Friday, March 30, 2007

Vermont House approves formation of state telecom authority

The state has set a goal of getting reliable cellular telephone service and high-speed computer service known as broadband into every area of the state by 2010. Now, wide swaths of Vermont get no cell signals and computer users must use much slower dial-up service.

The Telecommunications Authority would have the power to float state-backed bonds valued at $40 million to build the poles, towers and other parts of the basic network. It then would lease space on the network to companies that would sell their service to consumers.

The House Commerce Committee was the lead panel in crafting the legislation, which won overwhelming support. Chairman Warren Kitzmiller, D-Montpelier, said the bill "has as much important to Vermont as did the Rural Electrification Act of the 1930s. This bill can have profound impact on every citizen of the state and its economic impact is huge."

Broadband black holes in the Big Apple?

In much of America, market failure and lack of competition have cut off millions from broadband Internet access. It's typically in areas outside of more densely populated urban areas and most acutely felt in rural parts of the nation.

But in New York City, the nation's largest and most densely populated urban center? How can that be? It's apparently so according to this Newsday story that cites aging infrastructure and lack of competition in Big Apple boroughs where the telco/cable duopoly holds the cards.

Thursday, March 29, 2007

Broadband over TV spectrum would dramatically alter Internet access

This is the biggest broadband development of the year so far: the potential of using frequencies in the television broadcast spectrum to carry broadband two years from now.

As Eric Bangeman of Ars Technica writes, should tests of the technology being pursued by Microsoft, Intel, Dell and Google succeed, the broadband landscape would be dramatically altered when it comes on the market in early 2009.

"Wireless networks using the spectrum should be relatively easy to deploy, and would provide residents of rural areas easy access to broadband while giving everyone else a third alternative to DSL and cable," Bangeman writes.

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

AT&T chief's words at odds with company's pathetic broadband deployment efforts

In a recent meeting with AT&T employees in Atlanta, AT&T Chairman and CEO Edward E. Whitacre Jr. admonished them to go the extra mile to serve customers.

“I’m asking you, I’m pleading, don’t let them go until they’re happy,” The New York Times quoted Whitacre as telling AT&T employees. “You just can’t let them go. Hang on till it’s done.”


But rather than hanging in with customers, AT&T has hung out large numbers of them to dry, letting them go years without broadband services and without any meaningful hope of getting broadband anytime soon.

They may be only a mile from existing broadband infrastructure, but Ma Bell won't go the extra mile to provide service as Whitacre as exhorts his workers. Instead, customers are told the system cannot provide broadband because they're too far from a central office, their loop's too long, there's no neighborhood DSL gateway and any number of "no can do" excuses.

While Whitacre may insist AT&T can't "just can’t let them go," that's exactly what it's doing with a sizable segment of its residential customer base.

Monday, March 26, 2007

Analysts question AT&T broadband strategy

Analysts aren't the only ones questioning Ma Bell's broadband strategy, one that can't deliver any broadband services at all let alone IPTV to large portions of her service area.


But there is potential downside for AT&T too, analysts said, particularly when it comes to its closely linked broadband and television strategies. Some analysts assert that AT&T has set itself up poorly to compete in those areas, which are considered essential to the telecommunications product bundle.

In the case of TV, the strategy is called Uverse, and it entails delivering programming over the Internet, called IPTV. But the service has been plagued by delays and glitches and, even now, takes on average more than six hours to install in a home.

"If it cannot be called a complete failure, it's at least struggling," said Phillip Swan, president of TVPredictions.com, a Web site that tracks the television technology industry. He said that if things did not pick up soon, AT&T might have to get back into the acquisition game to buy a TV distributor, like a satellite or cable company.

Friday, March 23, 2007

Newspaper stories suggest AT&T contributions to Schwarzenegger committees linked to AB 2987

The Los Angeles Times and the Sacramento Bee published stories this week suggesting that Ma Bell lavished love on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to the tune of $540,000 for the governor's approval last fall of AB 2987, the Digital Infrastructure and Video Competition Act.

The Times reported AT&T gave a cool half million dollars to Schwarzenegger's
After-School All-Stars, a tax-exempt group founded by Schwarzenegger in the early 1990s to provide tutoring, recreation and other programs to poor children.

The Bee reported today in a page one story that eight high level AT&T executives gave $5,000 each to Schwarzenegger's reelection campaign committee in recent weeks.

Both stories contained strenuous denials from the governor's office and AT&T that the cash contributions had anything to do with Schwarzenegger's signature on AB 2987 last October.

The stories put the donations in the context of AB 2987's allowing AT&T to provide television programming and bypassing local governments by putting the California Public Utilities Commission in charge of issuing video franchises. It should be noted however that the cable TV industry also supported AB 2987.

The real issue isn't AT&T's ability to sell television programming since its aged copper cable-based infrastructure cannot reliably transmit Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) service to the vast majority of California households and won't be able to anytime soon. Rather, it's AB 2987's limited build out requirements that allow the telco/cable duopoly to leave vast areas of the state -- ironically many of them inland counties inhabited by Schwarzenegger's fellow Republicans -- without any broadband services whatsoever.

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

State franchise laws codify the digital divide, consumer advocate argues

A push by the telco/cable duopoly to enact state laws putting states in charge of granting broadband video franchises rather than expanding broadband availability as backers claim will have the opposite effect, a consumer advocate argues.

Ben Scott, policy director of the advocacy group Free Press, told the National Journal's Technology Daily that by allowing telcos and cable companies to pick and choose areas where broadband will be offered, state franchising laws "unfortunately, are going to write the digital divide into law."