is the speed of the wireline network to the most rural of residents," Levin is quoted as saying. "That way of looking at the problem is entirely wrong, is profoundly wrong -- almost every word in the sentence I just uttered is wrong. And we should've done a better job of explaining that."

If Levin could go back and rewrite the plan, landline and wireless technology would be framed synergistically, working in conjunction with each other to make a more complete telecommunications infrastructure that meets the National Broadband Plan's objective of expanding service availability to all Americans.

On this point, I agree with Levin. Until the last and middle miles of the U.S. telecommunications infrastructure can be fully upgraded to fiber, wireless has an important but interim role to play since it can be deployed more quickly than wireline plant. That's a very important consideration given that the FCC reported in late July that between 14 and 24 million Americans "still lack access to broadband, and the immediate prospects for deployment to them are bleak."

However, if Levin sees wireless connectivity as a replacement for fiber, I disagree. Wireless telecommunications is largely designed for mobile use and not to serve premises. Wireless also lacks fiber's ability to handle the exploding demand for bandwidth. There is no field-proven wireless technology that matches fiber's capacity to accommodate that growth.

As Tim Nulty, who believes fiber to the premises can pencil out even in rural areas, put it in a 2008 interview, fiber optic plant is to wireless as jumbo jets are to helicopters. "Think about 747s and helicopters,” Nulty told The Progressive magazine. “Helicopters are marvelous when they’re used for what they’re good at. But you don’t use them to fly thousands of people between Boston and Chicago. For that you need 747s.”

America's badly needed revamp of its telecommunications infrastructure should not be based on the expectation that wireless technology will overtake and render fiber wireline plant obsolete and cost ineffective. Hope is a good attitude, but does not a plan make.

Burgeoning telecom bandwidth demand emulates Moore's Law

In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore successfully predicted semiconductor processing power would double about every two years. A trend similar to Moore's Law is now occurring in fiber optic capacity. And just in time as this New York Times article notes, pointing to burgeoning demand for Internet bandwidth:

The need for core network improvement is pressing, said Stojan Radic, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, San Diego. “We are looking at a point soon where we cannot satisfy demand,” he said. “And if we don’t, it will be like going over a cliff.”

Demand is continually growing, somewhere below street level, as details of our e-mail, bank balances and national security zip along on light waves. And consumers can’t get enough video clips on YouTube, television shows on Hulu, and movies streamed to them by Netflix that they watch on their computers and TVs.

This has implications for telecommunications services, which in theory could deliver a better Internet experience and new applications with far more bandwidth. While technological advances will allow more bandwidth to move along the fiber of the Internet backbone and middle mile distribution networks, this increased capacity hits a major bottleneck at the so-called last mile that connects to customer premises.

This segment of the network is still largely made up of metal wire designed for the single purpose of delivering analog phone service or cable TV. The business models of the telcos and cablecos don't allow them to make the capital expenditures necessary to upgrade the last mile to fiber, creating an urgent need for alternative providers that can devise viable business models that can make the fiber connections for consumers.

Suck a bigger, faster satellite!

Satellite companies have been the also-rans of Internet providers. They serve a little more than one million customers, most in rural areas that have no other options. Their services can be painfully slow and cost twice as much as high-speed broadband. But two companies, WildBlue and HughesNet, are now in a race to change all that.

Both plan to launch satellites in the next couple of years that will dwarf their predecessors in space. WildBlue’s alone will have 10 times the capacity of its three current satellites combined. Such behemoths, the companies say, will enable them, at prices similar to what they now charge, to provide Internet service at speeds many times faster than they now offer — as fast, in some cases, as fiber connections.

Further, the companies argue, satellites can provide service more easily and cheaply per subscriber than their earthbound cable and phone company competitors, particularly to the 14 million to 24 million Americans who live in areas without broadband service.

Read more of this New York Times story by clicking here. (Registration required)
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This is a crock and a travesty. Internet protocol based services via satellite will never measure up to terrestrial fiber telecom infrastructure and should never be offered anywhere outside of the polar and most remote regions of the globe.

The mere fact that satellite Internet connectivity is sold anywhere in the lower 48 United States is and should be regarded as a national embarrassment showing the rest of the world how far behind the information technology curve the nation has fallen.

Memo to HughesNet and Wildblue: sell your new and improved services to SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) in order to allow off world intelligent life to connect to the global Internet.

Independent New Englanders take control of their telecom infrastructure

Last year, 22 central Vermont towns took charge of their telecom infrastructure by forming a public/private partnership to deploy 1,400 miles of aerial fiber-optic lines to provide high-speed Internet access, phone and video.

True to their fiercely independent reputation, more New Englanders in a neighboring state are doing likewise. Forty seven Western Massachusetts towns plan to form a non-profit to plan and build a fiber optic network to serve a part of the U.S. that has been described as a "broadband ghetto." A key driver is a desire to provide an economic boost to the region.

