Sohn: Legacy incumbent telcos, cablecos should see publicly owned open access advanced telecommunications infrastructure as business opportunity and not competitive threat.

Gigi Sohn, executive director of the American Association of Public Broadband, urges incumbent telcos and cablecos facing the significant expense of modernizing their legacy metallic delivery networks to fiber to view publicly owned, open access fiber as a good business opportunity to offer services over the fiber instead of viewing it as a competitive threat.

We are hearing a lot about public-private partnerships now. But Sohn is talking about a true partnership versus local governments merely handing over federal and state dollars to the incumbents as subsidies to build out their infrastructures but not necessarily to provide universal service to all addresses within their jurisdiction.

Here’s what Sohn said on this in a podcast interview this week with Mike Masnick of TechDirt at 47:50:

“Perhaps we should have started with open access to begin with. The facilities-based competition when you have cable competing against telecom competing against wireless, maybe wasn’t the best idea. But it’s the world we live in now and we can fix it by having more open access. I’m always encouraging the incumbents to see community broadband, open access as a business opportunity and not as a competitive threat. And some have approached me quietly and said yes, Gigi, we’d like to find ways to work together and I think that’s really refreshing.”

Facilities-based competition is arguably a wasteful use of high cost infrastructure. “It’s a waste of resources more than anything,” says Carl Åhslund, CEO of Open Infra. “Everyone fights, they have to build their own network if they want customers, but it doesn’t make sense. You don’t have two water lines.”

California, Vermont on the right path prioritizing FTTP

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) presented its draft 5-year plan to connect the state’s unserved with broadband using the $1.86 billion BEAD funding it received, and at the same time warned the total $4 billion available in state and federal funding won't be enough.

Critics of “the fiber-above all” approach have called the CPUC’s concerns “unsurprising.”

“The fiber lobby has done a great job of pitching itself as kind of the end-all, be-all, and it does have a lot of great case study for it. But there are other opportunities that can come along,” said the Wireless Internet Service Provider Association’s (WISPA) state advocacy manager for California, Steve Schwerbel.

Colorado BEAD plan is ‘agnostic’ to fiber versus fixed wireless

Wireless Internet Service Providers (WISPs) have been a valuable stopgap for widespread deficits in landline advanced telecommunications infrastructure, first coming on the scene about two decades ago when telephone companies instead of fiber deployed digital subscriber line (DSL) technology that couldn't reach many customer locations over their aging copper delivery infrastructure.

But federal policy should regard them as just that and not subsidize them going forward, particularly in any major federal infrastructure improvement initiative such as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA).

They grapple with a difficult business model in which they must purchase landline backhaul at high cost or use microwave. That forces them to offer service at high monthly rates in limited areas in order to profitably operate, hindering affordable access to even what the federal government deems basic access. They also face technical challenges of terrain and foliage growth that blocks wireless signals from reliably reaching end user premises, limiting their potential customer base and promoting churn off. And most importantly, limitations on bandwidth imposed by radio spectrum physics that does not allow them to feasibly accommodate growing bandwidth demand.

California and other states such as Vermont are demonstrating the correct, forward looking approach to set fiber to the premises (FTTP) as the standard for advanced telecommunications delivery infrastructure.

Lacking goal of universal fiber, incrementalism dominates

Billions of dollars in recently announced federal grants have been called a once-in-a-generation opportunity for internet service in rural America. But the same prediction was made about other plans, and some of those fell far short of their goals.

Billions in rural internet grants could be a once-in-a generation opportunity

That’s because these are incremental and not wholistic ongoing initiatives to bring fiber to every doorstep that was connected to copper telephone lines in the previous century. They will inevitably come up short with limited timelines and budgets and “technical neutrality” favoring substandard stopgaps when this isn’t the clearly expressed goal.

Wisconsin has roughly 246,000 locations lacking access to even minimum broadband speeds of 25 megabit per second downloads and 3 Mbps uploads, and another 217,000 without access to 100 Mbps downloads and 20 Mbps uploads, adequate speeds for many households, according to the state Public Service Commission. The locations are spread across the entire state, said PSC Chairwoman Rebecca Cameron Valcq.

Once again, incrementalism is the reason. Investor-owned telephone and cable companies extend service to discrete, cherry picked neighborhoods where they expect a relatively rapid return on investment and that generate sufficient revenues to be profitable. The resulting infrastructure deficiencies cannot be neatly categorized into broad residential settlement patterns e.g., urban, suburban, exurban, rural. As Karl Bode described the issue, it’s infrastructure that is only half completed, leaving many addresses without fiber connections:

I’ve spent the better part of a life writing about how federal and state telecom regulators and politicians throw billions at companies for fiber networks that then somehow, repeatedly and quite mysteriously, never arrive. It happens over and over and over again, with only fleeting penalties for big ISPs that miss meaningful deployment goals.