Analysis & commentary on America's troubled transition from analog telephone service to digital advanced telecommunications and associated infrastructure deficits.
Sunday, June 17, 2012
Connected company muscled state agency out of Internet contract - Florida - MiamiHerald.com
Enter Connected Nation, a little known but well connected Washington-based company. It won the Florida contract to use $2.5 million to map the broadband gaps for use by policy makers and telecommunications companies.
A year later, when the state won a second grant for $6.3 million to extend the broadband efforts, Connected Nation, a non-profit company, believed it had signed up to be part of a public-private partnership with the state that entitled the firm to a no-bid shot at that money too. But the Department of Management Services, the state agency that housed the project, disagreed.
DMS said the grant requires it to use some of the money to pay for three more years of broadband mapping and the rest to expand broadband access in libraries and schools.
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The real story here is the tragic policy failure of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to provide technical assistance funding to communities interested in building their own open access fiber to the premises networks instead of dubious "broadband mapping" projects. It would have been a far more productive use of money to fill in the gaps with actual infrastructure instead of wasting it creating maps that won't connect homes in Florida and other states that remain disconnected from the Internet.
Friday, June 15, 2012
It's still 1985: California state offices stuck in pre-Internet management mode
The explanation appears in a January 2008 white paper prepared by a group of state employees, the Statewide Work Anywhere Team (SWAT). The paper notes use of information technology “is uniquely positioned to further the state’s ‘Green initiatives’ by contributing solutions for larger issues facing California: traffic congestion, dependence on oil, air pollution, and quality of life to name a few. It is possible to perform work from virtually anywhere. We can do business better. Work Anywhere provides one viable option that we should fully explore.” It adds, “[w]orking from anywhere and using virtual teams are integral to the success of today’s workforce” and recommends “the State of California initiate a statewide standard for expanding the concept into its work environment.”
Many program area managers and executives are hesitant to implement Work Anywhere strategies/policies due to concerns regarding monitoring staff productivity and the staff’s ability to perform their duties effectively from a remote site (usually their home) without immediate access to other workers. Additionally, there is concern on monitoring staff that under-perform. The main challenges mentioned by all contacted in the study were the importance of determining the types of duties that are easily measurable and candidate selection requirements for performing tasks that could be part of a Work Anywhere plan. The most often stated concern was how to quickly manage employees that are out of sight. Some of the examples of telecommuting floundered because they lacked executive sponsorship, clear performance measurements or procedures for implementation of the policies. Additionally, some of the managers indicated an interest in receiving additional training for developing skills to better manage employees who work away from the main office.
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
Broken Promises: The Telecommunications Trust That Doesn’t Deliver | Stop the Cap!
“Illinois Bell was supposed to rewire the state (with fiber-optic cable), starting in 1993 at an initial cost of $4 billion,” Kushnick said.
Instead, AT&T moved in and bought out the phone company and has dragged its feet on fiber deployment, along with most other big phone companies.
Kushnick told the Journal Star phone companies are going cheap avoiding fiber optic infrastructure while still ringing up huge profits
Saturday, June 09, 2012
Calling wireless Internet service "fiber grade" disingenuous and misleading
Broadband network expansion set for Dayton, other Ohio cities - Dayton Business Journal: A Canton-based company announced plans Thursday to build statewide network for wireless broadband services, bringing high-speed Internet access to 3 million Ohio address points, including 100,000 that currently have no service.
“It’s an exciting thing for the industry across the board,” said Kyle Quillen, chief technology officer of Agile Network Builders. “We’re going to enable anybody to get that last-mile connectivity with a fiber-grade connection anywhere in the state of Ohio. That’s a big deal.”
Calling terrestrial wireless Internet service "fiber grade" is disingenuous and misleading. It cannot emulate fiber or its carrying capacity, particularly for the delivery of high definition video.
Sunday, June 03, 2012
AT&T struggles with burden of legacy copper wireline plant
At issue is whether to upgrade field distribution equipment to extend the reach of U-Verse to more premises. But doing so still relies on AT&T's decades-old, legacy copper cable plant to bring the service to residential premises. That plant is less than optimal for transporting the higher frequency and more interference-prone VDSL protocol utilized by U-Verse, boosting the volume of customer service calls and increasing operating expenses. The technical limitations of the copper plant also bar AT&T from reaching about 5 million residential premises that remain disconnected from the Internet, as noted in the article by Barclay Capital analyst James Ratcliffe.
Thursday, May 10, 2012
It's time to halt the "digital literacy" baloney and build fiber
For example, this Texas Broadband Summit "designed to engage, educate, and equip technology providers and Texas communities with the resources and partnerships necessary to improve broadband access, adoption, and use," noting that "lack of digital literacy and the digital divide remain real issues in Texas."