Here's an excerpt from the Berkshire (Massachusetts) Eagle story:

"This wasn't a hard sell," noted David Greenberg, chairman of the WiredWest steering committee. "It's pretty much a no-brainer -- economic development is the driving force. Without this major initiative, Western Mass is going to be sinking fast."

Once the non-profit has been formed, financing options would have to be identified, and preliminary design and cost estimate work would start.

None of the cost of the project would be borne by the towns, Webb said.

Ongoing maintenance cost and debt service payments would come from money paid to the agency by the service providers, added Andrew Michael Cohill, president of Design Nine, a consultancy hired to help WiredWest through the next phase of development.

"This is a jobs creation and a business attraction project," Cohill said. "And the highest proportion of home-based businesses in the state are in Western Mass."

Google 1 Gigabit fiber stimululates interest in fiber infrastucture

When Google announced early this year it would build 1 Gbs fiber in a test market somewhere in the United States, it sparked a lot of interest. One outcome and side benefit is Google's gigabit fiber project got locals thinking about fiber-based advanced telecom infrastructure and how to do it themselves knowing that Google isn't going to deploy it everywhere.

Baltimore is one place that realizes that. Baltimore Mayor Stephanie C. Rawlings-Blake wants to explore how to expand high-speed fiber-optic Internet service to city residents with or without Google's help, according to this Baltimore Sun article, and has established a panel to look into it.

"We can't sit here and wait for a gift from Google to fall on us from the sky," said Tom Loveland, the city's volunteer Google czar. "This is our future we're talking about here. Those of us involved in the conversation have seen what other cities have already accomplished. These folks managed to get themselves wired without Google. If they can do it, we can do it, too."

FCC's National Broadband Plan needs bottom up incentives to bridge last mile

America's telecommunications infrastructure is least complete along the so-called last mile (referred to by some as the "first mile") that bridges middle mile distribution backhaul to homes and businesses. The U.S. Federal Communications recognized this in a footnote in a chapter addressing broadband availability in its recently released National Broadband Plan, noting 7 million housing units lie outside cable company networks or more than approximately 11,000-12,000 feet from telco distribution equipment providing DSL service. Six million housing units lack access to terrestrial broadband capable of providing downloads at speeds the FCC minimally defines as broadband because they are situated more than 16,000 feet from the nearest DSLAM.

The FCC's plan sets a goal of providing at least 100 million homes access with download speeds of at least 100 Mbs per second and upload speeds of at least 50 Mbs per second by 2020. In an interim report released in September, the FCC estimated reaching the "100/100" goal would cost as much as $350 billion.

The "100/100" goal is laudable. But a more pressing infrastructure shortfall now mires millions in the early 1990s with dialup access or subpar satellite Internet access that's a national embarrassment that should only be offered in Alaska or the north woods of Maine. The FCC report estimates bridging that gap would require existing providers to spend $24 billion on upgraded and expanded infrastructure. Investor-owned legacy providers aren't going to spend that kind of money. So the FCC proposes remaking the Universal Service Fund and other programs designed to subsidize legacy voice telephone service in high cost areas into the Connect America Fund (CAF). Recognizing this would yield just $15.5 billion over the next decade, the FCC's plan also calls on Congress to appropriate additional subsidies of a "few billion dollars" annually over the next 2-3 years to accelerate construction of advanced telecommunications infrastructure.

The weakness of the FCC's plan is that it relies too much on investor-owned telco and cable providers already burdened with outdated, legacy wire plant and the inherent limitations of their for-profit business models. These providers must naturally place their proprietary business interests ahead of any national goal for transitioning the nation's currently outmoded telecommunications infrastructure to one that delivers a range of Internet-protocol based services via fiber over the last mile. Consider, for example, that neither of the nation's largest telcos are currently expanding their own plants to bring fiber to customer premises. AT&T has except for some greenfield developments chosen to build out fiber only to neighborhood nodes, relying on legacy copper wire connections to reach customers. Verizon recently called a halt to further expansion of its FiOS fiber to the premises plant.

While the FCC's plan urges Congress to boost funding of the Rural Utilities Service's Community Connect program intended to provide funding for broadband to communities that are otherwise unserved, it doesn't go far enough. Instead of largely relying legacy providers to build out advanced telecom infrastructure from the top down to reach the last mile, it really needs to provide incentives that work from the bottom up.

One that holds promise is giving home and small business owners tax breaks to build their own last mile fiber much like current tax law provides incentives for solar power generation equipment. Tax breaks for properties with fiber "tails" as they were described in a November 2008 paper issued by the New America Foundation would help local governments and telecom cooperatives build fiber infrastructure since the tax savings would make it easier for property owners to pay fees for connection costs or fund coop memberships. Building out broadband infrastructure is primarily a business model problem. Providing tax credits for fiber "tails" would provide impetus to urgently needed alternative business models for modernizing America's telecom infrastructure.

The view from the UK: America's "lame" "costly" "third-world" telecom infrastructure

The Economist offers this critical perspective on America's "lame" "costly" "third-world" telecommunications infrastructure that combines the worst of all worlds with poor quality service at high cost compared to other advanced nations. But the dreary state of affairs isn't much better across the pond in the magazine's UK home base either. Just a few months ago, Prince Charles warned much of the British countryside is in danger of becoming a "broadband desert," hamstrung by an aging, latency copper wire infrastructure that can't deliver sufficient throughput to enough of the populace.

As Exhibit A of the U.S. broadband gap, the magazine pointed to the outpouring of supplications to Google urging the company to roll out its experimental 1 Gigabit fiber to the premises telecom infrastructure in their communities.

Much of the article goes on to repeat the same points made elsewhere about the flaws of the U.S. telecom paradigm and the sturm und drang industrialized nations are undergoing as they transition from legacy wireline single purpose systems designed to deliver voice and television signals to fiber optic infrastructures capable of providing multimedia and interactive applications using Internet protocol.

The article closes with a bit of wireless vaporware by suggesting Verizon is abandoning its FiOS fiber to the premises service in favor of Long Term Evolution (LTE) wireless service that could deliver 150Mbs. Perhaps over Starfleet Command's quantum sub-space channel. But not in today's world where people are literally jumping into freezing lakes in hopes of getting Google to deploy real state of the art fiber technology to their homes and businesses.

Prince Charles warns of UK "broadband deserts"

The UK's broadband "not spots" are getting royal attention from the Prince of Wales. The BBC today reported Prince Charles wrote the Daily Telegraph to point out that "Too many rural households are currently unable to access the internet at satisfactory speeds."

As the Brits would say, Charles used rather extraordinary language to condemn the situation, calling the lack of investment in modern telecommunications infrastructure "vandalism on a grand scale" of rural economies.

From my perspective from across the Big Pond and on the other side of the North American continent, it seems a big contributor is inside the box thinking among our British friends. They appear stuck in the publicly switched voice telephone over copper network paradigm that can only deliver DSL -- and only so far. Instead, they and the rest of us need to be thinking in terms of advanced, second generation telecommunications over fiber to the premises delivering multiple digital services that copper was never designed to accommodate.

FCC wants comment on defining broadband

The Federal Communications Commission has issued a public notice requesting comment on how it should define broadband, a question that arose not long before the Obama administration assumed office at the start of the year. The notice contains a caveat on focusing on throughput speed:

Much of the discussion of any proposal to define “broadband” tends to center on download and upload throughput. Download and upload throughput are important, but neither is precise or diverse enough to describe broadband satisfactorily.

Indeed. The issue isn't broadband itself, but the poor state of the U.S. telecommunications infrastructure that has tended to keep the focus on speed and latency, largely because it's so lousy in much of the nation that its ability to deliver what could even be charitably described as broadband is sketchy and often nonexistent.

Broadband should be instead be defined as fiber infrastructure to the premises. As the FCC notice suggests, any definition based what the pipes can carry rather than the pipes themselves will devolve the discussion into a "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" debate and result in the the lowest possible standard chosen in order to dispose of the question in the most politically expedient manner.

Fiber is proven technology and remains the most obsolescence proof advanced telecommunications infrastructure going to best accommodate the growing volume of bandwidth hungry applications and multiple services.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Using U.S. economic stimulus funding for native fiber backbone and FTTH

Good piece in Network World today on using federal stimulus funding for fiber build out, both for native backbone and over the last mile. The article also touches on a point that's problematic in mainstream media coverage of broadband access: covering the issue exclusively along urban and rural lines as if it were still 1950. U.S. settlement patterns have changed substantially since then, with many Americans migrating to the exurbs, penturbs and semi-rural areas filled with broadband black holes. Here's the relevant excerpt:

In addition to building fiber backbones in rural areas, some ISPs also think that subsidizing fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) connections would be feasible for certain rural areas that have relatively high population densities. Patrick Knorr, the COO of cable and broadband provider Sunflower Broadband, says there are some suburban communities in his vicinity that have been sprouting up in rural areas that would have enough population density to justify building out FTTH infrastructure.

"Fiber to the home, like a lot of wire-based solutions, is cost intensive," he says. "But it is cheaper than DSL or coaxial cables. Fiber works better over long distances because it doesn't require as much maintenance as a lot of other technologies. The issue is that there is a significant initial infrastructure cost, which is why there should be opportunities for subsidies to build FTTH in areas that otherwise wouldn't be able to access fiber service."

The article also discusses the downside of Broadband over Power Lines (BPL), which in the opinion of this blogger isn't deserving of either investment capital or federal stimulus subsidies.