What does "digital literacy" have to do with getting IPTV, VOIP and other Internet protocol-based services over fiber? Nothing, because people have been watching TV and making phone calls for decades. In that regard, they are already digitally literate. And the web and email have been around for two decades and most people currently use these common services.
It's time to stop the PR baloney and work on alternative ways of building fiber to the premise -- such as community cooperatives and municipal fiber -- to fill in the gaps that investor owned telco and cable TV providers are unable to fill.
Saturday, May 05, 2012
Demand aggregation won't attract investor-owned providers
A consultant asked Genesee County lawmakers Wednesday if they wanted to join a regional coalition to try to get broadband Internet service to rural communities and homes.
Evhen Tupis of Clarendon said he’s been working on getting high-speed broadband for unserved areas of Orleans County and Niagara County. The sparsely populated parts of the two counties don’t have a provider because it isn’t financially feasible for companies such as Time Warner and Verizon.
The coalition would issue a request for proposals to broadband service providers “with 100 percent coverage,” he said.
Tupis’ proposed Inclusive Internet Initiative would pool together the region’s counties to make it more attractive to communications companies. He estimated the cost to provide broadband to most or all of Genesee County at $150,000, the same as it would in Niagara.
Yet another misguided notion that investor-owned telecommunications infrastructure providers can be convinced to serve an area that is insufficiently profitable for them by aggregating demand. Demand aggregation does not solve the underlying economics that make deployment impractical for these providers. If businesses and residents want modern Internet access, they will have to provide it themselves with municipal fiber or a consumer cooperative.
Copper culprits hasten obsolescence of twisted pair
Check out this Fresno Bee story that reports that the crooks have gotten so brazen they are toppling utility poles in order to get at AT&T's cables.
Saturday, April 21, 2012
SB 1161 doesn't touch California's real telecom problem
SB 1161 would neither help nor hinder that goal. California's real problem is incomplete Internet infrastructure that leaves millions of Californians disconnected from the Internet. Since telecommunications services tend to be a natural monopoly market, the fears of consumer groups of any form of reduced regulatory oversight are understandable. However, their concerns would make more sense if all Californians had fiber connections to the Internet via a monopolistic provider. They don't. California's telecommunications market suffers from market failure because the high cost business models of the incumbent telcos (and cable companies) don't allow them to achieve that level of service. Accordingly, the CPUC should do a better job of assisting alternative, lower cost business models emerge -- such as consumer-owned telecom cooperatives -- take root and thrive. So far, the CPUC has failed to do so.
Saturday, April 07, 2012
Drop DSL and go suck our sooper dooper satellite!
Satellite Internet providers that serve a captive market of those who are off the Internet grid because of a lack of terrestrial infrastructure now hope to attract DSL subscribers by offering higher speeds. But as this USA Today article points out, converting DSL customers won't be easy since they have to buy the dish and installation. Not to mention they'd be getting much higher latency, hardly worth the trade off for higher speeds.
Satellite providers are a national embarrassment that point up how just how much of the United States remains a backward Internet backwater. The service should only be available in the Alaskan wilderness and places like Buford, Wyoming (Pop. 1).
Sunday, April 01, 2012
Why America needs lower cost, coop business models to complete Internet infrastructure
FiOS is Verizon's attempt to solve this problem by replacing its slow telephone cables with fiber-optic connections capable of offering speed that can compete with Comcast's. But in 2010, Verizon announced that it was winding down its FiOS installation efforts. Verizon plans for the network to reach around 18 million households, but not in some major metropolitan areas, including a few (like Boston) at the heart of its service area. News reports cited the high costs of the project as a reason why it was not being extended to all homes in Verizon's territory. Meanwhile, AT&T's project to partially replace its copper network with fiber, "U-Verse," is also being hampered by high costs. U-Verse service is faster than a traditional DSL line, but it is significantly slower than Verizon's and Comcast's high-speed networks, and it will not reach all households in AT&T's service territory. This might explain why, in the third quarter of 2011, Comcast added more than twice as many subscribers as did the seven largest telephone incumbents combined.
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Bell wireline monopoly stymies wireless Internet
Crowe details uncompetitive market practices aimed at creating artificial market scarcity of wireless backhaul and calls for action from Washington to break up the big telcos' wireline cartel.
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
“Broadband adoption” is an irrelevant non sequitur
More than a decade after the term “broadband adoption” was relevant, studies such as this one issued today by TechNet continue to use the phrase as if the United States was on the eve of the new millennium and Y2K was a topic of concern. In 2000, discussing “broadband adoption” was pertinent since “broadband” Internet connections were relatively new and distinct from the then commonplace dialup “narrowband” service delivered over legacy copper cable telephone networks.
In 2012, broadband adoption is a non sequitur since both the term “broadband” and the notion that people are migrating in large numbers from “narrowband” are badly outdated. Nowadays, the Internet can deliver voice telephone and TV video in addition to websites and email that was relatively novel for many in 2000.
People adopted voice telephone and TV decades ago. What has changed is the means over which these services are provided. Internet protocol technology and fiber optic connections allow voice, video, websites, email and many yet to be popularized applications to be delivered to peoples’ homes.
TechNet is talking about the wrong subject. The real issue isn’t “broadband adoption.” The real issue is lack of adequate Internet infrastructure. President Obama so in his January State of the Union speech in which he spotlighted America’s "incomplete high-speed broadband network.” While the president’s choice of terminology — “broadband network” — is technologically obsolete from this writer’s perspective, he is clearly on the right track in identifying the problem as one of infrastructure.
It’s time to retire the term “broadband adoption” to the history books and get on with modernizing the nation’s telecommunications infrastructure to provide all American homes fiber optic connections and the many Internet-based services they can provide.
Tuesday, March 06, 2012
Verizon's residential LTE "HomeFusion" likely to serve only fringes of small number of metro areas
It's not likely HomeFusion will be broadly deployed in predominantly rural and quasi-rural areas. Like Verizon's mobile wireless offerings, it's bandwidth metered and can't offer the ample headroom for bandwidth demand growth -- much of it driven by video -- that fiber does. In order to improve Internet deployment and access in these areas, these communities will have to build their own fiber to the premises networks constructed by local governments or telecom cooperatives.
AT&T has effectively thrown in the towel in serving these areas. HomeFusion represents Verizon's last ditch effort to pick up some limited revenues in these underserved markets.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Protecting investor-owned Internet providers from market failure is bad public policy
It's understandable the incumbent telco and cable companies would want to protect their service territories from competition given that telecommunications infrastructure -- like roads and highways -- tends to be a naturally monopolistic (or at best, duopolistic) market. That kind of market creates a winner takes all situation in which the winners in turn pick winners (those who are provided good Internet service) and losers (premises deemed too costly to serve and left off the Internet grid). Their problem, however, is the losers are naturally getting restless and petitioning for relief such as recently proposed Colorado legislation designed to lay the groundwork for the state to directly serve areas lacking connectivity.
The incumbent telco and cable companies may wish to rethink their current strategy of locking down failed markets and barring the door to public providers. The courts could well cast a jaundiced eye toward such uncompetitive market conduct and state laws designed to preserve what in many areas of the nation have become telecommunications backwaters due to what President Obama described in his January State of the Union address as "incomplete" Internet infrastructure.
I'm not sure those state laws could survive judicial scrutiny in the federal courts as they effectively create a state sanctioned monopoly in telecommunications. But unlike other nations, the state doesn't actually provide the service. Instead, their function is to protect private investor owned providers from the consequences of market failure. That's poor public policy because it leaves too many effectively disconnected from the Internet and the economic, educational and other benefits it affords.
Incumbent providers may also want to considering partnering with communities instead of fighting them. As the USA Today article notes, businesses approached Lafayette about expanding the network throughout the city as a way of drawing businesses. City leaders asked BellSouth and Cox representatives to partner on the project. But they spurned a private-public partnership that could have allowed them to share in the revenues, instead opting for a short sighted win/lose strategy.
Colorado bill first step in state investment in Internet infrastructure
Schwartz said the intent of the Rural Broadband Jobs Act is to help Colorado improve access to broadband so that businesses throughout the state have opportunities to be competitive and successful.
“I am looking for a definitive assessment of underserved and unserved areas in our state that lack broadband access,” Schwartz said in an interview with Government Technology. After those areas are defined and as funding becomes available, she’d like the state to invest in the infrastructure needed to bring broadband to those underserved locations.
Click here to read Colorado Senate Bill 12-129, CONCERNING ACCESS TO AFFORDABLE BROADBAND INTERNET CONNECTIVITY IN NONCOMPETITIVE RURAL AREAS.
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Emergence of Internet TV reinforces end of “broadband” era
The emergence of the Internet ready or “smart” TV marks the graduation of the Internet to a full featured, multiple service telecommunications service. It also marks the beginning of the end of siloed, single purpose video programming providers such as cable TV and satellite. Now that HD video content of all varieties is available via the Internet, the medium is the message in the words of mass communications theorist Marshall McLuhan and the medium is the Internet.
The Internet or “smart” TV also marks the end of the “broadband” Internet era, where the Internet was mostly used for viewing web pages and email — and later Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP). It’s notable that TV manufacturers aren’t marketing the latest sets as “broadband” TVs. That reinforces a point I made in December 2010 when I declared distinguishing “broadband” from dialup “narrowband” was growing increasingly irrelevant since dialup was becoming technologically obsolete. Consumers either have functional Internet infrastructure connected to their premises, or they don’t. And if that infrastructure can’t deliver HD video while simultaneously allowing them to browse the web, download email and make a voice call, they’re effectively disconnected from the Internet.